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CWC Review Conference Avoids Difficult Issues

The second review conference for the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) only barely avoided failure. The meeting, which took place April 7-18 in The Hague, had to be suspended at midnight of the last day, and diplomats worked until the early morning of April 19 to reach agreement.

Nonetheless, most participants gave a positive assessment of the meeting's outcome. Rogelio Pfirter, director-general of the CWC's implementing body, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), described the final document to Arms Control Today April 22 as "fully satisfactory." A U.S. official interviewed by Arms Control Today April 27 said that Washington assesses the outcome of the review conference as "overall positive" and a "modest success." He said that "based on the language in the final report and the behavior of delegations, there can be no doubt that states-parties remain committed to the treaty."

Several diplomats contacted by Arms Control Today agreed that, given the procedural difficulties, finding consensus on the final document was a success in itself but conceded that agreement was only possible at the price of avoiding contentious issues and copying large sections from the final document of the first CWC review conference in 2003.

Difficult Negotiations

An open-ended working group, chaired by British Ambassador Lyn Parker, had been preparing a draft final document since July 2006. Those consultations had not resolved many of the key issues, a job that was left to the review conference. A senior Indian official told Arms Control Today April 22 that "the problems related to reaching a consensus [at the review conference] were partly due to the postponement of give-and-take on more difficult issues, such as the balance between the obligations on disarmament and nonproliferation, destruction and verification, national implementation and international cooperation, and references to resolutions/activities outside [the] CWC such as [UN Security Council] resolutions [in] the last few days."

The draft text submitted by Parker to the meeting left some key developing countries feeling unhappy and believing that Parker had not adequately taken their views into account. Thus, negotiations were further complicated when the countries of the Nonaligned Movement (NAM), which come mostly from the developing world, introduced their version of the text, which proposed changes to almost all paragraphs contained in Parker's draft.

As it became clear that word-by-word negotiation of the final declaration in the Committee of the Whole, chaired by Algerian Ambassador Benchaâ Dani, would likely not lead to a consensus document by the end of the two-week meeting, a smaller group of about 20 states-parties began on the penultimate day to work out the draft of an agreement. The exclusiveness of this process led to considerable frustration among many of the 114 delegations participating in the meeting, particularly smaller countries that were not part of "the other meeting," as the select group quickly became to be known. Not only were these proceedings closed to outsiders, but the small group also rewrote language that had previously been discussed among all participants. The results of consultations in "the other group" were presented to the plenary meeting at 4 a.m. on Saturday morning, and most delegations only had an hour to work through the 149 paragraphs of the final declaration, which was adopted by 6 a.m Some diplomats contacted by Arms Control Today voiced concern that the resentments caused by the marginalization of several smaller states-parties during this process could negatively affect the future operation of the convention. The U.S. official called it "unfortunate that not more information was provided and not more delegations were involved" in the deliberations, but argued that "inevitably you have to have a group like that in multilateral meetings" to prepare a final outcome.

No Pressure on Destruction

The procedural difficulties encountered were all the more surprising as the review conference, chaired by Ambassador Waleed El Khereiji of Saudi Arabia, had gotten off to a smooth start. The feared confrontation between Iran and the United States did not take place. U.S. Ambassador Eric Javits in his statement to the conference April 7 did not accuse specific countries of violating the CWC, a step that had caused diplomatic ruptures at previous meetings. Iran's opening statement delivered by Ambassador Bozorgmehr Ziaran on April 8 was considered by many participants as less confrontational than past speeches.

To be sure, Tehran and Washington did clash over the likely failure by Russia and the United States to meet a treaty deadline to destroy all of their chemical weapons. The two countries are the largest possessor states and so far have destroyed 27 percent and 54 percent, respectively, of their stockpiles (see table 1). It is unlikely that they will be able to meet the extended treaty deadline of April 29, 2012.

Javits voiced understanding in his April 8 opening statement for "the concerns that have been expressed over the delays in achieving the destruction of existing stockpiles of chemical weapons," but argued that "the commitment of the United States to disarmament is clear, and the resources we have devoted to this complex, difficult task are enormous." Russia took a more assertive stance. Victor Kholstov, head of the Russian delegation, in his opening statement to the conference on April 8 stated that the "Russian Federation is taking all the necessary measures" to allow it to complete chemical weapons stockpile destruction "within the established timelines."

Iran called a possible violation of destruction deadlines "a clear and serious case of noncompliance." Yet, Iran was the only delegation to call into question the determination of possessor states to completely eliminate chemical weapons stockpiles by stating that failure to meet the deadline would "raise the concern that domestic policies have resulted in preferences for retaining certain stockpiles as ‘security reserves.'"

In the end, states-parties reaffirmed the importance of meeting destruction deadlines, noted the progress made by the possessor states, and expressed their "concern that more than 60 percent of stockpiles still remained to be destroyed."

The U.S. official described this compromise found on chemical weapons destruction as "fair and balanced." Pfirter told Arms Control Today that the final document "recognizes that, at some stage hopefully and according to the convention, all stockpiles will be destroyed, certainly the stockpiles of member states that have been declared but also stockpiles of states that are still not members of the convention," hinting at the possibility that some states that might join in the future might have to declare possessing such weapons.

The Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Israel, and Myanmar have signed but not yet ratified the CWC. Angola, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, North Korea, Somalia, and Syria have not signed the convention.

Pfirter and several delegations had suggested holding a special meeting of states-parties closer to 2012 to discuss the potential failure to meet destruction deadlines. Some participants in private conversations dismissed the lack of such a specific recommendation in the final document as irrelevant. Likewise, the U.S. official argued that the absence of an agreement in the final document "will have relatively little impact" because a decision on convening a special meeting of states-parties "will depend on assessment of states-parties in 2010 or 2011." Others believe that it might now be more difficult to convene such a meeting ahead of the third review conference, scheduled for 2013.

Nonproliferation or Disarmament?

Agreement at the review conference was complicated by a fundamental debate about the relationship between treaty obligations related to the destruction of existing stockpiles and those tied to the task of preventing the production of new chemical weapons.

This debate took place primarily between developing countries, which emphasized the role of the CWC as a disarmament treaty, and industrialized countries, which tend to highlight the nonproliferation aspects of the convention.

José A. Díaz Duque, Cuban deputy minister in the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment who spoke for NAM and China, in his opening statement on April 8 emphasized "that with the amount of [chemical weapons] that is still to be destroyed, verification of destruction of the remaining chemical weapons stockpiles shall remain one of the major tasks of the Technical Secretariat."

Conspicuously, the NAM draft of the final declaration as well as a NAM working paper introduced during the first week of the meeting did not mention the term "nonproliferation." NAM diplomats denied that this was intended to signal a shift in interpretation of the convention. The Indian official explained that giving disarmament a priority until destruction is completed "does not mean that nonproliferation is less important. All the important pillars of the convention have to be upheld."

Western states, by contrast, emphasized nonproliferation and argued that the convention's industry verification system needs to be updated. "Today's risks and challenges are not necessarily the same as those that existed when the convention's negotiations were concluded in September 1992," said Anita Pipan, a senior official in the Slovenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs April 7 on behalf of the 27 European Union (EU) member states.

The United States, like many other Western states, argued particularly that the monitoring of "other chemical production facilities" (OCPFs) needed to be altered "both by increasing the percentage of facilities that are inspected annually and by improving identification of the specific facilities that should be inspected," as Javits stated.

The CWC verification system is based on three schedules, or lists of toxic chemicals and their precursors that have been developed and manufactured in the past for military purposes. The OCPFs fall outside those schedules and are inspected on a random basis. About 10 to 15 percent of these facilities are perceived as especially susceptible to manufacturing chemical weapons because they apply flexible production technologies that could be easily converted for the production of chemical weapons agents. (See ACT, January/February 2007.)

By contrast, developing countries were concerned that industrialized countries want to reallocate inspections toward facilities in their countries. The NAM statement therefore demanded that the OPCW's verification regime must "correspond to the hierarchy of risks inherent to the respective category of chemicals. Any shift in the distribution of inspections which is contrary to this hierarchy would signal a departure from the fundamental principles of the verification regime based on the convention."

There is a continuing shift in the global distribution of chemical production facilities from the traditional producers in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries to developing countries, particularly in Asia. New producers are often relying on modern plants such as the OCPFs, which so far have received only 11 percent of OPCW inspections because nonproliferation monitoring is concentrated on those plants that use or produce chemicals listed in three schedules contained in the CWC.

Schedule 1 consists of chemical warfare agents and precursors that have no significant commercial applications, although they may be synthesized in small quantities for scientific research, pharmaceutical development, or chemical defense. Schedule 2 lists toxic chemicals and precursors that have commercial applications in small quantities. Schedule 3 contains toxic chemicals and precursors that have commercial applications in large quantities. The primary focus of routine inspections of the chemical industry under the CWC is on declared production facilities that manufacture the dual-use chemicals listed on Schedules 2 or 3.

The debate on the relative importance of nonproliferation also is part of an emerging discussion over OPCW spending. To date, the OPCW has spent 85 percent of all verification resources on monitoring the destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles. As destruction nears completion, the question will be whether those resources should be redirected toward verifying that chemical weapons are not produced at industrial facilities; funding other efforts, such as technical assistance; or scaled down altogether.

The Indian official argued that "technical cooperation on peaceful uses will become even more important as we approach 2012, and it is an important incentive for nonparties to join the convention."

By contrast, the EU argued "that the Second Review Conference should provide strategic guidance for addressing the current and future challenges to the Convention, bearing in mind that, following the completion of the destruction of all chemical weapons, the OPCW needs to be well prepared to focus on the next phase of the implementation of the convention, in particular its nonproliferation role."

The review conference did not provide that kind of guidance and specifically did not agree on any new mechanism for the allocation of verification resources. Instead, it charged the OPCW's Technical Secretariat with evaluating the effect of revisions to the site selection methodology that have already been implemented and to continue working on the problem.

The Indian official claimed this as a victory for the NAM countries. "The CWC verification regime is based on a hierarchy of risks. This has been upheld by the review conference even though the Technical Secretariat and the states-parties would keep this under review," he told Arms Control Today. But in private conversations, Western diplomats also expressed satisfaction with the result, pointing out that the final document does not preclude an adjustment of verification mechanisms and does not contain the "hierarchy of risks" wording championed by NAM countries. The U.S. official conceded, however, that Washington was "a little disappointed" by the lack of guidance provided by the meeting on how to improve monitoring of the OCPFs.

Pfirter is also satisfied with the outcome of discussions. He referred to the fact that the final document explicitly mentions nonproliferation and pointed out that it "quite clearly gives a mandate to keep on considering this issue, which is what I was trying to promote."

The Hidden Debate About Incapacitants

The review conference failed to agree on specific language on how the convention should treat the development of new types of incapacitating chemical agents. The convention allows the use of toxic chemicals for "law enforcement, including domestic riot control purposes." Yet, several delegations, including the 27 EU member states, Switzerland, and Pakistan in their opening statements, called for a debate on which types of incapacitating agents are prohibited and on the circumstances when the use of such agents might be legal.

A Swiss working paper, introduced by Bern to "launch a discussion of the ambiguities of the Chemical Weapons Convention regarding riot control agents, and the lack of provisions pertaining to incapacitating agents," was an important point of reference. Switzerland proposed that the review conference adopt "a mandate for a discussion of inter alia an agreed definition of incapacitating agents, the status of incapacitating agents under the Convention, and possible transparency measures for incapacitating agents."

Iran in its statement had deplored "the recent use" of nonlethal agents as a method of warfare. Such use of riot control agents is prohibited by the convention. Asked about what specific case Iran was referring to, the Iranian diplomat contacted by Arms Control Today refused to elaborate but remarked pointedly, "If people were discussing this statement against the background of the U.S. attacks on Fallujah, our statement has fulfilled its purpose."

In 2004 and 2005, the United States was accused of violating the CWC by using white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon, in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, such as in the city of Fallujah. The United States has admitted to having used phosphorous shells but maintains that they were used legally and only fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters. The U.S. official rejected the connection between riot control agents and the incidents at Fallujah. "I don't understand it," he told Arms Control Today.

Several diplomatic sources told Arms Control Today that the draft final document contained a reference to incapacitants but that Iran objected to this language at the last minute. The Iranian diplomat explained the rationale behind the Iranian veto in the following way: "Iran was in favor of having a strong statement on the problem of incapacitants and riot control agents. We wanted a clear reference to incapacitating agents and not simply to ‘new developments in the field of toxic chemicals,' as had been proposed by Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We objected to that proposed language because it was too weak from our perspective and because the subject of the new proposal was different from what we expected." The diplomat said Iran was concerned that the proposed language could be read to curtail the right of peaceful uses of chemicals, granted under Article VI of the CWC. "The thrust of our idea was focusing on the incapacitating agents that fall under the purview of the definition of chemical weapons, not Article VI," he explained.

Other diplomats contacted by Arms Control Today regretted that the language had been deleted, arguing that even weak language may have provided a hook for future debates on the issues and pointing to the fact that the United States was apparently ready to support such language even though it had previously objected to any reference about concerns about incapacitants. The U.S. official also rejected the Iranian reasoning. "It doesn't make an awful lot of sense to me," he said and remarked that "there were a number of occasions when Iran was objecting to language that otherwise was not objected to by other delegations."

A different Western source told Arms Control Today April 28 that it was difficult to understand Iranian logic. "In objecting to the text that was available, they threw the baby out with the bath water," the source said. "Of course the language could have been stronger as several delegations would have preferred, but that simply was not going to happen given U.S. and French positions."

The U.S. official said that Washington was "concerned about the confusion between riot control agents and incapacitants," arguing that the use of riot control agents is not categorically prohibited under the treaty. "From our position, incapacitants are covered by the general purpose criterion," he said, referring to the fact that the treaty includes language making clear that the basic prohibitions of the CWC apply to all toxic chemicals and precursors that are acquired or used for hostile purposes, not only those listed in the three schedules. "We have no programs to develop incapacitants and got rid of our stockpiles," the official explained.

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Threat Reduction Programs Meet Benchmarks

Daniel Arnaudo

U.S. threat reduction programs in Russia registered three significant successes in April. First, the Department of Defense announced April 9 that its Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program had helped Russia completely dismantle and destroy its stockpile of SS-24 ICBMs. Later the same month, the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that the U.S.-Russian Material Consolidation and Conversion (MCC) program had downblended 10 metric tons of Russian highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium in its nine years of existence. Finally, with U.S. funding and support from the NNSA, Russia completed the shutdown of a reactor that produces weapons-grade plutonium in Seversk.

In an April 9 press release, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) announced the elimination of the last SS-24. "This is another important milestone in our 16 year effort to secure and dismantle the weapons of mass destruction of the former Soviet Union. The SS-24 ICBMs posed a serious threat to the United States with its 10 independently targeted warheads and ability to be moved throughout the country by train," said Lugar. After the Cold War ended, Lugar helped create the CTR program with then-Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) in the early 1990s by co-sponsoring legislation that allowed for cooperation between the United States and Russia on a range of nonproliferation work.

SS-24s could be deployed in silos or on railcars, making them mobile and difficult to target. Fifty-six SS-24s were eliminated in all, 42 of which were specially designed to be mounted on railcars.

The work was done as part of the Pentagon‘s Strategic Offensive Arms Elimination program, which was allocated $91 million for fiscal year 2008 and was set up to dismantle Russian ICBMs and their related infrastructure. The SS-24 destruction brings Russia closer to the limit set by the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), under which Russia and the United States agreed to cut the number of their deployed strategic warheads to 2,200 by the end of 2012.

According to Lugar's press release, the reductions were made in accordance with the guidelines set by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and reaffirmed by SORT in 2002. The program will continue to dismantle truck-mounted SS-25s as part of the same treaty commitments.

Addressing another aspect of threat reduction, on April 24 the NNSA pointed to its MCC program that is operating at three facilities in Russia and has successfully converted enough material for 400 weapons into low-enriched uranium for power production purposes.

The NNSA also announced April 21 that a plutonium reactor at Seversk had been completely shut down. It is the first of three Russian reactors that can produce weapons-grade plutonium to be deactivated under the program for the elimination of weapons-grade plutonium. Two reactors are in Seversk, and another is in Zheleznogorsk. Because the reactors also produce power for their respective cities, the NNSA is working with Russian contractors to simultaneously build one coal-fired power plant in Zheleznogorsk and refurbish another in Seversk to replace the energy the reactors generate. (See ACT, March 2008)

The reactors were originally supposed to have been deactivated eight years ago under a agreement between then-U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin in 1994, but construction difficulties, cost overruns, and disagreements about how to replace the electric power they provided extended the project for many years.

