SIPRI Update, November 2008
THE PEACEFUL USE OF ATOMIC ENERGY AND NON-PROLIFERATION
A talk by Alyson J.K. Bailes, Director,
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Beijing, 28 April 2006
As I mentioned earlier, 2006 is the 40th anniversary of SIPRI, and the Yearbook we are presenting to you today is actually the 35th in an unbroken line. We are proud that it is also the fourth to be translated into Chinese in partnership with CACDA.
The very first Yearbook, covering the year 1968-9, took the danger of nuclear weapons as one of its central themes. At that time it naturally focussed on the massive nuclear confrontation between the USA and Soviet Union and between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the two rival armed blocs that faced each other across the centre of Germany. SIPRI’s reporting followed the development of the two sides’ nuclear forces and doctrines and warned of the risks when the arms race seemed to be breaking out into new areas, notably with the plans on both sides to introduce intermediate range missiles into Europe. Eventually SIPRI was able to report on breakthroughs in arms control and disarmament, including the agreement to eliminate all Intermediate Nuclear Forces but also important limitations on and reductions in strategic weapons that were agreed between Washington and Moscow. At one point, with the Reykjavik Summit of October1986, it looked as if Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev might be able to agree on eliminating practically the whole of the US and Soviet strategic nuclear arsenals. But as we know, that did not prove possible; and even after the peaceful end of the Cold War, the five powers who had developed nuclear weapons to play various purposes in the overall East-West confrontation—China, France, Russia, the UK and USA—all decided that they had to hold on to at least the key elements of their forces.
Even more disturbing and controversial, however, has been the rise of the problem of nuclear proliferation – that is, the spreading of nuclear weapons to new nations and users - from one that was hardly mentioned in Cold War times, to an issue that sits literally at the top of many security agenda today, including those of the USA, NATO and the European Union. It is worth pausing a moment to consider just why the status of this issue has changed so dramatically. It is not only because of objective reasons—for instance, of simple arithmetic. It is true that two states openly declared themselves as nuclear weapon possessors in the mid-1990s—India and Pakistan; that another, Israel, is universally believed to have an arsenal of perhaps up to 200 nuclear weapons although it will not confirm the fact itself; and North Korea also declared it had created nuclear weapons in 2005. Even before the end of the Cold War, there was also a growing concern about the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons by radical Arab states like Libya and Iraq. The lack of assurance over whether the UNSCOM process after 1991 had really destroyed all Iraq’s WMD capacities was a major factor in launching the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, an event that is still having such serious consequences for world peace; and today we have the new worries about possible or actual nuclear weapon development by Iran. That makes a maximum total of seven actual or suspected proliferators up to the present. But since Cold War times we have also seen South Africa agree to give up its clandestine nuclear weapon arsenal and dismantle its production capabilities under international supervision; Argentina and Brazil voluntarily abandon programmes of research and development that were leading them towards a nuclear weapon potential; and Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all agreeing peacefully in the end to return the nuclear weapons on their territory to Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Libya gave up all its relevant capabilities as part of a deal with the USA and UK in December 2003; and now we know that Iraq did in fact have its nuclear capability destroyed as a result of the actions mandated by the UN in the 1990s, and had not come anywhere near rebuilding actual weapons by 2003. That makes a total of eight countries that have been in one way or another de-nuclearized over exactly the same period when the seven cases of concern over proliferation have arisen. I do not think that an objective observer would immediately agree, on these facts alone, with the often-heard statement that the proliferation threat is getting out of control.
It is much easier, however, to understand statements like that if we consider the subjective and relative dimensions of world security. As one threat reduces, others start to look proportionally larger. Particularly in the Western world, populations who felt at the end of the Cold War that a huge shadow of potential nuclear war had been lifted from over their head are naturally not very happy to be told that they could now be threatened all over again—and by enemies who are much less predictable than our traditional Cold War rivals. This new sense of exposure and vulnerability has been further sharpened by horrific terrorist incidents like the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the USA. Terrorists are for many people a much more frightening threat than most of the dangers we grew up with, not just because they are so reckless and inhumane, or because they seem impossible to deter or to negotiate with, but because of the feeling that they could be hiding anywhere in our societies and could strike us as it were from the inside. The extreme feelings of uncertainty that they provoke were illustrated in the European Union’s first ever Security Strategy document adopted in December 2003, which described the risk of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction as perhaps the single worst danger that Europe has to face in the 21st century. Looking back on that statement from today, it may seem perhaps a bit exaggerated: and yet I think it was quite a sincere reflection of the anxiety that was felt and is still felt by Europe’s leaders about whether they can adequately protect their lands and peoples from such unfamiliar and highly unpredictable threats.
