I will keep my eye on the clock.
I thank the Chairman and members for an interesting and challenging set of questions. I will begin with Senator Norris's contribution. It will be a joy for me to convey the greetings of this committee to President Higgins. Senator Norris asked about procedures in the Irish Parliament. I would like to leave it to members to decide in their own way how to proceed. I will link that with Senator Mullins's question on what parliamentarians can do. As a long-standing parliamentarian, I am with Members in their search for avenues to exert due influence on the legislative processes of their country. Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, PNND, which was sponsored by the middle powers initiative a number of years ago, has approximately 800 members in roughly 60 countries, including Ireland. The global co-ordinator of the PNND, Mr. Alyn Ware, travels the world regularly. His representative, to whom a reference was made, Ms Mayra Gomez, visited the Oireachtas recently.
Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament has a terrific website providing a network of information in several languages. It offers a source of information that parliamentarians can apply, including debates, motions, resolutions and committee hearings - the very thing members are engaged in at this moment - and does anything, within the parliamentary precincts and then into the apparatus of governments, to elevate and raise the visibility of this issue. This is a highly constructive thing to do.
As I stated, Ireland has a distinguished record. It is, if not the father, then certainly one of the fathers of the non-proliferation treaty. For this reason, it has a vested interest in the success of the treaty and in ensuring it is not allowed to drift. I will answer Senator Mullins's question, therefore, by encouraging constructive, vigorous debate in the appropriate channels to raise this issue. I will return to how one raises this issue in a moment.
Senator Norris and one or two other speakers referred to the leakage or theft of nuclear materials. President Obama, when he convened a 47 state summit on the subject of nuclear dangers in Washington in 2009, held up an apple and stated that just an apple sized container of plutonium in the hands of a terrorist would be enough to destroy a city and kill many thousands, if not millions, of people in an instant. Such is the danger of the scenario we are facing. Resolution 1540 of the United Nations Security Council and allied instruments seek to protect the sources of nuclear materials, prevent their illicit transfer and so forth. That being said, there have been 18 known attempts of theft of nuclear materials. Time does not permit me to catalogue each case but they are well charted.
The position in the former Soviet Union, now Russia, is serious. Under the nuclear threat initiative, sometimes known as the Nunn-Lugar approach, the United States is spending a considerable amount of money to protect the disarmament processes in the former Soviet Union and prevent the leakage of materials and siphoning off of nuclear technologists into other areas that would be less reputable than would be desired. These measures are not sufficient. When one considers the dangers of Pakistan where nuclear materials have literally been transported through cities on buses, one is not filled with great confidence that we can escape a nuclear catastrophe of some kind. The bomber apprehended on the evening of Saturday, 1 May 2010 on Times Square in New York city stated to the authorities that if he had access to nuclear materials he would have used them. Having pointed out the dangers in this area, my answer to Senator Norris's question is that we must tighten up all the regulations and so on and get at the heart of the problem, namely, how will we ensure the atom is used peacefully for humanity in the 21st century and not for weapons.
This brings me to Iran, an issue to which several speakers referred. Iran takes a position that it has a right to nuclear energy and that is true. Article 4 of the non-proliferation treaty refers to an inalienable right to access nuclear technology and Iran claims this right. It states that, inasmuch as the major states are not fulfilling their end of the non-proliferation treaty, under which in Article 6 good faith negotiations towards the elimination of nuclear weapons are required, the non-proliferation treaty is ineffective. The treaty is a balance between those who had nuclear weapons and those who did not have them. Under the treaty, the former would negotiate the elimination of nuclear weapons and in return the latter would not acquire them and would provide nuclear technology and materials for the peaceful use of the atom.
Iran poses a challenge to the world. The International Atomic Energy Agency has done its best and has not yet come to a determination that Iran is making a nuclear weapon. There has been a great deal of hype in the media concerning Iran. However, when it comes to how to resolve the current dilemma, I call again today for diplomatic action, rather than military action. Furthermore, the elections in Iran in 2013 will produce a new Administration. There are signs, politically, that the new regime will be more moderate than the regime that obtains at present. Thus, there is every incentive for western countries to keep applying diplomatic pressures and other measures in the same way as was done with North Korea. We recently had a success with North Korea when it acknowledged it will not pursue nuclear weapons in return for certain economic benefits. Diplomacy is a trade-off game. We saw the outcome of the failure to use diplomacy in 2003 in the Iraq war when military means were used instead. I will only say that the countries that have some considerable experience in diplomacy in nuclear disarmament - I have in mind Ireland, although it is not the only such country - have a role to play in raising their voices.
