NRRCs and Nuclear Stability in South Asia: History of NRRCs

This article was written while I was Research Assistant at the IPCS, New Delhi in 2004.

Against the recent backdrop of nuclear CBM talks between India and Pakistan, an atmosphere of cautious optimism has been building up. One suggestion that is doing the rounds is that of setting up Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers (NRRCs) in India and Pakistan. This is akin to the NRRCs that exist between Moscow and Washington.

The US concept of the NRRC came form a Congressional working group sponsored by Senators John Warner and Sam Nunn in the mid-eighties. The NRRCs were perceived as tools of lessening US-Soviet nuclear tensions. At the Geneva Summit in November 1985 President Reagan and Secretary General Gorbachev discussed the concept of nuclear risk reduction. After a series of meetings held in 1985 and 1986 in the US and the USSR the proposal to set up NRRCs was further refined. Finally, on 15 September 1987 the NRRC Agreement was signed by the then US Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that formally recognized the US and Soviet NRRCs. The two centers assumed greater importance because they were the first direct communications link between the two capitals in more than twenty years since the Presidential ‘hotline’ was instituted in 1963.



The NRRC agreement called for the exchange of ballistic missile launch and ‘goodwill’ notifications, as well as those for future agreements. Less than three months later, in December 1987 with the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the NRRC was given the task of exchanging INF messages related to inspections, elimination and conversion activities.

The US NRRC was set up within the Department of State after a lot of debate regarding its location ? whether it would be within the Department of State, the Department of Defence, the NSC or as a separate institution. It was finally with the National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 301, that the US NRRC was formally established within the Department of State on 22 February 1988.

The NRRCs between the US and the Soviet Union have to be studied in depth as they hold valuable lessons for the sub-continent.

One important lesson can be derived from the debate that raged within the US administration regarding where to locate the NRRC. In order to be effective the NRRCs should be part of the National Security Council set-up and not independent of it. This would lend authority and institutional arrangement that are so crucial to the proper functioning and building up of legitimacy for the centers.

The scope of activities that have been assigned to the NRRCs in the West is another aspect that needs consideration. The role of US NRRCs was significantly increased in 1991 with the National Security Council (NSC) assigning it the task of operating the US node of communication of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), then known as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Nevertheless, its tasks are still mostly linked to exchanging notifications over the OSCE network with the fifty-five participating countries.

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