7 February 2008
The Conference on Disarmament (CD)’s rotating President Samir Labidi of Tunisia opened the session and welcomed Thomas D’Agostino, the Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration of the United States, who made a presentation to the plenary. Mr. D’Agostino was accompanied by William Tobey and Dr Christopher Ford. The plenary then broke into an informal session for questions to Mr. D’Agostino and the formal session resumed 40 minutes later, with statements from representatives of Algeria,, Poland ,Malaysia, and Iran.
The PowerPoint presentation delivered by Mr. D’Agostino was an updated version of a similar presentation delivered by Dr. Ford during the 2007 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Preparatory Committee. New information included reports that the US has achieved the stockpile reduction goals set out in the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) five years ahead of schedule, and that on 18 December 2007, President Bush declared an additional 15% planned reduction in the US arsenal. Mr. D’Agostino went on to state that there are “ongoing discussions with Russia on a Post-START arrangement after Treaty expiration in December 2009.” He also noted that there are currently discussions taking place in the US Congress about conducting another nuclear posture review.
In 2004, Andrew Lichterman and Jacqueline Cabasso of Western States Legal Foundation argued in an information bulletin that these types of presentations ask us
only to look at the numbers, and to measure progress mainly by a partial descent from the heights of insanity that the Cold War arsenals represented. They ask us to accept as adequate the “achievements” of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, (SORT), which requires only that the United States and Russia reduce deployed strategic nuclear arsenals to between 1700 and 2200 warheads and bombs by 2012. Thousands more will be kept in various states of storage and readiness. There is no requirement that a single bomb, warhead, or delivery system be destroyed. There are no transparency or verification mechanisms and no milestones for reductions prior to 2012, when the treaty expires. There will also be unspecified numbers of non-strategic nuclear weapons, which are likely to grow more diverse in capabilities and intended missions.
Hans Kristenson of the Federation of American Scientists wrote in Natural Resources Defense Council’s Nuclear Notebook:
As of January 2007, the U.S. stockpile contains nearly 10,000 nuclear warheads. This includes about 5,736 active/operational warheads: 5,236 strategic warheads and 500 nonstrategic warheads. Approximately 4,230 additional warheads are held in the reserve or inactive/responsive stockpiles or awaiting dismantlement.” He estimates that by 2012, “approximately 6,000 warheads [will be left] in the total stockpile, including the maximum of 1,700–2,200 ‘operationally deployed’ strategic warheads specified by SORT.
Regardless of the actual number of US strategically deployed warheads, it is important to remember that, as Dr. John Burroughs noted in his comments during a debate at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Washington, DC on 29 November 2007, “the detonation of just one or a few nuclear bombs ... would be abhorrent.” He went on to quote McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who said, “one hydrogen bomb on one city of one’s own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable.”
Throughout his presentation, Mr. D’Agostino emphasized the dismantlement of the US nuclear arsenal. After the informal session,Algeria’s Ambassador Al Jazaïry said the US efforts “would be more interesting if they met the criteria of irreversibility, transparency, and above all, the criteria of verification decided on through consensus by the states parties to the NPT in 2000.” Mr. D’Agostino noted in his presentation that the US has made outreach and engagement a priority, saying the US has issued fact sheets, given speeches and briefings, and maintained a public booth at the 2005 NPT Review Conference. Unfortunately, fact sheets and information booths are not the same thing as verification—if they were, perhaps the United States would agree that a fissile materials cut-off treaty would be verifiable.
Mr. D’Agostino’s presentation included a slide quoting Ambassador Linton Brooks, Former Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security and Administrator, National Nuclear Security, March 2004:
Over the past decade we have seen very significant reductions in the numbers of U.S. nuclear weapons, reductions in the alert levels of nuclear forces, and the abandonment of U.S. nuclear testing. No new warheads have been deployed and there has been little U.S. nuclear modernization. There is absolutely no evidence that these developments have caused North Korea or Iran to slow down covert programs to acquire capabilities to produce nuclear weapons. On the contrary, those programs have accelerated during this period.
The US administration may see this as an argument that other states will seek to acquire nuclear weapon technology even if the US reduces its stockpile (or if it ever eliminates its stockpile); WILPF takes it to indicate that many members of the international community are not placated by a reduction from an incomprehensible amount of nuclear weapons to an insane amount of nuclear weapons. In addition, it indicates that the US government’s other policies and actions—including its nuclear weapon modernization programs, its continued plutonium “pit” production, its quest for a prompt global strike capability, its development of ballistic missile defense and space weapon technology, and its occupation of Iraq, among others things—have done little to ease the security concerns of the international community.