In December 2002, the project was transferred from the Defense Department to the Energy Department, which then concluded the present accord with Russia in March 2003. Its timetable called for the reactors at Seversk to be shut down by the end of 2008, and the NNSA press release added that it expects to shut down the second reactor there in June. The Energy Department's fiscal year 2009 budget request earlier this year noted that the second reactor at Zheleznogorsk is scheduled to be deactivated by the end of 2010.

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Russia Unflinching on CFE Treaty Suspension

Wade Boese

Russia is denying foreign arms inspections as part of its decision last year to stop abiding by a treaty limiting conventional weapons in Europe. Claiming the current situation "cannot last indefinitely," the United States and its NATO allies are seeking to induce Russia to reverse its suspension with a proposal to resolve long-standing disputes related to the treaty.

Accusing Western countries of acting in bad faith under the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, Moscow Dec. 12 announced that it would freeze implementation of the pact. (See ACT, January/February 2008 .) The treaty, which limits the tanks, armored combat vehicles, heavy artillery, attack helicopters, and combat aircraft that its 30 states-parties may station between the Atlantic Ocean and the Ural Mountains, has no suspension provision.

Russia contends that because the treaty has a withdrawal option, a state-party may take actions short of that step. NATO members disagree, and there is some discussion, particularly within the U.S. government, on whether to declare Russia in noncompliance.

Meanwhile, some NATO members recently have "tested" the Russian suspension by requesting treaty inspections in Russia. Moscow has refused all of them, according to officials of NATO governments who spoke in April with Arms Control Today. One official noted that no other states, including close Russian ally Belarus, have followed the Kremlin's lead.

NATO warned in a March 28 statement that Moscow's suspension "risks eroding the integrity of the CFE regime." Still, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the secretary-general of the 26-member alliance, said April 4 that he is "not in [a] panic." He indicated his attitude would remain calm as long as both NATO and Russia continue to support a revised version of the CFE Treaty, which was negotiated in 1999 but has yet to enter into force.

The Adapted CFE Treaty sets national weapons limits for each country instead of imposing equal bloc limits on NATO and the defunct Warsaw Pact like the original treaty. Although outdated, the Cold War-era agreement remains in force until all of its states-parties ratify the newer instrument. Only Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia have completed that action, while Ukraine has finished all the necessary steps except depositing its instrument of ratification.

Russia is upset that the 22 NATO members bound by the 1990 agreement have not moved to ratify the 1999 version. NATO had maintained that Russia must first fulfill commitments to withdraw its military forces from the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova. Russia made those political commitments at the Istanbul summit at which the Adapted CFE Treaty was concluded and signed. (See ACT, November 1999 .)

Russia adamantly refutes the linkage. After an April 4 NATO-Russia Council meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin argued "there is no legal link" between the Adapted CFE Treaty and the so-called Istanbul withdrawal commitments. He described the "crisis surrounding the CFE Treaty" as one of the "serious obstacles" to better NATO-Russian relations.

The alliance has offered Russia a "parallel actions package" to end the stalemate. The proposal calls on NATO countries to begin their national ratification processes, some of which could take several months or longer, while Russia resumes its military withdrawals from Georgia and Moldova. Once Russia completes its withdrawals or reaches some other settlement acceptable to Georgia and Moldova, all NATO members would strive to complete ratification of the Adapted CFE Treaty.

After the accord takes effect, NATO pledges it will seek to address other long-standing Russian concerns. For instance, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovenia-the four current NATO members not bound by the original CFE Treaty-have indicated they will join the adapted agreement and take on arms limits. The older accord does not have an accession option.

NATO members also vowed in the March 28 statement to consider future changes to their weapons ceilings "where possible." Russia complains that NATO's collective arms holdings are growing as the alliance expands. Since the original treaty's negotiation, NATO has added 10 members and recently offered membership to Albania and Croatia, committed to add Macedonia, and announced the intention to invite Georgia and Ukraine.

NATO further indicated that it would hear out Russian arguments on the "flank zone" limits, which restrict the amount of weapons Russia can deploy in its northern region near Norway and the Caucasus region in the south. Russia wants those limits abolished but supports keeping the zone limits on other states, such as Norway, Turkey, and Georgia. NATO, which has previously agreed to relax Russia's flank zone limits, opposes Moscow's current demands.

Progress on the NATO plan is complicated by the fact that the remaining Russian forces in Georgia and Moldova are in separatist regions. Russia argues that its troops, approximately 200 in Georgia and 1,200 in Moldova, are needed to help prevent renewed conflict. NATO maintains that foreign forces must have the consent of the government where they are located, which is not the case in Georgia and Moldova.

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NATO Summit Results Fall Short of Bush Goals

Wade Boese

President George W. Bush's top goals heading into his final NATO summit included winning support for U.S. policies to deploy strategic anti-missile systems in Europe and extend NATO membership to former Soviet allies and republics. The administration claimed success afterward even though the alliance agreed to less than Bush sought.

A priority for the Bush administration since early last year has been getting backing for its initiative to base 10 long-range ballistic missile interceptors in Poland and a missile-tracking radar in the Czech Republic to counter what Washington says is a growing Iranian missile threat. On April 3, the administration took one step toward its goal by concluding negotiations with the Czech Republic to host the radar. In a joint statement, the two governments said the agreement would be signed "in the near future." The agreement would then need to be approved by the Czech parliament, and U.S. lawmakers would need to fund the project for the radar to be built. U.S. negotiations with Poland remain unfinished. (See ACT, April 2008 .)

The administration's anti-missile project also got a boost at the April 2-4 NATO summit in Bucharest. In a final summit declaration, the leaders of NATO's 26 members stated they "recognise the substantial contribution" that the current U.S. proposal could make in protecting against long-range missiles. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates April 4 called the statement "significant," and many media stories blared that NATO supported missile defenses.

Certainly, the fact that European countries subscribed to a positive statement about the U.S. project was a boon for the Bush administration. Some NATO countries, such as France and Norway, have voiced various reservations with missile defenses. Moreover, Russia has been extremely hostile to the U.S. deployment proposal, and there is strong domestic opposition in the two countries where the systems are to be based.

Still, some officials of NATO governments told Arms Control Today in April interviews that the statement was not quite the victory that was portrayed. The Bush administration reportedly sought stronger language, such as "welcomes" or "supports," but settled for "recognise."

In addition, the officials noted that the alliance did not commit itself to developing any missile defenses. Instead, NATO agreed to "develop options" for systems to protect areas, particularly southern Europe, outside the notional coverage of the proposed U.S. system. Those options, NATO stated, would be reviewed in 2009, but the alliance did not say a decision to pursue any option would be made.

NATO is currently developing the Active Layered Theatre Ballistic Missile Defence (ALTBMD), which is a command and control system intended to allow NATO members in an emergency to link up their separate sensors and missile interceptors against short- to intermediate-range missiles. Currently, nine NATO countries have or are developing various systems that could be linked by the ALTBMD system, which is supposed to be made initially operational in 2010.

Apart from the ALTBMD system, NATO has not been eager to work on missile defenses. In 2006, NATO leaders decided against initiating work on defenses to protect alliance members' territories and population centers against the full range of missile threats despite a 10,000-page study that found such defenses feasible. Some NATO members have expressed concerns about the effectiveness of such systems, their cost, and their potential for damaging relations with Russia.

In the Bucharest declaration, NATO members indicated they wanted to avoid a rupture with Russia over the U.S. missile defense project. The alliance stated it was "committed to maximum transparency and reciprocal confidence building measures to allay any concerns." It further encouraged Russia to respond positively to a package of recent U.S. proposals to ease Russia's worries that it is the true target of the initiative. Still, Gates noted April 1, "the Russians are probably...never going to like missile defense."

Similarly, Russia has consistently and vehemently protested NATO's drive to add new members. That effort was contentious even among NATO members at the Bucharest summit. The United States pushed for inviting Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia to join the alliance and offering Membership Action Plans to Georgia and Ukraine. Those plans pave the way for a country to be formally asked to become a member. Greece, however, objected to extending membership to Macedonia because it claims that country's name reflects territorial ambitions for a Greek province of the same name. Furthermore, many countries, led by Germany, opposed giving Georgia and Ukraine membership plans in order to avoid antagonizing Russia.

In the end, the alliance compromised. It officially invited Albania and Croatia to become members, declared Macedonia would be invited to join as soon as it resolved the name dispute with Greece, and agreed that some day Georgia and Ukraine "will become members." The alliance said a decision to extend membership plans to the two former Soviet republics could be made as early as this December. Russian President Vladimir Putin reacted to the news April 4 by warning that Russia would view "the appearance of a powerful military bloc on our borders...as a direct threat to the security of our country."

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Bush, Putin Leave Arms Disputes Unsettled

Wade Boese

Meeting for their final time as presidents, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin extolled their efforts to move the United States and Russia beyond their Cold War confrontation. Yet, the two leaders left unresolved arms disputes rooted in that competition that have been a constant source of friction for their two administrations.

Organized on short notice, the summit took place April 5-6 in Sochi, Russia, on Putin's initiative. He had called for the meeting following a March meeting in Moscow of the two countries' top defense and foreign policy officials. (See ACT, April 2008 .) Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, announced the trip March 26 and said its purpose was to "consolidate areas where we're cooperating together, maybe resolve some outstanding issues such as missile defense, and provide a platform for the relationship of the two countries going forward."

Agreements on the contentious issues of missile defenses, nuclear weapons, and conventional arms deployments in Europe, however, eluded the two presidents. Putin told reporters after the meeting that the "strategic framework" document the two leaders approved "does not provide any breakthrough solutions on a number of issues." In particular, he noted, "one of the most difficult issues was, and remains, the issue of missile defense in Europe."

Russia has blasted Bush administration plans to station 10 long-range ballistic missile interceptors in Poland and an advanced radar in the Czech Republic. Fearing that its nuclear forces are the true target, Moscow has dismissed U.S. assurances that the systems are to offset growing Iranian missile capabilities and warned that the proposed systems would be targeted by the Russian military. In Sochi, Putin reiterated that "our fundamental attitude to the American plans [has] not changed."

Still, Putin sounded a positive note about recent Bush administration proposals intended to ease Russian concerns about the anti-missile plan. He described the U.S. ideas as sincere and himself as having "certain cautious optimism," but he also trotted out the standard caveat that "the devil is in the details."

The specific U.S. proposals are secret, but their general nature is known. Among other measures, the United States has pledged to limit the systems it deploys to Europe and not activate them unless Iran demonstrates the capability to send a missile deep into Europe or against the United States. There also have been discussions of enabling Russia to keep tabs on the systems through sensors and Russian personnel at the U.S. deployment sites.

The latter proposal is an example of details potentially bedeviling a deal. Putin expressed interest in having Russian personnel at the proposed sites on a "permanent basis." But the Czech and Polish governments have indicated such an arrangement would be intolerable to the former Soviet satellites. The United States, meanwhile, has reportedly suggested that the Russian personnel could be liaison officers at the Russian embassies in the two countries and given access to the sites. How much access would be provided and under what conditions is unclear.

Bush and his advisers portrayed the meeting as a triumph on the missile defense issue, pointing to Russia's agreement to include a statement in the strategic framework document that if the U.S. proposals were "agreed and implemented," they would be "important and useful in assuaging Russian concerns." Bush described the outcome as a "significant breakthrough."

Pressed by reporters aboard the president's plane during the return trip to the United States, Hadley acknowledged that many details still must be worked out to soothe Russian concerns. He conceded, "[T]here's huge ifs here." Russian government experts have reportedly prepared dozens of questions for the Bush administration about its proposals.

In the strategic framework document, Bush and Putin also endorsed exploring a broader anti-missile architecture that would involve Europe, Russia, and the United States as "equal partners." Putin, who said that effort should be given priority over other anti-missile projects, stressed that "equal democratic access to managing the system" would be essential.

How that would be made to work and how seriously both governments intend to pursue that option is uncertain. Proposals for Moscow and Washington to work together on missile defenses have been floated intermittently over the past decades but have yielded few results. The two countries, however, are planning to conduct a "high-level dialogue" to assess ballistic and cruise missile threats that fall below the long-range threshold and "inventory options for dealing with them."

The strategic framework also reiterates the two governments' standard pledge to enact nuclear weapons reductions "to the lowest possible level consistent with our national security requirements and alliance commitments." Yet, the two presidents failed to agree on a way ahead. Putin observed that "we do have certain differences still in our basic approaches."

Russia wants a new treaty that limits both strategic warheads and delivery vehicles, while the Bush administration prefers an agreement focused on codifying some verification measures to last beyond the scheduled 2009 expiration of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which has an extensive verification regime. Moscow also favors a future treaty that would rely on the START warhead accounting rules rather than the method introduced by the Bush administration in the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, which limits "operationally deployed strategic" warheads. Washington and Moscow have not reached a common understanding on what warheads are counted under that phrase.

Putin further noted that Russia and the United States remain at odds over the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, which Russia suspended implementation of last December. Putin, however, expressed some satisfaction that the United States was "listening" to Russian concerns and trying to respond to them with a package of proposals.

The presidents did not fulfill some expectations that they might finally sign an agreement for nuclear trade and cooperation between their countries that was first initialed in June 2007. Instead, the strategic framework vaguely states the two sides will sign the agreement in the "near future."

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LOOKING BACK: The 1998 Indian and Pakistani Nuclear Tests

Michael Krepon

Ten years ago, the governments of India and Pakistan tested nuclear devices, prompting a global uproar, a united front by the five permanent members (P-5) of the UN Security Council, and stiff sanctions directed at New Delhi and Islamabad. Although the timing of the tests came as a surprise to the U.S. intelligence community, New Delhi had foreshadowed its decision to test two years earlier by withdrawing from the negotiating endgame for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a goal that was ardently championed from 1954 onward by Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, and his successors.

New Delhi's stated reason for its reversal was the failure by states possessing nuclear weapons to accept a time-bound framework for nuclear disarmament along with the CTBT. New Delhi also took issue with a complex entry-into-force (EIF) provision that would make the treaty contingent on India's deposit of its instrument of ratification, along with no less than 43 other states that then possessed nuclear power or research reactors.[1] This provision, which was widely perceived at home as an affront to India's strategic autonomy, bore the fingerprints of China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, which wished to prolong taking the treaty's bitter medicine as long as possible by forcing others to take it as well.

The real reasons behind the Indian government's sudden reversal on the CTBT were not the EIF clause, despite its aggravating features, nor the absence of a time-bound framework for nuclear disarmament, an agenda item that was not part of the negotiations. What truly rankled New Delhi was that the walls of the global nonproliferation system appeared to be closing in from all sides. The nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) had been indefinitely extended in 1995, with the promise of a CTBT to follow-a promise that the P-5 could condition but from which they could not back away. India's nuclear enclave believed that negotiations on a treaty ending the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons would be next in line. Global export controls also seemed to be closing in on India's nuclear options, while the screw-tighteners seemed to put blinders on when China helped Pakistan.

No nuclear agreement has more onerous EIF provisions than the CTBT, which attests to the reluctance of the P-5 to accept what President Bill Clinton called "the longest-sought, hardest-fought prize in arms control history." By comparison, the Chemical Weapons Convention required the deposit of 65 instruments of ratification, and the NPT simply required the deposit of instruments of ratification by the United Kingdom, United States, and USSR, along with 40 other countries. Securing comparable EIF procedures for the CTBT and avoiding the treaty's extended limbo would have required Clinton's strenuous, early, and sustained efforts. Instead, Clinton put off consideration of EIF provisions until the very end of negotiations, when he succeeded in convincing British Prime Minister John Major to be more flexible. Then, instead of making other phone calls, Clinton quickly threw in the towel.[2] The hour was late, and the time had come, in the view of the president and his advisers, to orchestrate a treaty signing ceremony at the United Nations.