Deputy Mac Lochlainn was one of the first speakers to refer to Iran. The approach I would use on Iran would be to ensure the success of the conference that has been called on the Middle East nuclear weapons free zone. Finland has been named as the facilitator and the venue for the conference to be held in 2012. I do not know whether it will slide into 2013.
All of the questions in the Middle East cannot be solved in one conference but it is for the good of the world, and certainly the good of the region, if a dually prescribed conference, mandated by the non-proliferation treaty, NPT, review conference, to address the question of Iran had the participation of Israel. To my knowledge, Israel has not definitively stated that it will not attend, as staying away would be difficult if there was sufficient pressure from non-Arab states. This would help to get us to 2013, at which point we could measure the situation. As the Deputy stated, we need to level the playing field.
Senator Walsh raised the question of the resources used in the nefarious business of building nuclear arms. Some $100 billion per year is being spent on the maintenance of nuclear weapons. According to the Global Zero movement, $1 trillion will be spent in this decade on nuclear weapons that cannot be used for anything else. The US alone is spending more than $50 billion per year on nuclear weapons. This is ten times greater than the annual global budget of the UN system. The misuse of the world's resources is something to consider. I am not laying the blame on the US alone, but it is the principal spender among nuclear states. The fact that the world is tolerating the expenditure of moneys of this magnitude at a time when education, health and all manner of human needs go neglected is a scandal. We need to address this matter.
The question of India and its acquisition of nuclear power has been raised. With the compliance of the US, India did an end run around the NPT, which would otherwise have prohibited the transfer of nuclear technology to a non-NPT country. That said, India is trying to find a way to give some leadership. Recently, a committee was appointed by its Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. Headed by Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar, the distinguished Member of Parliament who rejuvenated the Rajiv Gandhi action plan of 1988, it called for global negotiations. Given that India voted at the UN for the start of global negotiations, we should pay some attention to what it is trying to do.
I discussed nuclear leakage. As Deputy Durkan stated, it is sometimes easier to convince non-nuclear weapon states, but how to convince the nuclear weapon states is at the heart of the matter. Some countries have considerable credibility in this regard because they gave up their nuclear weapons. I am referring to South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine, all of which had nuclear weapons at one stage and, thus, are qualified to speak of the benefits to their societies of not having nuclear weapons. It will always be difficult to speak to the major powers, the five permanent members of the Security Council, namely, the US, Russia, Britain, France and China, the original nuclear weapons club. Some hold that they are maintaining their hegemony by possessing nuclear weapons. I am not suggesting that convincing them will be easy.
None the less, we must build a world law. We built the International Criminal Court, ICC, and other instruments of human rights are gradually requiring universality despite having been resisted by the major states at one stage or another. The movement of getting like-minded states to work together to build the groundwork for negotiations raises the temperature and what I call the normalisation process in the world, that is, making it normal for states to consider such a world law against nuclear weapons and to rely to some extent on gathering public opinion within those states. I cannot do much better than this except to point out that China, as a nuclear weapon state, has already voted at the UN for the commencement of negotiations, as have India and Pakistan. The US will come around.
This brings us to the question of internal domestic political machinations within the US, with which everyone present is familiar. I do not want the committee to believe that I have some sort of magic solution, in that if something is done, everyone will suddenly get in line. It is a process. We must establish momentum and show that, having established globalisation, the 21st century is capable of having a law to protect that globalisation. This is the challenge.
I was asked about the nuclear fuel cycle. How can we be sure that states that claim they want nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes will always stay peaceful? Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, stated that the multilateralisation of the nuclear fuel cycle was the way to go. Namely, there would be a pool of nuclear materials that developing countries could tap into at market prices. This idea is on the table and work is being done on it. It would be one of a number of ways to ensure that Iran could have nuclear power without being accused or suspected of leaking it for the purpose of building nuclear weapons.
To Senator Mullins, I say that we are almost there at 81%, yet it is still off the agenda. This is a paradox. We have come a long way in history. The intellectual validity of nuclear weapons is decreasing and we are trying to provide momentum. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is one such instrument. We are trying to get like-minded states to put the issue back on the agenda. As parliamentarians, we need to raise our voices and actions in an appropriate way to ensure that governments that understand their responsibility to humanity will act accordingly.
