There is no more urgent threat to the United States than a terrorist with a nuclear weapon. Nuclear weapons materials are stored in dozens of countries, some without proper security. Nuclear technology is spreading. . . . It is essential to strengthen the global nonproliferation and disarmament regime, deal with those states in violation of this regime, and uphold our obligations to work constructively and securely toward the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.
—Susan E. Rice, former US ambassador to the UN
On the day after 9/11, the Security Council officially decreed that acts of international terrorism are threats to international peace and security. The events of September 11, 2001, also pushed the council to act quickly in creating a broad resolution aimed at cutting off all support to international terrorists. “The UN rewrote the law after the 9/11 attacks by stating that countries have an affirmative duty not to give any kind of assistance to terrorist groups [Resolution 1373],” remarks international law expert Ruth Wedgwood of Johns Hopkins University. “It changed the terms of state responsibility. It was a hugely important resolution.”
The shocking attacks of September 11 placed the United States at the top of the list of terror-afflicted nations and helped raise international awareness about the urgency of the threat. The media ran stories and editorials about the need to find terrorists and neutralize them before they could mount another major attack, possibly one using weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs.
One immediate response by the United States and many of its friends was to treat terrorism as a variety of military threat, to be countered with the use of force, as in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda had formed a close alliance with the Taliban government and was using its resources to train recruits. The United States launched an invasion in 2001, with UN approval, that overthrew the Taliban regime and forced al-Qaeda into hiding.
Another response, not only by the United States and its friends but also by the UN, was to treat international terrorism as a form of criminal activity that needed to be made clearly illegal everywhere, both within nations and in international law. As the world’s global forum, the UN would seem well suited for this task. The UN has defined several important counterterrorism roles for itself, observes Pakistan’s former ambassador Munir Akram, by, for example, shaping “international public opinion, standards, and conventions which have outlawed terrorism and made it possible for countries to cooperate with each other on concrete terms.”
A striking aspect of counterterrorist deliberations is that the major powers all seem to be generally on the same page. The Security Council’s permanent members (P5) publicly and officially agree that only through joint efforts can they hope to stop terrorism. They have expressed their unity through a series of resolutions, beginning in late 1999, when the Security Council passed Resolution 1267, requiring the Taliban government in Afghanistan to give up Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaeda network had been targeting US government and military facilities. Next, Resolution 1269 pledged a “common fight against terrorists everywhere” and specified that member states should share information and refuse to provide a safe haven to terrorists. At the end of 1999, the General Assembly voted to adopt the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism. This convention makes it a crime to participate in raising funds for terrorist activity, even if no terrorist act ensues.
Then came 9/11. Security Council Resolution 1373, approved on September 28, 2001, requires every UN member state to freeze the financial assets of terrorists and their supporters, deny them travel or safe haven, prevent terrorist recruitment and weapons supply, and cooperate with other countries in information sharing and criminal prosecution.
Resolution 1373 also established the Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC), a subsidiary body of the Security Council, to strengthen the capacity of UN member states to fight terrorism and coordinate the counterterrorism efforts of regional and intergovernmental organizations both inside and outside the UN system. In 2004 the council adopted Resolution 1535, which created the Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate, designed to give the CTC greater technical capability and expand its ability to help member states implement the provisions of Resolution 1373.
One of the CTC’s greatest contributions has been to amass information about the ability of UN member states to fight terrorism. “Of course, the hard work against terrorism on the ground is done by national governments or international agencies,” says former Ambassador Akram, and therefore these governments are the focus of the CTC’s activities. Under Resolution 1373, each member state must submit an annual report on its antiterrorism activities and capabilities. The annual reports have revealed that numerous smaller or less developed nations lack key elements of an effective strategy such as the legal, administrative, and regulatory capabilities to freeze financial assets, deny safe haven to terrorists, or prevent terrorism groups from recruiting new members and acquiring weapons.