An important side note, in response to Brook’s inclusion of Iran as a state developing a covert nuclear weapon program: as Michael Spies of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy pointed out in December 2007, “Scant evidence exists in the public domain to back up the administration’s assertion that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.” He argued that Iran’s nuclear-related activities, even those prior to 2003, do not indisputably indicate a “covert military dedicated nuclear weapons program”.
Mr. D’Agostino also mentioned the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), arguing that the RRW “is key to sustaining our security commitment to allies, and is fully consistent with U.S. NPT obligations. Indeed, for the reasons above, RRW can help advance Article VI goals.”
First, a note on RRW itself. As pointed out by Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group on 4 February, the Energy Department’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2009
[c]obbles together some $40 M in funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) and closely allied design and “advanced certification” projects, despite congressional direction to end the RRW project 7 weeks ago. Congress can be faulted for providing vague direction and creating a redundant, if not illogical budget line for FY2008 (“Advanced Certification”), but once again the NNSA has exploited such an opening for its own purposes. NNSA, which administers the nation’s nuclear weapons program, indicated a few weeks ago it would attempt to continue the RRW despite congressional direction, and today the agency has made good on that promise. NNSA is also proceeding with manufacturing capacity for RRW components in other program and construction budget lines.
Second, a note on D’Agostino’s remark. Modernizing nuclear warheads is not consistent with US NPT obligations, nor does it advance Article VI goals. In their 2004 information bulletin, Lichterman and Cabasso said, “There is no way to reconcile this resurgence of nuclear weapons development with disarmament.” They argued, “The approach taken by the United States towards its own disarmament obligations ... expects us to accept the possession and constant modernization of thousands of nuclear weapons for many decades to come as meaningful progress towards disarmament.”
During her statement to the plenary, Malaysia’s Ambassador Hsu King Bee voiced concern over “the development of new, more sophisticated types of nuclear weapons replacing old stockpiles, as well as qualitative improvement on existing nuclear arsenals within the stockpiles of Nuclear Weapon States.” She argued, “such retrogressive movements reinforce the untenable perception that the existence of nuclear weapons is essential for the maintenance of peace and security, and places the NPT regime and indeed the whole of humanity, at risk.”
Algeria’s Ambassador Al Jazaϊry said, the “indefinite extension [of the NPT] does not mean indefinite possession” of nuclear weapons. Yet the US presentation, like the UK presentation on Tuesday, indicates little movement from removing nuclear deterrence from national security strategies. If one state has decided it requires nuclear weapons for its security, what is to stop other states from deciding the same thing?
Mr. D’Agostino argued, “Even as it has been shrinking, the U.S. nuclear arsenal serves NPT objectives, assuring our allies that the U.S. security relationship continues to help ensure their security, thus obviating any need for them to develop nuclear weapons on their own. [emphasis added]”
Michael Spies argues, “To put it another way, under D’Agostino’s Orwellian logic, perpetual US repudiation of its NPT obligation to pursue nuclear disarmament actually is not only justified but necessary for the Treaty regime to survive.”
The main thrust of this statement is that benefit of US nuclear weapons extends only to its friends and allies. For the rest of world that does not benefit from this doctrine of benevolent US nuclear hegemony, Lichterman and Cabasso characterize US non-proliferation policy as increasingly moving “away from a policy emphasizing diplomatic efforts to restrain nuclear weapons proliferation, and towards a counterproliferation policy mainly based on the threat of overwhelming force.”
The contemplation of the use of nuclear weapons not just to counter use of similar weapons, but even to prevent their spread, arguably runs directly counter to the intent of the NPT, which states in its preamble that states should act at all times “in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations,” and that “States must refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.”
Mr. D’Agostino’s presentation covered a number of other points, including reduction of delivery systems, closure of certain segments of the nuclear weapon complex, consolidation of fissile materials, and various non-proliferation initiatives. For the full presentation, seehttp://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/political/cd/papers08/1session/Feb7agostino.pdf.
After the formal plenary resumed, a few delegations took the floor and spoke about matters related to the CD. Algeria’s Ambassador Al Jazaïry said the CD is “paralyzed by attempts to equate consensus with unanimity.” He argued that he has not heard a single delegation categorically reject the L.1 proposal—thus the Conference cannot just leave it aside and go back to square one. He argued it needs to mature so that the programme of work can provide a feeling of security to all states in the spirit of the Decalogue. Poland’s Ambassador Zdzislaw Rapacki likewise said the CD only has one choice: to move forward. He argued, “Time is running out for all of us, not only as diplomats, but also as human beings. None of us has the luxury to waste another coming day.”
The next CD plenary session will be on Tuesday, 12 February at 10am. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will deliver the joint Russian-Chinese draft treaty on the prevention of placement of weapons in outer space.
- Ray Acheson, Reaching Critical Will
- Susi Snyder, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom