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Ending Further Production
Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty
Status
![[ click here for larger photo ]](/web/20100411014702im_/http://www.nti.org/images/cnwmphoto_fmct1_sm.jpg) Verifying all the plutonium flows in an older reprocessing plant can be a major challenge. |
In July 2004, the Bush administration announced that while
the United States still supported a legally binding treaty
banning production of nuclear materials for weapons—usually
referred to as a fissile material cutoff treaty, or FMCT—it
no longer supported including verification measures in
such a treaty, as verification "would require an inspection
regime so extensive that it could compromise key signatories'
core national security interests and so costly that many
countries will be hesitant to accept it." Moreover,
the Bush administration argued, "even with extensive
verification measures, we will not have high confidence
in our ability to monitor compliance with an FMCT."[1] Since
many other countries support a verified fissile cutoff,
this new position made successful negotiation of an agreement
in the near term even less likely than before. Even before
the Bush administration's announcement, however, negotiation
of an FMCT had been stymied for years and seemed to have
little likelihood of moving forward soon. The idea of an internationally verified ban on production of nuclear materials for weapons dates back to the Baruch Plan of 1946.[2] Throughout the Cold War, such an agreement was intermittently proposed as a means of capping the number of nuclear weapons that could be built. A verifiable agreement to end production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) for weapons would be a central part of an overall regime for deep reductions in nuclear arms, and hence has long been seen as a key part of the nuclear weapon states' meeting their obligations under Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to negotiate in good faith toward nuclear disarmament.[3] |
Moreover, if accepted by the NPT nuclear weapon states and the few states outside the NPT (India, Pakistan, Israel, and now North Korea), a cutoff could begin the process of placing agreed limits on these states' nuclear weapons activities, bringing the non-NPT states into at least a part of the nonproliferation regime and reducing the discrimination inherent in the NPT's division of states into nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states.
The current round of interest in the FMCT began with the end of the Cold War, with the realization that both the United States and Russia had far more nuclear material than they needed for their military programs. In 1993, the Clinton administration swung the U.S. position from opposition to support for a verified international cutoff agreement, and a resolution adopted by consensus in the United Nations General Assembly called for negotiation of a "non-discriminatory multilateral and internationally and effectively verifiable treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices."[4]
In 1995, after a range of consultations with states participating in the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament (CD) on the key issues involved in negotiating such an agreement, the conference agreed to begin negotiations. Unfortunately, that negotiation mandate expired with the end of that year's conference session, and since then has only been renewed once, for three weeks in 1998. Despite repeated calls from the UN General Assembly and NPT review conferences to begin negotiations of a cutoff treaty, negotiations have not resumed. The CD operates on the basis of consensus, and so a small number of states have been able to block any further negotiations on a cutoff over disagreements about its scope and purpose and over linkages to other issues (see discussion below).
As all non-nuclear-weapon states that are parties to the NPT are already prohibited from producing nuclear material for weapons, and the five NPT nuclear weapon states have already informally stopped production of nuclear materials for weapons, the most critical participants in a cutoff would be the states outside the NPT—India, Pakistan, Israel, and now North Korea.[5] But none of these states currently appears interested in agreeing to a verified fissile cutoff, though that could change in the future. Even before the Bush administration's announcement—which was made without prior consultation even with leading U.S. allies—there appeared to be little near-term prospect for breaking the deadlock and putting in place a verifiable agreement banning production of nuclear materials for nuclear weapons. The key issues facing a fissile cutoff treaty are discussed below.
Disputes over verification. The Bush administration has not offered a public explanation of the specific concerns that led to the conclusions of its interagency review. It appears that (a) officials concluded that far-reaching inspection rights would be needed to uncover possible covert nuclear material production facilities, and that giving other countries such inspection rights in the United States might pose a danger of compromising U.S. secrets; (b) even such a far-reaching inspection regime might not be able to provide high confidence that covert facilities would be detected before they could be producing nuclear bomb material; and (c) such a wide-ranging inspection regime would be quite expensive.[6] Since challenge inspections could potentially be requested virtually anywhere, the secrets potentially at risk might not even be nuclear secrets. The administration offered much the same reasons for ending negotiation of a monitoring protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention.
