Prospects for Nuclear Disarmament: Alternative Nobel Prize Winner, Alyn Ware

According to Alyn Ware, Winner of the 2009 Right Livelihood Award (the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’) and International Coordinator of the Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament (PNND), more needs to be done to spread the message of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s five point plan for nuclear disarmament. According to Mr. Ware, even though the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) has adopted the resolution supporting the 5 point plan, many parliamentarians are not aware of this. Mr. Ware cited a number of examples in which parliamentarians and civil society have had a positive impact including the addition of US nuclear weapons on the agenda of the NATO Strategic Review, the support for the EU Parliament resolutions on Nuclear Weapons Convention and Nuclear Weapon Free Zones and the 10th March 2010 resolution on US nuclear weapons in Europe.

P.N. It is a real pleasure for us as the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention and Human Security to speak with an alternative Nobel Prize winner. Can you please tell us more about this prize which you won last year and also maybe what the PNND is focusing on regarding the nuclear issues?

A.W. Yes, the Alternative Nobel Prize was looking at the importance of supporting the openings for progress on nuclear disarmament and at finding practical ways of moving forward. They saw the work that I’d been doing on the Nuclear Weapons Convention and with the parliamentarians, both in terms of providing the framework for nuclear abolition and building the political momentum to achieve the goal.

P.N. This is a really great achievement and very positive for all those supporting nuclear disarmament. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon sent a letter to all  heads of parliaments in February of this year. And PNND reports in the last newsletter that there was a lot of support from governments. Can you tell us which parliaments, from Europe but also from outside Europe, were supporting this 5 point plan from Ban Ki-moon?

A.W. It was a wonderful positive thing that Ban Ki-moon sent out this letter, and in it he also recognized the work of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament (PNND), our two networks. We know there are many parliamentary networks on different issues; some say there are even too many. PNND would like to have collaboration between some of these different parliamentary networks because there are things that we are working on together. So, we have been working in collaboration with the IPU which is made up of 155 national parliaments and 9 regional parliaments. This has allowed our relatively small group of around 800 parliamentarians to reach out to a much broader catchment area and give us more of a voice in the parliaments. However, more remains to be done: though the IPU adopted the resolution supporting Mr Ban Ki-moon’s 5 point plan for nuclear disarmament, it is often the case, when I’m talking in the parliaments with the parliamentarians, that many of them do not even know about those two initiatives. I’d say there is often not the transparency process or the accountability. The IPU delegations do not always report back to their Foreign Affairs committees. The chair or president of the parliament does not report to the rest of the house that this letter has been received from the UN Secretary General. This is one example of where active networks of parliamentarians – like PNND and the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention – can play a key role in promoting and implementing proposals and resolutions agreed by larger bodies such as the IPU and initiatives from the United Nations. key role in .

P.N. In the coming months there will be enormous decisions to make with the NPT Review Conference, and there have been, for example, requests to withdraw the last US nuclear weapons from European countries. Do the members of your organization, the PNND, have enough power to influence their governments and push for a real step forward, giving a clear signal of support to Ban Ki-moon?

A.W. Parliamentarians can have debates and raise questions but it does not necessarily mean that government follows the will of the parliamentarians. But it can be very influential. There may be procedures which have more direct impact, for example the difference between a resolution and legislation or the difference between a resolution that’s voted upon and one that’s adopted by consensus by the parliament. Those differences affect the government in different ways. Then of course there are differences between parliaments in relation to how much the government listens to parliamentarians. So there is not one answer to say that if parliamentarians have a resolution then it is going to change government policy. However, collectively their work really does have an impact. We are seeing this now with NATO: four governments have said they want to have the issue of US nuclear weapons on the agenda of the NATO Strategic Review. I think that’s partly because they have been having questions, resolutions and debates in the parliaments, as well as in the civil society, and now it has developed momentum.

P.N. In the previous legislature of the European Parliament there was a majority demanding ‘no more nukes in Europe’. Is it the same situation in this new elected European Parliament?

A.W. The European Parliament has adopted 2 resolutions leading up to the non-proliferation treaty, one in 2009 and one in 2010. The one in 2009 went a little further, including support for the Nuclear Weapons Convention and Nuclear Weapon Free Zones. The one that was adopted on 10 March 2010 did not talk about the Nuclear Weapons Convention but did talk about the US nuclear weapons in Europe.

