Login/Logout

*
*  

"Though we have acheived progress, our work is not over. That is why I support the mission of the Arms Control Association. It is, quite simply, the most effective and important organization working in the field today." 

– Larry Weiler
Former U.S.-Russian arms control negotiator
August 7, 2018
Arms Control Today

DOE Conducts 'Subcritical' Test

On July 2, the Department of Energy (DOE) conducted the first in a series of "subcritical" experiments deep underground at the Nevada Test Site. Although these experiments involve the use of nuclear weapon materials (including plutonium) and high explosives, these components are not in a potential weapons configuration and cannot generate a nuclear yield. DOE maintains that the experiments, which will produce data on the behavior of plutonium under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, are an "essential component" of its science-based stockpile stewardship program intended to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal under the Comprehensive Test Ban (CTB) Treaty. DOE plans to conduct one more subcritical experiment this fall and four in 1998.

Though the July 2 experiment, code-named "Rebound," drew some international and domestic criticism, most governments (Iran was the notable exception) refrained from characterizing the experiment as a nuclear weapons test and a violation of the CTB Treaty. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Tang Guoqiang said July 3 Beijing "will closely follow this situation" and urged all states to "faithfully fulfill their commitments" under the treaty. That same day, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns replied that the subcritical experiments are consistent with the CTB Treaty because they are not nuclear tests and that the Chinese "ought to get their physics right."

Earlier, in a June 20 letter to President Bill Clinton, 44 members of the House of Representatives urged the administration to cancel the experiments, claiming that they are not necessary to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and "could severely damage global entry-into-force of the [CTB]."

The North Korean Nuclear Crisis: Understanding The Failure of the 'Crime-and-Punishment' Strategy


 

Leon V. Sigal

Leon V. Sigal is a consultant at the Social Science Research Council in New York. This article is based in part on Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, a study to be published by Princeton University Press this winter.

The United States nearly went to war with North Korea in June 1994 to stop its nuclear weapons program. North Korea had just shut down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon and begun removing spent fuel rods, which contained enough plutonium to make five or six bombs. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), having failed to gain full access to the North's nuclear sites to determine whether it had reprocessed enough plutonium in the past for one or two weapons, had turned the matter over to the UN Security Council, where the United States was rounding up votes to impose economic sanctions on Pyongyang. Knowing that North Korea had repeatedly denounced sanctions as a "declaration of war," President Bill Clinton on June 16 decided to dispatch substantial reinforcements to Korea. That precaution was likely to trigger a North Korean mobilization, risking a war that neither side intended.

The June 1994 crisis was a turning point in U.S. nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. For nearly three years, starting in late 1991, the United States had tried to coerce Pyongyang into halting its nuclear weapons program, and failed. Then it tried cooperation and succeeded. In the end, it was the high-level diplomatic intercession of former President Jimmy Carter that diffused the immediate crisis and allowed Washington and Pyongyang to peacefully resolve their nuclear stalemate.

The IAEA was central to both that failure and that success. The United States initially tried to use the IAEA as the chief witness for the prosecution, pressing the agency to tighten its inspection procedures and to build a case against North Korea for violating the nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT). This "crime-and-punishment" strategy ceded the initiative behind U.S. nonproliferation policy to the IAEA, an organization that is ill-equipped for such a role. That the agency did not have the power to compel adherence to international nonproliferation norms was all too often demonstrated during the long nuclear stalemate with Pyongyang. The agency's narrow institutional interests severely limited its deal-making ability with a regime that clearly wanted to strike a grand nuclear bargain.

Even worse, it was not clear what would be accomplished by uncovering hard evidence of past North Korean transgressions. Attempting to punish those transgressions was more likely to prompt rather than prevent proliferation. A cutoff of trade and contact would give the North good reason to acquire nuclear arms. Worst of all, by focusing on the past, this strategy lost sight of the future. North Korea's lone operating reactor at Yongbyon was generating five or six bombs' worth of spent nuclear fuel all the while. And even more significantly, Pyongyang was also constructing two larger reactors and a second production line at its reprocessing plant that would enable it to produce up to 30 more bombs a year. It was not at all clear how punishing North Korea for past transgressions would stop those developments, short of war.

After June 1994, the United States began negotiating with North Korea in earnest. In October 1994, they concluded the Agreed Framework, under which the United States promised to help replace the North's nuclear reactors with two, more-proliferation-resistant light-water reactors; provide security assurances; and, forge diplomatic and economic ties in return for a verifiable end to its nuclear arms program. The IAEA plays a pivotal role in monitoring that agreement, a role that it is more capable of playing effectively than that of prosecution witness.

The story of U.S. nuclear diplomacy with North Korea has important lessons for proliferation policy in the future, particularly given Washington's increasing concern over Iran's nuclear intentions and the Clinton administration's apparent willingness once again to pursue a policy of coercion over one of cooperation.

 

North Korea: A Nuclear Enigma

North Korea was understandably regarded by most experts in and out of government as a prime threat to the nonproliferation regime. It certainly had a nuclear weapons program, and it undoubtedly reprocessed more plutonium than it was willing to acknowledge to the IAEA. Although Pyongyang had signed the NPT in 1985, it did not ratify its safeguards agreement with the IAEA until April 1992—nearly five years later than the deadline stipulated in the treaty.

Yet, at any time from 1992 on, North Korea could have removed spent fuel from the Yongbyon reactor and extracted the plutonium. The North did not, and it allowed the IAEA to verify that. If North Korea was so intent on acquiring a nuclear arsenal, why would it negotiate a safeguards agreement that would open Yongbyon to international inspection? Why consider a ban on reprocessing? Why not just go ahead and build bombs?

For a country supposedly intent on obtaining nuclear weapons, that self-restraint seems difficult to explain. One possible explanation is that, starting in 1990 or 1991, North Korea was trying to trade in its weapons program for what it thought it needed more—security, political and economic ties with the United States.

For several years, however, the United States could not bring itself to engage in sustained diplomatic give-and-take with North Korea. Instead, it adopted the crime-and-punishment approach, putting pressure on Pyongyang to allow nuclear inspections and holding out talks as a reward for compliance with its demands. Washington entered into talks only with extreme reluctance, and even then it was unwilling to specify what it would give North Korea in return for abandoning its nuclear arms program. When it did make promises, they were not always kept, often because Washington was dependent on others to fulfill them. As a consequence, the United States very nearly stumbled into war.

 

Misuse of the IAEA

The IAEA was central to this misguided strategy. Its use and misuse are keys to understanding U.S. nuclear diplomacy with North Korea.

Because all nuclear reactors produce plutonium as a byproduct of nuclear fission, it is essential to safeguard nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities against diversion of plutonium for bomb-making. The IAEA performs its safeguards mission in two main ways: by monitoring these facilities with surveillance cameras, radiation detection gear, occasional inspections, and sealing off critical areas to impede diversion of nuclear material; and by material accountancy, carefully weighing and measuring the flow of nuclear material in and out of declared facilities to detect and give timely warning of any diversion.

The agency has little ability to detect, let alone monitor, undeclared nuclear facilities on its own. It has to rely on member-states to detect clandestine sites and share this intelligence. Washington's unwillingness to share what intelligence it had was a critical source of the IAEA's failure to detect Iraq's bomb program.

Safeguards also require the consent and cooperation of the host country. North Korea, while it proved willing to allow agency inspections to verify that it was not diverting spent nuclear fuel to bomb-making, resisted inspections to look into its nuclear past.

The IAEA is much maligned and misunderstood. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, IAEA inspections were more effective than U.S. satellite imagery in narrowing the range of uncertainty about North Korea's nuclear past and present. The existence of the IAEA also made it easier for the United States to mobilize international political support in order to persuade North Korea to abandon bomb-making and implement the Agreed Framework, once it was reached. Despite North Korean accusations of IAEA bias, it was politically more palatable for Pyongyang to grant access to agency inspectors than to allow South Korea or the United States to monitor its nuclear facilities.

Yet, the IAEA's internal rules, procedures and organizational interests became impediments to nuclear deal-making with North Korea. Having been judged a failure in Iraq, the agency was determined to lay down the law in North Korea, fearing that any flexibility in implementing safeguards would create an unfortunate precedent for other would-be proliferators. Once the agency detected a discrepancy in the North's initial declaration about the amount of plutonium that had been reprocessed in the past, it insisted on inspections to determine the North's nuclear history. That put the agency on a collision course with Pyongyang, which wanted something in return for granting inspectors greater access.

At times the IAEA became more preoccupied with investigating North Korea's nuclear past than with constraining the country's nuclear future. At other times, most notably in the fall of 1993 and in May 1994, it nearly abandoned monitoring altogether rather than accept limits on its inspections, seemingly more concerned about upholding the sanctity of its own procedures than about preventing further proliferation.

 

Ignoring North Korean Reciprocity

U.S. security assurances were needed to convince an insecure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. These assurances took nuclear forms: withdrawal of all U.S. nuclear warheads from the Korean Peninsula and suspension of "Team Spirit," the large, joint military exercise conducted annually with South Korea. When the Bush administration unilaterally provided these assurances in September 1991, North Korea reciprocated, putting the brakes on its nuclear ambitions. On December 31, 1991, North Korea concluded a "Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" with South Korea, agreeing not to "test, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons." Going beyond obligations under the NPT, it pledged not to "possess facilities for nuclear reprocessing and enrichment." It accepted mutual inspections with South Korea, with procedures to be worked out by a Joint Nuclear Control Commission. On January 30, 1992, North Korea signed its safeguards accord with the IAEA.

Most important of all, Pyongyang halted reprocessing plutonium, which is necessary to make nuclear arms, and delayed removing spent nuclear fuel, containing plutonium, from its reactor until May 1994, more than a year later than the IAEA expected it to be de-fueled. For the next year and a half, North Korea allowed the IAEA to verify that it was neither reprocessing nor defueling, even while it was impeding agency efforts to get at its nuclear past. Since late 1991, by IAEA and U.S. intelligence assessments, it never resumed reprocessing. Having taken these steps, North Korea had reason to believe that nuclear diplomacy might pay off.

Instead of engaging in diplomatic give-and-take, the Bush administration adopted the crime-and-punishment approach. It decided to hold one high-level meeting with North Korea, and to use that meeting, not to begin diplomatic dialogue, but to restate its preconditions for any future talks: IAEA inspections and progress toward bilateral North-South inspections. In Washington's view, the United States was not about to pay for North Korea to do what it had already agreed to do by signing the NPT.

In Pyongyang's view, it was being asked to give up its nuclear bargaining chip first, and only then would the United States talk about quid pro quos. Washington encouraged the IAEA to get tough with North Korea and pressed South Korea to hold up economic and other ties until Seoul secured intrusive inspections in talks with Pyongyang. As a consequence, the United States was left hostage to an IAEA and a South Korea whose own internal politics led them at times to adopt even more prosecutorial postures.

 

Ignoring the North's Offer

The standard U.S. account asserts that throughout 1992, North Korea was pursuing a strategy of "cheat and retreat," while the United States and the IAEA were tightening the screws and forcing it to comply. Yet, the pattern of events is open to a very different interpretation, that North Korea was engaged in show-and-tell, revealing enough to demonstrate willingness to make a deal while withholding enough to retain its bargaining leverage.

Pyongyang was surprisingly forthcoming about its nuclear program. On May 4, it gave the IAEA a 150page declaration inventorying its nuclear material and equipment, a response more prompt and detailed than was required under its safeguards agreement. It disclosed some of what a determined proliferator should have wanted to hide. In addition to three reactors, its declared inventory confirmed construction of a reprocessing plant, somewhat disingenuously described as a radio-chemical laboratory. North Korea's most surprising disclosure was that it had reprocessed some 90 grams of plutonium in the past. U.S. intelligence had been unaware of the reprocessing. The declaration prompted a reassessment that the North may have removed enough spent fuel to extract one or two bombs' worth of plutonium.