By contrast, cutoff advocates argue that: (a) inspections of declared facilities—such as reprocessing and enrichment plants—coupled with a limited approach to "complementary access" at other locations, as called for under the International Atomic Energy Agency's Additional Protocol, would provide far higher confidence in compliance than would exist without verification provisions; (b) inspection arrangements could be negotiated to allow far-ranging challenge inspections while protecting national security secrets, as was done, for example, with the Chemical Weapons Convention, which also permits wide-ranging inspections in the United States; and (c) the additional cost of a fissile cutoff verification regime would be modest compared to its security benefits, in the range of a few tens of millions of dollars per year.[7]
Even before this broad challenge from the Bush administration, there were a number of important disputes over how a fissile cutoff should be verified. One view is that since the obligation not to produce nuclear materials for weapons is basically the same as the obligation verified by full-scope safeguards in non-nuclear-weapon states, the most effective approach would be to place the entire civil fuel cycle of the nuclear weapon states and the three non-NPT states—including reprocessing and enrichment plants, fuel fabrication plants, power reactors, research reactors, and the like—under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. This would have the advantage of reducing the degree of discrimination between nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states in the intrusiveness of the verification they have to accept under the NPT. Others argue for a "focused" verification approach, targeted on the enrichment and reprocessing facilities that could produce HEU or separated plutonium, and on tracking the HEU and separated plutonium produced for civil purposes after the treaty enters into force. Advocates of a "focused" approach argue that it would be significantly cheaper (though advocates of a comprehensive approach argue that most of the verification cost will be at the enrichment and reprocessing facilities in any case, making the net incremental cost of a comprehensive approach relatively modest); "focused" approach supporters also argue that the NPT nuclear weapon states and the non-NPT states are not likely to accept a comprehensive approach. Supporters of a comprehensive approach, on the other hand, argue that if verification only on reprocessing and enrichment plants is considered sufficient for a cutoff, NPT non-nuclear-weapon states will inevitably ask why much more extensive verification is required for them.[8]
One particular technical issue is the difficulty of effective verification at older reprocessing plants that were never designed for safeguards, but which will continue to operate—such as the U.S. plant at Savannah River and the Russian reprocessing plant at Mayak. Because reprocessing plants handle intensely radioactive spent nuclear fuel, once they begin operations, human inspectors can never again go into the processing areas for inspection. There are thousands of pipes carrying nuclear material in solution in such a plant, and confirming that none of them are carrying plutonium solution somewhere outside the inspectors' view, without having been able to verify where each pipe went before the plant began operation, will be a difficult challenge. Inspectors could treat the reprocessing plant as a "black box," examining the plutonium in spent fuel entering the plant, and the separated plutonium leaving the plant, without attempting to verify anything in between, but whether such an approach would be effective enough to be acceptable to the other parties remains to be seen.
Disputes over agreement scope and purpose. The nuclear weapon states argue that the fissile cutoff should be focused on the subject identified in the 1993 UN General Assembly resolution—a verifiable ban on future production of nuclear materials for nuclear weapons. A number of non-nuclear-weapon states, however, argue that a fissile material treaty (they tend not to use the word "cutoff") should be not just a nonproliferation measure but a disarmament measure as well, limiting existing stockpiles of fissile material in addition to future production. Pakistan has taken this position as well, given its fears over India's possibly larger stockpiles of weapons-usable nuclear materials.[9] There appears to be no chance that the nuclear weapon states will agree to include existing stocks—though it is possible that voluntary steps to place large quantities of existing materials under international verification (as in the regime being developed in the Trilateral Initiative), if appropriately coordinated with the cutoff effort, could help address concerns over existing stocks.
Some critics of civilian plutonium reprocessing have gone further, and argued that a fissile cutoff should ban all separation of plutonium, not just separation of plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.[10] No major governments participating in the talks appear to be taking this view, however. At the same time, some analysts, seeing the deadlock over scope and purpose, have proposed redefining the cutoff as focusing not just on production, but on a broad spectrum of measures to improve security for nuclear material in the face of potential terrorism, including improved physical protection.[11] Whether such a redefinition will be accepted by the governments involved remains to be seen.
Lack of support from key states. As already noted, the NPT already prohibits production of nuclear materials for nuclear weapons by all its non-nuclear-weapon state parties—which represent the vast majority of the countries in the world. The additional benefit of a fissile cutoff treaty would come from extending that ban to the five nuclear weapon state parties to the NPT (the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China) and the four states outside of the NPT (India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea). Extending verification to India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea, in particular, bringing them at least the first step toward participation in the international nonproliferation regime, is seen by many as a crucial purpose of a cutoff agreement. Unless all or most of these states participated, a fissile cutoff would have little value.
But India and Pakistan are both continuing to produce nuclear materials for their weapons programs, and Israel is currently unwilling to accept any verification over its nuclear activities. Whether North Korea would accept such a deal would presumably depend on the outcome of broader negotiations over the future of its nuclear weapons program. Extended Clinton-era efforts to convince India and Pakistan to stop production of nuclear materials for weapons and agree to sign on to a verified cutoff appear to have borne little fruit, and there has been no further reported progress in the Bush administration. Negotiations with North Korea were largely deadlocked as of mid-2004. No significant effort has been made to convince Israel to accept a cutoff agreement. Until those circumstances change, there seems little prospect for successful conclusion of an agreement that would include these states. One could imagine a cutoff being reached that had a limited number of the key states as parties at the outset, but succeeded in attracting additional participants over time—as was true of the NPT itself. But paying the costs of verifying a cutoff without getting the benefit of verification in India, Pakistan, or Israel might be a hard sell for the legislatures of the NPT nuclear weapon states.
Nor are those states especially enthusiastic: the United States has put rather little effort into pushing a cutoff forward for years, and the Bush administration's announcement makes clear that its support is lukewarm at best. Russia remains a supporter of a cutoff in principle, but has proposed that the agreement be limited to weapon-grade plutonium, a proposal that would exempt most reprocessing plants from verification and effectively vitiate the treaty's effectiveness. Britain and France continue to support a cutoff, but are lukewarm in their enthusiasm. China publicly supports a cutoff, but until recently has blocked the start of negotiations by linking them to other issues, as discussed below apparently in part to delay a cutoff long enough to keep open the option of resuming production if necessitated by increasing U.S. and regional missile defenses. In short, the prospects for all nine of these states agreeing to a cutoff in the near term are slim, and the agreement does not appear to have the level of political support from the major powers that would be needed to break the current deadlock, make the necessary difficult compromises, and reach an agreement in the near term.
Linkages to other issues. In recent years, it has been impossible to reach consensus in the Conference on Disarmament on even beginning negotiation of a fissile cutoff, in part because several countries have indicated they would not agree to the start of negotiations on a cutoff without simultaneous agreement to start negotiations on other issues. China, for example, concerned about the implications of U.S. missile defense plans, for years linked its agreement to allow cutoff negotiations to begin to agreement to start negotiations on an agreement on prevention of an arms race in outer space (PAROS). In August 2003, China relented, saying it would allow cutoff negotiations to forward even if there were only discussions, not formal negotiations, on PAROS. The Bush administration then stymied any further progress by launching its interagency review of the U.S. position on the cutoff, which was not completed until almost a year later.[12] There is a logic to the Chinese position, as China may have enough nuclear material already to support the strategic modernization it would plan if U.S. and regional missile defenses remained small, but might feel it had to produce more to support a larger strategic buildup in the face of ever larger and more capable missile defenses in the United States (and perhaps in Taiwan and Japan as well).[13]
Other delegations have called for the start of negotiations on a broad multilateral agreement on nuclear disarmament. The United States, which has a substantial missile defense program and a large technological advantage in potential space weaponry, has refused to negotiate on PAROS in the CD. The United States and other nuclear weapon states also have refused to begin negotiations on nuclear disarmament in the multilateral CD forum, though it appears that the disarmament issue could be overcome by establishing an ad hoc committee to discuss the issue without beginning formal negotiations. Fundamentally, however, as long as leading states are not enthusiastic about moving forward with a cutoff treaty, they will find ways to use such linkages to prevent discussions from moving forward.
Overall, international support for a verified end to the production of plutonium and HEU remains strong — as exemplified, for example, in a resolution passed by the UN General Assembly in September 2002, calling for negotiation of a cutoff within five years, as a step toward nuclear disarmament[14] — but the prospects for a cutoff being negotiated and entering into force in the near term currently appear slim.
Key Issues and Recommendations
Verified versus unverified agreement. The unverified agreement the Bush administration proposes would be far less effective and do far less to strengthen the nonproliferation regime than a verified agreement. Issues related to protection of secrets from disclosure can be addressed with "managed access" limitations on inspectors' rights, as was done in the Chemical Weapons Convention.
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Recommendation: The United States should reverse its new position and return to its long-standing support for a verified fissile cutoff. States that support a verified cutoff should work intensively to convince the United States to reverse course.
Lack of progress toward a fissile cutoff treaty. After some eight years of inactivity, it is time to question whether the consensus-based Conference on Disarmament is capable of moving forward and negotiating a fissile cutoff.
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Recommendation: Key non-nuclear-weapon states that support negotiation of a fissile cutoff, such as Japan, Canada, and Australia, should launch a negotiation outside of the CD, as Canada successfully did for the ban on anti-personnel landmines.