The CTC’s efforts to help these nations get the technical expertise needed to upgrade their capability may have been hindered by the decision not to sit in judgment of UN member states or to report non-complying governments to the Security Council—a stance adopted to maintain engagement with all member states. In its annual reports the CTC organizes the analysis by region, not country, making it impossible to determine the antiterrorist measures and capabilities of any given member state. This preference for working quietly and not pointing fingers at offenders has brought criticism from some observers. As one human rights organization complained in 2013, the CTC “has never named a single terrorist organization or state sponsor of terrorism.” To the contrary, four states identified by the US State Department as state sponsors of terrorism “have written reports to the CTC about their compliance with Security Council Resolution 1373.”
Another barrier to full implementation of Resolution 1373 has been the lack of consensus over which possible lines of action are most likely to eliminate terrorism. In part this derives from disagreement on a definition of terrorism. The General Assembly has been deliberating on counterterrorism measures to augment the international conventions now on the books. As you might expect, the assembly’s diverse membership has struggled to find consensus, especially on this question of a definition.
Even the much smaller Security Council has engaged in fruitless debates on a clear definition. To cite one instance, at a Security Council meeting those delegates who stated a position on the matter had differing views on the desirability of even defining terrorism. The Libyan delegate (representing the Gaddafi regime) thought that there was a need for a “clear” definition. The representative from India thought that “there was no need for a philosophical definition of terrorism” because the UN already had plenty of language making terrorism a criminal activity. The representative from Venezuela thought that “in the short run, it was important to create a definition of terrorism” but that terrorism should not be equated with “legitimate struggles for national liberty and self-determination by people under colonial or foreign occupation.” The United States and its friends refused to accept the distinction made by the Venezuelan representative.
Former US ambassador John Bolton has a criticism about such debates. “The conclusion you have to draw from the record on terrorism,” he says, “where the Security Council creates a committee on terrorism but can’t even agree on a definition of what terrorism is . . . is that it’s not going to be effective in those areas.” Munir Akram is just as impatient with the debates about finding a definition of terrorism, but for quite different reasons. “Perhaps the search for a definition of terrorism is a red herring,” he argues. “We all know what terrorism is when we see it, and therefore the search for a legal definition perhaps is not the most urgent effort.” Rather, he maintains, it is more important to understand that terrorism takes many forms, divergent from place to place. “We have to address it globally, but we have to act locally.”
The Security Council has made international terrorism and its antidotes the focus of numerous meetings. At a special session on terrorism in 2012, for example, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opened with a call to strengthen global cooperation against terrorism. He urged an integrated approach providing “education and job opportunities, promoting development and inter-cultural dialogue, and addressing the grievances that terrorists exploited.” In the ensuing debate representatives of member states denounced terrorism but without trying to define it. “Terrorism has no justification, no matter how you dress it up,” declared Alexander Zmeevsky, a special envoy of the Russian Federation. Li Baodong of China stressed the need to address the “root causes” of terrorism “through integrated measures in development, as well as through a fight against intolerance and extremism,” and warned that “relying on military means was counterproductive.” Hardeep Singh Puri of India likewise preferred an integrated approach, because “terrorism could not be countered by law enforcement alone”—a view echoed by the representative from South Africa.
The Security Council’s increasing willingness to move ahead with a working concept of terrorism, without trying to gain consensus on a carefully devised definition, has been hastened by concerns that time is wasting. During the debate at the special session the representatives often remarked on a growing connection between terrorism and organized crime, as well as rising use of the Internet and other aspects of information technology to recruit terrorists and disseminate terrorist propaganda. The Security Council, and the UN in general, finds itself in a grim race with the terrorists, and winning it requires both reflection and action.
Much of the urgency for acting against terrorism comes from the fear that a terrorist group might acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), such as poisonous chemicals, deadly microorganisms, or radioactive or even fissile material that could cause harm on a scale far beyond what happened on 9/11. When the Soviet Union unraveled in the early 1990s, some experts warned about the danger of unauthorized access to nuclear weapons or nuclear materials such as enriched uranium. Meanwhile, the UN had been developing an office to advise on both nuclear and conventional arms. Its name was changed in a series of administrative shufflings going back to the 1980s. In 2007 it became the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), serving as a “focal point” for promoting, assisting, and integrating disarmament efforts and related matters; it is responsible to the office of the secretary-general.
Although UNODA focuses on arms issues, it regards its work as part of a much bigger set of issues. While it acknowledges that disarmament alone will not produce world peace, it maintains that the “elimination of weapons of mass destruction, illicit arms trafficking and burgeoning weapons stockpiles would advance both peace and development goals. It would accomplish this by reducing the effects of wars, eliminating some key incentives to new conflicts, and liberating resources to improve the lives of all the people and the natural environment in which they live.”
UNODA’s High Representative, Angela Kane, is quick to note that her organization has to rely heavily on persuasion and public support from the secretary-general to accomplish its broad mandate. She is an experienced Secretariat insider, one of her previous posts having been under-secretary for management affairs, and enjoys a close working relationship with personnel at other UN bodies concerned with weapons and disarmament. She is also a realist. “If I were easily discouraged I wouldn’t have taken this job,” she says half jokingly, “because you can only advocate, only bring pressure, and you cannot easily measure success. If I were in humanitarian affairs and I did X, I could say that I had improved the world to that extent—it’s measurable. But I can’t do that. I can’t say that there is a sudden reduction in nuclear weapons simply because I’ve advocated.” Yet she sees opportunities for positive change. “What I argue for is transparency.” For example, she asks, “Why don’t we know how many nuclear weapons the nuclear states have? We think we know, we have a figure we toss around, but it’s not a confirmed figure.” She wants the nuclear states to provide an accurate baseline for assessing the progress of nuclear disarmament, one of her organization’s long-term goals.
Nuclear-weapon issues claimed most of UNODA’s attention until 2013, when a spreading civil war in Syria raised the specter of another kind of WMD. The many violent encounters between government forces and their opponents included the alleged use of chemical weapons on citizens. At the request of the Syrian and other governments the secretary-general decided to investigate the allegations. Kane led an expert team to Syria, which determined that chemical weapons had indeed been used on a relatively large scale. The Syrian government, in an agreement brokered by the Russian Federation and the United States, declared its willingness to divest itself of its chemical weapons—despite having stated in previous years that it had no chemical weapons—and acceded to the UN-sponsored Chemical Weapons Convention, whose implementation is monitored by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The OPCW–UN Joint Mission swung into action to locate the weapons and chemical agents and transport the most dangerous chemical materials out of the country for destruction at sea. For its impressive work the OPCW received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Kane marvels at the swift response of the international community and the decisive actions that ensued, attributing much of the success to the collaboration of the Russian Federation and the United States. Other observers saw the Syrian chemical weapons affair as possibly an opening to the reduction or elimination of other kinds of WMDs in the Middle East and other parts of the globe. However, progress in curtailing nuclear proliferation and reducing nuclear stockpiles has not been nearly as impressive.
During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union, which held large nuclear arsenals and their associated delivery systems, negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970, which addressed both disarmament and proliferation. It obligated the signatories to reduce their atomic arsenals (though without setting a schedule), and it forbade acquisition of nuclear weaponry by nonnuclear states.
US Secretary of State John Kerry addresses the Security Council after its vote to adopt a resolution on Syrian chemical weapons, September 27, 2013. UN Photo / Amanda Voisard.
