What next for the nuclear 'grand bargain?' Phil Twyford outlines the government's thinking on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

• Author: Twyford, Phil

Forged in the depths of the Cold War nuclear arms race, for more than 50 years the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has been the cornerstone of multilateral efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons. New Zealand was an early joiner of the NPT and remains a committed supporter.

A half-century after the NPT was agreed, it is a suitable moment to take stock of what the treaty is, what the major challenges and opportunities are and why the NPT is still relevant in a world that looks very different from the one in which it was adopted in 1968. It is especially timely now ahead of the NPT's next five-yearly Review Conference--scheduled for New York in January 2022.

I will first outline the history and context of the original NPT agreement, and explain the importance of the 'grand bargain' the NPT sets up. I will touch on developments over the past 20 years, and explain the role New Zealand plays and continues to play. Throughout, I will be delivering a strong and clear message about the need for action by nuclear-weapon states if we are to ensure a successful meeting in 2022. I also touch briefly on the separate Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, highlighting how it reinforces the NPT and provides an additional opportunity for us to demonstrate our commitment to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

To set the scene for the NPT, we need to go back to the early 1960s. At that time, the prospect of nuclear war was frighteningly real. A consensus began to develop internationally on the need for concerted action to prevent this occurring. US President John F. Kennedy, speaking to the UN General Assembly in September 1961, summed up the problem succinctly when he said, 'We must abolish these weapons before they abolish us.'

A year later, in October 1962, the world indeed came perilously close to the brink of nuclear war over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis sobered political leaders in both East and West. It contributed to an impetus for international agreements to try to dampen the nuclear arms race through arms control, if not one day entirely reverse it through nuclear disarmament. Following the adoption of a treaty establishing a partial ban on nuclear testing in 1963, a much broader international agreement to prevent the spread or 'proliferation' of nuclear weapons was adopted in May 1968. The objectives of this new treaty --the NPT--were threefold:

* to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology;

* to promote co-operation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy;

* to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament.

Imperfect instrument

Of course, the NPT was--and remains--far from perfect. The NPT established a two-tier system of nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states. The former were the five countries that had made and exploded nuclear weapons prior to January 1967--China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. All other states had to either forgo nuclear weapons, or not belong to the NPT and thus miss out on its benefits. Today, four non-NPT states have nuclear weapons--India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea. Apart from them, the treaty's membership is almost universal.

The NPT's discriminatory structure has been persistently criticised, as has its failure to establish a permanently resourced body to monitor and ensure implementation of its nuclear disarmament obligation. But the fact that a half-century after the treaty's adoption there are only nine nuclear-armed states is something of a miracle, even if it is a situation also tinged with disappointment and frustration due to the glacial pace of nuclear disarmament.

New Zealand has, over the decades, acquired an international reputation for championing nuclear disarmament. I like to think that New Zealanders have an underlying quality of fairness and justice. And it was those values that drove tens of thousands of kiwis into the streets--myself included --in the 1970s and 1980s in response to devastating nuclear weapons tests that France, the United States and the United Kingdom were conducting in our neighbourhood, the Pacific. Over half a century, the nuclear powers collectively tested more than 300 nuclear weapons; devastating communities and ecosystems and driving Pacific people from their homelands. And as David Lange went on to say at the Oxford Union debate in 1985, nuclear weapons have a 'strange, dubious and totally unaccepted moral purpose which holds the whole of the world to ransom'.

But this policy shift...