Nigel Chamberlain: Renewing nuclear sharing under the "special relationship"

Nuclear sharing under the “special relationship” umbrella

By Nigel Chamberlain
Global Beat Syndicate
(KRT)
LONDON—Despite his administration’s antipathy toward international treaties, President Bush is preparing to sign a bilateral agreement with minimal fanfare and limited oversight, unless Congress decides otherwise.
Here in London, the Labour government has shown every indication that it would prefer to avoid any serious debate in Parliament on this issue. This despite the critical need to publicly examine all bilateral nuclear issues, especially those that might promote, rather than curtail, global nuclear proliferation.
Members of the Blair government would argue that the security provisions in the agreement are so strong that no foreign power would have access to new information. Nonetheless, the agreement is, in itself, a form of proliferation
On May 23, 1994, President Bill Clinton transmitted to Congress the amended 1958 U.S.-UK agreement for “Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes.”
This amendment to the 1958 Agreement extends to the end of this year, by which time it must be renewed in London and Washington, or fall. While highly motivated to prevent the spread of nuclear materials that might find their way into weapons programs across most of the world, the United States permits Britain access to scientific information, technology and materials “to continue to maintain viable nuclear forces” in this near open-ended agreement.
When Mr. Bush transmits his approval and recommendation to congress, representatives and senators have 60 days to formally raise their concerns or challenge the basis of the agreement. If no voice is raised in that period, the 1958 U.S.-U.K. Mutual Defense Agreement is deemed ratified until 2014 and will not be revisited until then.
In terms of costs to the United States, there is the money spent to service the Joint Atomic Information Exchange Group in the Defense Nuclear Agency Headquarters, plus those incurred by the joint working groups and the cost of “Exchange of Information by Visits and Reports” to facilitate face-to-face meetings between scientist and military personnel. But the full and actual costs remain in planned obscurity, as do the arrangements for exchanging nuclear materials and related components. For instance, it is understood that barter arrangements like the transfer of U.S. highly enriched uranium in return for U.K. plutonium may mean that both countries can maintain the dubious answer of “nil cost” when questioned.
Is it legal? According to successive administrations since its original signing in 1958, the Mutual Defence Agreement was legitimized by an amendment to the 1954 Atomic Energy Act and “meets all statutory requirements”.
While this active and extensive assistance to the U.K. allows Britain to maintain its Trident nuclear weapons system may be deemed legal by domestic law, it is certainly highly questionable under international law. Article 1 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty was written to prevent those states already in possession of nuclear weapons (at the time of its signing in 1968) from sharing that knowledge and capability.
From the start, the United States and Britain chose to exclude their nuclear sharing arrangement from scrutiny under the NPT; they either offered a different interpretation of their obligations or ignored criticism altogether.
To this day, the legality issue remains unresolved, but there can be no doubt that the Mutual Defense Agreement subverts the spirit and objectives of the NPT. In turn, the continued obduracy of the two nuclear weapon states has not gone unnoticed internationally and, at best, this has contributed to the stagnation at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. At worst, this determination to remain a nuclear power indefinitely is rightly deemed hypocritical and used by aspiring nuclear weapon states to justify their own “pursuit of greatness” via unofficial membership of the nuclear club.
The British Government has recently indicated that any decision to replace its four Trident submarines with another nuclear delivery system will have to be made in the next parliament after a general election in 2005. No mention was made of what Britain needs to do to comply with its own obligations under Article V1 the NPT.
The Bush administration is currently engaged in a vigorous campaign to curb horizontal nuclear proliferation worldwide, rightly so in the opinion of many commentators. But should Washington, at the same time, be actively promoting vertical nuclear proliferation at home and in selected countries abroad just when the signatory nations to the Non-Proliferation Treaty are making plans to meet for their conference in New York later this month?
Or will members of the U.S. Congress and the British Parliament assert their representative rights and bring the executives of both countries to account?
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