The nonproliferation aspect of that treaty held up pretty well for the next few decades, notes Kane, with only India, Pakistan, and Israel never joining and North Korea announcing its withdrawal. But the major nuclear powers have done little, she argues, to reduce their arsenals, and that foot-dragging has led to “increasing dissatisfaction among the nonnuclear states, that the nuclear powers don’t want to do anything to change the nuclear status quo.” She worries that some nonnuclear member states may decide that they can have bombs if the major powers do. “What really surprises me,” she says, “is that nuclear weapons are still seen as status symbols. Excuse me? If you’re not going to use them, what status do they have?”
The UN’s oldest and best-known agency focusing on nuclear issues is the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which in the aftermath of September 11 became a lead entity in the UN’s efforts to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is the world’s forum for discussing, debating, and regulating the peaceful, and sometimes not so peaceful, use of atomic energy. Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA’s director from 1999 to 2009, has noted that because terrorists are willing to take their own lives when committing their violence, the nuclear threat is very serious.
These concerns are shared by his successor, Yukiya Amano, who was Japan’s representative to the IAEA when he was elected to become the new director-general in 2009. At a conference on nuclear security in 2013, Amano said that each year more than a hundred incidents of theft and other unauthorized activities involving nuclear and radioactive material are reported to the IAEA. “This means the material is outside regulatory control and potentially available for malicious acts,” he declared. “Most of the incidents reported to us are fairly minor, but some are more serious. However, effective counter-measures are possible if all countries take the threat seriously.”
The IAEA operates the Incident and Emergency Centre (IEC), the world’s only international response system capable of reacting quickly after a nuclear accident or a nuclear terrorist attack. In 2013, for instance, the IEC brought more than forty experts from eighteen countries to conduct measurements in the evacuated areas around Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which suffered a catastrophic failure during the earthquake and tsunami of 2011. The IAEA also maintains the Incident and Trafficking Database, established in 1995, through which member states share information. As the title suggests, the goal of the database is to identify instances of illegal trafficking in nuclear and other radioactive materials, as well as cases where such materials were lost or disposed of in an unauthorized manner. During 2012 there were 160 incidents reported: 24 involving theft or loss and 119 involving “other unauthorized activities.”
Participants at a session of the UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination in Vienna include Yukiya Amano (second from right), newly appointed director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, April 9, 2010. UN Photo / Mark Garten.
The concerns of the IAEA—indeed, of the whole UN family—extend also to information about how to manufacture nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. The danger came home in 2004, when it was discovered that a Pakistani nuclear scientist, A. Q. Khan, who had helped develop his nation’s nuclear bomb, had sold sensitive information to North Korea. It is not hard to imagine that someone else, likewise well placed in a national atomic weapons program, might offer to provide similar information to a terrorist organization.
Recognizing the threat, the Security Council passed Resolution 1540 on April 23, 2004. Among other things, the resolution requires member states to “refrain from supporting by any means non-State actors from developing, acquiring, manufacturing, possessing, transporting, transferring or using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and their delivery systems.” Non-state actors are private persons or groups, whether a secret terrorist ring with international connections or a vigilante coven seeking to destroy some aspect of a government. The resolution also requires member states to “adopt legislation to prevent the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and their means of delivery, and establish appropriate domestic controls over related materials to prevent their illicit trafficking.” Overseeing implementation of the resolution is the 1540 Committee, which was established in 2004 by the Security Council for a two-year period, later extended (Resolutions 1673, 1810, 1977) until 2021. Resolution 1977 (2011) also provides for two Comprehensive Reviews, one after five years and one before the end of the mandate.
Resolution 1540 focuses on the need to prevent the proliferation of WMDs, that is, the acquisition of these dangerous weapons by persons or groups who did not previously possess them. The resolution did not speak of abolishing the WMDs that sit in the arsenals of the United States and several other member states. Some have argued that the surest way of preventing proliferation would be to destroy all WMDs, even those held by member states. The debate about whether to pursue nonproliferation or abolition has continued, sharpened by the fact that nuclear weapons are now within the reach of nations with small industrial and technological bases, as is clear from the situation in North Korea.
