It was shaping up to be a big week for the North Korean nuclear diplomacy.

The Washington Post reported today that sensitive negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang had resulted in an agreement whereby the US would provide substantial amounts of food aid in exchange for the DPRK halting its uranium enrichment program, suspending nuclear and missile testing, readmitting IAEA inspectors and resuming dialogue with South Korea. Both the food aid package and halting of uranium enrichment were to be announced this week. Another US-DPRK meeting this week was then expected to lay the groundwork for a rapid return to the Six-Party Talks.

This multi-stage diplomatic opera is unlikely to proceed as planned, as the DPRK settles into a period of mourning for its Dear Leader. But even if it did, the Six Parties would most likely have been heading for a repeat of the provocation-tension-rapprochement-negotiation cycle that has depressed disarmament and non-proliferation advocates for the past decade whenever the DPRK is mentioned.

Even now that regime succession is under way in the DPRK, the 'strategic patience' that many (including those in the US government) have exercised will not necessarily be rewarded with denuclearisation, especially if Kim Jong-Un (pictured), the youngest son and designated successor to Kim Jong-Il, holds on to the reins of power.

Why? Because nuclear weapons are deeply enmeshed in both DPRK politics and the political legacy of the Kim family. Jonathan Pollack's outstanding Adelphi paper, 'No Exit', is a potent antidote to any sure hopes of denuclearisation following Kim Jong-Un's succession.

• The Nuclear Threat Initiative has published a major report on reducing nuclear dangers in Europe, with an all-star cast of nuclear experts from both sides of the Atlantic providing fresh ideas on some of the most contentious issues in NATO-Russia deterrence, from nuclear posture to missile defence and tactical nuclear weapons deployments.
• With Labor's debate on uranium sales to India hotting up, there is plenty to learn from the US experience of nuclear cooperation with India, detailed in this Congressional Research Service report.
• If this leaves you confused as to who is involved in nuclear policy-making in the US, this chart should help untangle the agencies and lines of authority.
• India's decision to acquire nuclear weapons, resulting in its outsider status to the NPT, is a key element of the uranium sales controversy. Why did India acquire the bomb? ANU's Andrew Kennedy persuasively argues that it first exhausted other options to ensure its national security before turning to nuclear weapons (subscription required).
• The latest issue of International Security has two more treats for the nuclear inclined: one analysing domestic reasons why Japan won't acquire nuclear weapons and another on how to cope militarily with a collapsing North Korea (subscription required).
• Fallout from the Iran IAEA report continues: while Republican candidates in the US one-up each other with promises of pre-emption, others appear to be imagining how to live with a nuclear Iran, drawing implicitly on the US experience with a nuclear North Korea.

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute. 

The list of strategic tensions in the China-India relationship is dismally long.

While there are elements of increasing cooperation, notably in trade and global governance (think Copenhagen), mistrust underpins the bilateral relationship. The root of that mistrust is the disputed border and China's 'all-weather friendship' with Pakistan, but other problems have emerged in recent years — India worries about China's presence in the Indian Ocean; China worries about the India's newfound warmth for the US and its role in Tibetan politics. Add to that resource and diplomatic competition, rising nationalism and poor public perceptions and things are not looking too rosy.

But in The Dangers of Denial, a new Lowy Institute paper examining the China-India nuclear relationship, Rory Medcalf and I argue that nuclear weapons are a crucial factor in determining the tenor of the relationship. India and China need to start talking to each other about nuclear stability, but this will be by no means easy.

Understanding the asymmetry in Sino-Indian relations is critical to evaluating just how dangerous the nuclear factor is. China is quite relaxed about India and sees little threat from its southern neighbour. India, on the other hand, is very concerned about the Chinese threat.

Just over a week ago, the giants of the nuclear power industry announced a new voluntary code of conduct that will guide their future nuclear reactor exports.

The 'Nuclear Power Plant Exporters' Principles of Conduct' took three years to negotiate, facilitated by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a panel of experts and the now–adherents to the code — Areva, Russia's Atomstroyexport, Canada's Candu Energy, GE Hitachi, Korea Electric Power Co, Mitsubishi, Toshiba and Westinghouse. The Principles have not made a serious media splash, but are significant for their specificity, comprehensiveness and proactive approach to the risks posed by the industry.

