Mark Fitzpatrick, Senior Fellow for Non-proliferation, IISS
Welcome to this session on strengthening the global arms control and non-proliferation regime. I am delighted to be able to present to you this morning two of the leading authorities on the subject. Yesterday we received word from Rose Gottemoeller, US Assistant Secretary of State, that because of the hot and heavy negotiations in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the ratification procedures for the New START agreement she is regrettably unable to join us. However we are delighted to have in her place the very able Laura Kennedy, who was willing to step in at the last moment.
Laura Kennedy, Ambassador, US Delegation to the Conference on Disarmament
President Obama presented his vision of a world without nuclear weapons in his Prague speech in April 2009. A year and a half later there is much to report. I will begin my remarks today by focussing on the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) Treaty, which was largely negotiated here in the US and Russian missions in Geneva. In addition to New START, I will also touch on elements of the Comprehensive Nuclear‑Test‑Ban Treaty, the negotiation of the Fissile Material Cut‑Off Treaty, and I will also comment on two existing treaties – the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention.
Before getting into the details of the New START Treaty, I would like to share with you Assistant Secretary Gottemoeller’s update on progress in the US’s ratification of the treaty. The treaty was signed by President Obama and President Medvedev on 8 April. Just over a month after that the White House transmitted the treaty to the US Senate for its advice and consent to ratification. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the chairmanship of Senator Kerry and Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking member, has held 12 hearings featuring more than 20 senior witnesses. Additional hearings were held by a multiplicity of other committees and the administration has answered more than 900 submitted questions about the treaty from senators. Senator Kerry has announced that consideration of the New START will be the first order of business for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as they reconvene this week.
The New START Treaty is a continuation of the international arms control non‑proliferation framework, which the US and the Russian Federation have worked long and hard to foster and strengthen for many years. It will provide ongoing transparency and predictability regarding the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals, while maintaining our ability to maintain the strong nuclear deterrent that remains an essential element of US national security, as well as the security of our partners and allies.
The New START Treaty’s verification regime is effective and robust; … it will provide confidence to each party that the other is upholding its obligations. The new treaty along with its protocol and annexes contains a detailed set of rules and procedures for verification of the New START Treaty, many of them drawn from START. Informed by our earlier experiences we were able to make the verification regime simpler and safer to implement. The new regime reflects the current strategic situation and the vastly improved US/Russian relationships of the end of the Cold War and the knowledge we gained from the 15 years of implementing START. The New START treaty sets the stage for engaging other nuclear powers in fulfilling the goals of the Non‑Proliferation Treaty and expanding the opportunities for enhancing strategic stability.
We believe the New START Treaty deserves the same bipartisan support in the US Senate that past arms control treaties with Russia have received. The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, for example, was approved in the Senate by 93 to five; the original START Treaty was approved by 93 to six and the Moscow Treaty was approved by 95 to zero.
The administration will continue to work with senators to answer all their questions in support of the advice and consent procedure. We believe it is in US interests to ratify and bring the New START Treaty into force as soon as possible. By adding greater stability and transparency to the relationship between the US and Russia, the world’s two largest nuclear powers, and by demonstrating that we are living up to our obligations under Article Six of the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty (NPT), we enhance our credibility to convince other governments to help strengthen the global non‑proliferation regime. At the NPT Review Conference in May, the US and Russia worked closely together along with other NPT nuclear-weapon states and, of course, all the 189 member states on the review conference final document. This document contains a number of important provisions that will advance non‑proliferation efforts. Its action plan, the first such at an NPT review conference, is an important development.
At the NPT Review Conference, Secretary of State Clinton reaffirmed the US commitments to ratify the CTBT (Comprehensive Nuclear‑Test‑Ban Treaty) and to support early, multilateral negotiations on a verifiable Fissile Material Cut‑Off Treaty (FMCT) in the Conference on Disarmament (CD), where I currently labour. US ratification of the CTBT is a critical step in reaffirming the importance of the international non‑proliferation regime and in reducing the role of nuclear weapons in international security. We have no incentive to make the world safer for countries to test nuclear weapons, and we believe the US and all states will be safer when the test ban is ratified and enters into force.
Much has changed since the US declined to ratify the treaty in 1999, particularly in regard to verifiability and stock‑pile reliability. In 1999 the International Monitoring System (IMS) to provide us with the ability to detect, identify and attribute nuclear test explosions was just a plan on paper. Today the IMS is more than 80% complete and is already providing important data, including data on two announced nuclear tests in North Korea. In addition the US continues to enhance its national technical means to supplement and reinforce IMS monitoring capability.
With regard to reliability in 1999, we had little experience in maintaining the safety and security of our nuclear weapons stockpile through sophisticated, science‑based computational modelling. The successful implementation of the stockpile stewardship programme over the past decade has been such that our nuclear experts say that they know more about how such weapons work today than when we actively tested them very many years ago.
