The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference: An Interview with Ambassador Eric Danon

Also published here.

Ambassador Eric Danon, Permanent Representative of France to the Conference on Disarmament, speaks at the 2010 NPT Review Conference. Photo credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

Forty years ago, one of the most important treaties in recent history went into effect: the The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or the NPT. This treaty has been ratified by 190 countries, with the main objective being to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon-related technology, while providing a framework for the peaceful, civilian use of nuclear energy.

Every five years, an international conference is held to review the treaty; the NPT Review Conference, or “RevCon”, as it has been nicknamed, lasts for a month. All state parties of the NPT attend the conference, as well as a variety of non-governmental organizations. You can read more about it here, here, and here.

The 2010 NPT RevCon started on May 3, and will end on May 28. As President Obama said:

Over the coming weeks, each of our nations will have the opportunity to show where we stand. Will we meet our responsibilities or shirk them? Will we ensure the rights of nations or undermine them? In short, do we seek a 21st century of more nuclear weapons or a world without them?

It’s important to recognize that the atmosphere of global cooperation has changed significantly since the last NPT RevCon, in 2005. It’s also important to recognize that the conference is essentially a month of carefully orchestrated negotiations, a dance of diplomacy between allies and opponents, with the outcome yet to be seen.

In this spirit of international communication, I had the opportunity to interview Ambassador Eric Danon, who is the Permanent Representative of France to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. This interview took place via email, over the past two weeks. My questions are in bold, and his replies follow. I’ve inserted links where appropriate.

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Nuclear Sightseeing: The B Reactor And What It Teaches Us

Also published here.

The front face of the B Reactor gives visitors a sense of the scale of this engineering achievment. Photo Credit: US Department of Energy. Click to enlarge.

Last week, while most of my friends in the nuclear weapons analyst community traveled to New York City to assess the future of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, I headed to a remote corner of south-eastern Washington State to explore the origins of the US side of the Cold War nuclear arms race.

For years, I’ve had a goal of visiting as many of the Manhattan Project sites as I could; I’ve been to the Trinity Site, and I’ve visited the Bradbury Museum in Los Alamos. As I’ve mentioned before, many years ago, I’d worked at the Hanford Site as a chemist, but had never gotten to tour the historic B Reactor. It was finally opened for official public tours only in recent years, as part of the ongoing effort to promote preservation of the reactor as a designated National Historic Landmark.

There has been some controversy associated with preserving the B Reactor and turning it into a museum. The controversy stems from the fact that it was used to produce the plutonium that for the atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki in August 1945, as well as plutonium used in some of our earliest Cold War nuclear weapons. As Jeffrey Lewis said at ArmsControlWonk.com, some people fear “that the exhibits will be one-sided hagiography of the nuclear weapons enterprise…”.

Though that potential exists, I am happy to say that the B Reactor exhibit and tour was absolutely accurate, straightforward, and simply presented the facts, emphasizing the engineering feat that the reactor represents rather than taking one side or the other regarding the ultimate use of the plutonium that it produced.

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Politico: Forget Actual Arms Control Experts! Bring On John Bolton.

Also published here.

Remember John Bolton? He was the guy President George W. Bush appointed as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, and later as Ambassador to the United Nations. He was famous for a number of things, not the least of which was his complicity in lies that the US used to justify the war in Iraq. This is John Bolton in a nutshell:

As [John Bolton] settled into his office on the sixth floor of the State Department in the spring of 2001, Bolton placed on his coffee table a memento from his days in the conservative revolution: a hand grenade mounted on a small wooden base with a plaque that read “Truest Reaganaut”. He quickly went to work dismantling the structure of international arms control…

– From Us vs. Them: How A Half Century of Conservativism Has Undermined America’s Security, by Peter Scoblic.

After his resignation in 2006, and after the Bush administration ended, you’d think that John Bolton and his compatriots would have faded into obscurity, with their diatribes known only to members of conservative think tanks and crowds of tipsy neocons on cruise ships.

Sadly, that has not been the case. John Bolton, Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle, and others have all taken up residence on the op-ed pages of the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, and a variety of conservative magazines, where they have been railing against President Obama’s policies ever since he took office.

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