Lowy Institute Deputy Director Martine Letts and I have previously advocated for the nuclear industry to be more proactive in supporting the non-proliferation regime (see our report to the Evans-Kawaguchi disarmament commission, an update of which is due to be published later this year). It remains to be seen whether this initiative will spur further industry efforts in support of the non–proliferation regime, though the signs are promising.

The fact that the Code covers more than just non–proliferation but also safety, security, environmental protection, waste and other ethical considerations, provides a framework for more integrated thinking about the corporate social responsibilities (CSR) of the nuclear industry.

It makes sense to consider all of these factors together given events such as the Fukushima accident, President Obama's Nuclear Security Summit last year, persistent concerns about the proliferation of sensitive nuclear technology and the inability of the non–proliferation regime to address non–compliance, as the Iranian, DPRK and Syrian cases illustrate.

Why is Obama's nuclear policy schizophrenic and who was Bush pointing US nuclear weapons at? Our Wednesday Lowy Lunch speaker, the Federation of American Scientists' Hans Kristensen, has the answers in his presentation on the Obama Administration's 2010 Nuclear Posture Review.

The implications of Obama's Nuclear Posture Review are just beginning to be felt as they filter down into the US military planning bureaucracy and its objectives meet with real-world constraints such as the US fiscal crisis and allied anxiety, especially in the Pacific. Kristensen's talk was most unusual (and fun) due to the redacted top secret US military planning documents he showed during his presentation, acquired thanks to US Freedom of Information legislation.

Listen to his full talk to hear what was peeking out from under the redactions. Below is my chat with him after the event.

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute.

Photo courtesy of the US Air Force.

• The US returns to talks with the DPRK.
• International Crisis Group's Daniel Pinkston suggests how the DPRK could signal its good faith to the US and ROK.
• Ralph Cossa from CSIS offers some very sensible analysis of South Korean public support for the re-deployment of US tactical nuclear weapons, and even an independent ROK nuclear weapon.
• Ban Ki-Moon suggests ad hoc meetings to negotiate a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty outside the Conference on Disarmament, and consider reforms to the hamstrung disarmament forum.
• The Nuclear Suppliers Group's amended guidelines, which raise the bar for sales of enrichment and reprocessing technology, are now available.
• Want to test your views on the causes of proliferation? Stanford Professor Scott Sagan offers an excellent critical review of the current academic literature, from number crunching to psychological profiles of proliferating presidents (journal subscription required).

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute.

• Deliberations on the global policy response to the Fukushima accident will ramp up this week at the IAEA's ministerial conference on nuclear safety. The Agency's Fukushima fact-finding mission is expected to deliver its full report at the conference; a preliminary version is already available here.
• Somewhat overshadowed by this week's IAEA event is a critical meeting of the Nuclear Supplier's Group plenary in the Netherlands. Among the thorny agenda items are Indian membership and a review of guidelines for trade in sensitive nuclear technology.
• Meanwhile, the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit has added nuclear safety to its agenda, according to its South Korean hosts.
• The Obama Administration's missile defence diplomacy took a beating last week. The Czech Republic pulled out of the NATO shield, while Russia and China warned in a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation declaration that missile defence could damage strategic stability. Also, reports surfaced that the White House rejected a missile defence agreement drafted by the State Department that would have allayed Russian concerns.
• Areva CEO Anne Lauvergeon has been ousted from the helm of the French nuclear industry giant. Mme Lauvergeon was one of the only nuclear industry chiefs to publicly recognise the need for the industry to play a greater role in supporting non-proliferation.
• On the disarmament front, Arms Control Today has interviewed China's man at the Conference on Disarmament about his country's take on the future of the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty negotiations.
• The Non-Aligned Movement, the 120-strong group of non-Western countries with significant sway in global nuclear negotiations, is not the monolith it appears to be, according to this discussion paper by a former nuclear diplomat.

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute.

Discussions about nuclear strategy have an unfortunate tendency to insulate themselves from the broader strategic context in which nuclear weapons exist.

