From Obama, A Nuclear Resolution With Teeth?

Tomorrow, President Obama chairs a special session of the United Nations Security Council devoted to nuclear non-proliferation, a topic near and dear to his heart. For the first time since his speech in Prague this spring, Obama will address America's nuclear posture -- a topic almost as important as the words of the resolution. The resolution itself (see this draft obtained by the Politico) is a mix of standard "P-5" -- that is, permanent members of the security council, the US, China, France, Britain and Russia -- rhetoric and a rededication to nonproliferation principles that the current administration believes were abandoned by the previous administration.

India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea are the four nations who haven't signed the treaty. The U.S. tends to ignore Israel's proliferation, a bargain struck during Richard Nixon's administration, and the Bush administration signed a nuclear energy treaty with India in order to coax them into signing. Iran is developing a nuclear energy capacity and could be a few years away from building a nuclear weapon. North Korea has tested a nuke.

So does the UN resolution have teeth? It does break ground on issues --- reaffirming the importance of negative security assurances, emphasizing that states can enjoy the benefits of the NPT, e.g. peaceful civilian use of nuclear energy, only so long as they are in compliance with all of the treaty's articles, establishing the principle that states cannot withdraw from the treaty without paying a price for past violations of the treaty, encouraging all non-NPT states to immediately join the treaty, etc. In essence, the most powerful countries in the world have agreed to ratchet up the price for not complying with the treaty -- although they're not going to be more specific than that. And the verb used to describe the type of complaince is deliberately a bit soft -- "call upon" -- in part because some countries, like France, don't want to be boxed in and prevented from updating their nuclear armaments, and in part because the U.S. itself is going to have to figure out how it updates its own nuclear arsenal, since President Obama has retained this country's committment to nuclear deterrence. The countries that have nuclear weapons are supposed to be working to get rid of them, according to the treaty.

The draft resolution won't be specific -- and won't call for sanctions on Iran and North Korea -- because Russia and China won't agree to anything that directly involves North Korea or Iran, preferring to have follow-on negotiations -- or, perhaps -- no negotiations at all, which is one reason why the U.S. has been so eager to remove Russian obstacles to such talks.

One sign that the U.S. is privately encouraged by: the government of India is screaming bloody murder about the resolution, so it has some bite.

Obama may use the occasion to clarify his view of the extent of this country's nuclear deterrence umbrella. He is expected to promise that the US will never attack a country that does not have nuclear weapons -- that is -- we won't use nuclear weapons in a conventional war. This isn't exactly groundbreaking, but in the arms control community, it sends a signal that Obama's goals aligns with their own. Obama is not expected to make any unilateral promises about the size of America's nuclear arsenal. That'll come next year, after the U.S. signs a follow-on treaty with Russia and attends a non-proliferation treaty conference in May. The BBC is reporting that UK PM Gordon Brown will use the stage to announce that his government wants to reduce the missile count aboard Trident submarines.