IAEA Director-General Hans Blix made an official visit to North Korea from May 1116. He accepted an invitation to tour the reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, which he found to be still under construction and far from fully equipped. He was told the IAEA could "visit" any site it wanted to, even those not on the list of declared nuclear facilities subject to inspection. An ad hoc inspection was scheduled for the end of May to verify the North's initial declaration. Once that audit established a baseline for the North's nuclear facilities and materials, the IAEA could institute routine inspections.

Having engaged in a little show-and-tell, North Korea invited the IAEA and the United States to pay to see more, but its invitation was ignored. During Blix's visit, North Korean officials asked for help in acquiring new light-water reactors and supplying them with nuclear fuel in return for abandoning reprocessing. North Korea repeated the proposal in a June 1 meeting with U.S. diplomats in Beijing. Only a member in good standing of the NPT was entitled to such help. That was an opening to negotiate with North Korea about replacing its gas-graphite reactors in return for a halt to its nuclear weapons program.

The Bush administration, determined to pursue the crime-and-punishment approach, dismissed the idea out of hand. There was no interagency deliberation and no reply. The bid for replacement reactors received so little attention that when the North revived it in July 1994, it came as a complete surprise.

 

Witness for the Prosecution

Having adopted the crime-and-punishment approach, behind the scenes the administration was urging the IAEA to tighten up its monitoring procedures and pressing South Korea to insist on elaborate and intrusive inspections of its own—inspections so demanding that, as one senior U.S. official put it, "If the North accepted them the South might have to reconsider." Washington leaned on Seoul to delay other North-South ties until it obtained them. IAEA officials bridled, however, at the thought that South Korean inspections were needed because the agency's were not rigorous enough for Washington.

The IAEA seemed to confirm the worst suspicions about North Korea. During their second ad hoc inspection at Yongbyon in July 1992, inspectors took smear samples at glove boxes used for handling nuclear material. Subsequent analysis revealed an "anomaly" in the North's initial declaration to the IAEA. Although North Korea claimed it had separated about 90 grams of plutonium in early 1990, the agency's analysis showed that reprocessing had occurred on three separate occasions—in 1989, 1990 and 1991—and involved different batches of irradiated material. Although many took the reprocessing as conclusive evidence of North Korean deception, other, less sinister activities involving the glove boxes could have contributed to the results. The agency reached no firm conclusion about the amount of plutonium extracted, however.

A follow-up inspection in September led to a "prototype" standoff. During earlier visits, inspectors had been too interested in the reprocessing plant to get around to the suspected waste sites, but now they were quite interested in the sites. Eventually the North relented and let the inspectors go to one of the waste sites. They were met by a military officer who said there was nothing new there, but new construction was clearly visible. Earth had been bulldozed around one building which months earlier had two above-ground levels, whereas now it had one. The inspectors were allowed to take radiological measurements but no samples, and left without visiting the second site. Unbeknownst as yet to the inspectors, U.S. intelligence satellites had detected North Korean efforts to bury pipes connecting the reprocessing plant to the waste site. As a result of the IAEA's discovery of discrepancies in the North's initial declaration, the Bush administration began to toughen its stance.

 

'Team Spirit' Resumes

Team Spirit was an instrument of coercive diplomacy, a way to put pressure on the North to accept intrusive inspections. The outgoing Bush administration gave its blessing to the resumption of Team Spirit in October 1992. The incoming Clinton administration allowed the exercise to proceed, not wanting to undercut the strong position taken by Bush. The new administration also continued its predecessor's policy of using the IAEA to pry open access to North Korea's nuclear facilities, in an effort to constrain its nuclear program without offering anything in return.

A shakeup at the IAEA brought in a new team in the safeguards division, led by Demetrios Pericos, determined to build a case for prosecuting North Korea for noncompliance with the NPT. During a November ad hoc inspection, the agency asked North Korea to clear up discrepancies in its initial declaration. Dissatisfied with the reply, the agency asked North Korea for a sampling of the spent fuel rods, but was told the refueling machine at Yongbyon was broken. That made it impossible for the agency to conduct a nondestructive analysis, which could help determine the reactor's operating history, that is, how many bombs' worth, if any, of spent fuel may have been removed in the past.1

By February 1993, the agency believed that the nuclear fuel was then too old for nondestructive analysis. But according to one U.S. official, no one at the IAEA or in the U.S. government had done a "technical analysis" to determine whether this type of assessment could be performed at a later date. (According to this official, in July 1993 scientists at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory discovered that the nuclear fuel still "could have told you everything you needed to know.")

