Nuclear Authority

The IAEA and the Absolute Weapon

Robert L. Brown

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626161849
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Once dismissed as ineffectual, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has in the past twenty years emerged as a powerful international organization. Member states allow the IAEA to render judgment on matters vital to peace and security while nations around the globe comply with its rules and commands on proliferation, safety, and a range of other issues.

Robert L. Brown details the IAEA's role in facilitating both control of nuclear weapons and the safe exploitation of nuclear power. As he shows, the IAEA has acquired a surprising amount of power as states, for political and technological reasons, turn to it to supply policy cooperation and to act as an agent for their security and safety. The agency's success in gaining and holding authority rests in part on its ability to apply politically neutral expertise that produces beneficial policy outcomes. But Brown also delves into the puzzle of how an agency created by states to aid cooperation has acquired power over them.

1

The Absolute Weapon

WHEN BERNARD BRODIE (1946, 21) described the atomic bomb as “the absolute weapon,” his hyperbole was intended to emphasize for US policymakers the importance of quickly adapting to the new and dangerous world they had created. The idea that the United States should work with others to reduce the danger from nuclear weapons predated the first nuclear weapon test and the first use of nuclear bombs against Japan that instantly killed tens of thousands of people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. But Winston Churchill, prime minister of the United Kingdom, and Franklin Roosevelt, president of the United States, rejected approaching the Soviet Union over the international control of atomic power during the Second World War. And after the war, when President Harry Truman’s emissary Bernard Baruch proposed the international control of atomic power to the United Nations, it was rejected. The Soviet Union wanted first to ban and destroy all nuclear weapons before it would accept a control system, which the West rejected. The major powers had abandoned plans for international nuclear controls before it was clear the spread of nuclear bombs would force even them to completely reconsider how they could provide for their national security.

The first success at imposing any international controls on the spread and use of nuclear energy did not occur until the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA 1957). The United States hoped the IAEA would spur peaceful exploitation of atomic power by supplying nuclear assistance in exchange for safeguards against that assistance being misused for nuclear weapons. The IAEA has come quite far from its origins as a failed provider of civilian nuclear energy services, from the 1960s when many questioned whether it could implement the global verification system called for in the impending Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and even from the early 1990s, when, after the Gulf War, the IAEA was heavily criticized for missing Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. The Secretariat, a bureaucracy of 2,500 staff, is best known today for verifying in over 180 countries that some or all their nuclear materials are exclusively in peaceful uses, including negotiating the international treaties that constitute safeguards agreements and define for states when and how they must open to verification. It supplies hundreds of international nuclear technical assistance and training programs each year and is the trusted agent of the international community for verifying disarmament in states that committed under the NPT to forgo nuclear weapons. The Secretariat also participates in the international governance of nuclear counterterrorism, nuclear trade, nuclear transport security, and nuclear safety by hosting international conferences, issuing standards, and conducting review missions.

The IAEA’s Board of Governors oversees the Secretariat’s programs. Usually by consensus, the thirty-five states represented by governors recommend to its General Conference of all members the annual budget and who should be appointed as the Secretariat’s director general. It also approves the slate of technical assistance projects and individual safeguards agreements. Less routine, very political, and sometimes decided by a straight majority vote are decisions imposing stronger verification standards and judging whether states like Iran, North Korea, and others are in compliance with their nonproliferation treaty commitments or should face sanctions or be reported to the UN Security Council for noncompliance. These decisions are informed by, if not initiated by, reports from the Secretariat, but the Board can also impose such decisions because many of the governors represent the same states that dominate the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank.

This book makes the empirical claim that the IAEA has acquired the independent power to issue rules and make commands in some areas of nuclear policy with which states feel pulled to comply. Efforts to control “the absolute weapon” have relied upon a hodgepodge of unilateral policies and multilateral arrangements, but only the IAEA is the agent of the 162 members of its General Conference, and of the 190 parties to the 1970 NPT, arguably the most important modern international security treaty, and of several regional nuclear weapon-free zones. The IAEA judges compliance with the NPT but also issues the rules by which compliance is judged, verifies compliance, demands that states found in violation return to compliance, and sanctions states for their violations. And beyond the area of nonproliferation, it also contributes to international nuclear disarmament, safety, security, and supply.

This power is actually a separation of powers between the two agents of the IAEA’s members: the Board and the Secretariat. This relationship has historically worked well although their occasional discord shows them to increasingly be distinct actors on the international stage. One salient example is the conflict that erupted between the Board and then–director general Mohamed ElBaradei. After the Secretariat was proven right about the state of Iraq’s nuclear program in 2002–3 and then received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2005, ElBaradei refused for years to declare that Iran was in non-compliance with its NPT commitments. Then, after winning reappointment to a third term despite opposition by the United States, the Agency’s most powerful supporter and the contributor of more than one-third of its resources, he criticized the Board for financially starving the Agency. He warned, reports Kerr (2007), that its proposed 2008 budget “does not by any stretch of the imagination meet our basic, essential requirements.” A leaked US government cable by Schulte (2009) described ElBaradei’s 2009 intervention into the debate as a “backlash.” ElBaradei said they “would eventually ‘reap what they sowed’ ” and that forcing the IAEA to increasingly subsist on voluntary contributions “was a ‘bastardization’ of an important international organization” (Schulte 2009). This supposed servant of the Board survived repeatedly challenging his masters, telling them that they, not he, would be held responsible for the dire consequences of failing to heed his warnings.

