Waiting to Hear from Condi

by CKR

From the Carnegie Nonproliferation Conference

Mark Hibbs, at the beginning of his presentation at the Carnegie Conference, said that Margaret Beckett said everything he was planning to say. Others agreed in the halls that she had said everything they’d like to hear Condoleezza Rice say. I do enjoy good writing and good speaking, and Beckett’s speech was both. I’ll excerpt her remarks and add some of my own. I think I’m not damaging hers by removing them from their context; her speech was simple and straightforward. (And hey Glenn Kessler and colleagues: I haven’t seen an article about this in the MSM yet!)

First, the news. Beckett said that nonproliferation and disarmament goals currently seem to be in conflict and then used that distinction to highlight the UK’s nuclear policy while proposing a number of ways to resolve that conflict. She gave the Bush administration a way to step around its prejudices against treaties and move forward.

Next, a caveat. She spoke carefully, as befits the foreign secretary of an NPT nuclear weapon state.

The truth is that I very much doubt – though I would wish it otherwise – that we will see the total elimination of nuclear weapons in my lifetime. To reach that point would require much more than disarmament diplomacy, convoluted enough thouth that is in itself. It would require a much more secure and predictable global political context.

That context does not exist today. Indeed it is why, only a few months ago, the UK took the decision to retain our ability to have an independent nuclear deterrent beond the 2020s.

Her careful qualification could undermine confidence in that nuclear weapon state’s commitment to its disarmament goals. However, her statement of the UK’s approach and intentions was strong and clear enough to overcome my reservations.

None of today’s political context prevents

us from taking steps to reduce numbers now and to start thinking about how we would go about reaching that eventual goal of elimiating all nuclear weapons.

In the Trident decision, she said, the UK was “very clear about four things”:

1. Being open and frank about what they were doing and why.
2. When the political conditions existed, the UK would give up their nuclear weapons.
3. That the UK was not enhancing its nuclear capability and would continue with its NPT obligations.
4. A reduction of 20 per cent in their operationally available warheads.

She noted that the UK’s submarines on patrol do not have their missiles aimed at particular targets.

With the end of the Cold War, she said, reductions can be unilateral and not formalized in treaties, but

Part of the solution may be provided by the extension of the most useful transparency and confidence building measures in the START framework, should the US and Russia agree to do so.

Measures and framework soften the effect of treaty for those allergic to such words. She urged that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty be ratified. A gentle progression that would allow George Bush to back down from his no-treaty stance if he wanted to.

She said that the UK is ready to engage in verification measures focusing on the warheads themselves, rather than the delivery vehicles. This would be a big step forward. The initial stages of nuclear arms control, in the 1980s, focused on those more easily countable containers for the warheads. But as the numbers of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles go down, it is the warheads themselves that must be tracked.

The UK Atomic Weapons Establishment was developing methods to help make the dismantlement process more verifiable. It’s important to know “that an object presented for dismantlement as a warhead is indeed a warhead”, that what emerges from a dismantlement process came from the authenticated weapons that went in, and that the materials from dismantlement are not returned to weapons use. The US has had programs in these areas which now seem to be dormant. Prototypes for these processes are available and sometimes not particularly difficult: for example, storing materials from dismantlement under IAEA supervision can provide confidence they are not being returned to weapons use.

She also emphasized the importance of a conventional arms trade treaty.

These are serious arms control proposals, which will require significant negotiation. But the reductions in numbers of nuclear weapons, the treaties that will assure that those numbers remain low, and the verification of those actions to the world’s satisfaction are all necessary steps to maintain the NPT bargain.

The bargain of nonproliferation for disarmament is poorly appreciated and understood in the United States. The rest of the world takes Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty seriously: in it, the nuclear weapon states promise that they will move toward nuclear and general disarmament. Recent talk of the robust replacement warhead, bunker busters and the more prominent place of nuclear weapons in recent American defense strategies lead many to conclude that the nuclear weapon states, particularly the United States, are not keeping their disarmament side of the bargain. Beckett’s speech provided a number of steps that could reconfirm the nuclear weapon states’ commitment to Article VI, thereby bolstering international confidence in the bargain and the willingness of the non nuclear weapon states to support nonproliferation.

And now a selection of quotes from her speech, slightly rearranged, but I think within the spirit of what she said.

Despite the recent log-jam, the basic non-proliferation consensus is and has been remarkably resilient. The grand bargain of the NPT has, by and large, held for the past 40 years. The vast majority of states – including many that have the technology to do so if they chose – have decided not to develop nuclear weapons. And far fewer states than was once feared have acquired and retained nuclear weapons.

Even more encouragingly,…many more states – South Africa, Libya, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Argentina, Brazil – have given up active nuclear weapons programmes, turned back from pursuing such programmes, or – in the case of the former Soviet Union countries – chosen to hand over weapons on their territory….

So we have grounds for optimism; but none for complacency. The successes we have had in the past have not come about by accident but by applied effort.

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…our efforts on non-proliferation will be dangerously undermined if others believe – however unfairly – that the terms of the grand bargain have changed, that the nuclear weapon states have abandoned any commitment to disarmament.

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What we need is both vision – a scenario for a world free of nuclear weapons. And action – progressive steps to reduce warhead numbers and to limit the role of nuclear weapons in security policy.

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The judgement we made forty years ago, that the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons was in all of our interests – is just as true today as it was then. For more than sixty years, good management and good fortune have meant that nuclear arsenals have not been used. But we cannot rely on history just to repeat itself.

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…we have to keep doing the hard diplomatic work on the underlying political conditions – resolving the ongoing sources of tension in the world, not least in the Middle East and between Pakistan and India. We also need to build a more mature, balanced and stable relationship between ourselves and Russia.

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But there is a danger in familiarity with something so terrible. If we allow our efforts on disarmament to slacken, if we allow ourselves to take the non-proliferation consensus for granted, the nuclear shadow that hangs over us all will lengthen and it will deepen. It may, some day, blot out the light for good.