The P-5 signed the CTBT on September 24, 1996, thereby incurring the obligation under international law not to undercut the treaty's objectives and purposes pending its entry into force or until renunciation of their treaty commitments. Two of the five, China and the United States, have yet to deposit their instruments of ratification. The Senate refused to consent to ratification in 1999-a sad tale recounted below-and China's legislature continues to consider this matter at a snail-like pace.

Even if Washington and Beijing were to join the 144 other capitals that have ratified the CTBT, other prominent holdouts may not follow suit. Despite the international community's best efforts, India and Pakistan refused to sign the treaty after testing nuclear devices. This reluctance either reflects lingering domestic constraints against doing so, the intention to test again after a suitable interval, or both. Other holdouts, which include Egypt, Iran, and Israel, as well as North Korea, which broke a global moratorium on nuclear testing that had lasted for eight and a half years after the Indian and Pakistani tests, may be expected to seek inducements and conditions that the EIF procedures invite. Rarely in the history of nuclear negotiations has a provision ostensibly designed to rope in stragglers given them so much bargaining leverage or mischief-making potential.

The CTBT and the Indian and Pakistani Tests

Many Indian supporters of the CTBT argued that it would help reduce the shadow cast by nuclear weapons over international politics, thereby advancing India's long-standing goal of nuclear abolition. This and other arguments fell on deaf ears. India's test of a nuclear device in 1974 was more of a physics experiment than a workable bomb design, and India's nuclear enclave was chafing at the bit. If ever there was a juncture to break free of New Delhi's decades-long ambivalence regarding nuclear weapons, it was, paradoxically, at a time of progress to prevent proliferation and to end nuclear testing permanently. The timing of India's decision to test depended on the election of a coalition government led by a party with enough nerve to break out of this box. That government took office in March 1998, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) two most senior politicians, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani. When India finally decided to test, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Pakistan would follow suit.

Predictably, instead of tying New Delhi's hands, the EIF clause became a source of indignation across the domestic political spectrum, a powerful consensus-builder to reject any constraints on India's nuclear options sought by outside powers. As anticipated, the Pakistani government welcomed the disapprobation placed on India for withdrawing support for the CTBT and waited in the shadows for New Delhi's eventual decision to accept even more heat by testing nuclear devices. When New Delhi obliged on May 11 and 13, no inducements or penalties the United States and other capitals could identify were powerful enough to prevent Pakistan from following suit. Just to make sure that Pakistan would reject U.S. offers and to prevent India from being singled out for international pressure, Advani issued a thinly veiled public threat to the effect that now that New Delhi possessed the bomb, its neighbor should watch its step in Kashmir.[3] Pakistan tested its nuclear devices on May 28. The exact number of tests conducted on the subcontinent in May 1998 remains in doubt because several devices were tested simultaneously and because Pakistan may have inflated its number of tests for political reasons.

After the Tests

Immediately after New Delhi inaugurated this round of testing, the Clinton administration made an intense effort to threaten international isolation unless the governments of India and Pakistan signed the CTBT and took other steps to reduce nuclear dangers. The point man for the Clinton administration was Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. His opposite number was Jaswant Singh, a confidant of Vajpayee who was later appointed external affairs minister in December 1998. Talbott quickly came to the conclusion that little would result from his dialogue with Pakistan unless he could first gain traction in India.

Drawing from a P-5 joint communiqué issued in June 1998, Talbott and his negotiating team initially laid down five conditions for India and Pakistan to meet in order to be freed of sanctions and to break their diplomatic isolation. The topmost condition was signing the CTBT. Next was cooperation in negotiating a permanent ban on the production of fissile material and, pending this negotiation, a freeze on further production of bomb-making material. Third, the United States wanted both countries to accept a "strategic restraint regime" that would limit ballistic missile inventories to versions that had already been tested. Other parts of the strategic restraint regime included pledges by India and Pakistan not to deploy missiles close to each other's borders and also not to maintain warheads atop missiles or stored nearby. Fourth, the United States demanded that both countries adopt "world class" export controls. The fifth condition called on India and Pakistan to "resume dialogue to address the root causes of tension between them, including Kashmir."[4]

Beijing's imprint on the P-5's conditions was difficult to miss, as the proposed strategic restraint regime and a fissile material cutoff treaty (FMCT) would not just curtail New Delhi's options against Pakistan, but would also significantly constrain India from countering China's strategic modernization programs. The reference to Kashmir as the "root cause of tensions" on the subcontinent, without mentioning Pakistan's support for crossings of the Kashmir divide by Islamic extremists to initiate acts of violence, was akin to waving a red flag in front of a very disgruntled Brahma bull. Nonetheless, India swallowed its resentments over the P-5's agenda. New Delhi's top priority after May 1998 was to chip away at its diplomatic isolation, and the best interlocutor to accomplish this objective was the United States.

The talks began in June 1998. Singh asserts in his memoirs that, at the outset, he told Talbott, "I was not there to negotiate, either to give or to ask for anything. I was really there much more to engage in a dialogue.... [W]e could endeavor to harmonize our views so that the first requirement-a restoration of confidence-is achieved, even if only in part."[5] This was a deft gambit, one that Talbott could hardly refuse. U.S.-Indian bilateral relations were in desperate need of repair, and the upside potential of a serious dialogue could yield important dividends downstream. Neither could Talbott wave away the Clinton administration's stipulations for concrete measures to reduce nuclear dangers, specially the need for India to sign the CTBT.

The extended dialogue between Talbott and Singh might be likened to the diplomatic equivalent of a handicap match in professional wrestling, with the world's sole superpower shouldering the handicap. The most crucial factor in the Talbott-Singh strategic dialogue was the passage of time because the Clinton administration had less than three years to accomplish any of its objectives. As Talbott wrote, "India's strategy was to play for the day when the United States would get over its huffing and puffing, and with a sign of exhaustion or a shrug of resignation, accept a nuclear-armed India as a fully responsible and fully entitled member of the international community."[6] For a nation such as India, which waited 24 years between tests of nuclear devices, three years was not a very long time to outwait Washington.

The primary reason why New Delhi backed away from previous internal deliberations to test was the threat of economic sanctions imposed by foreign governments on an overly centralized, underperforming national economy. According to a well-sourced Indian account, an internal assessment done prior to the 1998 tests estimated that if sanctions lasted more than six months, the Indian economy could be seriously stressed.[7] Members of the U.S. Congress from farming states began chipping away at the sanctions well before then, in search of export earnings. Commercial interests in Paris and Moscow also began to erode the P-5's united front, as might be expected. One by one, the concrete measures demanded of India by the Clinton administration slipped off the negotiating table.

What remained was the CTBT. Vajpayee announced a moratorium on testing in May 1998, even before Talbott and Singh met, but this was hardly the legal or political equivalent of signing the CTBT. The U.S. negotiating team repeatedly asked a simple question: If New Delhi had no plans or intentions to test again, why not sign the CTBT? Talbott, a meticulous chronicler of nuclear negotiations, never got a straightforward answer. He recalls Singh stating in June 1998 that, "in exchange for the lifting of American sanctions, India might take the next step, ‘de jure formalization of our position and acceptance of the letter of the treaty.'"[8] In August 1998, Singh showed Talbott a letter from Vajpayee to Clinton promising "to engage constructively with a view to arriving at a decision regarding adherence to the CTBT by the month of September 1999."[9] During this visit to Washington, Talbott reports that, in his presence, Singh told national security adviser Sandy Berger that "Vajpayee had made an ‘irreversible' decision to sign the CTBT-it was just a question of how and when to make that decision public."[10] In January 1999, Talbott reports that Singh told him that "India would sign the CTBT by the end of May."[11] None of these statements were vocalized publicly by Indian officials.

Singh's memoir offers no promises in this regard. He writes, "India had a certain position on the CTBT, and we were going to move purposefully in that direction-but at our own pace. The Prime Minister had already stated that we were not going to conduct more tests. This was a self-imposed restraint amounting to a moratorium." Singh stresses in his account and in his meetings with U.S. officials that the CTBT had been "demonized" in India and that it was widely viewed as "an unequal, dangerous, and coercive treaty."[12] In perhaps the most revealing passage about his interactions with Talbott, Singh notes in characteristically stilted fashion that "[i]f, occasionally during the dialogue and in discussing the issue of adhering to the CTBT, recourse was taken to deflective ambiguity, that can hardly be characterized as adherence."[13]

The longer the U.S.-Indian strategic dialogue proceeded, the less Singh needed to resort to deflective ambiguity. The Clinton administration necessarily needed to turn its attention elsewhere, especially to al Qaeda, which had begun to carry out long-distance acts of violence from its base in Afghanistan. The flurry of nuclear tests also set in motion dangerous friction between India and Pakistan that raised nuclear dangers and the risk of uncontrolled escalation. Within eight months after testing nuclear devices, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's chief of army staff, in effect called Advani's bluff over Kashmir by beginning to infiltrate military units across the Kashmir divide in mountainous terrain overlooking the town of Kargil. Infiltration levels and acts of violence carried out by Pakistani-supported jihadi groups on Indian soil were also becoming more brazen. The stability/instability paradox-a construct devised by Western deterrence theorists who postulated that nuclear weapons could check full-scale wars but encourage mischief-making below the nuclear threshold-seemed to be playing out on the subcontinent under a risk-taking Pakistani army chief.[14]

Beginning in May 1999, when the Pakistani units were discovered by Indian reconnaissance teams in the heights overlooking Kargil, the CTBT took a distant back seat to the need to secure a Pakistani withdrawal and to prevent the high-altitude war from expanding in scope and intensity. Several unanticipated consequences and deep ironies resulted from U.S. crisis management in the Kargil war. Clinton, who was withholding a trip to the subcontinent as leverage for CTBT signatures, promised one to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as a face saver for withdrawal. His subsequent trip to the region clarified how much progress was possible in improving Indo-U.S. relations and how badly strained bilateral ties with Pakistan had become, primarily due to its ties to al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups.

The prospects of gaining Indian and Pakistani signatures on the CTBT were hanging by a slender thread when the Republican-led Senate suddenly consented to long-standing demands by their Democratic colleagues to vote on the treaty. The Clinton White House and Senate Democratic leadership were completely unprepared for this eventuality and ignorant of the prior efforts by Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) to line up sufficient Republican votes to kill the treaty. Relations between Republicans and the Clinton White House were venomous, as reflected in the 16-month-long impeachment proceedings during 1998-1999 regarding Clinton's sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. Lines of communication were also severed between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. When Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) stood up in the Senate in September 1999 expressing his intention to block all further proceedings unless the CTBT were brought up for a vote, he was about to learn that Kyl had the votes to defeat ratification.[15]

Senate Democrats found it awkward to pivot away from the CTBT after demanding a vote. As in Geneva, the Senate's negotiating endgame left the Clinton White House holding a very poor hand. Clinton had neither the time nor the leverage to influence the outcome. Sixty-two Senators, led by John Warner (R-Va.) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), tried to avoid a complete train wreck over the CTBT by signing a letter requesting postponement of the vote. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) agreed to withdraw the treaty if Clinton would request a withdrawal in writing and if he would pledge not to bring up the CTBT for the duration of his presidency. Under the prevailing circumstances, these conditions bowed to political realities, but the second condition was somehow deemed unacceptable by the Clinton White House. As Berger explained, "The president believes that it is inappropriate for him to say to the world that the United States is out of the nonproliferation business during an election year."[16] On October 13, 1999, the Senate failed to give the CTBT a simple majority, let alone the necessary two-thirds vote required for passage. The vote was 48 in support, 51 opposed.

September 11 and U.S. Relations With India and Pakistan

The Bush administration's agenda for the subcontinent shifted dramatically after the terrorist attacks of September 11, as it sought to forge a strategic partnership with Islamabad to fight the "war on terror" and to create a new partnership with India with the unstated purpose of helping to provide a counterweight to China. On September 22, 2001, the Bush administration lifted all remaining economic sanctions on India and Pakistan, except for sanctions on entities that had engaged in proliferation-related commerce. India's economic potential, trade, and growth have inoculated the country from new threats of sanctions. Besides, the Bush administration made it a strategic priority to befriend India, including the promotion of a wide-ranging civil nuclear cooperation agreement with New Delhi, overriding decades of export control arrangements established by the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The Bush administration asked for very little in return, least of all India's signature on the CTBT. Ironically, this proposed deal, which was the Bush administration's most important regional priority as Pakistani governance faltered, remains in limbo. Like the CTBT, the deal has been stymied by polarized domestic politics in India.

Ten years after testing nuclear devices, India and Pakistan still have not accepted any constraints on their strategic autonomy. Along with China, both states are engaged in strategic modernization programs of considerable breadth, building nuclear-tipped cruise missiles as well as ballistic missiles to be carried by their land, sea, and air forces.[17] India has plans for a deterrent it deems worthy of a major power, which might entail further tests to certify thermonuclear weapon designs. If India tests again, Pakistan is likely to do so as well. The nuclear enclaves in each county are highly respected at home and believe they have more work to do. This spells trouble not only for the CTBT's entry into force, but also for initiating and successfully concluding fissile material cutoff negotiations in Geneva.

Looking back, the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan and the subsequent rejection by the Senate of the CTBT were significant setbacks for global nonproliferation efforts. Nonetheless, the sky has not fallen. In the following decade, only one additional device has been tested, the lowest number in any 10-year period since the bomb's unveiling. This test, by North Korea, was widely condemned and helped to spur diplomatic efforts to dismantle Pyongyang's nuclear infrastructure. Although other nuclear-weapon enclaves would welcome the opportunity to test again, several are weaker than they have ever been, and political leaders are hesitant to be the first to break an informal global moratorium or to follow the lead of an outlier state. This calculus of restraint can change quickly, especially if China, Russia, or the United States is the first to resume testing.

Looking forward, U.S. CTBT ratification depends, in the first instance, on the identity of the next president. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) voted against the CTBT in 1999; Senators Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) support the treaty. Yet, even if the next president thinks positively of the CTBT, he or she will have many pressing matters to address. The priority attached to the CTBT will depend in part on the projected vote count in the Senate. Perhaps a dozen Republican senators will need to join Democrats in consenting to ratification, including some, such as Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who voted nay in 1999. Kyl may well hold an even more important Republican leadership position after the next U.S. election, and his opposition appears unyielding. If the new administration is favorably disposed toward the CTBT and if its vote count falls short, moving forward might well require trade-offs involving support for some variant of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program that may be very controversial and unacceptable to long-standing treaty supporters who oppose new warhead assembly lines.

Another option for the next U.S. administration would be to pursue modest but useful steps that are already in train, thanks to the steady and wise leadership of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization's (CTBTO) current executive secretary, Tibor Tóth of Hungary, and his predecessor, Wolfgang Hoffmann of Germany. The treaty's international monitoring system is being expanded, and valuable training exercises are being carried out. The next administration may also see the wisdom of paying U.S. dues to the CTBTO in full. The treaty's international monitoring network's ability to identify the sub-kiloton North Korean nuclear test marks a major success story. Adapting and adding to this network to provide for an improved tsunami early-warning system could add to the success of the CTBTO.

We are a long way from closure regarding the CTBT. India, like the United States, believes deeply that it is an exceptional country and exceptional countries prefer to lead rather than to join. The harsh treatment meted out to the civil nuclear cooperation agreement by opposition leaders in the BJP-an agreement they would surely have welcomed had they been in power during the Bush administration-does not bode well for forging a national consensus in India on the CTBT. The EIF provision continues to serve its intended, malign purpose, which in turn makes it essential to continue an informal global moratorium on testing.

Ten years after the May 1998 tests, India and Pakistan remain outliers to treaties that help define responsible stewardship of nuclear arsenals. Pakistan shows every inclination to compete with India, as is suggested by its growing bomb-making infrastructure and its willingness to block the initiation of negotiations on an FMCT in Geneva. Islamabad's response to treaty commitments remains fixed: Pakistan will consider whatever India agrees to first. Meanwhile, New Delhi's timelines for considering the CTBT and the cutoff treaty seem quite elastic.

The positive news about nuclear stabilization measures on the subcontinent lies outside the domain of treaties. India and Pakistan have agreed to several confidence-building and nuclear risk-reduction measures, such as notifications regarding certain missile flight tests and military exercises. After a period of domestic turbulence in Pakistan, these discussions will resume, perhaps yielding more agreements that reduce the possibility of unintended escalation. Each country is focused on trade, economic development, and domestic cohesion. In turn, this requires that the divided territory of Kashmir, which Pakistani officials used to describe as a "nuclear flashpoint," remain on the back burner. These important gains are unlikely to be supplemented by constructive initiatives relating to nuclear negotiations.