However, in order fully to understand why Europe or any of the world’s other prosperous democracies feels so strongly about the new nuclear risks it is also necessary to draw attention to the common description of these new threats as ‘asymmetrical’. Today, the USA and the other Western powers of NATO and the EU, as well as other democratic regional powers like Australia, have an asymmetrical advantage over most of their neighbours in terms of conventional military strength, and often also in economic strength and political and cultural influence. Since we ended the Cold War which was tying up so much of our strengths in the Northern hemisphere unprofitably, it has been easy to assume that the rich nations of the G8 and OECD would ‘have things all our own way’: that we would make the decisions to intervene or not intervene in the crises of other parts of the world and that if we did intervene, we would always win. These attitudes and hopes face a very obvious challenge from the possibility that one or several small, relatively poor states might suddenly get their hands on nuclear weapons; that they might see us as being among the enemies against whom those weapons might be used—unlike India and Pakistan who we assume are only interested in balancing their neighbours; and that they might take their decisions on nuclear action in a much more reckless way then the world has ever yet known. Nuclear weapons in the hands of a regime like the one in Pyongyang, as well as in the hands of terrorists, really do create an asymmetrical threat to world order in the sense that they would allow an essentially weaker player to try to paralyse much stronger players by nuclear threats, and then severely wound them by actual nuclear use. Even if we can assume that our countries would survive a limited strike or number of strikes from such enemies, there would be an enormous temptation to nuclear retaliation, and then the taboo which we have so carefully preserved since 1945 on any operational use of nuclear weapons would have been broken with truly frightening and unpredictable consequences.
You may wonder why I am talking so much at the outset about the proliferation fears of the larger and stronger states. It is not because I don’t know that there are other quite different ways of looking at the matter that could come to quite different conclusions. But by considering these feelings experienced by what are, after all, the world’s dominating powers, it is easier to understand how these nation’s strategic elites can be led into ideas about handling the new nuclear threats that are, at the same time, perfectly natural and very largely wrong. When countries believe that their power and wealth gives them a right to a peaceful life, and someone unexpectedly threatens that peace, they are very likely to assume that their power also provides the best answer to the threat and that they should use it to crush their enemies as fast and as directly as they can. They are also likely to think that when they have to face such a treacherous and, as it were, unreasonable threat they are justified in using any means they can find against it, and should not be held back from protecting themselves by mere international rules and regulations. This is, of course, the kind of thinking that led to the invasion of Iraq. Also, in a particular historical situation where we have only very recently emerged from the Cold War with its dominant ideas of nuclear balance and deterrence, it is natural to assume that the answer to any nuclear threat includes keeping even stronger nuclear capacities ourselves, and perhaps trying out additional ways to get a strategic advantage such as ballistic missile shields. With fifty years of a major and global ideological confrontation behind us, it is easy to assume that the new players threatening us with nuclear weapons are also our ideological or existential enemies, that they could all be linked in some kind of global conspiracy with deviant states and terrorists, and that their interest in weapons of mass destruction is the illogical result of perverse beliefs and abnormal personalities. This kind of thinking makes it very hard to look calmly and objectively at countries’ deeper and more specific reasons for considering a nuclear breakout, and it also makes it easy to slip into the view that it is OK for people to have WMD (or get more WMD) if they are nice people who seem to have the right beliefs and who at least say they are our friends.
In the rest of my talk I will try very hard to avoid falling into subjective perceptions of this kind which only reflect the outlook of one group of the world’s states, and which may not correspond to the real interests even of those. I would like to go back to the beginning to consider why the risk of nuclear proliferation exists at all; what are the strengths and weaknesses of the general instruments that the international community has developed to deal with it; and what are some of the wrong ways and the better ways to approach particular countries and regions of concern. Finally I will come back to the question of whether there are any particular remedies that can work against the risk of nuclear terrorism.