The Interpreter's debate on the future of extended nuclear deterrence (END) has by and large avoided that pitfall. But, I wanted to look at a simple concept — proportionality  — that dictates which military tools (conventional or nuclear) will be picked out of the extended deterrence toolbox when an ally is threatened.

The concept of proportionality is central to decision-makers' calculations to use or threaten nuclear weapons. The use of nuclear weapons is a proportionate response if a security threat posed by an adversary is grave enough. If it is not, then conventional weapons or even diplomatic means might be used.

Although one of the central principles of the law of armed conflict, proportionality is not an objective calculation, as some — international lawyers in particular — believe. It depends entirely on how decision-makers perceive their security interests.

Even where nuclear weapons are reserved for existential threats, what may constitute such a threat, is hardly a settled (or short) list of possible events. The 2010 US Nuclear Posture Review used an even broader formulation, stating that the US would use its nuclear weapons to defend its 'vital interests'.

This is, of course, all common sense, but it does bring one of the major difficulties with END into sharp focus — it complicates calculations of proportionality.

Bringing a third party into a nuclear relationship means that it is no longer just two states who are forced to recognise each others' red lines. Allies often perceive threats differently and responding in a proportionate way for one ally may be viewed as an over- or under-reaction by the other.

It is not uncommon for an adversary to find and exploit this gap, where it can successfully compromise the security of one ally without provoking action by the other ally.

Differing perceptions of proportionality also explain the double-edged sword of entrapment and abandonment that a beneficiary of END typically fears — both involve a disproportionate response by the provider of END to the security threat.

Before we dump END, we need to think carefully about whether diverging post-Cold War threat perceptions among beneficiaries and the provider of END kill it or not.

Japan's post-earthquake nuclear problems have escalated, with major accidents at two or more nuclear reactors, which are the most serious since the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 and the Chernobyl accident in 1986.

While the consequences and implications from these accidents will take weeks, months and likely years to settle and be analysed by technical and policy types alike, speculation is already rife as to what the accident will mean for the international nuclear landscape. Uranium stocks have plunged on the Australian market as Japanese authorities assess the risk of radiation contamination following damage to nuclear reactors in the country. 

Some have suggested that the accident spells the end of the so-called 'nuclear renaissance', an increase in the uptake of nuclear energy surpassing its heyday in the 1980s, forecast on the basis of the large number of governments currently interested in nuclear power programs for the first time. While industry representatives have responded that the Japanese situation is unique, this 'perfect storm' explanation is little comfort to Japanese people and unlikely to allay the concerns of people around the world, including in Australia, that remain wary of or even hostile to nuclear power.

The image of one of the most advanced nuclear nations struggling to contain a reactor meltdown could haunt public opinion and the civil nuclear industry for many years to come.

The New START arms control treaty was ratified overnight after months of wheeling and dealing on Capitol Hill over a lot more than just the substance of the treaty. The ratification will chalk up a foreign policy victory for President Obama, all the more remarkable given that Congress is in its lame duck session and will cede to Republican control in 2011 after the Democratic Party's thumping in the Congressional elections earlier this year.

The ratification of New START, considered by most arms control experts to be a common sense and uncontroversial treaty which requires neither Russia nor the US to cut their arsenals in a strategically compromising way and re-establishes bilateral verification measures, gives rise to both optimism and pessimism for Obama's two major arms control challenges in 2011. It shows that while politicking may hold up a treaty, it did not prevent enough Republican senators from voting in favour of the treaty and against their party leadership.

Presidents Obama and Medvedev at the signing of New START in April 2010. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Obama faces a much more difficult challenge in achieving ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by a Republican-controlled Senate, which he vowed to pursue 'aggressively' in his 2009 Prague speech calling for a nuclear weapon-free world. The Republican-controlled Senate rejected the treaty in 1999, for reasons of both partisan politics and genuine concerns about the security implications. Both of these obstacles must again be surmounted before the Senate will ratify the CTBT.

Obama's second major nuclear arms control challenge will be to negotiate a follow-on treaty to New START, but this time dealing with far more strategically sensitive topics such as further cuts to warhead numbers and delivery systems, reductions in tactical nuclear weapons, and (at Russian insistence) missile defence.