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Michael Krepon is the co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center and a diplomat scholar at the University of Virginia. His next book, Better Safe than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb, will be published by Stanford University Press.

ENDNOTES

1. See Arundhati Ghose, Statement to the Conference on Disarmament, Geneva, June 20, 1996.

2. Senior Clinton administration officials, interviews with author, Washington, D.C., 1996.

3. "Islamabad should realise the change in the geo-strategic situation in the region and the world. It must roll back its anti-India policy especially with regard to Kashmir. Any other course will be futile and costly for Pakistan." Sabina Inderjit, "Advani Tells Pakistan to Roll Back Its Anti-India Policy," Times of India, May 19, 1998 (quoting Advani).

4. See Strobe Talbott, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), pp. 96-97. Talbott's account is essential for specialists and accessible to nonexperts, making it an excellent teaching tool for the complexities of proliferation and U.S.-Indian relations.

5. Jaswant Singh, In Service of Emergent India: A Call to Honor (Calcutta: Rupa & Co., 2006; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 253.

6. Talbott, Engaging India, p. 5.

7. Raj Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, The Secret Story of India's Quest to be a Nuclear Power (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 48-49.

8. Talbott, Engaging India, p. 86.

9. Ibid., p. 121.

10. Ibid., p. 123.

11. Ibid., p. 145.

12. Singh, In Service of Emergent India, p. 263.

13. Ibid., p. 274.

14. For more on the stability/instability paradox as it applies to South Asia, see Michael Krepon, "The Stability-Instability Paradox, Misperception, and Escalation Control in South Asia," in Prospects for Peace in South Asia, ed. Rafiq Dossani and Henry S. Rowen (Stanford University Press, 2005); Michael Krepon, Rodney W. Jones, and Ziad Haider, eds., Escalation Control and the Nuclear Option in South Asia (Washington, D.C.: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2004). For another perspective, see S. Paul Kapur, "India and Pakistan's Unstable Peace: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not Like Cold War Europe," International Security, No. 30 (Fall 2005), pp. 127-152.

15. For a superb case study, see Terry L. Deibel, "Inside the Water's Edge: The Senate Votes on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," Institute for the Study of Diplomacy Case Studies, No. 263 (2003).

16. Ibid., p. 147.

17. See Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, "India's Nuclear Forces, 2007," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, No. 63 (July/August 2007), pp. 74-78; Robert S. Norris, "Pakistan's Nuclear Forces, 2007," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, No. 63 (May/June 2007), pp. 71-74.

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The EU’s Nonproliferation Efforts: Limited Success

Oliver Meier

In 2003, European states, shaken by their inability to unite around a common strategy toward Iraq, determined to forge a common and independent approach to dealing with proliferation threats.[1] Five years later, the EU's hopes of being an independent power broker on arms control and nonproliferation issues have only been partially realized, with both external pressures and internal fissures and constraints limiting Brussels' heft on the international stage.

In October 2003, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom ignored protests from the United States and reached an agreement with Iran to work toward a resolution of the crisis regarding Tehran's nuclear program. In December of that year, European Union (EU) member states adopted the European Security Strategy (ESS) and the associated EU Strategy Against Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, which called for effective policies to strengthen multilateral regimes and to address the root causes of instability and proliferation in cooperation with the United States and other key partners.

Since 2003, the EU has played a leading role in the ongoing effort to curb Iran's uranium-enrichment program, but its ability to make progress has been limited by the recalcitrance of Iran and the United States, and its negotiating role has been eclipsed at times by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Russia. Internal fissures, including differences between nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states and the failure to approve an EU constitution, have limited Brussels' ability to carve out an independent stance on such issues as missile defense, nuclear disarmament, and the future of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

To be sure, leadership change in the United States and the streamlining of the EU's foreign policy bureaucracy offer the prospect that Brussels in the next few years could come closer to the goals the EU set for itself five years ago. Yet, given the experience of the past five years, there is widespread skepticism that these opportunities will be seized.

Iran

In October 2003, more than a year after Iran's clandestine nuclear program was publicly revealed, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom (the so-called EU-3) negotiated a deal with Iran in which Tehran vowed to declare past nuclear activities and promised improved cooperation with the IAEA. In return, the EU-3 prevented referral of Iran to the UN Security Council, which Washington supported. In November 2004, Iran and the EU-3 signed the Paris agreement, in which Iran pledged to voluntarily suspend enrichment-related and reprocessing activities until a long-term agreement had been worked out. Although Washington continued to discourage negotiations between the European states and Iran, the move deflated U.S. pressure for a Security Council referral.

As the war in Iraq increasingly commanded U.S. political attention, Washington's opposition toward EU negotiations became less pronounced. After President George W. Bush traveled to Europe in February 2005, Washington for the first time backed some incentives offered by Europe to Iran, such as support for Iran's membership in the World Trade Organization and the supply of spare parts for civil aircraft if Iran were to halt its enrichment program and other fuel cycle-related activities. Yet, at nearly the same time that Washington was relaxing its pressure, Iranian attitudes began to harden, particularly following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian president in August 2005.

Since that election, the EU has sought to keep the negotiating process alive. In June 2006, the EU-3 plus China, Russia, and the United States (the "EU-3+3") offered a new package of incentives to Iran.[2] The offer came after Iran had resumed certain nuclear activities and the UN Security Council for the first time had imposed sanctions on Iran, in February 2006.

Throughout this period, EU officials have sought to maintain a united stance against what they see as Iranian efforts to chip away at these sanctions without giving up its nuclear ambitions. Since last fall, Iran has carried out a work program with the IAEA to address some of the past questions that had raised international concerns about whether it truly intended its nuclear facilities for peaceful purposes. Yet, Tehran has still moved forward with its uranium-enrichment program, despite calls from the Security Council to suspend it.

The IAEA's efforts have drawn criticism from European diplomats who fear that agency director-general Mohamed ElBaradei would allow the Iranians to sidestep the UN sanctions and the EU-3+3 negotiations and issue Iran a clean bill of health. A senior official from an EU member state on April 14 argued that it was not possible "to close Iran's nuclear file" even if the program of work agreed between the agency and Iran is completed. He said that, in addition to resolving questions related to past Iranian activities, it was also necessary to build confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran's current nuclear program.[3]

European officials also have said that the recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) did not justify backing away from UN sanctions. In December 2007, a U.S. NIE concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weaponization efforts by 2003, further undermining the hard-line approach taken by the Bush administration. In response to a parliamentary inquiry on the NIE launched by the Green Party in the Bundestag, the German government on January 10 maintained that the NIE had "confirmed the international community's justified doubts about the peaceful character of the Iranian nuclear program" and simply refused to answer any questions about the validity of the NIE's findings, citing confidentiality concerns.[4]

An EU official explained that the EU is now pursuing a dual-track approach for Iran. "The first one-pressure through sanctions and readiness to start negotiations-is aimed at convincing Iran to stop its controversial nuclear activities. The second one is aimed at keeping [the] unity of the EU-3+3."[5]

Some EU members, particularly France, have called for the union to take more aggressive measures on its own. In September, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said "We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war."[6] Kouchner also called for tougher EU sanctions above and beyond those agreed to by the UN Security Council. His calls have met with little support, with Europeans opting to follow the German preference for a gradual increase of pressure through the adoption of moderate and reversible UN Security Council sanctions.

With presidential elections in the United States in November 2008 and in Iran in 2009 ahead, European efforts to resolve the nuclear crisis in Iran are effectively in suspension.

After the last direct contact with Iranian lead nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili on November 30, 2007, Javier Solana, the EU's high representative on foreign policy, stated his disappointment. "I had expected more from the talks with the Iranian delegation."[7] According to Iranian statements, both sides have not been in contact since then. On March 16, Solana was quoted by the Chinese news agency Xinhua that a next meeting might take place in "30 days to 90 days."[8]

The EU official also said that an improved package of incentives to be offered to Iran now under consideration is aimed only partly at kick-starting negotiations and also has to be seen against the background of keeping the EU-3+3 unity. "This is more a matter of presentation than of substance," he explained.

Despite the lack of success in convincing Iran to limit its nuclear program, some decision-makers judge the EU's effort at resolving the nuclear crisis as a success. "It is true, we have not been able to convince Iran to improve international confidence by suspending critical nuclear activities" the EU official stated. "However, after initially being skeptical of Europe's involvement, Washington is now fully supportive of a negotiated agreement along the lines proposed by the EU," he argued.

Grzegorz M. Poznanski, deputy director of the Department for Security Policy at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, concurred on April 17. "The EU involvement in the talks with Iran is an example for the union's ambition to become involved in big issues and [that it] has the teeth to do just that," he said. "This is not the EU's fault that there has been no success so far in resolving the nuclear crisis with Iran."[9]

EU Versus NATO

For most Europeans, NATO is responsible for their collective defense, although the EU has increasingly expressed a desire for greater autonomy on defense issues since 1999. Thus, the EU is now in charge of several peacekeeping operations, and institutionally the European Defense Agency is supposed to oversee and coordinate procurement of military hardware.

Despite these aspirations and in spite of the fact that it will have a serious impact on European security, the EU has remained all but mum on a recent headline issue: the planned deployment of U.S. missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic. The issue has instead been left to NATO, where differences between Europeans persist. Although some countries call for a stronger link to NATO or even an integration of U.S. missile defense capabilities into an alliance-wide defense, Warsaw and Prague have so far not been willing to give other NATO members a say on the timing, scope, and content of bilateral agreements under negotiation with Washington. That dispute was not resolved at the April 2-4 NATO summit in Bucharest, which gave basic support for a missile defense system but left details to be resolved.

Early on, Solana, who had been head of NATO before becoming the EU's foreign policy chief, decided that the EU should not become involved in the issue. Initially, Solana argued that the EU lacked the capability to develop its own missile defense system and therefore was not able to take a position on the bilateral agreements under negotiation between the United States and two EU member states. On April 3, Solana presented the Romanian newspaper Adevarul with another reason for European lack of action by stating that, "under the Treaty of the European Union, the EU is developing a foreign and security policy which does not extend for the time being to territorial defense. This aspect falls under national responsibility and, for some of our member states, this means through NATO."[10]

The senior official from an EU member state backed Solana by arguing for a pragmatic course of action. "When thinking about whether to discuss an arms control issue in the EU or in NATO, you have to consider where you can make most progress," he cautioned. "On missile defense, little would be gained by raising the issue in the EU."

Ondrej Liska, deputy chairman for foreign affairs of the Green Party, who is the junior partner in the Czech government, offered a different view. "There are provisions in the Treaty on the EU that could have been used to initiate such a debate [on missile defense,] but the member states have not found the courage and the will to get rid of their old protective mentalities," he wrote.[11] Liska argued that "the U.S. intentions are to have lasting and profound impacts on the foreign and security policy of the EU."

Early attempts to explore possibilities for a joint position on missile defense within the EU apparently did not get very far. Poznanski said that "Poland has informed its European partners about its plans concerning missile defense, both bilaterally, and ad hoc in the EU Council, when EU partners have requested such briefings." To date, the EU Council has not taken a stance on the issue.

Privately, EU officials admit that the EU could have played a more active role on missile defense, and some argue it should have been more assertive. Concerns about the lack of official EU involvement are also widespread among members of the European Parliament. Karl von Wogau, Conservative chairman of the European Parliament's Security and Defense Subcommittee, argued that it would have been "desirable" if the planned deployment of missile defense components in the Czech Republic and Poland "would have been agreed at the European level."[12]

The debate is taking place against renewed fears that Europe might once again find itself in the uncomfortable middle between Russia and the United States. Wogau points out that the European Parliament wants to ensure that "Europe is not separated into zones with different levels of security." Wogau argues that NATO "has to take into account specific European security interests" in setting up a future missile defense system's infrastructure and command structure. He believes that NATO has now accepted this point of view because the communiqué of the April 2-4 Bucharest summit reaffirms "the principle of the indivisibility of Allied security as well as NATO solidarity."[13]

Asked about the dangers of renewed conflict between the East and West in Europe, Poznanski replied that he does not believe "that there is a possibility of going back to the Cold War in Europe. There are several institutionalized dialogues on strategic issues taking place between the EU, Russia, and the United States, including the NATO-Russia dialogue. The EU can play an important role as a partner to both the United States and Russia. This should be seen as an opportunity to be seized, rather than as a risk to be faced."

The EU's lack of a coherent position on missile defense is lamented by many, but its silence on another key European security crisis, Russia's suspension of the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), is widely accepted. Solana has repeatedly called the CFE Treaty a "cornerstone of European security," but the treaty's demise has not been an issue for the EU as a whole,[14] primarily because NATO has historically coordinated its member states' positions on conventional arms control. Thus, a French diplomat highlighted the fact that the EU "is at an disadvantage" vis-à-vis NATO because the alliance has a long track record of dealing with issues such as the CFE Treaty and missile defense.[15]

Nuclear Disarmament

With review conferences on the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions recently concluded, the next diplomatic nonproliferation challenge for the EU will be to develop a strong common position for the 2010 NPT Review Conference. Common positions are binding agreements adopted by the EU Council and designed to make cooperation more systematic and improve its coordination.

Many EU officials remain concerned about the stalemate on strategic nuclear arms control between Russia and the United States. In a statement to the European Parliament on April 8, Solana warned of "the difficulties that we may be facing in 2009 and 2010 when all the major agreements on disarmament will come up for renewal." The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) will expire at the end of next year and the NPT review conference will take place just a few months later. Solana stated that "it will be important for the EU and its citizens to have the possibility of avoiding a vacuum between now and then" and urged the United States and Russia to "renew" START and reaffirm past unilateral pledges on nuclear disarmament, which he described as "fundamental pillars of our strategic security."[16]

Hopes for a more active EU arms control policy have been fueled by recent British and French statements on nuclear disarmament. Each country continues to modernize its nuclear arsenal but both recently announced cuts in their numbers of operational warheads. The French diplomat insisted that President Nicolas Sarkozy in his March 21 speech on nuclear deterrence had made "unprecedented gestures" for a nuclear-weapon state, for example by publicly announcing that the fact the force de frappe now maintains fewer than 300 nuclear warheads. He called the nuclear disarmament section of the speech "innovative."[17]

The United Kingdom recently announced a 20 percent cut in the number of operational warheads, and unusual for any nuclear-weapon state, British Defense Secretary Des Brown in a statement before the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament on February 5 recognized that nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation are connected, implying that continued reliance on nuclear deterrence may fuel proliferation.[18]

EU officials express caution about the significance of the shifts in British and French nuclear policies. The EU official described the two countries' statements in favor of progress on nuclear disarmament as helpful but warned that "it is too early to tell" whether they reflect a substantive shift, enabling a more proactive EU policy on some nuclear arms control issues. Poznanski pointed out that the United Kingdom's position on nuclear disarmament is "not surprising" because its work on nuclear arms control verification "has been going on for several years." He also stated that there is "a possibility of a French change of mood on nuclear arms control. This would potentially raise the lowest common denominator on nuclear arms control in the EU, especially in the light of 2010 NPT Review Conference."

The EU also has a problem in forging common positions on other issues on the nuclear nonproliferation agenda, such as the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal. Annalisa Giannella, Solana's personal representative on nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), has repeatedly warned that preferential treatment for India will undermine the EU's efforts to bring third countries to accept and implement tougher export control standards. Giannella has also voiced concerns about the deal's overall impact on the nonproliferation regime. Thus, she stated at a conference in Madrid in November that "only when solutions are discussed and agreed in a multilateral framework [are they] felt as legitimate and have a chance to be fully respected." Giannella went on to state that this is why "the nuclear deal with India has raised and continues to raise so many questions from the point of view of the credibility of the NPT. We have here a case where a country is rewarded without adhering to all the rules subscribed by the vast majority."[19]

These isolated warnings, however, do not necessarily reflect the consensus among member states. The EU official conceded that early attempts to develop a joint position among the 27 EU members on the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal have not been conclusive so far and have been abandoned because of significant differences among member states.

Nuclear-weapon states France and the United Kingdom openly support the agreement while many other EU members remain opposed.