The IAEA did not want to wait until the North refueled its reactor to do nondestructive analysis of the fuel rods. It instead chose another, less conclusive way to determine whether the reactor had been refueled: by analyzing two nuclear waste sites at the Yongbyon facility believed to contain evidence of past reprocessing activities. It asked to take samples at the two sites, but Pyongyang refused. When Blix on February 9 requested a special inspection of the sites, North Korea rejected the request as an infringement of its sovereignty.

Previously, the IAEA had conducted only two special inspections—in Romania and in Sweden. On February 25, the IAEA Board of Governors took the unprecedented step of setting a one-month deadline for access to the waste sites, and warned of "further measures" by the Security Council if North Korea failed to comply.

While Pyongyang might have been willing to trade away its nuclear bargaining chips in high-level talks with the United States, it was not about to let the IAEA whittle away that leverage without getting something in return. Nor was it about to yield to a threat to resume Team Spirit. On March 8, Team Spirit began and President Kim Il Sung ordered North Korean forces placed on "semi-war alert status." Four days later, Pyongyang gave the world 90-days' notice of its intent to withdraw from the NPT. Although many observers mistook North Korea's notice to withdraw as irreversible, its statement implied it would reconsider when the United States "stops its nuclear threats" (meaning Team Spirit) and the IAEA "returns to its principle of independence and impartiality" (referring to special inspections).

 

The U.S. Response

North Korea's signature of the NPT provided the international legal basis for curtailing its nuclear weapons program, and getting Pyongyang to comply fully with the treaty was central to any sound nonproliferation policy. Yet, the United States was reluctant to spell out inducements for the North to comply. That left Washington no alternative but coercive diplomacy, trying to compel compliance by threatening economic sanctions. In seeking Security Council backing for sanctions, however, the United States had to convince its fellow members—particularly China—that it had tried diplomacy and failed. This prompted the United States to enter into negotiations with North Korea, precisely what Pyongyang had been trying to get Washington to do all along.

An appreciation of North Korea's insecurity might have led the new administration to abandon coercive diplomacy, but it did not. Instead, the Clinton team pursued what it called the "step-by-step" approach. It kept setting preconditions for high-level talks, insisting that North Korea take the first step. Only after the North complied fully with IAEA safeguards and resumed North-South talks would the United States engage in diplomatic give-and-take.

On March 30, North Korea's minister of atomic energy "categorically" rejected the IAEA's demand for a special inspection, but invited consultations on "implementation" of the safeguards agreement; that is, inspections at other than the nuclear waste sites. On April 1, the IAEA Board of Governors declared North Korea to be in violation of its safeguards agreement—the first time the board had found an NPT signatory to be in noncompliance with its obligations. While 28 countries supported the resolution, China and Libya voted against it and India, Pakistan, Syria and Vietnam abstained. The IAEA referred the matter to the Security Council to enforce compliance. On April 8, in a move designed to avoid a veto by China, the Security Council president issued a statement urging further consultations between the IAEA and Pyongyang. While much of Washington was wondering whether Beijing would allow a sanctions resolution to pass, few considered resolving the dispute through direct talks with North Korea.

Although the North was ready to allow inspections to confirm there was no reprocessing of its spent fuel, it drew the line at more intrusive inspections that could have helped the IAEA ascertain how much plutonium may have been produced in the past. In an April 6 statement that received only cursory notice, the North Korean Foreign Ministry accused "some officials of the IAEA secretariat and some member nations" of "deliberately ignoring our reasonable proposal and patient efforts to seek a negotiated settlement of the problem." Even after declaring its intent to withdraw from the NPT, the statement made clear that Pyongyang was prepared to let the agency monitor its nuclear installations to prevent any diversion of nuclear material. However, the statement said the "so-called 'nuclear problem'"—how much plutonium it may have reprocessed in the past—was "not a problem between our country and the IAEA" but "between us and the United States," and should not be raised "in the UN arena" but "resolved through negotiations" between the North and the United States.

