ISLAMABAD: The failure of the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s (NPT) Review Conference to produce a document with a substantive consensus has convinced many Pakistani experts that the country’s leadership has made correct decisions on nuclear issues in the past.

These views were expressed on the first day of a two-day seminar on ‘NPT Review Conference and Future of the Non-Proliferation Regime’ organised by Strategic Vision Institute (SVI), an Islamabad-based think tank.

The NPT Review Conference has been held after every five years since the treaty went into force in 1970. This year’s conference held at the UN headquarters in New York from April 27 to May 22 looked into the implementation of the Treaty’s provisions since 2010. Review conferences on four previous occasions – 1980, 1990, 1995, and 2005 – had failed to deliver a final declaration.

The failure to produce a consensus document at the 2015 conference has led to disappointment across the world. It was widely expected that steps to be taken for advancing the 64 point Action Plan, agreed at the 2010 conference, for promoting nuclear disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy would be agreed upon. The opposition of the United States towards a plan for convening a conference on the establishment of the Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone and strong differences between nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states on the divisive issue of disarmament prevented the participating countries from agreeing on a final document.

Speakers at conference hail Pakistan’s past decision of not signing NPT as correct

Director-General, Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI), Ambassador Masood Khan said: “The future of disarmament is bleak.”

He said Pakistan took the right decision in not joining the NPT and then conducting nuclear tests in 1998.

Ambassador Khan said Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent should be both “credible and symmetric” with its conventional and strategic capabilities.

“Refinement of the nuclear capabilities should continue,” he added.

Ambassador Tariq Osman Hyder, who untill recently was a member of the Oversight Board for Strategic Export Controls, said the collapse of the NPT Review Conference was a setback to the developed countries, which had projected this flawed and discriminatory treaty as the linchpin of the non-proliferation regime.

The outcome, Ambassador Hyder believed, vindicated Pakistan’s position in the Conference on Disarmament (CD) that it was not Pakistan, but the major western powers which were obstructing progress on nuclear disarmament.

At the CD the western countries, he said, used Pakistan’s justified national security concerns to distract from their own reluctance to make any meaningful move towards fulfilling their disarmament obligations.

Brigadier Zahir Kazmi, who is serving as a director at Strategic Plans Division’s Arms Control and Disarmament Branch, called for normalisation of relations between the NPT regime and those outside the Treaty.

He suggested that Pakistan should be granted Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) waiver under similar terms as India. He simultaneously proposed that expansion in the membership of the NSG should be put on a hold for a period of at least six years after which the NSG could assess its interaction with Pakistan, India and Israel and decide on their membership claims.

Such a measure, Brig Kazmi said, would assuage Islamabad’s concerns and allow the NSG to examine if the non-NPT powers are delivering on their pledges.

“Such action could lay the groundwork for prudent decisions about the further expansion of the NSG and other export-control arrangements. The haste to grant membership to India has benefited neither the non-proliferation regime, nor South Asian strategic stability,” he added.

Dr Tughral Yamin, associate dean of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Nust, said that the biggest challenge to the future of the non-proliferation regime was from the failure to progress on disarmament.

He feared that the international non-proliferation regime could “collapse” due to the “short sightedness” of the nuclear weapon states, who are unwilling to give up their hegemony.

Dr Zafar Khan of National Defense University called for a combined and holistic approach by both nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states for making the non-proliferation regime “non-discriminatory, flawless, effective, and universal”.

President SVI Dr Zafar Iqbal Cheema said that the international non-proliferation regime was not only inadequate in dealing with instances of proliferation, but also undermined the objectives of the Article IV of the NPT on transfer of nuclear technology for exclusively peaceful purposes.

Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2015

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