Disarmament
From the UN’s inception, multilateral disarmament and arms control have been crucial to the organization’s attempts to maintain global peace and security. As they represent the greatest risks to mankind, the UN has placed a priority on reducing and eventually eliminating and destroying nuclear and chemical weapons as well as enforcing the prohibition on biological weapons. Disarmament
These objectives have not changed over time, but the scope of debates and negotiations has changed according to international environment and the political realities. The use of landmines, which endanger the social and economic fabric of societies and kill and maim an excessive number of civilians, disproportionately women and children, has been curbed. The international community is still trying to examine and have control over the excessive proliferation of arms. Furthermore, it is now more well known that certain weapons have diverse impacts on all humankind.
The UN is also focusing on how emerging information, communications and other sort of technologies may affect international security. Through international efforts, a variety of multilateral treaties and instruments have been created with the intention of regulating, restricting, or eliminating particular weapons.
New START agreement: What Is It?
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty i.e. START, is the last agreement between the US and Russia on nuclear arms reduction. The agreement was signed by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and US President Barack Obama, which places a limit on the number of strategic nuclear warheads that each country is allowed to deploy, in 2010. After US President Joe Biden assumed office in 2021, it was extended for a further five years, starting in February of that year.
Moscow and Washington are committed to the following under the agreement: New Start
Deploying no more than 700 long-range missiles and bombers, and no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons. There is a cap of 800 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles. To make sure the other has not violated the treaty’s restrictions, each side can inspect the other’s strategic nuclear weapons sites up to 18 times each year. The COVID pandemic caused the agreement’s inspections to be suspended in March 2020. Moscow postponed talks between Moscow and Washington on starting inspections again that were scheduled to take place in Egypt in November, and neither party has chosen a new date.
Suspension of the Treaty
In his address to the Federal Assembly on February 21, 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the termination to participate in New Start by Russian government. Putin made it plain that the United States and NATO were not welcome to see Russian nuclear facilities. He said the US has been developing new nuclear weapons and threatened that Russia would develop and test nuclear weapons in retaliation for any such US actions. Putin was also unhappy that nuclear weapons from France and Britain were excluded from the deal. According to Sergei Markov, director of the Russian Institute for Political Research, He said Putin is warning that if Washington would not show consideration to Russia, he may fully withdraw from the pact. In a few years, a major change might occur that would seriously compromise the nuclear security of the United States.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move has been criticized as “terribly horrible” and “very reckless” by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg, respectively.
Why is Russia putting it on hold?
In spite of what it dubbed the US’s disruptive approach to arms control, Russia stated earlier this month that it wished to keep the deal in place.
On the other hand, the Russian foreign ministry on Tuesday accused the US of violating its terms and attempting to damage Russia’s national security in order to justify its decision to halt participation. Accused US
Moscow claimed that the underlying geopolitical circumstances supporting the signature of the treaty had altered. Iran said that the terms had become biased in favor of the US and that it had discovered ways to go around the main restrictions about the maximum number of nuclear weapons that can be used. The President Putin said that Russia was pausing its involvement in the pact and not leaving it completely. The foreign ministry said that reversing the decision to leave New START was feasible. This can only be achieved if Washington shows political will and takes genuine action to deescalate the situation. Russian participation in the pact has been suspended after President Vladimir Putin accused the West of being directly involved in plots to target Russia’s strategic air bases.
The Russian Federation will no longer be complying with the strategic offensive weapons accord, Putin said on Tuesday. Announced
Disarmament Conference
On February 25, 2019, in the Palais des Nations, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a speech at the CD Segment. U.N. photograph by Antoine Tardy.
History
It was at the United Nations General Assembly’s (UNGA) Tenth Special Session on Disarmament (SSOD-I) that the Conference on Disarmament (CD) was officially recognized as the exclusive multilateral negotiating organization for world disarmament (1978). Tenth Special Session
Multiple treaties for disarmament and arms control, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC), and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), were all negotiated by the CD (CTBT).
Items on the CD’s agenda
At the moment, the CD concentrates on the following agenda items:
- To put a stop to nuclear weapons and the arms race.
- Stopping a nuclear war, including all related difficulties.
- The stopping of a nuclear weapons race in space.
- Effective multilateral treaties shielding non-nuclear weapon states from the threat or use of such weapons.
- Nuclear weapons; novel delivery methods and lethal technologies.
- A thorough strategy for eliminating WMDs i.e. weapons of mass destruction.
- Disclosure of all weapons.
The CD’s work
65 nations are represented in the Conference, including 60 nations with significant military importance and the five nuclear-armed nations that are members of the NPT. Also, non-member States take part in the CD’s activity each year at their own request. In 2019, their number grew to 50, which was a 20-year high.