The development of a coherent European position on the spread of proliferation-sensitive technologies is also complicated by France's desire to boost exports from its powerful nuclear industry, particularly to the Middle East. Since Sarkozy was elected president in May 2007, Paris has concluded bilateral nuclear cooperation agreements with Algeria, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates and is preparing such agreements with Jordan, Morocco, and Qatar. No attempt has apparently been made to coordinate these potentially proliferation-sensitive sales through the EU. For this, France has been criticized by one of its closest partners, Germany. Asked about Sarkozy's policy to promote nuclear energy exports to the Middle East, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung December 17, 2007, that he "cannot recommend to view nuclear energy as the solution to the world's energy problems and to spread nuclear reactor across the world and in regions where there is no guarantee that this technology will be handled competently and where no sufficient certainty exists regarding political stability."[20]

Different interests and backgrounds complicate the creation of a united EU position on the multilateralization of nuclear fuel cycle activities. Officially, the EU supports efforts to establish safe fuel-supply mechanisms that fulfill four criteria. According to a joint EU paper submitted to the 2007 NPT Preparatory Committee, these factors should be proliferation resistance, assurance of supply, a balance of rights and obligations, and market neutrality.[21] In reality, member states have now put forward a variety of proposals that are not necessarily complementary. Thus, the four supplier states, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, initially all supported the six-nation Concept for a Multilateral Mechanism for Reliable Access to Nuclear Fuel, submitted in June 2006.[22]

Germany, which has a national policy of phasing out nuclear energy, also has submitted its own proposal on a "Multilateral Enrichment Sanctuary Project," which calls for the establishment of a new enrichment facility in a special area under control of the IAEA.[23] Notably, Germany is the only nuclear fuel supplier that is not a partner country of the U.S. Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, which some in Berlin view as not sufficiently taking into account the interests of potential recipient states.

Austria, which is not using nuclear energy for electricity production, also has introduced its own proposal on a gradual multilateralization of the nuclear fuel cycle, and the United Kingdom is pursuing its idea of issuing "enrichment bonds" as a means of guaranteeing enrichment services.[24]

Technical Support for Nonproliferation

Because progress on many major arms control issues has largely eluded the EU, it has shifted attention to other topics, such as monetary support for international arms control bureaucracies, strengthening of export control regimes, and better national implementation of nonproliferation commitments.

Since the European Security Strategy was adopted, the EU has adopted a dozen joint actions to support multilateral regimes and institutions involved in tackling nonproliferation and disarmament issues, including the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Biological Weapons Convention, and the 1540 Committee. Joint actions are coordinated actions by EU member states involving the mobilization of resources in order to attain specific objectives set by the EU Council.

Most recently, it adopted two such actions on April 14, one giving 7.7 million euros to support the IAEA's work on nuclear security and verification and one appropriating 2.1 million euros to support the World Health Organization's biosafety and biosecurity programs. The bulk of European nonproliferation funding still goes toward Global Partnership programs, aimed at dismantling and securing the WMD legacy in Russia and other post-Soviet states. In addition to pledges by member states, the EU has promised $1.4 billion toward the Global Partnership. Yet, some member states, particularly France and Italy, have been slow in implementing their pledges.[25]

In other cases, EU nonproliferation goals sound ambitious but get bogged down in bureaucratic infighting. EU arms control policies have long been hampered by competition between the European Commission (the executive body and main bureaucracy of the EU) and the Council of the European Union, which includes individual representatives from each of the EU member states.

For example, the EU Council in December 2006 endorsed a concept paper written by Giannella in cooperation with the European Commission on the creation of a Weapons of Mass Destruction Monitoring Center. The goal was to establish a cooperative working method for the EU Council Secretariat, the European Commission, and member states "to work together and ensure better synergy in the fight against the proliferation" of weapons of mass destruction, according to the EU's website.[26] Yet, a WMD center still does not exist, and the idea seems not to have moved beyond discussions on the issue. As Poznanski explains, "Reaching agreement on some of the big, strategic issues is not so easy when you work on the basis of the lowest common denominator, as we do in the EU. Therefore, the focus of the EU nonproliferation and arms control policies is often more on technical issues, where agreement can be reached more easily."

What Impact Will the Lisbon Treaty Have?

So far, the EU's ambition to become a more effective global actor on nonproliferation and arms control has been only partly realized. As the senior official from an EU member state admitted, "The EU's room [to] maneuver is limited on issues where member states' positions are too far apart, such as missile defense and the planned nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and India." Nonetheless, an institutional streamlining of the EU's foreign policy, a possible reassessment of its arms control goals, and a redefinition of its relationship with NATO may all lead to a more energetic EU approach to arms control and nonproliferation issues in the future.

Progress on urgently needed institutional reforms was delayed for several years by the 2005 failure of an effort to win approval from some member states for a constitutional treaty that would have strengthened the union's foreign and security policy apparatus. The December 2007 Lisbon Treaty, which copies most of the constitution's provisions on foreign and security policy issues, could help make the EU's foreign policy more efficient and effective. That treaty still must be ratified by most EU member states but is expected to enter into force as early as January 1, 2009. Among the most visible changes in the foreign policy sphere will be the new posts of EU president, to be elected for two and a half years, and high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, effectively the union's foreign minister. The high representative will be "double-hatted," meaning that he or she will act in personal union as vice president of the European Commission and as the EU Council's representative on foreign policy, a potentially difficult combination. "This will be a mission impossible," the EU official warned.

The future role of the high representative will likely depend on his or her personality as well as interaction with the EU president. Potentially, the high representative could take the lead in representing EU member states collectively in arms control negotiations, such as in the talks with Iran.

According to press reports, Solana will continue to serve as high representative at least during an interim period when the Lisbon Treaty is being put into practice, which some say could last from months to a few years.[27]

Another novelty under the Lisbon Treaty is the European External Action Service (EEAS), which will consist of EU Council and European Commission staff as well as diplomats seconded from member states. The EEAS will assist the high representative but potentially also represent the EU as a whole abroad and in international organizations, including nonproliferation regimes. Although many details of the service's funding, role, and composition remain to be worked out, it is likely to create at least some bureaucratic pressure toward a more coherent EU foreign and security policy. An early indication of the bureaucratic hurdles to be overcome is the fact that the European Council Secretariat and the European Commission are preparing separate proposals on the EEAS. Implementation of the Lisbon Treaty will also help to consolidate the complex EU funding structure on arms control and nonproliferation, although the European Commission and the EU Council will continue to operate separate budgets.

Meanwhile, some unlikely connections appear between entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty and arms control. Liska indicated that there have been signals from elements of the Czech Conservative coalition party that it would link ratification of the Lisbon Treaty to the ratification of the bilateral agreement between Washington and Prague on the construction of a missile defense radar site. "I personally would consider that as a form of unacceptable blackmail," Liska said.

A New Security Strategy?

Against the background of the upcoming fifth anniversary of the ESS, EU member states are currently considering whether to update Europe's security strategy. The idea of revising the ESS had originally been put forward in August 2007 by Sarkozy, who wanted to push for a "bolder" EU.[28] On December 14, 2007, the EU Council asked Solana "to examine the implementation of the [ESS] with a view to proposing elements on how to improve the implementation and, as appropriate, elements to complement it, for adoption by the European Council in December 2008."[29]

That process, which could likely result in an annex to the ESS, is ongoing. According to the EU official, several proposals have been floated following Sarkozy's statement, but member states have not formally agreed on any specific course of action. The official also stated that no concrete preparations are currently taking place for an updated WMD strategy. Decisions on a revision of an ESS, including a possible update of the WMD strategy, are likely to be taken under the French EU presidency during the second half of 2008.

Several decision-makers support such a review, echoing the point made by Poznanski that "a review or an update of the [ESS] might be opportune because we will have a new institutional setting for the EU's Common Foreign and Security Strategy after the Lisbon Treaty comes into force, with the new position of high representative for foreign affairs and security policy and the [EEAS]." Such a review, however, may not necessarily lead to a more ambitious text. The senior official cautioned that a revision may not be in the interest of those that support the goals in the ESS because discussions may not result in a more ambitious document.

A New Division of Labor With NATO?

The EU's role on arms control issues will also be influenced by the future division of labor between NATO and EU. The relation between the two Brussels-based organizations on foreign and defense issues has always been competitive. A new push to realign the two institutions may be facilitated by the intention of the French government to rejoin NATO's integrated military structure. Given the interest of some within NATO to give the alliance a stronger role in nonproliferation and counterproliferation issues, such a development may also force the EU to reassert its role on nonproliferation and arms control issues.

So far, attempts to raise NATO's arms control profile seem not to have borne fruit. On December 7, Steinmeier and his Norwegian counterpart Jonas Gahr Støre called in a bilateral statement for NATO countries "to do more for disarmament."[30] In reaction, the NATO council launched a review, of which the Bucharest summit took note. Yet, NATO leaders merely tasked the NATO council to keep the alliance's contribution to arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation "under active review."[31] The goal apparently is to prepare another report on arms control for NATO's 60th anniversary summit next year.

During that summit, NATO is also expected to launch a long-planned review of its 1999 Strategic Concept. A new Strategic Concept would have to address the role of nuclear deterrence in alliance strategy, a topic with implications also for European nonproliferation policies. Not only would the two European nuclear-weapon states have to be part of such an agreement, the United States still deploys nuclear weapons in three EU non-nuclear-weapon states-Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. Liska argues that this is an issue where Europe should act. "The EU should go ahead with disarmament initiatives even alone and set an example to the rest of the world," he said. "It should negotiate the withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from its territory and start reducing its own arsenal."

In the end, Europe's ability to become a more effective actor on nonproliferation and disarmament will depend first on overcoming internal divisions and reducing the role of nuclear deterrence. Second, the EU will have to develop joint arms control agendas with Russia and most importantly with the United States. As a new administration takes over in Washington, the old diplomatic chestnut that the EU will have to become more effective and the United States more multilateral will gain new urgency.

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Oliver Meier is the Arms Control Association's international representative and correspondent based in Berlin and a researcher with the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg.

ENDNOTES

1. See Oliver Meier and Gerrard Quille, "Testing Time for Europe's Nonproliferation Strategy," Arms Control Today, May 2005, pp. 4-12.

2. In the EU-3+3 talks, negotiators representing the EU's three largest countries (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) plus the EU's high representative on foreign policy have been negotiating on behalf of the EU together with permanent Security Council members China, Russia, and the United States.

3. Senior official from an EU member state, telephone interview with author, April 14, 2008.

4. "U.S.-Geheimdienstbericht zum iranischen Atomprogramm," Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Fraktion BÜNDNIS90/Die Grünen, Printed matter 16/7702, January 10, 2008.

5. EU official, telephone interview with author, April 14, 2008.

6. "France Warning of War with Iran," BBC News, September 17, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6997935.stm.

7. "Brief Remarks by Javier Solana," European Council Press Release S348/07, November 30, 2007.

8. "Solana Hopes to Meet Iranian Negotiator for Talks," Xinhua, March 16, 2008.

9. Grzegorz M. Poznanski, telephone interview with author, April 17, 2008.

10. "HR Solana Interview for Adevarul," April 3, 2008, www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/sghr_int/99717.pdf.

11. Ondrej Liska, e-mail communication with author, April 22, 2008.

12. Karl von Wogau, e-mail communication with author, April 16, 2008.

13. "Bucharest Summit Declaration," NATO Press Release 2008(049), April 3, 2008.

14. See, for example, "Speech by Javier Solana at the 44th Munich Conference on Security Policy," Munich, February 10, 2008.

15. French diplomat, interview with author, April 4, 2008.

16. "Address by Javier Solana," Council of the European Union, S129/08, April 8, 2008.

17. "Speech by Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the French Republic at the Presentation of Le Terrible in Cherbourg," March 21, 2008.

18. Des Browne, "Laying the Foundations for Multilateral Disarmament," Speech at the Conference on Disarmament, Geneva, February 5, 2008.

19. "EU Aide Worried by Calls to Drop India WMD Clause," Reuters, March 2, 2007; Council of the European Union, "Speech by Mrs. Annalisa Giannella at a Seminar on Nuclear Proliferation," Madrid, November 6, 2007.

20. "Das deutsch-französische Verhältnis pflegen wir nicht aus bloßer Tradition," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 17, 2007 (interview with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier).

21. Preparatory Committee for the 2010 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, "Multilateralization of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle/Guarantees of Access to the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy," NPT/CONF.2010/PC.I/WP.61, May 9, 2007.

22. "Communication Dated 31 May 2006 Received from the Permanent Missions of France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America," IAEA, GOV/INF/2006/10, June 1, 2006.

23. "Communication Received from the Resident Representative of Germany to the IAEA With Regard to the German Proposal on the Multilateralization of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle," IAEA, INFCIRC/704, May 4, 2007.

24. Oliver Meier, "News Analysis: The Growing Nuclear Fuel-Cycle Debate," Arms Control Today, November 2006, pp. 40-44.

25. See Paul Walker, "Looking Back: Kananaskis at Five," Arms Control Today, September 2007, pp. 47-52.

26. "EU Strategy Against the Proliferation of WMD," Council of the European Union, 16694/06, December 12, 2006.

27. See Mark Beunderman, "EU Faces Raft of Open Questions Over Diplomatic Service," EUobserver.com, November 27, 2007.

28. John Thornhill, "Sarkozy in Drive to Give EU Global Role," FT.com, August 28, 2007.

29. "Brussels European Council 14 December 2007 Presidency Conclusions," Council of the European Union, 16616/1/07 REV 1, February 14, 2008.

30. "Germany and Norway Call for NATO Disarmament Initiative," Federal Foreign Office Press Release, Berlin, December 7, 2007.

31. "Bucharest Summit Declaration."

Read more about The EU’s Nonproliferation Efforts: Limited Success

The Trilateral Initiative: A Model For The Future?

Thomas E. Shea

Those seeking to design a system for verifying the dismantlement of nuclear weapons do not have to start from a blank slate. They can benefit a great deal from building on the experience of the Trilateral Initiative. This was a six-year (1996-2002) effort to develop a verification system under which Russia and the United States could submit classified forms of weapons-origin fissile material to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verification and monitoring in a irreversible manner and for an indefinite period of time.

Russia and the United States needed a new system because the IAEA's normal safeguards system, designed to prevent peaceful nuclear materials and facilities from being used for military purposes, is not set up to cope with nuclear materials still tied to weapons programs or with inspections at locations that have or had such programs. The initiative sought to broaden the items that could be brought under IAEA monitoring to include any classified items containing plutonium or highly enriched uranium, including nuclear warheads, warhead components, pits, or secondaries. The initiative also sought to ensure that these would be permanently safeguarded, unlike material submitted to IAEA monitoring under existing voluntary agreements. In 1993, for example, the United States had submitted 10 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and two metric tons of plutonium to voluntary IAEA safeguards, but this material could have been withdrawn at will.

Moreover, the methods and the overall framework had to be designed to protect classified information and to ensure that both countries met their obligations under Article I of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Under that article, nuclear-weapon states-parties to the NPT are prohibited from assisting, encouraging, or inducing any non-nuclear-weapon state to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, and this obligation logically extends to the IAEA or any other multilateral entity. Therefore, the IAEA recognized that its access would be restricted so as to prevent nuclear secrets from leaking out.

Some of the early decisions reached under the initiative related to defining the nature and scope of verification so that it could be politically acceptable and provide sufficient confidence that disarmament was actually taking place. One decision involved the nature of the disarmament-related nuclear material that the countries would seek to verify. Four verification levels were considered:

Level 1: limit the initiative to accepting only unclassified materials, which would have removed those materials from reuse;
Level 2: accept classified forms of fissile material without attempting to establish that the forms actually represent nuclear warheads or components thereof;
Level 3: verify the fact that the items presented are in fact nuclear warheads or specified components thereof, including specific model identifications; or
Level 4: start with the dismantlement of weapon systems or subsequent stages so that the monitoring could attest to the removal of warheads from delivery systems.

For practical purposes, the parties decided that the initiative should aim for Level 2, which posed significant challenges but was considered to be achievable. Level 1 would not have required a new framework. Going to Level 3 would have presented far greater security concerns and challenges related to authenticating warhead templates that could be used by the IAEA. Level 4 would have been a simple extension of Level 3.[1]

Participants also decided on a metric of effective verification, "the 1 percent solution." The working group proceeded on the basis that a breakout involving on the order of 1 percent of the monitored inventory at any time could portend a strategic change. Although never formally adopted, the 1 percent figure served as the de facto reference for determining sample-plan sizes for verification and reverification.