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Recommendation: States that support a fissile cutoff should work intensively with India, Pakistan, and Israel to attempt to convince them to accept and adhere to a fissile cutoff, including exploring with them the set of circumstances and incentives that would make that possible.
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Recommendation: Similarly, states that support a fissile cutoff should work intensively with China to convince China to support a cutoff without linkages to other issues, and with Russia to convince Russia to drop its suggestion that reprocessing plants processing reactor-grade plutonium be exempted from cutoff requirements.
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Recommendation: The United States and Russia should move forward in placing substantial quantities of excess fissile material under international verification, in an approach structured to partly address concerns over existing stocks. (See IAEA Verification of Excess Material.)
Difficulty of verification. As noted in the main text, both building confidence that no secret facilities exist while protecting national security secrets, and verifying that no nuclear material is being diverted for weapons from older facilities not designed for safeguards will pose challenges for cutoff verification.
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Recommendation: The United States, Russia, and other key nuclear states should begin an informal discussion—possibly including experiments with particular inspection approaches—regarding the best approaches to building confidence that no secret nuclear material production facilities exist while protecting national security secrets.
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Recommendation: The United States, Russia, and perhaps other key nuclear states should work with the IAEA to carry out verification experiments at their older reprocessing and enrichment plants, to demonstrate viable approaches to verifying these facilities under a fissile cutoff treaty.
Links
| Key Resources | |
 |
U.S. Ambassador Jackie W. Sanders, "Remarks to the Conference on Disarmament," July 29, 2004 |
| This is the official statement outlining the Bush administration's new approach. The State Department later released a short statement on "Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty Policy," elaborating on the U.S. concerns. | |
| |
Arms Control Association, "Arms Control Experts Say Ban on Production of Key Nuclear Materials for Weapons Should be Universal and Verifiable," press release, July 30, 2004 |
| This release is a critique of the Bush administration's new approach from supporters of verified arms control. | |
| |
Reaching Critical Will, "Fissile Materials Cut-Off Treaty" |
| This site provides an up-to-date summary of the state of the cutoff talks (including discussion of the Bush administration's new approach), links to key statements, and a good bibliography on the cutoff. | |
|
"Fissile Materials: Scope, Stocks, and Verification," Disarmament Forum, no. 2 (1999). |
| This issue of Disarmament Forum, focused entirely on the cutoff, provides a series of excellent articles addressing the key issues surrounding a fissile cutoff treaty. | |
|
Acronym Institute, "Fissile Material Talks (Fissban)". |
| This page provides a brief summary of the current status of the talks, and links to the full text of key documents. | |
|
David Albright and Kevin O'Neill (eds.), The Challenges of Fissile Material Control, (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Science and International Security Press, 1999). |
| Collection of detailed chapters addressing a wide range of issues relating to control of weapons-usable nuclear materials, including the fissile cutoff. | |
| |
Annette Schaper, Principles of the Verification
For a Future Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT), PRIF
Reports No. 58 (Frankfurt: Peace Research
Institute Frankfurt, 2001). |
| Building on previous papers by the same author, this paper provides a good discussion of some of the key issues related to the scope of verification of a cutoff treaty. | |
| |
George Bunn, "Making Progress on
a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty After the South
Asian Tests," Nonproliferation Review, Spring-Summer
1998. Download 33K PDF |
|
This article provides an overview of the state of the talks as of early 1998, and of the importance of a fissile cutoff treaty. |
|
|
Federation of American Scientists, "Weapons of Mass Destruction: Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty." |
| This FAS collection of documents and statements is useful, though it appears that it is no longer being updated. | |
|
Steve Fetter and Frank
von Hippel, "A Step-By-Step Approach to a Global
Fissile Materials Cutoff," Arms Control Today (October
1995). Download 50 K PDF |
| This paper argues for an approach to achieving an end to production of fissile materials for weapons that begins with a voluntary moratorium on further production, pending negotiation of a verifiable treaty. Written in 1995, it already begins with the statement that "progress toward a fissile cutoff has lost momentum." | |
|
Victor Bragin, John Carlson,
and John Hill, "Verifying a Fissile Material Production
Cut-Off Treaty," Nonproliferation Review 6,
no. 1 (Fall 1998). Download 48K PDF |
| This paper, from three officials of the Australian National Safeguards Office, makes the case for a "focused" approach to verification of a fissile cutoff, targeting enrichment and reprocessing plants and separated plutonium or HEU. | |
|
Hui Zhang, "Uses
of Commercial Satellite Imagery in FMCT Verification," Nonproliferation
Review 7, no. 2 (Summer 2000). Download 627K PDF |
| Describes how unclassified images from commercial satellites can confirm whether or not many key types of fissile material production facilities are operating, including reactors, reprocessing plants, and gaseous diffusion enrichment plants. | |
| Agreements and Documents | |
|
United Nations General Assembly, "Prohibition of the Production of Fissile Materials for Weapons or Other Nuclear Explosive Devices," UNGA 48/75L, December 16, 1993. |
| This resolution, adopted by consensus in the UN General Assembly, calls for the negotiation of "a non-discriminatory multilateral and internationally and effectively verifiable treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices." | |
|
Conference on Disarmament, Report of Ambassador Gerald E. Shannon of Canada on Consultations on the Most Appropriate Arrangement to Negotiate a Treaty Banning the Production of Fissile Material for Nuclear Weapons or Other Nuclear Explosive Devices, CD/1299, March 24, 1995. |
| Ambassador Shannon was given the task of consulting with states participating in the Conference on Disarmament to find an acceptable formula to begin negotiations of a fissile cutoff treaty; as a result of his efforts, the conference agreed on a mandate for negotiating a cutoff. It did so again in 1998, but has not been able to do so since. | |
FOOTNOTES
| [1] | U.S. Department of State,"Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty Policy", July 2004. The original statement to the Conference on Disarmament was made by U.S. Ambassador Jackie W. Sanders on July 29, 2004. |
| [2] | For an excellent summary of the issues surrounding a fissile cutoff, see the special issue of Disarmament Forum devoted to the topic in 1999: "Fissile Materials: Scope, Stocks, and Verification," Disarmament Forum, no. 2 (1999). See also Frans Berkhout, Oleg Bukharin, Harold Feiveson, and Marvin Miller, "A Cutoff in the Production of Fissile Material," International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994-1995), pp. 167-202. |
| [3] | For example, the 1995 conference that agreed to extend the NPT indefinitely agreed, as part of the agreement on indefinite extension, on a set of "Principles and Objectives for Nonproliferation and Disarmament," including three steps that were considered "important in the full realization" of Article VI, one of which was "immediate commencement and early conclusion of negotiations on a nondiscriminatory and universally applicable convention banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices." |
| [4] | United Nations General Assembly, "Prohibition of the Production of Fissile Materials for Weapons or Other Nuclear Explosive Devices," UNGA 48/75L, December 16, 1993. |
| [5] | See, for example, U.S. Department of State, "Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty" (Washington, D.C.: June 29, 1999), and Hui Zhang, "A Chinese View on a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty," Journal of Nuclear Materials Management 30, no. 4 (2002). |
| [6] | Interview with administration official, August 2004. |
| [7] | For a good discussion of fissile cutoff verification—though written before the Bush administration’s announcement, and therefore not directly responding to their arguments—see Annette Schaper, Principles of the Verification For a Future Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT), PRIF Reports No. 58 (Frankfurt: Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, 2001). |
| [8] | For discussion, see Annette Schaper, "Verification of a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty," in "Fissile Materials: Scope, Stocks, and Verification," Disarmament Forum, op. cit. |
| [9] | For discussions of the stocks issue, see, for example, Victor Bragin and John Carlson, "FMCT: Some Significant Divisions in the Scope Debate," and Lewis A. Dunn, "A FMCT: Can We Get From Here to There?" in "Fissile Materials: Scope, Stocks, and Verification," Disarmament Forum, op. cit., and William Walker, "Policies on Fissile Materials: The Cutoff Treaty and Existing Stocks," in David Albright and Kevin O'Neill (eds.), The Challenges of Fissile Material Control (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Science and International Security Press, 1999). |
| [10] | See, for example, Paul Leventhal, "The Plutonium Industry and the Consequences for a Comprehensive Fissile Materials Cutoff" (paper presented to the seminar on "Working Toward a Nuclear Weapon Free World," Oxford, U.K., April 28-30, 1997). |
| [11] | Personal communication with IAEA official, September 2002. |
| [12] | See, for example, discussion of this sequence of events in Rebecca Johnson, "Conference on Disarmament Adopts Programme of Talk", Disarmament Diplomacy, No. 76, March/April 2004. |
| [13] | See discussion in Zhang, "A Chinese View on a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty," op. cit. |
| [14] | See United Nations General Assembly, "A Path to the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons," UNGA 57/78 (L.42), October 10, 2002. |
Written by Matthew Bunn.
Last updated by Anthony Wier on August 1, 2006.
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