By Jean Jacques Roche
Translation: Melissa Okabe
Passage au crible n°23
On April 12-13 2010, United States President Barack Obama welcomed 47 heads of State and government to the Washington Summit on Nuclear Terrorism. This summit took place prior to the conference examining the Treaty of Non-Proliferation, which was held on May 3-28, 2010 in New York.
> Historical background
> Theoretical framework
> Analysis
> References
Terrorism has long been considered a weapon of the poor. It is historically noted that throughout the Cold War terrorist threats were used to cut Western means of communication, thus, subduing this type of threat became a concern unique to Occidental Nations. In this respect, it is important to mention the 1979 Convention against the taking of hostages, the 1988 Convention organized against maritime piracy, and finally the Protocol to the 1988 Rome Convention, concerning the security of platforms situated on the continental shelf. With the bipolar international political environment coming to an end, there has been a renewal in the method of approach toward assessing the major stakes in international relations. At the dawn of the early 1990’s this change allowed in particular for the raising of opposition of developing countries. A declaratory resolution made by the UN General Assembly concerning “the measures looking to eliminate international terrorism” was passed on December 9, 1994. This text prefigured the official January 12, 1998 adoption of the “Suppression of Terrorist Bombings” Amendment.
Nuclear armaments have existed since 1945, however at present, only 9 countries have retained official or non-official possession; these countries include China, North Korea, the USA, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, the UK, and Russia. It is now routine that disarmament diplomacy resides under state control, as determined by the eight conferences examining the Treaty of Non-Proliferation (signed in 1968 and renewed sine die in 1995), and the 4 START treaties focusing on the reduction of nuclear armaments, (a new version entitled START follow-on was agreed upon and signed by President Medvedev of Russia and President Obama of the United States on April 8th, 2010 in Prague). Finally the CTBT (The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty) was adopted in 1996. However, at present this last treaty has not been put into full effect- this is due to a lack of sufficient number of ratifications and additional threats by the Iranian Government to undermine the entire process of denuclearization.
In this context, the Washington Conference has insisted on the risk surrounding the nuclear sector, and how it has weighed heavily on world security. In effect, it is no longer sufficient to just take into account nuclear warheads and their vectors; matters of security must also assess the totality of physical property which can be used to construct a dirty bomb. Present in civil power plants or in nuclear powered ships as in warheads/ nose cones accumulation, – sometimes with low security warehouses – more than 1600 tons of uranium and 500 tons of plutonium, are disseminated, in this instance, within close to 60 countries across the globe.
1. Global security: this concept was first appeared in 1983, introduced by Richard Ullman’s article entitled “Redefining Security”. Accredited as the founder of global security, his works were further developed by Barry Buzan in People, States and Fear published later that same year. It was then a question of completing the traditional security approach in diplomatic-strategic terms by organizing the material in four sectors: 1) the economy, 2) the rights of man, 3) values, and 4) the environment. Originally developed under a constructivist perspective by the Copenhagen School, the concept of global security has now been imposed as an operational framework on states and international organizations, all the while being the object of intense re-appropriation.
2. Modeling crises: Following the works of Brubacker et Laitin, the model has since disassociated crisis from violence, as situations of tension do not necessarily entail violence. With Kenneth Waltz’s publication of Man, the State, and War (1959), further research began to make clear distinctions among the following three levels: 1) man or the individual, 2) political institutions namely the state, and 3) international structure or the system of states at the international level. It is henceforth important to recombine the three categories in the same frame of analysis, by doing so one can try to understand the crucial interplay of individual actions and their consequences, relating to both the internal and international model.
The Washington Summit leads us to question the aptitude of the secure bureaucracy in the face of nuclear terrorism. The apocalyptic character of the nuclear threat indeed implies the need for a considerable investment by various services, and makes international cooperation absolutely indispensable. If the danger as stated above results from dirty bombs, one must also know that these bombs leave traces everywhere and are at least easily located. If the alert signals are transmitted in time, the efficiency of counter-intelligence services and the police can effectively reduce the possibility of a successful (latent) terrorist attack. As such, strategies to assemble special services at the heart of the unitary structure (e.g. Homeland Security in the USA, and DCRI in France) allow for a more accurate analysis and treatment of terrorist information while reducing intra and inter institutional competition.
Inversely, the problem of dirty bombs- (exposing death to those who decide to resort to it) highlights the failure of the public structure to act effectively when confronted with such individual decisions. Moreover, national administrations have been slow in adapting to the concept of global security, which no longer requires focusing on the state as the principle designatory, but rather emphasizes the importance and concern of the human community in general. This likens to the fact that the threats no longer arise from the interstate agenda, but rather prove to be transnational in form. The French Government’s White Books (Livres Blancs) are an example of the difficulty in adjusting to the new world outlook. While the concept of global security has appeared in academic literature since the early 1980’s, the 1994 White Book does not make any reference to it. In fact, it is not until the 2008 White Book that the notion of global security finally became central to public authorities, at the very moment when the 1994 writer had become a president of the committee in charge of the 2008 document. With this approach, global security contributes to the “stressful perversion of strategic speech” – according to the expression made by Jean Dufourqc – in heightening the emotion of insecurity with the dilution of danger. As all other exercises of the same style, the French White Book reveals the mental representations its’ writers, without shedding even the slightest light on a path which could be used to anticipate future processes of destabilization. In other words, the current reflection led by political-administrative authorities seems to be adapted to filling today’s informational gaps by updating the attacks of the past. On the other hand, this reflection proves to be totally incapable of anticipating the operating modes of future acts of terrorism based on individual decisions.
Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations, Brighton, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1983. Rogers Brubaker, “David Laitin, Ethnic and Nationalist Violence”, Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 1998, pp. 423-452. Jean-Jacques Roche, “Épistémologie de la Prospective Sécuritaire”, Défense Nationale, juillet-août 2009, pp. 166-185. Richard Ullman, “Redefining Security”, International Security, 8 (1), Summer 1983, pp. 129-153.