One of Kofi Annan’s last speeches as secretary-general dealt with precisely this issue. He characterized the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a bargain between the nuclear states and the rest of the world. The nuclear states declared they would negotiate in good faith on nuclear disarmament, would prevent proliferation, and would encourage the peaceful use of nuclear energy. In return, noted Annan, the nonnuclear nations agreed not to acquire or manufacture nuclear weapons and to place all their nuclear activities under the verification of the IAEA.
The stability engendered by the agreement lasted until two states that had ratified the treaty were accused of trying to develop nuclear weapons. The government of North Korea started a serious nuclear program in 1989 aimed at producing weapons-grade materials, even though it had agreed to the NPT. Inspectors from the IAEA who visited North Korea under terms of the treaty complained that the government was not providing full information about the nuclear facilities, and the dispute escalated. In 2003 the North Koreans declared they would withdraw from the NPT, and the last IAEA inspections were in 2009. Since then the North Koreans have pushed ahead and tested small nuclear weapons capable of being mounted in long-range missiles, which they are also developing. It is unclear how much the Security Council’s sanctions (see chapter 6) have slowed the North Korean efforts to become a nuclear power.
Iran is the other member state that seems poised to develop a nuclear weapons program despite having signed the NPT. The Iranians claim that they are creating a civilian nuclear power industry, but many observers and the US government believe that Iran also aims to make weapons-grade material. Civilian nuclear power programs offer a potential source of enriched uranium, either for processing into fission bombs or for use as “dirty” bombs, which produce massive radiation. The more these civilian programs expand, the greater is the risk of proliferation. Ruth Wedgwood calls this crossover between peaceful and military potential a “fatal flaw” in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “The assumption was that you could segregate civilian and military uses. . . . But enriched uranium is enriched uranium, as North Korea and Iran have shown. The irony is that if you have the proliferation of civilian uses, you’re going to have proliferation of weapons uses.”
Unlike the North Koreans, the Iranians have continued to accept the NPT and have allowed inspectors to visit some of their nuclear facilities. IAEA inspectors concluded, however, in a report issued in 2013, that they were unable to assess fully the military implications of the nuclear program and urged the Iranians to be more forthcoming with information. The IAEA’s director-general put the problem neatly in remarks made in 2012: inspectors were able to track the nuclear material they knew about, but could only guess at what the Iranians were not showing them. As with North Korea, the Security Council has passed sanctions aimed at delaying or preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and they may have had an effect. The Iranians agreed in 2013 to join talks with the P5+Germany aimed at finding a solution to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful.
As UN resolutions on terrorism and WMDs have been made, one after the other, some experts believe that the organization’s reach may be exceeding its grasp. It is fine to outlaw terrorist acts, they note, but quite another thing to get compliance from member states. Moreover, counterterrorism often requires exactly the kind of stealthy intelligence gathering and quick action that the UN is not known for. According to William Luers, there are “certain issues in global affairs the UN is not equipped to deal with, such as international terrorism, illicit trafficking in humans, and drugs, all flowing out of globalization.” The UN, he argues, “has not faced up to terrorism. It has committees and great intentions, but the nature of terrorism doesn’t allow for a decisive UN role, though it is seeking to identify what that might be.”
Sebastian von Einsiedel, director of the UN University’s Centre for Policy Research, argues that the UN was “fairly effective in getting some state sponsors of terrorism out of the terrorism business through Security Council sanctions in the 1990s,” referring to measures against Libya (for the bombing of a commercial flight over Lockerbee, Scotland) and Sudan (where al-Qaeda was then lurking), but less successful with respect to Afghanistan (under the Taliban). While “the big Council-mandated terrorism architecture put together after 9/11 [Security Council Resolution 1373 and the Counter-Terrorism Committee] started out promising,” it did not lead to as much action as hoped. The Obama administration, in his view, seeing the need for a complementary route, decided to create “new structures outside the UN,” such as the Global Terrorism Forum. Von Einsiedel acknowledges the UN’s important role in legitimizing multinational intervention in countries such as Mali, where an al-Qaeda cell emerged as a lead element in an insurgency so threatening that it brought intervention by French military forces in 2013.