Pursuing this tricky agenda in 2011 would not have been possible without the ratification of New START, so let's take a break over Christmas and let President Obama and arms control advocates the world over enjoy this last minute gift for 2010.

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute.

Regardless of what you think about the WikiLeaks release of US diplomatic cables, its nuclear revelations have certainly delivered some surprises and occasional amusement. But I  have found them deeply concerning for the most part, particularly those recounting lapses in nuclear security and the efforts of some to take advantage of those lapses. My top five nuclear (and related) leaks are as follows:

• An Egyptian Ambassador casually remarked that Egypt had been offered nuclear scientists, materials and weapons from the former Soviet Union, which it refused.
• A US briefing on the Nuclear Posture Review to NATO allies last year disclosed exact numbers of US nuclear warheads, numbers that analysts are usually estimating. The US believes fewer than 1300 warheads would compromise US deterrence, and the US has 180 tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, against Russia's 3000-5000.
• A doctor's note can be used  to smuggle uranium across the Georgian border from Armenia, although you should keep the story consistent when you cross back over, otherwise the FBI gets on your case.
• Does Myanmar have a nuclear weapons program? Your guess is as good as that of Australian and American diplomats posted in Rangoon, but at least it’s pretty clear where the nuclear assistance is coming from. Right, North Korea?
• A Chinese official signaled support for a reunified Korea if North Korea collapses. The cable illustrates the divides within the Chinese foreign policy community, especially given the official's harsh criticism of China's man in the Six-Party talks.

No doubt there will be more stories of nuclear smuggling and strategic bargaining emerging from WikiLeaks in 2011, underscoring the complexity and importance of nuclear diplomacy. Damaging as the leaks are in many respects, the nuclear cables show the gravity of nuclear threats worldwide and the sincerity of efforts to combat them, which might just translate into support for strengthening those efforts.

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute.

• Brief talks between Iran and the P5+Germany on the Iranian nuclear program ended yesterday in Geneva without any substantive progress, though the parties agreed to meet again in Instanbul in January. The current issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is worth a look for its forum on the Iran 'quagmire'. Carnegie also has a good Q&A contextualising the discussions, including the impact of the Wikileaked cables and the state of Iranian domestic politics.
• The IAEA Board of Governors has approved a plan for the establishment of a nuclear fuel bank under IAEA control, as proposed by the Nuclear Threat Initiative. The IAEA Secretariat will now settle on the access, location and structure of the fuel stock; it has released a useful Fact Sheet explaining eligibility requirements and obligations of fuel recipients.
• There was no call for a special inspection of the site of the Syrian reactor bombed by the Israelis in 2007 from the IAEA Director-General at the Board meeting last week. This despite the persistent refusal of Syrian authorities to allow IAEA inspectors back in, and US calls (official and unofficial) for such an inspection.
• As Areva moves closer to signing a US$9 billion nuclear deal to build reactors and supply fuel in India, with a view to making India into a nuclear export hub, we may see increased conventional arms sales from France to India, according to Charles Ferguson's finding that civil nuclear assistance and conventional arms sales go hand in hand.
• Was President Obama's tax cut deal with congressional Republicans a quid pro quo for ratifying START?

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute.

Russia announced on Wednesday that its nuclear fuel bank in Angarsk is now operational, under IAEA oversight. With enough low-enriched uranium to sustain two nuclear reactors for a year, the bank will supply nuclear fuel to countries with a good proliferation record who lose access to their regular fuel supply and make a request to the IAEA, which will then be passed on to the Russians to be fulfilled.

The international community is, however, far from agreement on whether such fuel banks are a good thing — the Angarsk arrangements were narrowly passed by the IAEA Board of Governors last November, and plans for a second repository funded by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), US, EU, Kuwait, Norway and the UAE were delayed when the Board could not agree on details of the plan. The NTI plan is likely to be put to a vote at the last meeting of the Board for this year, and NTI is confident it will be passed despite continuing opposition from Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)countries.