The CD meets once a year for a session, and the members of CD alternately serve as its presidents. Each President will hold office for four weeks. Since 2006, an informal coordination mechanism between the six Presidents of the year (P6) has been formed to meet informally, typically once per week, in addition to formal and informal plenary sessions. The President and the P6 have an informal meeting with the Regional Group Coordinators once a week as well.
The CD sets its own agenda and objectives, ROP although it takes ideas from the General Assembly and other members into account. A group of people come together to make decisions on the CD.
What Went Wrong
In creating international weapons control treaties and disarmament accords, the Conference on Disarmament hasn’t contributed much in more than 15 years. Even the CTBT, the Conference’s most recent achievement, was not approved before being presented to the UN General Assembly. In the recent past, other efforts to establish a Space Preservation Treaty or a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty have languished.
The Conference on Disarmament’s continued reliance on consensus has been shown to be ineffective, according to Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller. She Said One member of the 65-member organization can stop the Conference as a whole from making progress on matters that are crucial to maintaining global peace and security. Nonetheless, she emphasised that the FMCT and the CTBT negotiations are crucial steps in the direction of achieving complete disarmament and the US commitment to obtaining their ratification.
The Ottawa Treaty, Otawa Treaty which gave rise to one such model is the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, etc. Frustrated by the lack of progress in Geneva, Canada’s foreign minister called on other countries with a similar outlook to sign on to a treaty banning anti-personnel land mines. This sort of original approach might be replicated in the creation of a FMCT. It is possible that a legally binding treaty may be negotiated in a different setting. Australia, Japan, Canada, and maybe others should take the lead in exploring the feasibility of negotiating a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty before the decade is up.
The issue of Non-compliance by CD
The current suspension of the New Start clearly depicts the failure of non-compliance mechanism by the CD.
The Conference on Disarmament (CD) has been paralysed for a considerable amount of time. It hasn’t generated any further agreements since negotiating CTBT in 1996 and hasn’t even been able to come to an agreement on a work plan. The CD’s excessive consensus rule for decision-making and a counterproductive dynamic among its 65 member states that prioritises national preference over the common benefit that compromise could produce are to blame for its dysfunction. The international disarmament effort’s credibility is damaged by both the CD’s bankruptcy and its members’ participation in a diplomatic ruse. For those governments truly interested in progress, moving its main concerns out of the CD and into negotiation forums not subject to a de facto veto offers a way out. The future of the UN’s single global disarmament negotiating forum appears grim without the political resolve to engage in innovative diplomacy to escape the CD’s prison.
Together, the US and Russia control nearly 90% of the nuclear warheads in the world and have safeguards in place to prevent their nuclear missiles from being accidently fired. According to a representative for the US Department of State
Analysts emphasised that Russia has not yet withdrawn from the deal.
Suspension of the treaty is not similar to quitting the treaty; I assume there will be no Russian build-up above the treaty limits, Andrei Baklitskiy of the UN Institute for Disarmament Studies stated on Twitter.
The compliance will be questioned, he continued, “but there will be considerably fewer opportunities to verify this. Thus, the issue of compliance has also been a failure at the end of the CD.
The possible future
Disarmament and weapons control have taken on a new significance after the demise of the bipolar international system, which is an undeniable fact. The bipolar, mutual nuclear deterrence-based international security framework was a major factor in the Cold War and in the post Cold War periods. Extreme military danger and yet remarkable peace and order, such issues were seen as the top priority in the agendas of the world powers throughout the cold war era. It was widely believed that arms control helped keep the peace and the power dynamic between the world powers. The fundamental goals of arms control were, therefore, to minimize the damage that might be expected from conflict, to keep the balance of forces stable, to keep the costs of the arms race to a minimum, and to diminish the likelihood nuclear outbreak among the two greatest adversaries of the world.
However, the future of the weapons control seems vague, and therefore needs to be inspected at a regional and global levels. Today, the European states are again at the verge of having a look at their security with the current Ukrainian attack and hence, the world needs to manage such tools to counter the future arm races and outbreaks of war.
During the visit to Geneva, we shall examine how non-compliance of the CD has contributed to failure for such suspensions as Putin freezes the pact (New Start) with the US. This trip can also help in exploring the future of the compliance mechanism of the CD as well as can help in analyzing the future of arms control and disarmament, keeping the recent suspension of new start treaty in view.
QUESTIONS TO BE ADDRSESSED
- How non-compliance of the CD has contributed to failure for such suspensions as Putin freezes the pact (New Start) with the US.
- What possible factors are involved behind the non-compliance of the CD?
- What is the future of disarmament and arms control, keeping the existing suspension of new start treaty in view?