The NPT entered into force 50 years ago; its object has been debated from the start

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has entered into force (or, in the jargon of diplomats, has entered into force) 50 years ago, Thursday March 5, 1970.

The landmark global agreement is starting to show its age.

Hailed in 2003 by American Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr. the centerpiece of international efforts to control the spread of nuclear weaponsa common refrain among supporters of treaties around the world, the NPT has gone through a series of storms since the start of the millennium: the end of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the war in Iraq in 2003, the program of & North Korea's nuclear weapons, the dismantling of the nuclear deal between Iran and the world's great powers, a long-announced nuclear renaissance with implications for global fissile material production, the end of the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, parallel modernization efforts by the nuclear powers, President Donald Trumps, shameless nationalism, and the rival of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was opened for signature nine years ago.

Against these headwinds, the States Parties to the NPT will meet from April 27 to May 22, 2020, at the NPT Review Conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York, which happens regularly every five years. Amid deep and enduring divisions over issues ranging ADM-free zone in the Middle East to dying New START talks between Washington and Moscow (what the Trump administration wants expand to include the five states with licensed nuclear weapons), it is unclear whether conference delegates will succeed in forging a consensus document and what will happen if it fails.

The rights, duties and expectations that the international community printed on the NPT from the first proposal for a nuclear restriction on September 19, 1958 to the treaties opened for signature on July 1, 1968, will be the subject of considerable debate at the Review Conference. Two States do not share the same interests. But it is also because states subscribe to contradictory interpretations of the history of the treaty, whether it be the formative intentions of its many drafters or the original meanings that they inscribed in its preamble and its eleven articles.

This divergence of interpretations was visible from April 26, 1968, when 124 delegations met at the 22^{North Dakota} Session of the United Nations General Assembly to discuss a draft nuclear non-proliferation treaty. That day, American Ambassador Arthur Goldberg and his Soviet counterpart, Vasili Kuznetsov, characterized it in very different terms. Goldberg, who had resigned from the United States Supreme Court to replace Adlai Stevenson as President Lyndon Johnsons at the United Nations, toasted the draft treaty as the creation of all nations, large and small who served on the Eighteen Nations Committee on Disarmament in Geneva. This exemplary feat of diplomacy from multilateral conferences had resulted in a forward-looking pact which, in Goldbergs' eyes, reflected three main objectives: to reduce the chances of nuclear weapons falling into new hands, to build a global regime that the Agency international atomic energy would promote. fair and equitable access to the peaceful benefits of nuclear energy and to internationalize the pursuit of nuclear disarmament as well as of general and complete disarmament.

Kuznetsov, on the other hand, pointed out the highest characteristic and in our opinion predominant of the project: close all routes, direct and indirect, leading to the possession of weapons of mass destruction. This insistence on what could be qualified as non-proliferation first testified to the Kremlins' concern for West Germany: the arrival of the ultimate weapon between at the hands of those who had twice launched devastating wars against the Russian people, this century was intolerable. (The fact that the former Axis power remained in a state of technical warfare with members of the Warsaw Pact was also a strong signal.)

This schism between the large NPT market in three elements and the predominance of the regulation of dual-use nuclear technology still defines treaty speech More than 50 years later. Only now, instead of pitting a superpower against each other, the United States and Russia both place paramount importance on the non-acquisition of nuclear weapons by the vast majority of the signatories to the treaty while that, for their part, unarmed nuclear underlines what many call NPT with three pillars. The schism was visible, for example, when the current United States Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation, Christopher Fords, said in 2007 that the treaty required all States Parties to continue negotiations in good faith on nuclear arms control and disarmament. And she is belied by what has proven to be the most insurmountable obstacle to the consensus of the Review Conference: the creation of an ADM-free zone in the Middle East.

International treaties are strange creatures. Each is the product of tortuous negotiations, often in the aftermath of great historical economic wars, terrible famines, viral epidemics, religious conflicts, continental congresses, world decolonization. Each replaces or reforms the operating system that helps nations, states and peoples to coexist within frameworks of mutually agreed (or at least mutually recognized) laws, standards and institutions. Everyone is ultimately the victim of capricious circumstances. Each one carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. And everyone is often taken for granted until their demise.