We will need to win the support of the Senate, whose composition has significantly changed since 1999, and to convince those senators who expressed concerns when the treaty was last considered. The administration has commissioned a number of reports, including a National Academy of Sciences report on the CTBT, and this should be completed in the early autumn. These documents and others will inform the Senate’s assessment of the CTBT and our ability to maintain a safe, secure and effective nuclear arsenal.
Pursing a verifiable FMCT is also part of the US arms control agenda that President Obama articulated in April 2009. If the international community is serious about drawing down nuclear weapons, we must constrain the ability to build up such weapons. We strongly support getting negotiations started on verifiable FMCT, which is widely recognised as the next logical step in multilateral nuclear disarmament. The NPT Review Conference action plan called on the Conference of Disarmament to adopt a balanced programme of work that includes mandates for negotiation on an FMCT and for substantive discussions on nuclear disarmament, negative security assurances and the prevention of an arms race in outer space. Unfortunately the CD remains unable to agree on a work programme that would allow for FMCT negotiations to proceed. We are under no illusions that such a treaty could be concluded quickly, but it is for this very reason that we cannot afford further delay in at least getting started. If the start of negotiations continues to stall, those countries that still wish to negotiate an FMCT will have to consider other fora, existing or ad hoc, that could serve as a venue for FMCT negotiations. The US has shown little enthusiasm for ad hoc negotiations among various groups of like‑minded states, but after well over a decade of inaction in Geneva, new approaches may be required. It should come as no surprise that patience is running out for many states, including my own, the Unites States.
To focus international attention on the continuing deadlock at the CD, UN Secretary‑General Ban will convene a high‑level meeting of UN member states on 24 September in New York that will permit all governments, including those not represented at the CD, to discuss ways to break the diplomatic impasse, including the deadlock on an FMCT. The US supports this initiative and will continue to support international initiatives to identify a way forward for FMCT negotiations to begin early next year in Geneva.
Looking to the high‑level meeting and beyond, to the annual session of the First Committee of the UN General Assembly in October, it will be important for governments to build on the hard‑won consensus that the NPT Review Conference achieved last May and to keep our eyes on one of its prizes, the opening of an FMCT negotiation. To that end governments will have opportunities during both meetings to propose ways to end the stalemate at the CD, now exceeding a decade. The US believes that, given the short, half‑day duration of the high‑level meeting, that gathering should limit its focus, and the US believes that should be on how best to get early negotiations underway. In contrast, the month‑long First Committee session provides ample opportunity for governments to discuss not just the CD or an FMCT, but all issues pertaining to the maintenance of international peace and security and, one hopes, the strengthening of those.
To build on the NPT consensus, the First Committee will ideally focus on issues on which there is international agreement or where national differences have narrowed. It is hoped they will not prematurely call for immediate progress on proposals such as the negotiation of a nuclear weapons convention or the convening of a special session of the General Assembly devoted to disarmament, on which it is known there is no international consensus at this time.
I will now turn to other agreements, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Biological Weapons Convention. These are two important treaties that significantly factor into our efforts to strengthen global arms control and non-proliferation. The Chemical Weapons Convention represents a grand agreement that all nations possessing chemical weapons will destroy them and that these nations will never use, develop, produce, transfer or retain chemical weapons; assist anyone else in such activities; or permit anyone to engage in these acts on their territory or under their jurisdiction. The multilateral CWC is the first and only international treaty that bans an entire category of weapons of mass destruction with a stringent and non‑discriminatory verification regime that is equally applicable to all state parties. To date, the state parties to the CWC represent about 98% of the global population and land mass, as well as about 98% of the world’s chemical industry, with 188 states on board.
We welcome the success and ongoing progress under the CWC and we intend to build on that success and work with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) under the leadership of Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü from Turkey, who recently took over as Director‑General. My Washington colleagues were delighted to have the opportunity to meet the new director and share some of our key priorities under the CWC, including the complete, verifiable destruction of our chemical weapons stockpile, universal adherence and implementation, maintaining an effective verification regime, and identifying how best to [address] new and emerging chemical weapons challenges that arise from advances in science and technology.
Basically we must keep pace with the developments in the chemical industry, if the CWC is to remain viable. As the world’s chemical industry evolves, verification must evolve with it. We have to make sound recommendations that will ensure that verification keeps pace with changes in industry and the chemical weapons threat. To achieve this challenging goal, states must recognise that the chemical weapons threat goes beyond the schedule of chemicals listed in that convention. To counter technological advances as well as the risk posed by the use of toxic chemicals by non‑state actors and terrorists, full implementation of the relevant articles and provisions must be enforced against emerging threats. To this end the US also continues to promote and encourage all state parties to adhere to their general obligations.
We strongly believe that verification facilitates both deterrence and detection of non-compliance and is an essential component of the convention and part of what we consider the compliance process, which includes compliance assessments. We further believe that individual state parties can and should make compliance judgements on other, individual state parties and are urged to take seriously their role in this effort.