Proliferation: general dynamics and remedies
The most fundamental reason for the risk of nuclear proliferation is that the technologies used for producing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, all around the world, are adaptations of ones that were originally developed for producing nuclear weapons. This explains the focus upon the enrichment of uranium, the potential to extract plutonium, and the fact that it is so hard to be sure just by observing the machinery of production whether it is intended purely for civil use or for potential weaponization—otherwise the IAEA’s task would be very much easier! While not all countries producing and using nuclear energy have developed full fuel cycles with this dual potentiality, there are a number of countries that do possess sensitive fuel cycle facilities but who have never (or at least, not for a very long time) considered military nuclear programmes or been suspected of developing them—Canada, Japan, Germany and Sweden among others. This underlines the fact that there is no simple, physical or systemic ‘fire-wall’ within the nuclear industrial process. The fire-walls that have actually prevented, stopped or reversed weapons production have been largely intangible, political and strategic ones: namely, the decision of some countries simply not to take the fatal step, or the actions taken to deter and prevent other countries from doing so by their friends or their enemies or the international community acting as a whole.
These are sobering realities to reflect on, at a time when we must clearly expect a sustained and worldwide increase in the demand for civilian nuclear power. The growth of overall energy demand, especially in the ‘rising giant’ economies like China and India, will combine with concerns about climate protection and also about national control and autonomy to make nuclear power look like a very attractive or, in some cases, the only possible choice. Popular concerns about nuclear safety and about environmental damage, for instance from waste disposal, can to some extent be met in future by better, safer nuclear plant design and by better, often more cooperative, ways of storing and disposing of spent fuels. What remains is the proliferation risk, and I would like already at this stage to mention the most obvious and general answer for it: that is, to see whether the world can develop more ‘proliferation-resistant’ nuclear technologies. This is already a hot topic of research in such countries as France, Russia, Japan and South Korea as well as the USA, particularly in connection with international initiatives to develop new types of nuclear reactors and fuel cycle technologies – like the International Project on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles, INPRO, and the Generation IV International Forum (GIF). One of the options being looked at is to use fuel cycles and methods of energy extraction that do not use uranium in the present way at all, e.g. nuclear fusion and cycles based on thorium (a naturally occurring element that is more plentiful than uranium in the earth’s crust, so that India for instance would have much bigger independent stocks of it than of uranium). Another approach is to design nuclear plants in such a way that they physically cannot carry out the higher stages of uranium enrichment, or at least, could not do so without large-scale rebuilding that would be easy for foreign observers and inspectors to notice; and to design nuclear fuel recycling techonologies that are incapable of producing plutonium.
If these solutions seem too far away in the future or too expensive and technically difficult, another idea would be to approach the commercial organization and ownership structures of nuclear power production operations in a different way. When one country is carrying out the whole business on its own and especially if it is a country with high levels of tension and suspicion and low levels of transparency, the increased risk that it will actually mis-use the process for weapons purposes is combined with more-than-average obstacles to anyone else finding out the real truth. This leads to tragic situations like that in Iraq where even the most skilled inspectors could not break through Saddam Hussein’s deception in order to prove that he did not actually have WMD—and thus to save the country from invasion. The opposite situation exists where several countries have come together in a joint governmental and commercial venture, like Urenco and Eurodif in Western Europe, to produce nuclear energy in a multilateral cooperative framework where only some of them possess the full technology to carry out the more sensitive stages of fuel handling, and thus even the very first step towards proliferation for the other members can be avoided. There is absolutely no reason why such cooperative schemes should not be set up, with both economic and strategic benefits, among neighbouring countries in other parts of the world. Indeed, the solution that the Russian Federation has been promoting to address international concerns about Iran’s sensitive nuclear fuel cycle activities was exactly of this type, and so are some of the ideas put forward in the past—and perhaps in future, too?—for meeting North Korea’s legitimate energy needs. Although it may be obvious, I should point out that such multilateral arrangements also tend to be of a relatively transparent character, and that the limited and concentrated nature of the more sensitive installations that they require (for uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing) lends itself very easily to correct supervision by the IAEA and other relevant authorities—like Euratom in the European case.
If we ask ourselves why some countries might not want to enter into such deals, we are reminded of one of the more political and psychological features of the global proliferation dilemma. Many countries especially in the developing world, even if they themselves have no wish to produce nuclear weapons, feel passionately about two principles that are formally proclaimed in the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968:
that every state has an equal right to the development and peaceful exploitation of nuclear energy; and
that the five countries who first acquired nuclear weapons have a special responsibility to engage in nuclear disarmament, leading to the eventual complete phasing-out of their arsenals, in return for the agreement by the great majority of the world’s states not to develop nuclear weapons at all.
There are obvious problems, however, about the fulfilment of both these commitments: starting with the fact that the NPT itself does not create any machinery for pursuing them, or for monitoring and judging the results. There is no global mechanism to share out access to nuclear power technology to those that most need it, as the WHO tries to do for example with medical expertise. On the contrary, nuclear technology is a commercial property that companies will only sell, and their governments will only license them to export, when they themselves consider it profitable and appropriate to do so. Indeed, the world’s leading nuclear nations have set up the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the so-called Zangger Committee in order to agree and enforce rules among themselves on not exporting certain sensitive objects and technologies to customers that they do not approve of. An obvious weakness of these groups is that the countries who acquired nuclear weapons after the NPT was signed do not belong to them; and the very real risk of deliberate or criminal technology leakage from the so-called secondary centres of nuclear expertise was dramatically illustrated when the nuclear smuggling network of the Pakistani government scientist A.Q. Khan began to come to light in late 2003. On the other side, namely the obligation of the larger nuclear powers to steadily disarm themselves, we know that only Washington and Moscow have ever signed formal and binding agreements on nuclear cuts, and although their national plans still provide for considerable reductions, there is reason to worry that they will be handled in a much less transparent way in future. France, Britain and China have all shown elements of restraint, abstention or actual reduction in their national nuclear holdings and doctrines, and we must hope that these elements of restraint will continue or be strengthened; but they are all essentially unilateral measures which, by definition, other powers cannot enforce or verify and which the countries concerned remain free to reconsider at any time. At the moment, it looks in fact as if all the 5 ‘recognized’ nuclear powers are making plans to modernize their arsenals so that they could still be used for some decades into the future, and such little information as we have suggests that the same is true also of India and Pakistan.
There is hardly anything new or secret about these points because they have been energetically pursued in public arguments by the countries that feel most resentful about the dominant powers’ attitudes—for examples, by Egypt and others at the latest Review Conference of the NPT last May. But on the other side, the USA and its supporters have been able to point out that the NPT in itself has not been terribly successful at doing the one thing it does formally claim to do, that is, to stop the emergence of new military nuclear powers. One problem is that states are not obliged to join the Treaty, so that neither India nor Pakistan nor Israel can be accused of formally breaking it. Another problem is that states not officially recognized as nuclear weapons states can leave the NPT, as North Korea declared it was doing in January 2003, and on that occasion the rest of the world could not agree on the precise legal status of Pyongyang’s action let alone on doing anything in particular to react against the withdrawal. Further, despite the excellent technical and diplomatic skills devoted by the IAEA to monitoring and inspecting states’ nuclear programmes over the last decades, the inherently two-sided nature of nuclear technology has allowed one state after another to build a lot of the key infrastructure for preparing weapons without too obviously breaking the nuclear safeguards agreements linked with the NPT or at least, without getting found out. Now, in my view all these different complaints about the way the NPT works all have some justification; but the problem is precisely that they are complaints, and that for countries to use such negative observations as a way of blaming and attacking each other only takes us further away from any kind of constructive solution. Such behaviour on all sides helps to explain why last year’s NPT Review Conference achieved so little, and why the UN Summit of September 2005 was not able to reach agreement on any language about arms control and disarmament at all. Such international arguments have politically weakened the global non-proliferation regime, without even helping us to understand how to correct it: because such a system that has grown up over decades is not like a car engine where you can just point to the faulty part and then replace it. The real task of reviving international consensus and strengthening the barriers to proliferation is something very much more complex, not least because of all the subjective as well as objective factors that have to be taken into account.
In fact, to blame the NPT itself, or any other international treaty, for this whole tangled set of problems would be just as foolish as trying to claim that the treaty itself could ever solve them all. It is not so much the international legal framework or the powers of the IAEA that need to be changed, but the dysfunctional elements in the security behaviour of states and in the relations between them. It is not nuclear weapons that cause more nuclear weapons, but the security problems and perceptions that are tied up with them. The big powers hang on to their nuclear stocks because of their general security worries that I outlined above including the specific worry that smaller players might use nuclear technologies to challenge them. Smaller players are tempted to seek nuclear weapons because they are afraid of each other or of the big powers, or possibly because they have positive ambitions that they want to fulfil—for instance, to become regional leaders—but for which they fear that their other qualifications might be too weak or the obstacles against them too strong. What is common to all such cases is the belief that having nuclear weapons can solve the underlying problem of insecurity, whereas unfortunately all the world’s experience tells us that it cannot. At best it can produce a long, costly and dangerous stalemate, like the Cold War and the current India-Pakistan relationship; and in many more cases, the appearance of new weapons or techniques either in new hands or in the hands of existing nuclear powers merely produces anxieties and reactions that make the overall security situation worse. This is particularly unnecessary and unfortunate at a time when the world has so many other really urgent and truly common challenges of human security to deal with.
This last argument might sound to you like an idealistic one, but in fact it is not meant to be. In claiming that the root of proliferation problems lies in states’ broader security predicaments I am actually calling for an approach that searches for the practical causes of the problem in each case and tries the most practical and productive methods possible to remedy them. Such a security-based approach might help us to cut through many of the confusions and mistaken policies surrounding individual cases of proliferation concern today. For instance, if we accept that security is a part of Iranian and North Korean motives it should be clear that threatening to attack them or overthrow their regimes can only make things worse. It should also be clear that the security perceptions of states like these are formed by their regional neighbourhoods as much as by their attitudes to the global powers, and so there cannot be any good solutions that do not also try to regulate and improve the security conditions in their whole regional environments. The chaotic Iraq situation and the Israel/Palestinians dispute are a part of the background to Iran’s actions just as much as anything going on in Brussels or Washington. China’s initiative to set up the framework of 6-power talks for handling the North Korean challenge was a rational response to the same kind of logic in the East Asian area. At the same time, it is important to confront our own subjective perceptions and to realize that while we might define a good eventual regional security solution as one that leaves Iran or North Korea weaker—or for that matter, a good solution in South Asia as one that stops both India and Pakistan from growing further as military powers—they are only going to see a good security solution as one that leaves the way open for them to grow stronger, and richer, and more respected internationally. If we think back to the past cases that I have defined as ‘de-nuclearization’, we can see that the states who pulled back from nuclear weapons all did so at a time when they were taking big steps forward on the global scene: towards guaranteed independence in the case of the post-Soviet states, or legitimate black majority rule in South Africa, or advances in democracy and regional stabilization in the case of the Latin American countries. In several cases some kind of security assurance from the great powers came into the picture. What this underlines is that the specific ‘package’ of measures that will be needed to give the best chances of avoiding proliferation in such individual cases will need to contain some encouraging elements as well as warnings and penalties: or as we say in English, there must be carrots as well as sticks.
You are probably thinking that this makes it all sound too simple—and indeed it does. Because if we feel free to choose just any carrots and sticks, and to get the quickest and easiest bargain that we can in each difficult case, another danger lies in wait for us—the danger which I referred to much earlier in this talk, of double standards and inconsistency. The most extreme kind of inconsistency is when we are actually ready to accept proliferation by one state, either because we think it is our friend or because we think it is too dangerous to stop it, and then we suddenly declare that it is a matter of life and death (justifying the most extreme measures!) to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of some other state and its leader who happens to be called Saddam or Ahmadinejad. Even some of the more successful recent approaches to proliferation are open to this kind of logical criticism. Libya was offered opportunities that have never been offered, for instance, to Iran although Colonel Qaddafi had just as dubious a record regarding human rights, democracy and terrorism. The recent nuclear cooperation agreement between the USA and India has given rise to similar debates. From one point of view Washington’s actions could be praised as rather practical: the Americans have accepted the reality of India’s nuclear status and they believe they understand the reasons for it, and now they are trying to guide India into a path that solves its future growing energy needs without creating worse security dangers inside India itself or running the risk of India spreading proliferation to other states. But now the agreement is being attacked equally by Indian patriots who say that New Delhi should not let Washington dictate the terms of its future nuclear policy, and by American and other security experts who say that India has not actually promised sufficient changes to bring its future nuclear weapons production under control or make its nuclear industry really transparent.