The NPT belongs to the subset of international agreements that have reformed an existing order, in this case the post-1945 international community that the Charter of the United Nations established. This happened at a time when the international community was plagued by decolonization in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and the countries of Europe and Asia from the East that had been destroyed during World War II were experiencing industrial revivals. to the relative detriment of American industrial pre-eminence. As Soviet and American negotiators spent years crafting the non-dissemination and non-acquisition language of the NPT, with its implications for NATO's nuclear sharing, the rest of the treaty articles took shape back and forth between the superpowers and other states. belonging to several groups: Afro-Asian nations, non-aligned powers, neutral states, advanced economies that read world markets, countries with large uranium mines, Latin American republics simultaneously negotiating a weapon-free zone nuclear, and regional powers like India, western Germany, Israel, Brazil and Japan with latent nuclear weapons capabilities.

In this postcolonial context of accelerating globalization, a strange coupling between the Cold War and the United States and the Soviet Union (and since 1991 the Russian Federation) forged a working relationship that became the heart of the success of the treaty. It was remarkably unlikely. The US-Soviet non-proliferation partnership reached a speed of exit to what seemed to be a low point in their relationship: the Americanization of the Vietnam War in 1965.

Why did Moscow and Washington join forces? There is more than one answer.

President Johnson seems to have found the question irresistible as a way of restoring his peacemaking powers while its increased military efforts in Southeast Asia have caused internal backlash. Soviet Secretary Leonid Brezhnev believed he would isolate the People's Republic of China and open a way to formalize Soviet gains in Europe by speeding up a delay continental peace treaty. However, the balance of negotiations in the Eighteen Nations Disarmament Committee and the First Committee of the United Nations, the two places where the treaty was mainly drawn up, reveals a deeper impulse: the conviction that the ideological enemies should restrict their competition lest the allies and neutrals take them for a ride.

A meeting between the main American architect of the NPT, the director of the American Arms Control and Disarmament Agency William Foster, and his Soviet counterpart, Semyon Tsarapkin, was exemplary. On February 11, 1964, the two sat down to discuss the reasons why a non-dissemination treaty would advance their mutual interests. As Tsarapkin said it, all other countries, including France, China, India (the United Arab Republic) ,. . . even (the German Democratic Republic) played (the) United States and the USSR against each other and tried to take advantage of the differences and contradictions between them; they could do it under the current circumstances, but if (the) United States and the USSR agreed with each other, not everyone would have no choice but to comply. When the Eighteen Nations Disarmament Committee finalized a draft treaty four years later, delegates from the Eastern, Western and non-aligned blocs joked that the only thing that the American and Soviet contingents weren't doing was holding hands.

When U.S. Ambassador Goldberg presented the draft consensus treaty in New York on April 26, 1968, he argued that periodic review conferences would play a central role in maintaining the balance between non-proliferation, peaceful uses and arms control. His country, he said, believed that the continued viability of this treaty would depend to a large extent on our success in the future negotiations envisaged by Article VI, the part of the treaty relating to nuclear and general disarmament. To keep Goldbergs' promise that the United States would enter into new disarmament negotiations with redoubled zeal and hope and with speed, once the treaty was opened for signature in London, Moscow and Washington DC on July 1, 1968, President Johnson and Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin simultaneously announced plans to launch negotiations on strategic arms limitation and anti-ballistic missiles in the near future.

More than half a century later, the NPT has 188 countries among its member states. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty no longer exists as a restriction on global nuclear competition, while the 1972 SEL Treaty was replaced by the START Treaty in 1991 and then the New START Treaty in 2011, which itself is in danger of collapsing into 2021. Even if the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995 reduced the stakes in the Review Conference process, the five-year rally is still this rare opportunity to take the temperature of the treaty as well as the world regime of which it remains the centerpiece.

As both nuclear and non-nuclear states contemplate the next half-century of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, they may consider the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, who Foster cited when asked to explain his mission at a time when non-proliferation talks were taking off in 1964: the task of creating community and avoiding anarchy is constantly posed on increasingly broad levels, had remarked the American theologian and philosopher. This continues to be true, added Foster, to an ever increasing degree. As the NPT enters its sixth decade, this maxim has lost none of its power.

The author would like to thank the Carnegie Corporation of New York for their funding and support of a two-year research consortium whose members will generate, disseminate and preserve historical knowledge of the constitutional history of the NPT.