One of the stated cornerstones of the Bush administration's approach to arms control and nonproliferation issues has been an increased emphasis on ensuring that other countries comply with their arms control and nonproliferation agreements.
As then-Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton told the UN Conference on Disarmament in 2002, "[I]t is one of our priorities to insist on compliance with international obligations that nations have undertaken, and by focusing on the issue of noncompliance, you can more precisely see just exactly where the problem is."
Yet, since 2005 the administration has failed to publish an annual report required by Congress detailing U.S. assessments of other countries' compliance with arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament agreements.
In addition to detailing noncompliance by other states, the congressionally mandated report also assesses U.S. compliance with its major arms control commitments. Broad in scope, the report covers the primary international disarmament agreements, arms control instruments between the United States and countries of the former Soviet Union, and a number of additional nonproliferation commitments. The administration has only prepared two such reports over the past eight years. The first assessed compliance in 2001 and was issued in June 2003. The second covered the years 2002 and 2003 and was issued in August 2005.
A Department of State official told Arms Control Today Jan. 6 that a report was still being prepared for the missing years.
Primary responsibility for preparing the report rests with the State Department's Bureau of Verification, Compliance, and Implementation (VCI), which was created in 1999 during the department's restructuring. As a presidential report, the report represents the assessments of the entire U.S. government and is therefore subject to an extensive interagency clearance process that includes the National Security Council, the intelligence community, and the Departments of Defense and Energy.
Prior to the bureau's existence, the Verification and Compliance Division of the former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) was responsible for preparing the report and did so regularly. Congress adopted legislation in 1999 to merge the ACDA into the State Department, but, largely at the urging of Senators Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), VCI was established as an independent bureau in order to stress the importance of compliance.
A key factor behind the reporting delays appears to have been a decision by VCI staff to dramatically increase the scope of the report in terms of the subject matter covered and in regard to the information used to inform the judgments in the document.
Assistant Secretary of State for Verification, Compliance, and Implementation Paula DeSutter explained some of these changes in a 2004 interview with Arms Control Today. (See ACT, April 2004.) In particular, she indicated that she began to incorporate intelligence information at a higher level of classification than previously used. DeSutter said that this made the reporting process more rigorous but also more time-consuming, stating, "[W]hat we've lost in timeliness will be made up for in quality."
A former State Department official involved in drafting the 2005 report explained Jan. 11 that including the additional intelligence level was important "because some very important information on certain really big problems was available only at this classification." The official added, however, that including this information "imposed additional delays" as the State Department and intelligence community "spent a lot of time discussing what specifically could and should be said in each of the three levels of classification."
In addition to including higher levels of intelligence information, VCI carried out an even broader overhaul regarding the framework of the report. Rather than only providing updates from a previous year's report, VCI officials sought to provide a comprehensive compliance assessment in each report. The former State Department official said that this decision was made based on the experience some VCI staff had as consumers of the report while working for Congress, stating "In its earlier form, the report was not as useful to the reader as it could have been, because one had to have a collection of them together to understand how new information built upon what came before, and how compliance assessments of particular countries had been developing." The former official noted that, although such information made the report more valuable, it also made the document longer and more difficult to clear.
The report is required by U.S. law, but the reporting delays do not appear to have caused much concern in Congress. A former staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees the State Department reports, told Arms Control Today Jan. 7 that "the department as a whole has a terrible time getting any reports done on deadline, so I don't know if there was any special angst over these reports." The staffer also stated that, "at least early on, it was unclear whether they had the requisite staff resources to produce those reports on a timely basis." DeSutter noted in her 2004 interview that VCI is "a very small bureau" and that "a lot of our attention has been focused on Libya rather than getting the report done."
In December 2003, Libya admitted to pursuing unconventional weapons and declared its intent to dismantle its programs for that purpose. VCI was one of the lead agencies responsible for verifying Libya's disarmament following that announcement.
The reporting delays have apparently become a contentious issue within the administration. A former State Department official said in communication with Arms Control Today that the delay has become politicized, with some segments of the bureaucracy seeking to use the lack of the report "to rein in VCI and reduce both its influence and the role of verification and compliance considerations within the policy process."
Although former U.S. government officials familiar with the reporting process indicated to Arms Control Today in January that disputes over what to include in the report often arose within the State Department itself, they admitted that the intelligence community in particular was resistant to the role of VCI in putting together some of the information in the report. A former National Security Council (NSC) official noted Jan. 12 that the intelligence agencies "did whatever possible to make life difficult for VCI to produce the report." The former official added, "[W]hile I wouldn't take the pen away from VCI, I could certainly see how a greater NSC coordinating role, for example, could help move the process along."