One of the core obligations of that convention is the complete destruction of chemical weapons stocks by possessor states. We remain fully committed to our obligations. We have made and continue to make substantial progress towards the complete destruction of our chemical weapons stockpile. As part of our continuing efforts to be transparent, we hosted just this month the new director‑general at one of our chemical weapons destruction facilities. We have also hosted a number of visits by members of the OPCW council as part of its own ongoing efforts to keep state parties informed.
We recently completed destruction of 78% of the chemical weapons stockpile. We are examining all options to accelerate destruction safely. We are proud of this accomplishment and continue to work hard to achieve the total destruction of our stockpile as soon as possible in a manner that is safe and environmentally sound. While 78% of the US stockpile has been destroyed, more than 40% of the total quantity of chemical weapons declared globally under the convention remains. The work is more difficult, dangerous, technically complex and time consuming than previously envisioned, but we are playing our part to ensure complete destruction. We are on track to have 90% of the declared stockpile verifiably destroyed by 2012 and we continue to look for ways to accelerate destruction of that remaining 10%.
Turning to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), we are committed to this convention. We view the forum provided by the BWC meetings as the primary venue for international coordination and discussion of real‑world efforts to counter biological threats. This commitment was reinforced last December when my boss, Under Secretary of State Tauscher, spoke before the annual meeting of state parties to the BWC here in Geneva. She introduced our new national security strategy for countering biological threats, which are aimed at preventing biological weapon proliferation and terrorism, and she emphasised the critical role of the BWC in these efforts. Our strategy for countering biological threats rests upon the main principles of BWC: that the use of biological weapons is ‘repugnant to the conscience of mankind’. Our approach seeks to protect against the misuse of science to develop or use biological agents to cause harm.
The work of the BWC during its inter‑sessional meetings has been valuable. We must use the opportunity presented to us by the forthcoming BWC Review Conference in 2011 to build on these successes through a reinvigorated and comprehensive work programme to promote real action to counter the biological weapons threat. We believe that the future work of BWC should focus on three critical issues. Firstly, we believe we should build global capacity to combat infectious disease regardless of the cause. Although infectious disease is first and foremost a health issue, it can also have security implications, so the ability to respond to outbreaks of disease is fundamental to a preparedness for a deliberate biological attack and may also have deterrent value. The World Health Organisation, headquartered in Geneva, plays and should, of course, continue to play the leading role in this arena, but the BWC can be used to complement and support other international efforts to build international surveillance, reporting and response capabilities, particularly with respect to the 2005 health regulations. We hope that the two recent US‑sponsored conferences into disease surveillance and the international health regulations held in Washington and Geneva will be useful in this context.
Secondly, we need to address the full range of today’s and tomorrow’s biological threats, including bioterrorism. The BWC can play an important role in supporting responsible national and international actions that help address the threat posed by non‑state actors and to mitigate the dual‑use risks of important new developments in science and technology. Inter‑sessional work to date on pathogen security, national implementation measures and scientific professional responsibility has been an important step in this direction, but there is more to be done.
Finally, we need to build confidence in effective treaty implementation and compliance with BWC obligations. This is important to the credibility of the convention and to the accomplishment of its basic objectives. State parties need to grapple with pragmatic solutions to the question of how we promote effective implementation: how we increase confidence in each others’ actions, and how we address concerns when they arise. The question of compliance and how to encourage it, monitor it and respond to non‑compliant behaviour is a key responsibility of the bureau that Assistant Secretary Gottemoeller heads at the State Department, the Bureau of Verification, Compliance and Implementation, which is, by the way, in the final stages of a reorganisation. It will be renamed and expanded; and this was one of the goals of Secretary Clinton and the Obama administration, when they took office, was to rebuild, expand and consolidate the arms control function at the Department of State.
Regrettably, we are faced with compliance concerns. The US together with other state parties wish to identify more effective ways to increase transparency, improve confidence‑building measures and engage in more robust, bilateral compliance discussions. A traditional verification protocol would not have achieved meaningful verification or greater security, and we hope to work with other state parties to improve our compliance toolkit through other means. We want to be forward-looking and build on the success of the past.
In conclusion, I would like to return to the topic of nuclear arms control and comment on the next steps. The New START Treaty represents a transition from the previous treaty regime developed during the Cold War. The Obama administration is committed to the negotiation of deeper nuclear arms reduction in the future. At the signing of the New START Treaty, President Obama noted that it was just one step on a longer journey that would set the stage for further arms reductions. Indeed, the preamble to the treaty states that we see the New START Treaty as providing new impetus to the step‑by‑step process of reducing and limiting nuclear arms with a view to expanding this process in the future to a multilateral approach.
As President Obama confirmed in Prague when he signed the treaty with President Medvedev, ‘The United States will seek to include reductions in US and Russian, non‑strategic and non‑deployed nuclear weapons in future discussions.’ Deep reductions that include non‑deployed and tactical nuclear weapons will introduce new challenges, of course. Maintaining stability and verifiability may also require new approaches and new technologies. This is something we hope to explore with the other nuclear‑weapon states in future.
Mark Fitzpatrick