How did this international organization acquire the power to issue rules and commands over sensitive national security issues like nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, with which states expect each other to comply? This book presents the theoretical claim that the power acquired by the IAEA is political authority, a form of power that arises out of the persistent demand for agency gains with successful supply by an agent. I argue that states are demanding political authority when they find collective action persistently impeded by policy uncertainty or conflicts of interest, but an agent’s authority is contingent upon its demonstrated, repeated ability to supply this cooperation. This contingency means all authority is continually contested as states and other actors advance their own more or less divergent interests and their own claims to authority.

This power is part of a larger puzzle about the effects of international organizations. Deployed to solve complex cooperation problems, their effects are difficult to disentangle from the complex strategic interaction in which they are embedded. Often the demand for agency gains is weak, short-lived, or easily isolated from other issues, allowing delegations to international organizations to be highly circumscribed in function or time. Often, states are unsure whether an agent is effective for their needs and delegation is a conditional policy experiment from which states can escape with little penalty.

THE NUCLEAR AUTHORITY PUZZLE

Months before the nuclear bomb was first used against Japan, demonstrating to the world the incredible power of this “absolute weapon,” deliberations were under way in the US government over how nuclear weapons could or should be used. The US internal conversation presaged the wider international debate that emerged after the world learned of the atom bomb’s destructive power.¹ On the one hand, even though the horrors of World War II had desensitized many from immediately considering the moral question of mass civilian death and destruction, Sims (1990) and Wittner (1993, 61) argue that the fear of the cataclysmic effects of nuclear weapons fed a strong desire for complete and general disarmament and “world government.” These ideas seem idealistic now, but in the world of the late 1940s, with two world wars and a global economic depression in the immediate past and another global conflict over Communism on the horizon, dramatic solutions seemed the only way to prevent another world war. Scientists involved in developing America’s first nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project called on President Franklin Roosevelt before the bomb’s use and then afterward were joined by many others inside and outside the United States in pressing President Harry Truman to internationalize all aspects of the atomic program (Wittner 1993, esp. chap. 4).

On the other hand, even Brodie’s (1946) early writings show it was hard to ignore the potential technological, economic, and coercive value of the US monopoly on atomic technology. Although US military strategists disagreed whether nuclear weapons were most effective for destroying Soviet cities or destroying the Soviet military capabilities that could launch a Pearl Harbor–style surprise attack, the monopoly appeared to deter any further Soviet incursion into Europe or Asia (Freedman 2003, 41).² Many inside the United States opposed any steps toward abandoning this leverage. Continuing nuclear science research also promised new technological developments that could further advance US power or quality of life. To dissuade others from pursuing nuclear weapons, President Truman was convinced within days of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to release the Smyth Report (1945), a public relations campaign that described in just enough detail the scientific and engineering difficulty of nuclear weapons. Redirection toward peaceful uses was also the purpose of the US Acheson–Lilienthal proposal for internationalization of the atom presented by Bernard Baruch to the new United Nations in 1945. Known as the Baruch Plan (1946), it called for the “managerial control or ownership of all atomic-energy, activities potentially dangerous to world security” by an international atomic development authority. The plan was rejected by the Soviet Union, in part because US disarmament would be delayed until others had accepted verification but also because Baruch proposed to eliminate the permanent member veto at the Security Council over this agency’s activities.

Although debate continued for decades over how the United States should use nuclear weapons, Brodie had made the point early, and publicly, of the vulnerability of Western democracies if their enemies acquired nuclear weapons. James Goodby (2006) argues that the compromise within the United States, and then between the United States and the United Kingdom, was to hope to maintain the US atomic monopoly through secrecy. The 1943 Quebec Agreement between Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States was extended to continue their agreement to not communicate any information about nuclear technology without the consent of the others. The Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls was then formed in January 1950 to extend a wider range of export controls by more Western states against the USSR and its Eastern Bloc allies. By now many states wanted nuclear arsenals for their assumed military utility, for technological advancement, or simply for the prestige of being an atomic power.

The Soviet Union became the second member of the atomic club in 1949 and only slowly embraced the disadvantages of further proliferation. The United States and the Soviet Union supported the proliferation of peaceful uses that could aid nuclear weapons programs and were themselves engaged in a rapid vertical proliferation toward ever-larger stockpiles, but they also worked independently to reduce demand for nuclear weapons by their respective allies. They offered alliances, conventional arms, and other security assurances. They were unsuccessful in stopping France and China from stockpiling nuclear weapons, but their unilateral efforts became more robust toward stopping South Korea, Taiwan, East and West Germany, and others. The effectiveness of these policies at reducing demand for nuclear weapons is the foundation of many arguments today for continuing to maintain a robust US nuclear arsenal.