Participants examined various technical means of verification, looking first at whether a technology might be found that would allow unrestricted measurements but would not be capable of extracting any classified information from the objects being measured. Not finding any suitable methods, the working group agreed to base IAEA verification measurements on references to unclassified attributes, using sensitive measurements operating behind "information barriers."[2] Although attribute verification would provide far less information than the IAEA obtains under routine plutonium safeguards, it was deemed to be sufficient to be formally accepted as the basis for the IAEA verifying the classified materials involved in the initiative.

Attribute verification involves comparing an object to a set of reference characteristics. For example, the presence of a militarily significant quantity of weapons-grade plutonium would be assessed by measures that first determined the presence of plutonium, then assessed that the isotopic composition of the plutonium was such that it was weapons-grade material rather than reactor-grade,[3] and finally calculated that the mass of plutonium fell above an agreed minimum defined in relation to each facility.

Several measurement methods were identified that could satisfy this requirement. In the end, the working group settled on high-resolution gamma ray spectroscopy to establish the presence of weapons-grade plutonium and the combined use of neutron multiplicity counting and high-resolution gamma ray spectroscopy to measure the plutonium mass.

The scheme for monitoring and verifying this material as it was converted to eventual peaceful use in nuclear fuel was straightforward: sealed containers would be transported to facilities where the material would be converted and shorn of classified isotopics and chemical properties. IAEA monitoring would begin with the arrival of the classified material at the entry point to the conversion facility. A perimeter monitoring system would assure that only monitored containers, plus other nonweapons materials needed in the peaceful fuel, would be allowed in. All fissile material containers exiting the conversion facility would be measured using normal IAEA safeguards methods, and then seals would be applied to the containers for storage or transport to processing facilities where they would be converted to fuel for nuclear reactors. Managed access would be allowed into the conversion facility annually to ensure that no warhead components accumulated and that no undeclared penetrations occurred that could have resulted in undeclared additions or removals of fissile material. IAEA inspectors could witness containers entering the measuring system, identify tag measurements, confirm seal data, and observe the attribute measurement results on a pass-fail basis.

Working group participants judged that if such a scheme were to be practical, the conversion facilities would have to be constructed following mutually agreed architectural plans. No discussions took place on specific agreements, however.

The initiative developed slowly because of some highly arcane technical differences between Russia and the United States and because the 2000 conclusion of a separate bilateral Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement between Russia and the United States drained some of the necessary political impetus and attention.[4]

Nonetheless, by November 2001, Russia and the United States were on the brink of agreeing to a model verification agreement. Unfortunately, the new Bush and Putin administrations brought the initiative to a halt. When President George W. Bush took office, his administration announced that it did not support a 13-point Article VI agenda from the 2000 NPT Review Conference that included support for the initiative. The Putin administration was also not as supportive as its predecessor. By the time of the 2002 IAEA General Conference, the two sides had agreed that the initiative should be brought to a close, concluding that it had been a success and that it was now up to the states to enter into individual implementation agreements with the IAEA.

Accomplishments

In many ways, Washington and Moscow were correct. From a legal perspective, the Trilateral Initiative was ready at that point to be carried out, although some implementation details still required further negotiation. As the final report of the Joint Working Group to the Trilateral Initiative Principals put it in 2002:

Over the course of six years, the Joint Working Group addressed the technical, legal and financial issues associated with implementing IAEA verification of weapon-origin and other fissile material released from defence programmes and can now recommend the successful completion of the original task. The enabling technologies developed under the Initiative could be employed by the IAEA on any form of plutonium in nuclear facilities, without revealing nuclear weapons information. The Working Group found no technical problem that would prevent the IAEA from undertaking a verification mission in relation to such fissile materials released from defense programmes, and believes that many of the technical approaches could have broader applicability to other forms of fissile materials encountered in conjunction with nuclear arms reductions.

In addition, verification arrangements essentially were agreed on for initial implementation at the Fissile Material Storage Facility at Mayak in Russia and at the K-Area Material Storage (KAMS) Facility at the Savannah River site in the United States. In placing the KAMS Facility under voluntary-offer safeguards, the United States stated its intention to alter these safeguards once an agreement pursuant to the initiative entered into effect.

Could the Trilateral Initiative Be Reactivated?

States looking at verifying nuclear disarmament might consider reactivating the Trilateral Initiative. In particular, two options might be pursued:

1. The initiative could be reactivated as a three-way study effort to continue work aimed at fleshing out a verification system in relation to nuclear disarmament. With no obligations to commit, that would be the low-risk option, more likely to gain support but running the risk of being a perpetual experiment.
2. Alternatively, Russia, the United States, or both acting together could negotiate agreements in a few months that could allow them to begin to submit weapons-origin fissile material to IAEA verification. Although the preparatory work carried out was extensive, significant practical issues remain. Phasing in the agreements over time could allow progress to be made while gaining confidence in the security measures implemented. Under such an arrangement, Russia or the United States would retain the right to determine which fissile materials to submit, when to submit them, and the conditions necessary. Through such provisions, Russia, the United States, and any other state possessing nuclear weapons that would enter into such an arrangement could gain the assurances needed to protect their security interests. The agreements could have a specified duration to provide an out if the parties could not reach agreement.

Concluding the first verification agreement based on the Trilateral Agreement would energize the international community, bolster support for the NPT, and provide the foundation for engaging other states possessing nuclear weapons. Such a step could be carried out in time for the 2010 NPT Review Conference.

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Thomas E. Shea served as head of the IAEA Trilateral Initiative Office over the full duration of its activities, from September 1996 through September 2002. Shea is currently on a two-year assignment for the U.S. Department of Energy at the World Nuclear University (WNU) in London, where he serves as director of the WNU Global Nuclear Policy Forum. This paper reflects the views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government or of any other government or institution.

ENDNOTES

1. Thomas E. Shea, "Potential Roles for the IAEA in a Nuclear Weapons Dismantlement and Fissile Materials Transparency Regime," in Transparency in Nuclear Warheads and Materials: The Political and Technical Dimensions, ed. Nicholas Zarimpas (Oxford: SIPRI, Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 229-249.

2. An information barrier would permit unrestricted measurements on a secure basis. The results would be compared to unclassified parameters in a way that questions could be answered in a pass-fail manner. For example, the measured ratios of the key isotopes would be compared to a limit. If less than the limit, the answer would be "pass," and conversely, if greater than the limit, then "fail."

3. The isotopic ratio chosen was such that there was at least 10 times as much plutonium-239 as plutonium-240, which is true for plutonium used in nuclear weapons in Russia and the United States.

4. The Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA) focused on the implementation of the steps for verification as one objective, but disposition was its primary focus. It called for reusing 34 metric tons of excess weapons plutonium in each country in mixed-oxide fuel for nuclear reactors. Although the IAEA was an equal partner in the Trilateral Initiative, in the PMDA, a different team of U.S. officials carried out the bilateral negotiations, and the IAEA was informed of the PMDA for the first time when the negotiations were essentially concluded. Nor did the PMDA include provisions for taking classified forms of fissile material into monitored operations. To be sure, the PMDA provides for the possibility of IAEA verification and calls for "early consultations" with the IAEA to work out the verification arrangements, but those consultations have yet to be held.

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Verifying Nuclear Disarmament: The Inspector’s Agenda

Andreas Persbo and Marius Bjørningstad

The Trilateral Initiative: A Model For The Future?

In the past year, support for moving toward eventual nuclear disarmament has gathered force. In early 2007, an op-ed by four influential U.S. policy shapers, two Republicans and two Democrats, called on the nuclear-weapon states to "turn the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise."[1]

Reaching this goal will require overcoming many political, diplomatic, and technical obstacles. In a June 2007 keynote address to the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference, former British Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett embraced the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and sought to help with this task by offering her country as a "disarmament laboratory."[2] What this meant was clarified in a February 2008 speech by British Defense Minister Des Browne when he invited representatives of weapons laboratories from four other nuclear-weapon states (China, France, Russia, and the United States) to participate in a technical conference in the United Kingdom on disarmament verification.[3] The challenge, Browne argued, "is in developing technologies which strike the right balance between protecting security and proliferation considerations and, at the same time, providing sufficient international access and verification." The proposed conference could contribute toward the development of these technologies and at the same time help build deeper technical relationships between the recognized nuclear-weapon states, hopefully generating additional confidence in the disarmament process.

In his speech, Browne confirmed his country's willingness to take the lead on disarmament research and also made reference to relevant joint British-Norwegian research cooperation. In March 2007, about 20 representatives from various institutes in Norway and the United Kingdom met in London to explore how in the future they might bring their respective expertise to bear on the challenge of verifying nuclear disarmament and agreed to explore a series of technical questions through sustained and cooperative research. Subsequently, technical experts from Norway and the United Kingdom, as well as nongovernmental researchers from the Verification Research, Training and Information Centre, met repeatedly to discuss verification requirements in nuclear disarmament. This article, which draws on some of these discussions, will focus on some of the key challenges related to verification, in particular, international inspections at nuclear dismantlement facilities. Moreover, it will mark out the course for future research and cooperation in disarmament verification.

Defining Verification and the Role of Inspections

Verification can be understood as the "process of gathering and analyzing information to make a judgement about parties' compliance or non-compliance with an agreement."[4] However, it is difficult to say what verification will practically entail outside the context of a given treaty.[5]

One thing is relatively certain: the difficulties of verifying nuclear disarmament will correspond with the complexity of the disarmament commitment. For example, verifying that a state has complied with an obligation to dismantle one nuclear warhead will be relatively straightforward. Even in that case, several important questions would need to be answered: How can the inspector be sure that she is looking at a nuclear warhead and not a dummy? If the inspector cannot observe the dismantlement process, how will he be sure that disassembled parts come from the warhead and not some hidden stash of electronics components? How can the inspector be sure that the host state has accounted for all nuclear material if she cannot measure and weigh the "physics package" (the fissile material part of the warhead)?

Verifying complete disarmament is likely to be far more difficult and will involve addressing an even larger and more complex set of questions: How can the inspector be certain that the state has declared all its nuclear warheads? How can the inspector be assured that there is no further undeclared production of nuclear warheads?

One factor that facilitates effective and efficient verification is the careful selection of items, activities, and facilities that must be monitored and those that need not be. If the goal is to verify the dismantlement of an agreed number of warheads, the inspector may not need access to the entire nuclear weapons complex, but only to certain sites, activities, and personnel. Under such a scenario, inspectors will no doubt prefer to pick and choose which sites to visit, although nuclear-weapon states may be unlikely to grant this privilege. By contrast, a comprehensive verification scheme is likely to require nuclear-weapon states to grant access to all relevant facilities, a large selection of relevant personnel, and a wide range of documentation.

Inspection designers need to develop standards for declarations of treaty-limited items along with lists of items, activities, and personnel available for inspection and interrogation. Ideally, the right to pick and choose some of these items, activities, and personnel should be firmly established.

In neither case, however, is it likely that an inspection process will "establish" or "confirm" that a warhead has been dismantled or that all warheads have been declared. In any verification scheme, it may be possible to identify and point out a fake weapon with relatively high certainty. Nonetheless, unless one can open up and check a weapon against a clear guide, there may be no way to prove that one's assessment is correct. Opening up the weapon would mean giving away critical design information. Obviously, that much transparency can never be given, making the quest for absolute confirmation a fool's errand. Therefore, some degree of uncertainty must be acceptable in verification.

Traditional International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, inspections, and measurements are likely to be powerful tools for nuclear disarmament verification because they would allow inspectors to monitor dismantlement processes up close. Moreover, interaction between the inspecting and the inspected party is likely to induce trust and cooperation, enabling more credible and efficient verification in the long run. Inspection designers need to define the purpose of verification, including the role of inspections, in any verification scheme.

Verification Challenges: Warhead Design and Fissile Materials

Those wishing to design a nuclear warhead dismantlement verification regime possess some advantages. First, nuclear weapons exist in small quantities compared to, for instance, small arms and light weapons. There are consequently fewer items to declare, monitor, and verify. Fissile material is also relatively scarce compared to treaty-limited items in other regimes, such as conflict diamonds. Fissile material is also inorganic, which means that quantities remain roughly the same once declared. Unfortunately, these few advantages are readily outweighed by the numerous safety, legal, and national challenges facing the verification designer.

The legal problem is one of interpretation. A nuclear-weapon state cannot, according to Article I of the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, "assist, encourage or induce" a non-nuclear-weapon state to manufacture a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device. If non-nuclear-weapon state inspectors are to play a role in the verification regime, negotiators would have to tackle several difficult questions. For example, is a nuclear-weapon state assisting another state if it unintentionally leaks weapons-relevant information, or does the assistance have to be intentional? What kind of leak would break international law? Would information on non-nuclear components constitute a breach?

Under the strictest of interpretations, the risks of involving international inspectors would probably be too great. With some legal flexibility, non-nuclear-weapon state inspections could be permitted if conducted with the utmost care. On the other hand, if inspectors are nuclear-weapon-state nationals, the designers of a verification regime have more legal flexibility. Here, however, national security considerations would play a major role. After all, the nuclear-weapon states would be hesitant about sharing their capabilities with states other than their closest allies.

As seen from the host state, inspector access to its nuclear weapons and facilities poses serious risks of passing on classified information: Could some inspectors be there under false guise to gather intelligence on behalf of another state? If so, what could they learn? Would an inspector from another nuclear-weapon state learn more, or look for other things, than inspectors from other countries?

What would an inspector from a state seeking to acquire nuclear weapons want to find out? For instance, is it isotopic ratios and similar information, or is it the layout of the weapon? Is it more important to protect the internal composition of advanced weaponry than that of an early-generation weapon, or should all weapons be equally protected irrespective of generation?

The host state may ask itself some of these questions when considering acceptable levels of intrusiveness. As a default position, it is therefore likely to provide only a minimum level of transparency just to be safe. Yet, this position may backfire. Seen from the inspector's point of view, a delay or deferral in access, for example, may be seen as a way to circumvent inspections in cases where compliance is an issue. Inspectors may think that the host is squirreling away a treaty-limited item. Consequently, inspection designers need to develop procedures and methods for resolving compliance issues involving national security-related facilities and information. These procedures are likely to differ from state to state.

Yet another challenge relates to the safety of the inspectors and the facility staff. Inspectors need to know how to behave around conventional explosives, as well as nuclear material. They must be made aware that certain restrictions are in place to prevent an accident rather than to curtail access. The large quantity of conventional explosives involved even in latest-generation nuclear devices puts restrictions on what equipment the inspectors can bring in, as well as what clothes they should be allowed to wear. This information should be available to the inspector upfront so as to avoid any misinterpretations or suspicions.

Verification Challenges: Protecting the Dismantlement Facility

Verification activities in established assembly/disassembly sites, such as AWE Burghfield in the United Kingdom or Pantex in Amarillo, Texas, are likely to be challenging.

The host will wish to protect as much sensitive information as possible, while the inspectors will wish to find out the truth. Naturally, any instruments or equipment that can give away device-based information relating to the mass, configuration, or isotopics of the physics package are sensitive. Other information that will need to be protected is the exact facility layout linked to various processes, schedules for input and output, and the location and function of security systems. Moreover, inspectors will be in close contact with ordinary facility operations, which may be unrelated to the verification objective. In addition to being a potential security risk, the inspectors' presence will interrupt site operations. Facility staff may feel that the presence of international inspectors is threatening, and the facility operator may want to safeguard the anonymity of his or her staff. There is a very real risk that the host's sensitivities will override the inspector's demands for transparency, effectively undermining the verification regime.

Many if not all of these concerns may be remedied by choosing built-for-purpose disarmament facilities and training programs. The advantage of constructing a new facility built with international inspections in mind is that it would be possible to share the facility floor plan with the inspectorate as soon as it leaves the drawing board. Inspectors could then be invited to conduct design-information verification as the facility is constructed. During these visits, the inspectors check the building against the floor plan to make sure that there are no hidden trapdoors, extra piping, or other undeclared construction. Ideally, all the nuclear-weapon states would build identical dismantlement facilities in order to facilitate inspections. Each facility could be placed within a larger construction protected by whatever physical protection measures the host state deemed necessary. This way, one would facilitate inspections while accommodating national security concerns. Facility operators could be specially trained to accommodate inspectors while protecting information at the facility.

