by Cheryl Rofer
The Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference couldn’t help but be an anticlimax after President Barack Obama’s speech last Sunday. He’s a hard act to follow.
President Obama’s speech was most likely timed to precede the conference, and he sent a statement to the conference. It was also most likely coordinated with UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s speech of two weeks before.
Besides the major theme of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons, a number of secondary themes were woven into those two big speeches as well as what the members of the Obama administration had to say at the conference.
Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg gave the first luncheon keynote. At Tuesday’s lunch, Peter Baker of the New York Times moderated a discussion between the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak, and the newly sworn-in Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance, Rose Gottemueller, who will be the US’s chief negotiator for the START follow-on talks. At a later session, Robert Einhorn, of the Obama transition team, weighed in.
An important secondary theme was that nuclear disarmament will need the participation of all nations, those that have nuclear weapons and those that do not; those who have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and those who have not. Every one of those speakers mentioned it. All the nuclear weapon nations will have to decrease, and eventually eliminate, their nuclear weapon stockpiles. Those nations that have depended on the nuclear nations to provide some sort of protection will have to rethink those relationships. And sometimes those who do not have nuclear weapons may have more innovative and effective ideas on how to solve the problems of disarmament than those who are more closely involved.
Another theme echoed by others beyond the administration was that the only purpose of nuclear weapons should be to deter their use by others. One of those saying this was Gareth Evans. He also urged action by all nations:
You in the United States are getting your act together. It’s time for the rest of the world to get their act together.
Steinberg also said that the START agreement by the end of the year will reduce levels below those of the Moscow Treaty (2200 deployed each). The number I heard in informal conversations was 1500. That, along with extension of verification, will be a big achievement in the less than nine months for negotiations.
Walter Pincus had a bit of excitement thinking (guessing? I didn’t see him there) that Steinberg said that Joe Biden would be in charge of getting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ratified. Biden was in the Senate when ratification was defeated in 1999. But what Steinberg said seems to me to be less than what Pincus reported.
As a measure of the president’s continuing commitment to this vital nonproliferation agenda, he has asked Vice President Joe Biden to help lead the administration’s nonproliferation efforts. The vice president will lead the conduct of a comprehensive review of the complex technical military and diplomatic issues surrounding the comprehensive test ban treaty and develop a strategy to secure its ratification. To protect the American people from the threat of nuclear terrorism, the vice president will lead the effort to meet the president’s goal of securing sensitive nuclear materials around the world in four years.Of course, that doesn’t exclude Biden’s shepherding the treaty through the Senate.
Gottemueller said, a couple of times, that we should look at Obama’s Prague speech and his joint statement with Russian President Medvedev very carefully, because they are her instructions from him.
Preventing Commercial Proliferation
Joby Warren of the Washington Post chaired a session with David Albright, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, and Ralf Wirtz on what we’ve learned from the Khan network. There was agreement that this sort of crime (making technology available for nuclear proliferation) is hard to prosecute, as is indicated by the fact that none of the people involved in the network is currently in jail, and also that luck played a part in unraveling the network and we have to do better in the future. None felt we really know whether all of the Khan network has been rolled up or if there might be other, similar but unaffiliated players out there.
Wirtz works for Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum. Vacuum technology is essential to many industries and research laboratories. I can’t imagine my life in the lab without the throb of vacuum pumps in the background. Vacuum pumps are also essential for uranium enrichment, and that’s where the problems arose for Oerlikon Leybold. Export restrictions were crunching in on them, so they decided to be proactive and deal with the problem by knowing their customers.
It turns out, Wirtz said, that it’s pretty easy to see patterns of procurement that suggest clandestine nuclear programs. And Oerlikon Leybold has good relations with the German government and the International Atomic Energy Authority that have allowed it to expose some bad players.
But procurement practices are getting more complex. Wirtz cited one case in which a Saudi inquiry on behalf of the Iranians went to the South Korean daughter of a European company. The company did figure it out, though.
And the biggest problem country? The United States. Government regulations are such that a company in the US doing what Oerlikon Leybold is doing would be subjected to increased surveillance or even prosecuted. Wirtz didn’t lay out the details, but I suspect that the “offense” would be something like “consorting with terrorists.” He called this “a willful disregard of international responsibilities” on the part of the United States. And the bad guys know and are using this enormous loophole.
Nonetheless, here’s a very recent prosecution in the United States.
That, er, Reactor in Syria
In a session devoted to Iran, North Korea, Syria and Pakistan, much of the attention, particularly in the questions, was devoted to Syria and that target the Israelis bombed in September 2007. It seems that most people now believe that it was a reactor, being built with the aid of the North Koreans, although the evidence seems to be no more than what the CIA provided last year. I’ll still count myself on the agnostic side.