When the United States finally entered the growing international market for nuclear supply in 1954, it did so because it feared both being left out of its commercial promise and seeing that market develop without proper constraints. US president Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program allowed US exports but made them conditional upon “safeguards”—assurances that US assistance would not be used to produce nuclear weapons, including certain rights of inspection and the right to later recall the assistance. The United Kingdom, France, and even the Soviet Union soon followed with their own bilateral safeguards systems. The primary focus of international cooperation, though, was on the supply side of the problem: limiting access to the equipment, knowledge, and materials needed for nuclear weapons.

Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech to the UN General Assembly also included another proposal for an international solution to the perceived danger of more nuclear states. Believing that converting fissile materials after their diversion from peaceful uses was “an elaborate and expensive process of a magnitude which would be very difficult to carry out without its becoming known” (US Senate 1957, 79), Eisenhower proposed creating an international atomic agency to underwrite the development of peaceful nuclear uses. With no immediate commercial prospects for nuclear energy, Eisenhower believed a little international encouragement could keep scarce national nuclear resources focused on civilian applications and unavailable for military uses. The IAEA that emerged from US-sponsored negotiations in 1957 held the promise of becoming a global supplier of nuclear materials and facilities but with safeguards against their subsequent diversion to military uses.

Superpower coercion, supplier constraints, and IAEA incentives to focus on civilian efforts offered parallel tactics for stopping new nuclear powers from emerging. However, they were also applied unevenly. And the United Nations was failing to offer more universal and permanent solutions. From the Baruch Plan to the UN General Assembly’s “First Committee,” created to negotiate complete and general disarmament, the threat of another use of atomic weapons did not abate. Enthusiasm for comprehensive solutions to the threat of another world war—complete and general disarmament and even limited nuclear disarmament—waned through the 1950s.

International efforts instead shifted to a more minimal strategy of “non-proliferation,” first in the form of a test ban. Popular support in many countries, explain Wittner (1997) and York (1987), came more from the fear of radioactive fallout from nuclear testing than from the belief that testing enabled the proliferation of nuclear weapons in ways that could destabilize the delicate US–Soviet strategic balance. A moratorium among the three nuclear powers provided some space for negotiating a ban on all tests until France “broke” the moratorium with its first test. But a complete ban on testing was already proving impossible to achieve for the United States and United Kingdom as long as the Soviet Union refused to accept the verification measures they thought necessary to confirm the absence of underground nuclear testing. Even then, explains Goodby (2005), it took the near spasm into nuclear war over Cuba in 1962 before they could conclude the 1963 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.³ Although “limited,” the treaty solved the fallout problem and relieved enough pressure on the superpowers that a comprehensive test ban would take another three decades to conclude. France and China, however, rejected the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, believing that as long as their support would reduce pressure for more comprehensive measures by the United States and Soviet Union, they might as well avoid constraints on their own programs and continue testing.

The nonproliferation successes of the 1950s and 1960s were successes of the various national nonproliferation efforts. The IAEA as a collective effort, though, was largely a failure. The Agency was a new agency facing all the struggles of newly stood-up bureaucracies but also tasked with creating a global safeguards system from scratch when even the United States safeguards system was rudimentary. These natural challenges were made worse when the main nuclear supplier states failed to give the Agency the nuclear materials it needed to become a supplier of nuclear fuel. Then commercial nuclear power began to take off, ending the market failure before it could carve out a peaceful supply niche. Supplier states, especially the United States, were also quite slow to transfer to the Agency the implementation of bilateral safeguards.

To fill the gap left by a disappointing IAEA, states began pursuing regional nuclear weapons–free zones (NWFZ) and a global nonproliferation agreement. NWFZs were more intended to keep superpower nuclear weapons out, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, than they were to prevent proliferation by regional actors. The NPT legalized a commitment to the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons with what is now described as a grand bargain between members of the nuclear club and the non–nuclear weapons states (NNWS). In exchange for promises of progress on complete and general disarmament, including nuclear disarmament by nuclear weapons states (NWS), and promises that no party would restrict access to nuclear materials and peaceful technologies, the NNWS parties would accept “comprehensive safeguards” by the IAEA on their civilian nuclear programs.⁴ In contrast to the voluntary nature of the regular IAEA safeguards system, these comprehensive safeguards would be mandatory for all NNWS parties to the NPT.

The international community now views this bargain as the keystone of the nonproliferation regime, but it was unclear if the Agency could handle the expected increase in its responsibilities or if many states of interest could be encouraged to accept the NPT. Several had ruled out ratifying the NPT at all, including China, France, and India. Many holdout states argued the NPT was discriminatory because it did not make nuclear weapons illegal to have or use. Others worried the NPT ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1 The Absolute Weapon
• CHAPTER 2 Theory of Authority
• CHAPTER 3 The Birth of the IAEA, 1945–1961
• CHAPTER 4 The Adolescence of the Agency, 1962–1985
• CHAPTER 5 The IAEA Challenged, 1986–1998
• CHAPTER 6 Nuclear Authority, 1998–2013
• CHAPTER 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index