Inspection designers should compare the costs and benefits of building new, identical built-for-purpose dismantlement facilities with using old, existing facilities with their inherent challenges.

A Proposal for a Future Research Agenda

Getting to zero nuclear arms will take a long time. It will be a frustrating process fraught with difficulties and dangers, but, as Browne stated, this is "a challenge we can overcome."[6] Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs Jonas Gahr Støre made clear recently that achieving the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons requires at least five things: political leadership at the highest levels, commitment followed up by action, nondiscrimination, transparency, and cooperation.

Støre held that "[n]on-nuclear-weapon states should cooperate with nuclear-weapon states to develop the technology needed for verifying disarmament. Nuclear-weapon states should seize the opportunity presented by reductions in nuclear weapon numbers to demonstrate this technology."[7] At a technical level, this cooperation in nuclear disarmament verification research should focus on at least the following:

1. Developing a generic model of the entire dismantlement process. This model should include all relevant verification objectives and technologies and identify suitable verification procedures for each dismantlement action.
2. Developing a declaration standard. This standard should allow the inspected party to list all sites, documentation, and personnel relevant to the verification process. It should include a section describing sites, documents, or personnel not eligible for inspection and for what reasons. It should include an attached description of special safety precautions the inspectorate must take when visiting the facilities.
3. Identifying key inspection points and associated measurement technologies and techniques, including information barriers and other restrictions. The IAEA Trilateral Initiative made significant headway in this work. The British and Norwegian research institutes are developing an information barrier system and procedures that will be credible and mutually acceptable to all parties under future disarmament treaties.
4. Developing procedures and methods that will help states-parties and the inspectorate resolve compliance concerns involving national security-related facilities and information.
5. Calculating the costs of building new, identical built-for-purpose dismantlement facilities and comparing these with the costs of using existing facilities with their inherent challenges.

A joint commitment by nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states will make verified reductions and, eventually, elimination of all nuclear weapons a reality. Joint cooperation between laboratories, where possible, will further this goal. It is time to seize the opportunity and get to work.

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Andreas Persbo is a senior researcher at the Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC) in London and publisher of the VCI weblog dedicated to verification, compliance, and implementation issues. Marius Bjørningstad is an adviser on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament issues at the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority. The views expressed in the article are the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or institutes participating in Norway-United Kingdom nuclear disarmament verification research.

The Trilateral Initiative: A Model For The Future?

Thomas E. Shea

Level 1: limit the initiative to accepting only unclassified materials, which would have removed those materials from reuse;
Level 2: accept classified forms of fissile material without attempting to establish that the forms actually represent nuclear warheads or components thereof;
Level 3: verify the fact that the items presented are in fact nuclear warheads or specified components thereof, including specific model identifications; or
Level 4: start with the dismantlement of weapon systems or subsequent stages so that the monitoring could attest to the removal of warheads from delivery systems.

Accomplishments

Could the Trilateral Initiative Be Reactivated?

States looking at verifying nuclear disarmament might consider reactivating the Trilateral Initiative. In particular, two options might be pursued:

1. The initiative could be reactivated as a three-way study effort to continue work aimed at fleshing out a verification system in relation to nuclear disarmament. With no obligations to commit, that would be the low-risk option, more likely to gain support but running the risk of being a perpetual experiment.
2. Alternatively, Russia, the United States, or both acting together could negotiate agreements in a few months that could allow them to begin to submit weapons-origin fissile material to IAEA verification. Although the preparatory work carried out was extensive, significant practical issues remain. Phasing in the agreements over time could allow progress to be made while gaining confidence in the security measures implemented. Under such an arrangement, Russia or the United States would retain the right to determine which fissile materials to submit, when to submit them, and the conditions necessary. Through such provisions, Russia, the United States, and any other state possessing nuclear weapons that would enter into such an arrangement could gain the assurances needed to protect their security interests. The agreements could have a specified duration to provide an out if the parties could not reach agreement.

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ENDNOTES

3. The isotopic ratio chosen was such that there was at least 10 times as much plutonium-239 as plutonium-240, which is true for plutonium used in nuclear weapons in Russia and the United States.

ENDNOTES

1. George P. Shultz et al., "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons," The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2007, p. A15.

2. Margaret Beckett, "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons?" Keynote address at the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference, Washington, DC, June 25, 2007.

3. Des Browne, "Laying the Foundations for Multilateral Disarmament," Speech before the Conference on Disarmament, Geneva, February 5, 2008.

4. United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research and the Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC), Coming to Terms With Security: A Handbook on Verification and Compliance (London: VERTIC, 2003), p. 1.

5. Allan Krass, Verification: How Much Is Enough (Stockholm: SIPRI/Lexington Books, 1985), p. 2.

6. Browne, "Laying the Foundations for Multilateral Disarmament."

7. Jonas Gahr Støre, Statement at the Conference on Disarmament, Geneva, March 4, 2008.

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Should Israel Close Dimona? The Radiological Consequences of a Military Strike on Israel’s Plutonium-Production Reactor

Bennett Ramberg

Much ink has been spilled about apprehensions in Israel and the West that Iran could develop nuclear weapons, prompting calls in American, Israeli, and now even Arab circles for the application of military force to stop the mullahs. Yet, there is another, more immediate nuclear-related danger to the Jewish state that has received far less attention: the possibility that Israel's adversaries could use more easily acquired conventional weapons to force a deadly release of radioactivity from Israel's plutonium-production reactor at Dimona.

In Middle Eastern tit-for-tat, the concern generated currency when the London Sunday Times reported in late 2007 that Israel went on "red alert" 30 times as anxiety grew that Damascus would retaliate against Dimona for Israel's September 6 strike on a suspected Syrian nuclear site. On Israeli state television, a commander of a Patriot air defense missile battery stated, "Every civilian aircraft en route from Cairo to Amman, or from Jeddah to Cairo and vice versa, which deviates even slightly from its route, sets off an alarm and risks a missile being fired."[1]

Israel's fear reflects the Middle East's unique history: since World War II, the only military strikes on nuclear facilities have taken place in the region.[2] In 1980, Iranian aircraft attempted to destroy Iraq's Osirak reactor but missed the mark, hitting adjacent structures. In June 1981, Israel finished the job in a dramatic cross-regional raid. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Iraqi aircraft mounted multiple attacks on Iran's two partially constructed power reactors at Bushehr.[3] In 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, the United States bombed a small Iraqi research reactor at Tuwaitha,[4] and Saddam Hussein launched several Scud-B rockets toward Dimona.[5] In 2003, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq to halt its presumed nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs.

Yet, in no case did these raids on nuclear facilities cause radiological consequences. Either the plants were still under construction (Osirak and Bushehr), had radioactive elements removed prior to the strike (Tuwaitha), or the attacker simply missed the mark. The outcome of a successful strike on the decades-old Dimona reactor could be different. Today, multiple factors may drive Israel's adversaries to hit the plant: its perceived centrality to Israel's nuclear weapons program, revenge for Israeli strikes on neighboring states, Dimona's symbolic significance as one of the Jewish state's most valued assets, and, most disturbingly, an attack to intentionally release the radioactive contents of the plant as a weapon of war or terrorism.

This raises a question: given the likely and serious consequences of a successful attack for Israel's public health, economy, and society, should Israel close Dimona? Does the centrality of the reactor for Israel's nuclear arsenal argue otherwise? On balance, shutting down or mothballing the Dimona reactor would reap both important security and political benefits.

Radiological Consequences of an Attack on the Dimona Reactor

Situated in a relatively remote desert at the Negev Nuclear Research Center, the Dimona reactor, also referred to as IRR-2, lies approximately 25 kilometers west of Jordan, 75 kilometers east of Egypt, and 85 kilometers due south of Jerusalem. Dimona is a heavy-water-moderated, natural-uranium-fueled reactor. Although the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates its power at 26 megawatts thermal (MWt),[6] most independent analysts believe that in the mid-1970s Israel upgraded the installation to generate between 70 and 150 MWt.[7] That output makes it not only the region's largest reactor for the moment-once Iran's Bushehr atomic power plant goes online, it will have more than 20 times the power[8]-but the sole evident producer of plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons.[9]

Although Israel neither confirms nor denies its atomic arsenal, experts generally accept that it has been a nuclear-armed state for several decades. Its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, inaugurated the enterprise to compensate for the country's strategic vulnerability, a fledgling army, and the West's unwillingness to enter into a formal alliance to defend Israel's survival.[10] Estimates of the nuclear arsenal range from 75 to 200 weapons, comprising bombs, missile warheads, and possibly tactical weapons.[11] Since it went into operation in the mid-1960s with initial French assistance, the reactor has produced plutonium and tritium for these nuclear weapons, which Israel has fabricated in a nearby underground chemical separation plant and a nuclear component fabrication facility.[12]

To model the consequences of a successful missile attack on the installation, the U.S. Department of Defense's Hazard Prediction and Assessment Capability code (HPAC) was utilized. Described as a counterproliferation and counterforce modeling tool, HPAC estimates the effects of hazardous material discharges and of the use of weapons of mass destruction, including casualties. HPAC's Nuclear Facility model calculates the properties of radioactive material released during incidents at nuclear reactors and related facilities. For Dimona, HPAC provides an input data file that lists the reactor core inventory of radioactive materials (fuel and fission products) for each MWt of operating power.

Given the uncertainties in the precise operating power of Dimona, separate HPAC calculations were performed assuming the reactor generated 26, 70, or 150 MWt, although the lower power level of 26 MWt would have produced only plutonium for a few dozen nuclear warheads over Dimona's lifetime, a figure well below Israel's presumed weapons inventory. To estimate the radionuclide release from a military strike, the first day of the April 26, 1986, Chernobyl Unit 4 accident[13] served as a model, as characteristic of a catastrophic incident involving an explosion, fire, and the bypass of containment (Chernobyl Unit 4 did not have a containment structure). The consequences were scaled to the much smaller release Dimona could emit. It was hypothesized that a military strike could breach the reactor's containment dome, which is visible in ground photographs and satellite imagery; disperse the heavy water surrounding the reactor core; and create explosions and fire involving the nuclear fuel elements, ejecting radioactive material into a puff carried away from Dimona by prevailing winds.

In a military strike, like a reactor accident, two key radionuclides, iodine-131 and cesium-137, would constitute important components of the public impact of elevated cancer risk. Although a short-lived element with an eight-day half-life, iodine-131 poses unique, early health concerns because it concentrates in the thyroid. Cesium-137, with a 30-year half-life, poses a longer-term "ground shine" risk to populations resident or working in contaminated zones. The risk increases with the concentration of the element.

Of the many release scenarios HPAC could generate, three are displayed to communicate a reasonable range of outcomes. The chosen maps also illustrate the broad impact of different reactor power levels and seasonal prevailing winds. In general, estimates show that large populations could receive acute low doses within the first 24 hours, at or below the average total annual dose from natural background radiation and medical procedures. Nevertheless, these low doses slightly increase the cancer incidence. Closer to the Dimona reactor, the release could generate substantially higher doses, risking the health of the nearby communities and the thousands of workers at the site, in addition to the emergency response teams who, at Chernobyl, bore the brunt of the most acute radiological impacts.

Figure 1 (see print edition) characterizes a November attack on the reactor operating at 150 MWt carrying the radioactive plume in the northwesterly direction over the city of Dimona (a community of 30,000 inhabitants) and then toward Beersheba before scattering toward Israel's heavily populated coastal plain housing approximately four million inhabitants. Statistically, this scenario could generate several hundred cancers above the expected natural rate for the exposed population. In a scenario exhibiting lesser impacts, were the reactor operated at only 26 MWt, an August attack would produce a narrower plume concentrated within Jordan's thinly populated south. Finally, in a February attack with the reactor generating 70 MWt, contaminants would settle in the West Bank. This scenario predicts the maximum number of excess cancers, exceeding 600 at the 70 MWt level and 1,000 at 150 MWt level, because of the more concentrated populations and collective doses that population would receive.

Given the secrecy shrouding Dimona, the maps and table provide rough probabilities that change with the input of different variables. Not factored into the calculations are such complicating but unascertainable factors as the age of the fuel (fresh fuel will have a lower buildup of radioactive elements, and as a matter of course, Dimona may not accumulate two-year-old fuel similar to that that blew apart at Chernobyl);[14] reductions in the quantity of iodine-131 in the reactor core were the plant shut down for weeks prior to an attack; operations at very low power to produce tritium; or the possibility that an attack would so fracture and scatter the reactor core that the absence of concentrated fires would diminish the release. Nor, due to the absence of data, do the calculations include the potentially significant contributions that could come from on-site spent fuel and high-level waste from reprocessing or separated plutonium. The modeling does suggest that were the Jewish state's adversaries bent on affecting the greatest number of Israelis, they would take advantage of late fall winds. To wait for winter would risk contaminating Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

In sum, because of Dimona's relatively small size and remote location, only in the worst cases are populations in the hundreds or more found to be at risk, distributed over a large fraction of the Israeli and Palestinian population. Israeli authorities have recognized the jeopardy to communities near Dimona in response to reactor accident concerns, particularly the vulnerability of the thyroid to iodine-131. To address the problem, they have distributed potassium iodide tablets to the nearby towns of Aruar, Dimona, and Yerham to block the absorption of iodine-131.

Risk and Response

These findings suggest that a successful strike on an operating Dimona reactor that breached containment and generated an explosion and fire involving the core would present effects similar to a substantial radiological weapon or dirty bomb. Although consequences would represent only a small fraction of the Chernobyl release, for Israel, a country the size of New Jersey with a population of some six million, the relative economic dislocation, population relocation, and immediate and lingering psychological trauma could be significant.[15]

Israel has not been unmindful of these challenges. From the outset of its nuclear program, it acted to reduce the dangers. It placed the reactor in the Negev. It placed critical facilities for manipulating nuclear material in deeply buried cells. It heavily defended the installations with anti-aircraft and missile defenses.[16] For some years, however, a hubris crept into the evaluation of the plant's vulnerability. Following decisive military defeats of its neighbors in past wars, some Israeli advisers disdained their ability to strike the plant. For example, in May 1984, after I published a book about the consequences of military attacks on nuclear power plants, an Israeli intelligence officer came to the United States to inquire about the book's conclusions regarding reactor vulnerability as Israel planned a nuclear power plant. The officer belittled the peril, arguing that no Arab air force had ever overcome Israeli air defenses and none ever would.

At that time, history provided odd support. Although Soviet reconnaissance aircraft flew over the reactor in May 1967 without incident,[17] during the June 1967 war, Israel shot down one of its own Ouragan jet fighters when it strayed over the facility.[18] In 1973, Dimona's defenders downed a wayward Libyan civilian airliner heading for the reactor, killing 108 people.[19] The 1991 Gulf War upset whatever solace Israel could take from the past. Iraqi Scud missiles rained on Tel Aviv, and one came close to striking Dimona. Hezbollah's bombardment of northern Israel in 2006 further demonstrated the country's vulnerability to crude rocket attack. Although Israel's Arrow ballistic missile defenses, which surround Dimona today, may be superior to the Patriot system that failed in 1991, Syria's more advanced Scuds and Iran's Shahab-3 rocket present a more capable challenge than Saddam's projectiles.

Furthermore, interest in "taking out" the installation, which reached an early pinnacle during Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt in the 1960s,[20] has now renewed. Following Israel's September 2007 strike, Syrian legislator Mohammad Habash said, "If Syria feels threatened by Israel, it will be hard to stop our missile operators from responding to the Israeli aggression by attacking the Dimona nuclear reactor."[21] Iranian General Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr remarked in 2004 that "[i]f Israel fires one missile at Bushehr atomic power plant, it should permanently forget about Dimona nuclear center, where it produces and keeps its nuclear weapons, and Israel would be responsible for the terrifying consequence of this move."[22] The March 2008 announcement by Israeli defense officials that Hezbollah had acquired rockets with the range to hit the plant raised further concerns that Dimona continues to be in the crosshairs of Israel's enemies.[23]

The Costs and Benefits of Shutting or Mothballing Dimona

Given mounting regional tensions and the capacity of Israel's adversaries to strike Dimona, does prudence dictate closure of the plant? Certainly Israel would sustain costs. Its capacity to produce weapons-useable plutonium and tritium would end. Absent an enrichment program or nuclear-weapon design improvements, closure would freeze the total size of the Israeli nuclear arsenal based on its current inventory of plutonium. Israel's supply of tritium, which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen with a half-life of 12.5 years, would decrease, but that element could be produced in an accelerator.