Unfortunately, the UN has itself become a target of terrorists. The first attack came during the early stages of the US-led occupation of Iraq in 2003, when a car bomb at the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq killed at least twenty-two people, including the UN’s’ special representative in Iraq, Sérgio Vieira de Mello. An al-Qaeda leader claimed responsibility for the blast, which was followed by another bombing a month later. In December 2007 an al-Qaeda–inspired suicide bombing destroyed the UN headquarters building in Algiers and killed nearly forty people, including seventeen UN employees. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have also threatened or targeted UN officials and peacekeepers in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, and southern Lebanon. In 2011 an Islamist terrorist organization claimed responsibility for a car bombing that killed many staff members at a UN building in Abuja, Nigeria.
The head of a UN team established to monitor the effectiveness of UN sanctions against al-Qaeda and the Taliban stated that “al-Qaeda certainly regards the UN as inimical to its own interests.” One of the UN’s longtime troubleshooters, Lakhdar Brahimi, was appointed the head of a panel to review security at the organization’s facilities worldwide. “I think there are quite a lot of people who do not make a secret that they consider that the UN has become their enemy,” he told reporters ominously. “I think the UN has been put on notice that their flag is not anymore a protection.”
Despite the UN’s limitations and vulnerabilities, it does provide access to information for the counterterrorism effort, and it has a coordinating function as well. Munir Akram puts it this way: “The UN is important because it maintains the international consensus on the issue of terrorism—how to address terrorism and try to take into account the views and interests of all concerned.” In the long term, the UN’s greatest contribution may include its social and economic programs, which Akram sees as addressing the root causes of terrorism. “The major focus has to be on economic and social development, on education, on efforts to wean away the appeal of terrorism.”
UN offices in Algiers destroyed by terrorist bombing, December 11, 2007. UN Photos / Evan Schneider.
Beyond the terrorism issue lies the huge question of arms reduction by member states, including even the possibility of nuclear disarmament. Here the UN can do little more than persuade, encourage, and use the bully pulpit, but such activities have considerable value, argues Angela Kane. The UN can also do something else: it can help the world community set standards, as in cyber security, “through the patient work of experts sitting around, coming up with results. Even if it’s at a low initial level, that’s when you build on every single step. It’s a normative effort, and that’s what the UN does extremely well.” Kane admits that “sometimes it takes a long time, but you cannot do this overnight.”
• The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was established in 1957 and is based in Vienna. It is the global forum for discussing and regulating the uses of atomic energy. Its Department of Technical Cooperation helps countries improve their scientific and technological capabilities in the peaceful application of nuclear technology. Safety and the protection of people from radiation have been important concerns. Inspectors watch more than a thousand nuclear installations worldwide that are covered under the IAEA Safeguards Program. The US government strongly endorses the work of the agency. The IAEA and its then director, Mohamed ElBaradei, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.
• The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is headquartered at The Hague. Its primary task is to monitor the provisions of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling, and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction, which entered into force in 1997, which is the first multilateral disarmament and nonproliferation agreement that addresses the verifiable worldwide elimination of a whole class of weapons of mass destruction. The organization received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 for its work in Syria.
• The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), established in 1996, is based in Vienna. The commission’s main job is to refine a verification plan to ensure that the signers of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty are adhering to its terms.
• UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), based in New York City, promotes nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation; encourages disarmament efforts in connection with other weapons of mass destruction and chemical and biological weapons; and advances disarmament programs for conventional weapons, especially land mines and small arms. UNODA had a role in the General Assembly’s approval (April 2013) of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which regulates the international trade in conventional arms with the aim of curbing arms flows to conflict regions.
