The Reform of the United Nations Disarmament Machinery

In the nuclear field the main accomplishments reached until now include unilateral disarmament decisions to cut excess of nuclear weapons and stocks, the closure of reprocessing or other weapons related facilities, bilateral arms reduction (with or without verification mechanism), and the adoption of international instruments, such as the Chemical Weapon Convention (CWC), the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and regional multilateral initiatives such as nuclear weapon free zones (NWFZ) (Johnson 2013).

Pursued as parallel, mutually reinforcing processes, disarmament, and arms control together constitute what is called “general and complete disarmament under effective international control”, which has been the world community’s ultimate objective, as agreed at the General Assembly’s first Special Session on Disarmament in 1978 (Hoppe 2011).

The term “disarmament machinery” is used here to refer to multilateral processes, procedures and practices, as well as relevant international bodies whose purposes are to deal with issues of disarmament, non-proliferation and arms control. A brief history of the development of multilateral disarmament machinery is provided in Disarmament Machinery: A Fresh Approach (UNIDIR 2010). According to Hoppe (2011), this is a term that has been used for many decades at the United Nations to refer to a set of institutions focused on the development and maintenance of multilateral norms for two specific goals found in the UN Charter—namely, disarmament and the regulation of armaments.

When the disarmament machinery is unable to advance the multilateral norm-building process —a situation that continues to prevail today and that has existed in the CD since 1998 and the UNDC since 1999 —it tells to the international community the level of disagreement among states concerning the fundamental goals of their security policies and not the imperfection of the institutions involved in non-proliferation, arms control, and disarmament.

States are not in agreement on what to do about the CD. Even as UN disarmament bodies have evolved over the past few decades in the search for increased efficiency, the productivity of the CD has decreased and this trend will continue without change at least during the coming years.

The United Nations has historically been the channel for processing arms control and disarmament proposals and this important role continues today, but with great difficulties. Other international forums have emerged in recent years for the same purpose.

The only two exceptions are the CWC, which was negotiated within the CD during several years and finally adopted in 1993 by the United Nations General Assembly, and the CTBT that was adopted in 1996, but has not yet entered into force.

It has never been easy to achieve agreement on disarmament issues. The difficulties, however, increased gradually and became ostensibly insurmountable from the mid-1990s onward. It is somewhat ironic that the end of the Cold War did not facilitate a narrowing of differences among the international disarmament community, but instead seems to have exacerbated rivalry and disagreement on many disarmament questions, particularly in the field of nuclear and biological disarmament.

One key component that is necessary for disarmament progress to move to the next phase is a clear legal prohibition on using, deploying, manufacturing, transporting, stockpiling with a legally recognised obligation to carry out the elimination of the existing arsenals. The absence of this legal prohibition makes it much harder to implement a rational step by step process for either disarmament or non-proliferation, particularly in the case of nuclear weapons.

See the United Nations Chapter for the full text of articles 11 and 12.

As long as certain states derive special status from their possession of nuclear weapons and attach high value to retaining and deploying them, nuclear disarmament will remain an unobtainable dream (Johnson 2013). Based on this idea, other countries will try to produce nuclear weapons for the same purpose.

It is important to highlight that in some nuclear-weapon states, government officials appear more concerned with the possibility that nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of non-state actors than with the threat posed by the mere existence of the weapons themselves in a limited number of states and the destruction power of this type of weapons. By the contrary, in many non-nuclear-weapon states, global issues such as unfair trade practices, economic and social development, the environment, urban violence, civil rights, drugs and organized crime, debts, among others, are the foremost preoccupations. For many people in these countries, the threat of catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences stemming from the intentional or accidental use of nuclear weapons seems a very distant possibility that does not raise much concern. Accordingly, in many nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states, demands for new multilateral efforts toward nuclear disarmament are largely not reflected in broad public opinion, despite the efforts of civil society organisations dedicated to disarmament. Citizens in all states, both those possessing and those without nuclear weapons, must wake up to the real threats of global nuclear arsenals and put pressure on their governments to pursue a disarmament agenda. After all, people worldwide are increasingly skeptical about the size of current military expenditures in the face of an economic crisis that generates rising unemployment and cutbacks in social spending (Duarte 2013).

Some specific actions have been included in this paper.

For example, the repeated tabling of nearly identical resolutions year after year tends to reduce their adoption to a time-consuming routine rather than to reinforcing the messages contained. This has led some delegations to wonder why a resolution that has been adopted cannot be left to stand unless it is re-tabled by its sponsor(s) for substantive amendment. At the least, the sponsors of resolutions should be more responsive to the annual urging of First Committee chairs that those measures be tabled less frequently, for example every, third or even fourth year.

It is important to treat the UNDC as a deliberative body rather than a negotiating one.

The main agreements are the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions, the NPT and the CTBT.

The CD has a permanent agenda, also known as the “Decalogue”, which include the following items: Nuclear weapons in all aspects; Other weapons of mass destruction; Conventional weapons; Reduction of military budgets; Reduction of armed forces; Disarmament and development; Disarmament and international security; Collateral measures; Confidence building measures; Effective verification methods in relation to appropriate disarmament measures, acceptable to all parties; and Comprehensive programme of disarmament leading to general and complete disarmament under effective international control. The item of the agenda related to the CWC was removed some years ago from the original CD agenda due to the fact that the negotiations of this convention concluded in 1993.

It has been argued that a nuclear-weapon state that chooses to stand in the way of consensus on the adoption, for example, of a mandate for fissile material negotiations in the CD should content itself with not becoming party to the eventual treaty rather than with preventing the negotiations from even getting underway (UNIDIR 2010).

The last treaty adopted in the CD was the CTBT in 1996, this means 19 years ago, and there are no signs that the current deadlock situation within the CD could be changed in the near future.

One of these resolutions (A/RES/67/53) adopted by the UNGA in 2012 in the fields of non-proliferation, arms control, and disarmament initiated by Canada, calls on the conference to start “immediate” negotiations on a treaty banning the production of fissionable material for weapons purposes or other nuclear explosive devices. This resolution also requests that the Secretary General of the United Nations seek the views of members states and experts on such a treaty and establish a 25-member expert group to “make recommendations on aspects, which could contribute to, but not negotiate, a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices” in 2014 and 2015 or until the conference reaches agreement on this matter.