Time is of the essence here — as Mark Hibbs points out, the window of opportunity to pass the NTI proposal may close as political divisions in the Board are entrenched (as foreshadowed in the September meeting) and time-limited funding pledges expire. Some NAM countries staunchly oppose such fuel banks because they perceive that their rights to develop an enrichment capability for peaceful purposes under the NPT may be narrowed.

The latest round of Iran sanctions yet again appear not to have had the desired effect on Iran's nuclear conduct, with the latest IAEA Country Report criticising Iran for its persistent lack of cooperation with safeguards inspections. Iran lashed out at the IAEA after the report, made headlines with President Ahmadinejad's UN General Assembly address and held out the prospect of new talks with the EU – nothing particularly new there.

But Iran might have bigger fish to fry than Western diplomats in New York, with computers at the Bushehr power reactor infected with the Stuxnet virus. Officials are saying that there is nothing to worry about, but the suspicious are pointing the finger at Western cyber-warfare.

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute.

While there has been heated discussion about Australia's nuclear choices, including on this blog, debate and action on Australia's disarmament policy under the Gillard Government has been decidedly more subdued.

Nonproliferation and disarmament was hidden among a litany of international ills that Kevin Rudd urged the international community to address in his speech at the UN General Assembly over the weekend – after global finance, climate change and terrorism but before UN reform, poverty and human rights.

Yet there are signs that Rudd may be swinging into action on the nuclear front, establishing a new group of ten countries advocating disarmament and nonproliferation with his Japanese counterpart. Dubbed the Cross-Regional Group on Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, this nuclear G10 includes Canada, Chile, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland and Turkey as well as Japan and Australia.

The German press has rather cynically reported it as a way for Germany to burnish its credentials for election to a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute.

China's nuclear industry is set to become the next big thing in the civil nuclear power industry, according to ANSTO Chairman Ziggy Switkowski, despite reports that China's rapid nuclear build-up is creating a dangerous shortage of properly trained staff. Asian countries are implementing ambitious nuclear power agendas, and China, India and South Korea are positioning themselves as cheaper and more efficient suppliers for the region and the rest of the world.

So it should come as no surprise that China finally officially announced its plans to build two new power reactors for Pakistan, and appears to see no need to seek approval from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) for the deal. Back in April, when word of this deal was first on the street, Carnegie's Mark Hibbs saw it as a harbinger of the growing assertiveness of China's nuclear industry; he also analysed China's calculations in the lead-up to the NSG meeting in June. Both pieces are worth re-visiting now that the cat is officially out of the bag.

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute.

 Photo by Flickr user errata-tat-tat, used under a Creative Commons license.

Last week The Guardian reported that the UK Government has changed its policy on nuclear commerce with India, and will now supply civil nuclear technology and expertise to India.

Since the US agreed to do the same in 2005 (obtaining a waiver from Nuclear Suppliers' Group guidelines prohibiting nuclear transfers to countries which are not members of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty), the world's nuclear supplier nations have been all to keen to sell their wares. The UK is the latest among civil nuclear suppliers to pave the way to nuclear business with Delhi – following the US, Russia, France, Canada, South Korea and, in the past month, Japan. Australia remains firmly off this list after Kevin Rudd cancelled the Howard Government's plans to sell uranium to India.

Nuclear cooperation deals are interesting creatures, motivated as much by politics as economics, and this is certainly the case with India. The Bush Administration argued that the US-India deal would help to bring India into the nonproliferation regime, implicitly questioning the central role played by the NPT in determining who was inside the tent and who was out.

Critics argued that the US should have extracted more concessions from India. If India was going to get the same access to technology as NPT members, it should have to make the same commitments as a Nuclear Weapon State under the NPT – why should other states stay in the treaty regime if a non-member gets the benefits without the responsibilities?

A bit like Zhou Enlai's famous quip that it was too early to tell the impact of the French Revolution two centuries after it occurred, it is still to early to tell the consequences of the US-India nuclear deal for the non-proliferation regime.