P.N. We are aware of the debate about Iran, and the prospect of sanctions to stop any plan – if it exists – to develop nuclear weapons there. In this context, can there be any step forward at the NPT Prep Conference even to speak about nuclear disarmament, between Russia and the US? Is Iran an obstacle to progress?

A.W. Yes, Iran is an obstacle but it is also a challenge to look seriously at a more comprehensive approach to non-proliferation and disarmament in order to deal effectively with the proliferation risk in Iran, and with countries outside the NPT such as North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel. Under the Bush administration, the main Western countries were very strong on non-proliferation, on missile controls, on UN Security Council Resolution 1540, and in cases where other countries were on the potential road to having nuclear weapons, such as Iran, using sanctions. But they were not doing a lot on the disarmament side. This was feeding into the politics in Iran, where the government could highlight that it was being criticized and not allowed to have its own nuclear energy independence whilst the West was doing nothing about Israel’s or its own nuclear weapons. So Iran was actually supported by many non-aligned states who saw that these Western states were being hypocritical, targeting Iran but letting Israel and India off the hook and not doing anything with their own nuclear weapons.

There is now much more support for a comprehensive approach which will look at non-proliferation and disarmament together, looking at ideas such as Ban Ki-moon’s 5 point plan for nuclear disarmament. This is to say, we need more controls, but they cannot just be directed against some countries, which we think are ‘bad’ while ignoring the nuclear weapons capabilities of other countries. Universal controls on the materials and weapons have to be developed. This would include, – for example, a nuclear weapons inventory as a first step in accountability of the nuclear weapon States – and then we have to move towards the disarmament of current stockpile and that will help the non-proliferation regime. That was the basis of Ban Ki-moon’s plan. Initially it was dismissed because it was the UN Secretary General, not a country, which was saying this, but it is now gaining more support amongst governments:  it has been supported by organizations and networks like the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU), and by parliamentarians more generally, and it is coming up in parliamentary resolutions. There have been 2 meetings of Ambassadors already in New York on the 5 point plan for nuclear disarmament, the second attended by 60 countries. The idea was that this should shape the 2010 NPT Review Conference.

P.N. Is PNND involved in those talks or are they behind closed doors?

A.W. Yes, it was our network of parliamentarians which proposed that the IPU in its disarmament resolution specifically support Ban Ki-moon’s 5 point plan. That gave Ban Ki-moon the possibility of sending this letter to all the parliaments, thanking them for supporting the plan and asking them to remind their governments what they want to achieve at the Review Conference.

Of course there are still lots of problems. But the old arguments saying that it’s too early to work on nuclear weapons convention have less traction now than in the past. It probably will not be possible to get all governments to start negotiations on a convention at the NPT Review Conference, but they should and could agree to start on a preparatory process. This would be starting a concrete work with intergovernmental meetings, looking at the different elements which will be required for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons, using the model convention circulated by Ban Ki-moon as food for thought and ideas, but also looking at what  governments can ‘buy into’ to start that process. The Chair of the NPT Review Conference, Ambassador Libran N. Cabactulan of the Philippines , has already had special sessions to discuss this idea.

To follow up, I would come back to the issue of the NATO strategic concept. It has been difficult to get a democratic process into the discussions. They used to be behind closed doors: the very defense-oriented NATO ambassadors were looking very much at the Cold War, state-based, military security perspective. Although the NATO Parliamentary Assembly was established, for a long time it played a superficial role to publicize the things NATO was doing amongst its member states. Now its role is becoming much more significant. I just met with the Dutch rapporteur for the subcommittee report on US non-strategic nuclear weapons, which will be tabled in May in Riga. He has done a very good job on the draft report at laying out the arguments for and against maintaining tactical nuclear weapons: this means that the parliamentarians can come in May, and will be able to state that their own parliaments are supporting the arguments for withdrawal, which are much stronger. The decision-makers are starting to pay much more attention to the input from the parliamentarians than they did before.

P.N. That’s a good message because this will mean that parliamentarians will have much more input in these strategic debates in NATO and perhaps other security organizations.

To conclude Alyn, I would just like to thank you very much for your time. We know you are very busy so are really glad to have been able to get hold of you to have this important discussion and we hope we can develop collaboration between our two networks in the near future. We wish you all the best.