Israel could manage these challenges and take advantage of substantial benefits by closure. Dimona has produced all the plutonium Israel's armed forces could possibly utilize. The numbers of nuclear weapons in the arsenal, even if the weapons were not tritium boosted, suffice to destroy any collection of adversaries multiple times over and are therefore sufficient for deterrence. Closure would eliminate a radiological hostage and a reactor, which is among the world's oldest and which has already suffered minor mishaps, that Israel should shut because it is nearing the end of its life expectancy of safe operation.

In addition, Israel could derive political and strategic benefits. It could demand compensatory security guarantees from the United States and NATO.[24] More broadly, in the public relations war, it could claim that closure marks a step toward a regional fissile material cutoff treaty in the effort to demonstrate its commitment to reducing regional nuclear tensions.

Alternatively, the Jewish state could mothball the plant, removing all radioactive elements from the site while keeping the facility in cold standby in the event circumstances required a restart.

Israel may conclude that avoiding the squeeze a shutdown would impose on weapons production outweighs the environmental threat posed by a successful attack. It may bank on the effectiveness of its defenses, the ineffectiveness or poor accuracy of enemy munitions, or the reluctance of adversaries to risk contamination of Arab populations in Jordan and the West Bank. It may also take solace from the failure of adversaries to effectively attack the plant in past conflicts. Were Israel to anticipate a strike, it could shut the plant and, as Iraq did in 1991, remove the "hot" material to a safe location.[25] A shutdown alone could reduce the inventory of iodine-131.

Public banter about striking Dimona and Iran's nuclear plants raises a host of other troubling questions. Looking to the future, should atomic installations expand through the Middle East-Iran's Bushehr power reactor will be the first to fire up, possibly later this year-Israel's neighbors will see in the mirror their own reactors' vulnerability to military attack. Like Israel, they may take comfort in reactor defenses. Additionally, similar to India and Pakistan, they could replicate the 1990 treaty that the South Asian adversaries negotiated forbidding attacks on nuclear sites.

Nonetheless, such an accord, defenses, or mutual vulnerability acting as a deterrent to attack would not provide a guarantee that plants will be immune from military or even terrorist strikes in such an unstable part of the world. This ought to raise the question whether the planned growth of plants, many orders of magnitude larger than Dimona, should go forward. Until the region resolves its political differences, nuclear energy planners ought to take a second look. In the meantime, Israel would do well to reflect whether, given its own reactor vulnerability, keeping Dimona operating is worth the risk. I believe it does not.

Corrected online September 3, 2008. See explanation.

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The Radiological Dangers of an Israeli Attack on Iran's Nuclear Facilities

Bennett Ramberg

In a region where an "eye for an eye" has defined adversarial relations for millennia, it merits examining what response Israel could exact for an attack on Dimona. Although Syria has the capacity to strike the plant, which it has threatened to do, Syria's proximity to the Jewish state makes it an easy target for reprisal. Given Israel's September 2007 attack on Damascus's suspected nuclear site, Israel would have to apply any revenge on Syria to other, non-nuclear targets.

Iran, Israel's most capable adversary, is another matter. Clearly, a successful blow on Dimona by Iran or Hezbollah surrogates would generate an Israeli public outcry for revenge even were Tehran's attack in response to Jerusalem's destruction of Iran's enrichment facilities.

Although Iran operates several small nuclear research reactors, two larger plants would dominate the attention of Israel's military planners, the 40-megawatt thermal heavy-water reactor at Arak and the 1,000-megawatt electric Russian-supplied nuclear power plant at Bushehr. The Arak installation shares many of Dimona's features as a dedicated plutonium generator but is years away from completion. Obviously, were Israel to strike before the plant commenced operations, as it did in the 1981 bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor, no radiological consequences would ensue.

Bushehr is quite another matter. The plant may go critical in a matter of months. It is evidently a nuclear power plant, the first of many Iran plans to build over the next decades. Nonetheless, some warn that it could serve as a plutonium mine for nuclear weapons despite the inefficiency of civil-reactor plutonium for bombs.[1] Iran could have such an option once its enrichment program is up and running. At that point, it could rely on its own fuel rather than its current practice of relying on Russian fresh fuel. Moscow has insisted that it will only provide such fuel if the spent fuel and its plutonium content is remitted back to Russia.

Relying on its own fuel would allow Tehran to conduct reprocessing without international encumbrance, unless it violated International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. This risk could also make Bushehr a target for Israeli military action.

Given Bushehr's size and some recent analyses concluding that Israel has the capacity to destroy any Iranian nuclear plant, the radiological releases from Bushehr's destruction could approach the scope of Chernobyl.[2] Fortunately, however, the plant's remote location along the Persian Gulf coupled with prevailing northwesterly winds would carry the most concentrated radioactive plumes south into lightly inhabited parts of Iran and the waters of the gulf, likely limiting public health impacts.

Still, as one of the most valued assets in Iran's economy and one that could contaminate vast regions of the Iranian countryside and beyond, Tehran could not treat the plant's loss lightly. Arguably, the radiological mutual hostage relationship in which Israel and Iran would find themselves could discourage attacks. India's decision not to strike Pakistan's nuclear weapons complex, fearful that retribution would include attacks on its civil nuclear sector, and the subsequent agreement the two countries negotiated provides a precedent that Israel and Iran should consider.[3]

ENDNOTES

1. Victor Gilinsky, Marvin Miller, Harmon Hubbard, "A Fresh Examination of the Proliferation Dangers of Light Water Reactors," Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, October 2004.

2. Whitney Raas and Austin Long, "Osirak Redux? Assessing Israeli Capabilities to Destroy Iranian Nuclear Facilities" International Security, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Spring 2007).

3. George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).

Lessons From Chernobyl for Dimona

Bennett Ramberg

The 1986 Chernobyl accident marks the most significant release of radiation from a nuclear reactor mishap to date. The radiological consequences of a successful military strike on Dimona, a reactor with an output of well under 5 percent that of the Soviet plant, would pale in comparison. Still, because a successful attack could generate harmful radiological contamination, Israel could learn much from how the Soviet Union and successor states coped with the tragedy.

Similar to Chernobyl, the heaviest radiological consequences likely would fall within the immediate vicinity of Dimona, although downwind hotspots could emerge. At Chernobyl, Soviet emergency responders performed heroically, but they were ill prepared to deal with the disaster. Many hours elapsed before authorities provided radioiodine blocking tablets to nearby populations. That interval increased the number of thyroid cancers. The additional 40 hours it took authorities to evacuate the nearby community of Pripyat and the weeks it took to remove 100,000 inhabitants residing in more distant but heavily contaminated zones added to the problem.

Still, postmortem analyses concluded that what evacuation did occur "substantially reduced radiation exposures and the radiation-related health impacts of the accident."[1]

Israel can learn from this finding. It should have in place sheltering and evacuation protocols for all potential radiological impact zones. Future national civil defense exercises, such as the April 2008 exercise that tested the country's response to a missile and chemical weapons attack, must include the radiological risks presented by Dimona. Also, authorities should consider a much wider distribution of radioiodine blocking tablets beyond the communities near the plant.

Contaminated foodstuffs, particularly radioiodine-laced milk that impacts the thyroid of its principal consumers-children-posed an additional problem during and following the Chernobyl releases. Israel must prepare to address this and other contaminated-produce risks by stocking food, e.g., powdered milk, in secure warehouses for distribution. Replicating Chernobyl, agriculture will require monitoring for years. In time, natural processes such as rain and soil migration will concentrate radionuclides in some areas and remove some elements from others. Human intervention will help. Land and urban reclamation, along with population relocation and medical monitoring, proved costly in the former Soviet states, running into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The relatively small radionuclide release Dimona could generate should make meeting Israel's challenge and costs somewhat more bearable.

Finally, the failure of Soviet public officials to tell the public the truth about Chernobyl marked one of the most grievous errors in the handling of the accident.[2] The result contributed to a rate of long-term psychosomatic illness three to four times greater than unaffected control groups. The sense of victimization and associated depression continues to be the largest lingering impact on the broadest population. Israeli authorities could reduce needless fears by educating citizens that Dimona is no Chernobyl and that they are well prepared to manage the radiological challenge that destruction of the country's nuclear reactor may pose.

ENDNOTES

1. Chernobyl Forum, "Chernobyl's Legacy: Health, Environment and Socio-Economic Impacts," IAEA/PI/A.87 Rev.2 / 06-09181, April 2006, p. 7.

2. Evelyn Bromet et al., "Psychological and Perceived Health Effects of the Chernobyl Disaster: A 20-Year Review," Health Physics, Vol. 93, No. 5 (November 2007), pp. 516-521.

Bennett Ramberg served in the Department of State in the George H. W. Bush administration and is author of Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril (1984).

ENDNOTES

1. Uzi Mahnaimi, "Israel on Alert for Syria Airstrike," The Sunday Times (London), November 11, 2007.

2. For the history of the use and contemplation of force to halt nuclear weapons programs from World War II to the present, including in the Middle East, see Bennett Ramberg, "Preemption Paradox," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2006, pp. 48-56.

3. Leonard Spector, Nuclear Ambitions: The Spread of Nuclear Weapons 1989-1990 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990), pp. 190, 208-209.

4. Burrus M. Carnahan, "Protecting Nuclear Facilities From Military Attack: Prospects After the Gulf War," American Journal of International Law, Vol. 86, No. 3 (July 1992), p. 524, fn. 1, 5.

5. "Iraq Says It Aimed Missiles at Israeli Reactor, Says Allies Face Defeat," Associated Press, February 17, 1991; "The Gulf War: Nuclear Plant Is Targeted by Iraq," The Guardian (London), February 18, 1991.

6. The IAEA provides multiple citations establishing Dimona's operating power of 26 MWt. For example, see IAEA, Safe Decommissioning for Nuclear Activities: Proceedings of an International Conference (Vienna: IAEA, 2003) (held in Berlin, October 14-18, 2002). Megawatt thermal (MWt) refers to the thermal or heat output of a reactor in contrast to megawatt electric (MWe), which measures the electrical output from the reactor.

7. For a discussion of the range of values for Dimona's thermal power and implications for plutonium production, see David Albright, Frans Berkhout, and William Walker, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996: World Inventories, Capabilities, and Policies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 260-263.

8. The Bushehr nuclear power plant is a 1,000 MWe, 3,000 MWt light-water-moderated, light-water-cooled power reactor. See G. Raisali et al., "Calculation of Total Effective Dose Equivalent and Collective Dose in the Event of a LOCA in Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant," Radiation Protection Dosimetry, Vol. 121, No. 4 (2006), pp. 382-390.

9. Research reactors elsewhere in the Middle East include Algeria's reactors at Es Salam (15 MWt) and Nur (1 MWt); Egypt's ETRR-1 and ETRR-2 at the Inshas Complex (2 MWt and 22 MWt, respectively); Iran's research reactors at the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Centre (.03 MWt) and Tehran Nuclear Research Center (5 MWt); Israel's IRR-1 at Soreq Nuclear Research Center (5 MWt); Libya's IRT-1 at the Tajoura Nuclear Research Center (10 MWt); Morocco's MA-R1 at the National Center for Science and Engineering (2 MWt); Syria's SRR-1 Reactor in Dayr al-Hajar (0.03 MWt); and Turkey's ITU-TRR at the Technical University of Istanbul (0.25 MWt). See IAEA, "Nuclear Research Reactors of the World," www.iaea.org/worldatom/rrdb/.

10. For an excellent history of Israel's nuclear weapons program, see Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

11. Robert S. Norris, Hans M. Kristensen, and Joshua Handler, "Israeli Nuclear Forces, 2002," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October 2002, pp. 73-75.

12. For a comprehensive description of the weapons activities at the Negev nuclear research center, see Frank Barnaby, The Invisible Bomb (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989), pp. 24-45.

13. To estimate the magnitude of a radiation release following an attack on Dimona, the fractions of various radionuclides released during the first day of the Chernobyl accident were multiplied by the Dimona core inventory of radionuclides assuming the 26 MWt, 70 MWt or 150 MWt power levels. Radiation releases from Chernobyl Unit 4 occurred over a 10-day period before the reactor fire was extinguished. During this period, 20 percent of the core inventory of iodine-131 was released along with 13 percent of the cesium-137 inventory. On the first day, beginning with two explosions involving the reactor core, 5.1 megacuries (MCi) of iodine-131 and 0.6 MCi of cesium-137 were emitted, accounting for 8 percent of the iodine-131 and 4 percent of the cesium-137 core inventory. For the Dimona calculations, iodine-131 releases of 1.7 percent, 4.4 percent, and 9.4 percent of the Chernobyl releases were estimated for Dimona operating powers of 26 MWt, 70 MWt and 150 MWt, respectively. Cesium-137 releases of 0.2 percent, 0.4 percent, and 1.1 percent of the Chernobyl releases were estimated for Dimona operating powers of 26 MWt, 70 MWt and 150 MWt, respectively. Other categories of reactor-core radionuclides were also scaled accordingly from Chernobyl to Dimona. The calculations also assume the reactor's discharge occurs over a one-hour period (one surmises that Israeli emergency response and fire-fighting at the Negev Nuclear Research Center would be more effective than the Soviet response at Chernobyl). Once the radioactive source term is calculated by the HPAC system, HPAC's atmospheric dispersion model calculates the path of the radiation plume from the site, the degree of contamination, and doses to exposed populations based on historical weather and population databases in the code. The radiation dose for a 24-hour exposure to the plume was then tallied (the duration of evacuation or sheltering may be more or less rapid).

14. Frank von Hippel, communication with author, April 2008.

15. The Chernobyl accident has generated much debate about the extent of its consequences. Current documentation finds that several thousand often treatable thyroid cancers dominated evident physical impacts, apart from the 28 people who perished from acute radiation syndrome at the time. However, the mental health effects may have impacted the most people by increasing the rates of serious depressive anxiety and unexplained physical symptoms by 100-300 percent as compared to control groups. Projections out to 2065 suggest that Chernobyl will generate tens of thousands of additional cancers across Europe and the former Soviet states resulting in fatalities that could exceed 15,000. In addition, combating the accident, evacuation, relocation, cleanup, and lost productivity cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Future costs include construction of a new protective structure. Chernobyl Forum, "Chernobyl's Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts," IAEA/PI/A.87 Rev2/06-09181, April 2006; Elizabeth Cardis et al., "Estimates of the Cancer Burden in Europe from Radioactive Fallout From the Chernobyl Accident," International Journal of Cancer, No. 119 (2006), pp. 1224-1235; Evelyn Bromet, et al., "Psychological and Perceived Health Effects of the Chernobyl Disaster: A 20-Year Review," Health Physics 93 (5), November 2007, pp. 516-521.

16. Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, Foxbats Over Dimona, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 124.

17. Ibid., p. 122-133; David Horovitz, "Russia Confirms Soviet Sorties Over Dimona in '67," Jerusalem Post, August 23, 2007.

18. Warner D. Farr, "The Third Temple's Holy of Holies: Israel's Nuclear Weapons," The Counterproliferation Papers, Future Warfare Series, No. 2 (September 1999), www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cpc-pubs/farr.htm.

19. Ahron Bregman, A History of Israel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 146.

20. Ginor and Remez, Foxbats Over Dimona, pp. 30-31, 38, 123.

21. "Syrian MP Threatens Attack on Dimona," Jerusalem Post, December 24, 2007.

22. "Iran Warns of Preemptive Strike to Prevent Nuclear Attacks," Agence France-Presse, August 18, 2004.

23. "Defense Officials: Hizbullah Has Rockets That Can Reach Dimona," Jerusalem Post, March 27, 2008.

24. For elaboration, see Bennett Ramberg, "Defusing the Nuclear Middle East," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 2004, pp. 45-51.

25. Mordechai Vanunu told the London Sunday Times in September 1986 that Dimona, which normally stored high-level waste in liquid form above ground, had the capacity in an emergency to pipe the material into storage tanks in the bottom floor of the six-story underground reprocessing plant. Barnaby, Invisible Bomb, p. 38.

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