• Suspicions over Myanmar’s alleged nuclear program continue, with some now suggesting it is seeking a laser enrichment capability, ruling out North Korean assistance and pointing the finger at China or Russia. 
• Meanwhile in the US, laser enrichment (developed at Lucas Heights by Australian company Silex) is taking its first steps toward a full scale commercial plant, with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission giving the plant environmental approval, the first of many hurdles during its 30 month approval process.
• Following up on an NPT Review Conference promise to kick start the Conference on Disarmament (CD), UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon will meet with ministers at the General Assembly session in September. Movement out of the CD’s dozen-year deadlock will be a test of whether the past six months’ flurry of nuclear activity has really created a consensus in favour of change.
• Deepti Choubey from Carnegie has a very balanced evaluation of the outcome of the May NPT Review Conference, rightly pointing out that the NPT is ‘not a panacea to cure all that ails the nonproliferation regime’ though she puts forward a good case for what it can cure or contribute to curing.
• Matthew Kroenig’s book Exporting the Bomb is now out. It takes a fresh and innovative look at transfers of sensitive nuclear technologies by focusing on why states sell them rather than  buy them. A taste of Kroenig’s work was published earlier in the American Political Science Review and his book was reviewed in the June edition of Arms Control Today.

It is never a bad idea to wait a few weeks for the dust to settle after a big event to reflect on whether it has really changed anything. So, along with a dozen or so nuclear policy experts, that is exactly what I did at a recent event hosted by ANU on the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference (NPT RevCon), held in New York in May.

I was asked to focus on emerging and evolving threats to the nonproliferation regime. While my fellow panelists examined the North Korean and Iranian threats in detail, in my opinion the acquisition of enrichment and reprocessing capabilities (sensitive nuclear technologies) that give states the capacity to build a bomb remain the greatest threats to the nonproliferation regime.

This threat is all the more serious because it is permissible within the framework of the NPT and requires drastic changes in the institutional framework of the global nuclear order if it is to be neutralised. The 2010 RevCon has done nothing to remedy this threat, and the problem is well illustrated by the outcome of the recent Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) meeting in Christchurch.

After a month of deliberations at the 2010 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (the NPT RevCon), ending last Friday, the international community appears to have diagnosed the condition of the non-proliferation regime as 'serious but stable'.

'Stable' because there has been concrete progress towards disarmament by the nuclear weapon states under the treaty, upholding their end of what has become the pre-eminent bargain of the NPT, that non-nuclear weapon states would not acquire their own nuclear weapons, provided that nuclear weapon states disarm.

'Serious' largely because the pace and extent of disarmament has disappointed, and the Treaty's lack of universality undermines its effectiveness in achieving its non-proliferation and disarmament goals.

• Following the US lead, the new UK Government has now made public its (intended) arsenal size – 225 warheads altogether, with 160 operational and 65 non-operational – and is planning to conduct its own review of declaratory policy later this year.
• The set timeframes for disarmament consultations among Nuclear Weapon States have been dropped from the draft final document to be approved by the NPT members at the close of the conference. No prizes for guessing who was behind this!
• The draft document does, however, set some concrete dates for steps towards a WMD-free zone in the Middle East, proposing a 2012 conference for Middle Eastern countries to begin talks on such a treaty. While only expressing concern at non-compliance by NPT members (read Iran), the document calls for state-parties who have left the treaty to re-join it (read North Korea) and for non-parties to join as non-nuclear weapon states (read Israel, India and Pakistan) offering no room for practical solutions on these persistent proliferation headaches.
• South Africa has hit the nuclear headlines in the past few days, but for all the wrong reasons, namely alleged nuclear shopping from Israel's arsenal, as reported in the Guardian. The report should be taken with a grain of salt, according to Avner Cohen, an authority on Israel's bomb.
• Further to my earlier link on the Sino-Japanese diplomatic incident in which Foreign Minister Okada sent his Chinese Counterpart Yang Jiechi over the edge by suggesting that China limit its arsenal size, ACW's Jeffrey Lewis has found a few more reports of the incident. John Pomfret's Washington Post account reports on Yang's alleged utterances in Chinese to Okada, about Japanese WWII atrocities in China.

The Nuclear Reactions column is supported by the Nuclear Security Project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as part of a wider partnership between the NSP and the Lowy Institute.