Nuclear proliferation was the subject of some important meetings across the globe this week.
In New York City: The UN Security Council met to slap Iran with new sanctions for its nuclear program. Reuters reported:
“The U.N. Security Council on Monday imposed a third round of sanctions on Iran for its refusal to halt uranium enrichment, even though some members acknowledged that more penalties were unlikely to change Tehran's mind… The sponsors of the resolution, the five permanent council members the US, Russia, China, Britain and France) plus Germany, said they were trying to provide Iran with a choice between isolation and engagement, and that the new sanctions were intended to demonstrate that the council was serious.”
The BBC published an international round-up of news commentary on the Security Council's move. Most authors express skepticism that this round of sanctions would prove effective.
The sentiment of the journalists and pundits reflected that of some US diplomats currently negotiating the sanctions. Bill Leurs, former Ambassador and current President of the United Nations Association (UNA-USA), Thomas Pickering, former US Ambassador and co-chairman of UNA-USA, and James Walsh, a research associate at MIT, authored an article in the International Herald Tribune titled “How to end the U.S.-Iran standoff.”
Their stance on the new sanctions is this: “Continuing to try to sanction Iran has made life difficult for some Iranians but will not coerce Iran to change its commitment to a nuclear program. Nor will sanctions result in regime change. U.S. diplomacy has proven that there is world opposition to Iran having nuclear weapons, but it has not prevented Iran from continuing to build large numbers of centrifuges to enable them to enrich uranium.”
They boiled down the standoff to this: “Face-to-face U.S.-Iran talks on the nuclear program are blocked because Washington will not agree to talk until Iran suspends nuclear enrichment. Iran says it will never suspend. The U.S. insistence on zero enrichment on Iranian soil grows less viable with every newly constructed Iranian centrifuge.”
Their recipe for success is contained in this article published in the New York Times Review of Books.
In Oslo, ambassadors gathered to attend an international conference on nuclear disarmament titled “Achieving the Vision of a World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” At the conference the International Atomic Energy Chief Mohammed ElBaradei put pressure, refreshingly, on Russia and the US to reduce their nuclear arsenals.
In Washington, DC the non-partisan, quasi-governmental think tank the US Institute for Peace held an event titled “A World Without Nuclear Weapons: The International Dimension.” You can listen to part one of the event by clikcing here here, and part two here here.
The titles of both conference in Oslo and DC borrow from an important Wall Street Journal op-edauthored in January 2007 by a group of former US statesmen calling for nothing less than the abolition of nuclear weapons. The authors, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, George Shultz and William Perry, were key players at the conference this week in Oslo, attempting to move forward their ambisious agenda. National Public Radio broadcast a segment about their efforts in Oslo.
Side note: If you’re like me and you have a hard time keeping up with the complexities of the nuclear “standoff” between Iran and the international community–not to mention the scientific complexities of producing nuclear energy/weapons– a glance at the Carnegie Endowment's “Iran Compliance Timeline” probably won't make you feel any better. While an eye trained in diplomatic negotiations might find it immensely illuminating, to me it looks like about as clear as the London Tube map.
Nuclear non-proliferation is an extremely complicated and important campaign that requires diligence, enormous effort, diplomatic elan, a lot of patience and apparently some good map-reading skills. My hats off to all the diplomats–past and present–invovled in the negotiations and summits in New York, Osloand Washington, and beyond.