It is not for me to give a final verdict on that case today, but just let me draw out two further thoughts that it suggests about the wider security context. First, if one US motive might be to treat India better because it could thereby become a better balance to another fast-growing nuclear power, such as China, that would reflect a rather Cold-War kind of zero-sum thinking about the evolving power balance in Asia which surely would not create a more stable security situation either now or in the longer run. If we want to reward the improvement of a state’s nuclear behaviour by allowing it to become more of a friend, it logically needs to become more of everybody’s friend—as I would say that South Africa did in 1990, and as North Korea would need to do now if the 6-power talks should actually succeed. Secondly, if we make individual bargains against proliferation only at the price of making exceptions from basic rules and principles like those of the NPT (or in this case, the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group), we may turn round one day to find that the rules are now so full of holes that they no longer have any use either as a restraint and a model for the well-intentioned nations, or as a weapon against the badly behaved ones. If some hard-line thinkers in Washington might claim that this does not matter, I am obliged to say that I think they are simply wrong: and that the world’s system of international nuclear rules is already in a state where any further serious damage could seriously threaten the USA’s vital interests as well as those of everyone else. To sum up very simply what I have been trying to say here: I believe the responsible powers of the world must stand united in trying to tackle proliferation and united in supporting the well-established international rules and standards against it, or their divisions will merely lead to so-called successes that carry new dangers on their other side and will leave even more gaps for the really determined proliferators to exploit.
Just a few last words about the non-state aspects of the challenge, including terrorism. I hope it is clear that what I have just said about the need for the world to find its way to some kind of united front and united standards is even more relevant in this case. The danger of nuclear technologies leaking into terrorist hands is literally everybody’s problem, because terrorists could cause great damage and panic even by using so-called dirty bombs that are not proper nuclear weapons at all but devices designed to cause radioactive contamination in other ways. The materials to be used for such attacks can be found in any country that has advanced medical technologies, let alone a nuclear power industry. Terrorists, as we know, can use global networks of smuggling and financing and can launch their attacks in the most unexpected places. A very important step to recognizing this reality was taken by the United Nations Security Council when in April 2004 it passed its Resolution No. 1540, with a unanimous vote which of course included China. This Resolution makes it a responsibility for every state to introduce criminal penalties against companies or individuals that illegally possess or try to trade in WMD, and it demands in practice that every state should have effective export controls and transit controls against the most dangerous items and technologies. Could we perhaps dream of one day building on this Resolution to design a worldwide system of export controls or, rather, trade controls on WMD that would give equal ownership and equal rights to all well-international countries, and that would take business as its friend and partner in making the system work—rather than imposing arbitrary and badly designed restrictions that could hamper the development of honest trade and legitimate industries, including civilian nuclear power?
That is a dream that SIPRI, for one, is very interested in encouraging and exploring. But for the moment, there are many other things that all countries of good will can do, and can help each other with, to reduce the risks of nuclear leakage to a minimum. They include programmes like the so-called Global Partnership of the G8 to collect and destroy leftover and unwanted WMD materials in the former Soviet Union, and the retraining of former WMD scientists for more peaceful jobs, and better measures of physical security and protection at all nuclear installations, and a more coordinated and transparent way of organizing advanced nuclear research, and training for individual scientists and technicians in their personal responsibility to maintain control over dangerous technologies—and no doubt many more. My institute recently delivered a major report to the European Union authorities about ways in which the EU could more effectively pursue its own, rather sophisticated and essentially peaceful, strategy against WMD proliferation: and we argued that the Union should not only devote more money and effort to all the kinds of activities I have just mentioned, but also pursue them and encourage others to pursue them in other places, including China and its region. I know that the People’s Republic of China and the EU not so long ago signed a joint declaration on non-proliferation, and I think it would be appropriate for me, coming as I do from an EU member country and representing an institute in another EU member state, to end this talk today by welcoming that declaration and also the whole spirit that it stands for. Nuclear weapons are bad for security, and allowing more states to have more of them is even worse, yet millions of people around the world are quite convinced that peaceful nuclear power is something good and that more of it would be even better. The only way out of this situation is international cooperation, both to control the bad and to properly manage the good: and the intelligent and sincere further development of such cooperation gives us the only chance we have to create a world of shared security where perhaps none of us will have to give in to the nuclear temptation any more.