On April 22, the IAEA reluctantly accepted North Korea's offer "in order not to lose the continued validity of safeguards information," what came to be known as the "continuity of safeguards." The agency expected to observe the refueling of the Yongbyon reactor during its May inspection, but no refueling took place. Instead of calling attention to North Korea's restraint, U.S. and IAEA officials publicly expressed fear that the North would in the future divert nuclear material to a weapons program. The prevailing view, according to Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who then shared it, was that Pyongyang was "playing for time, trying to figure out some way to keep this program going."

The same day the IAEA acquiesced to limited inspections, Washington agreed to reopen high-level talks. Once again, the only inducement the United States was prepared to offer North Korea for not abandoning the NPT was more talks. Following a round of high-level talks in New York in early June, North Korea announced on June 11—one day before its withdrawal from the treaty was due to take effect—that it had "decided unilaterally to suspend" that fateful step "as long as it considers necessary" while talks continued. In a joint statement, the two sides agreed to a set of principles for resolving their differences, among them, "assurances against the threat and use of force, including nuclear weapons," and "peace and security in a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, including impartial application of full-scope safeguards, mutual respect for each other's sovereignty, and noninterference in each other's internal affairs." In a unilateral statement, the United States said it "would regard additional reprocessing, any break in the continuity of IAEA safeguards or a withdrawal from the NPT as harmful and inconsistent with our efforts to resolve the nuclear issue through dialogue."

In May and June, the United States, concerned that the IAEA might not regain access to the facilities at Yongbyon, began preparing an alternative: training South Koreans to conduct inspections under the 1991 North-South denuclearization accord. Washington also urged Seoul to make its proposal in the North-South talks more negotiable by dropping demands for short-notice challenge inspections and focusing on the main concern—diversion of spent fuel and reprocessing.

At the time, Pyongyang was allowing the IAEA to confirm what U.S. intelligence was seeing for itself: the Yongbyon reactor was operating and the reprocessing plant was not—evidence that the North was not removing spent fuel or producing more plutonium. It was also allowing the agency to do the routine maintenance necessary to keep the monitoring equipment in working order. Yet, Pyongyang continued to insist that the IAEA could gain unimpeded access to its nuclear facilities and to its nuclear past only as part of a larger deal with the United States.

The makings of a nuclear deal appeared closer when high-level talks in July yielded an agreed statement in which Washington pledged, "As part of a final resolution of the nuclear issue, and on a premise that a solution to the provision of light-water-moderated reactors (LWRs) is achievable, the United States is prepared to support the introduction of LWRs and to explore with the DPRK ways in which the LWRs can be obtained." To the Americans, it was not a formal offer of new reactors but just a commitment to negotiate, and it elicited a commitment to negotiate in return. For its part, North Korea promised to begin consultations with the IAEA "on outstanding safeguards and other issues as soon as possible," and to "begin" North-South talks as soon as possible on bilateral issues, "including the nuclear issue."

The North was once again prepared to allow inspections to ensure the continuity of safeguards, but it stopped well short of allowing full inspections by the IAEA or any inspections by South Korea. On July 31, Pyongyang told the agency its access would be limited to performing routine maintenance. When inspectors tried to cross that line during an August 310 inspection, the North Koreans roughed them up, leading to another standoff. The IAEA complained that the access it had been granted "is still insufficient for the agency to discharge its responsibilities."

During its August inspection at the reprocessing plant, the IAEA was alarmed to discover that one of three seals at an access point to the hot cells was broken, and another showed signs of tampering. (The third seal remained in place, impeding access.) The discovery was considered as incontrovertible proof that further reprocessing was taking place, but that may not have been the case. According to one U.S. government expert, the seal at the hot cell could have been damaged accidentally as a result of construction that was then underway. Those with a "Manichaean" view of the North Koreans took this as evidence that they were "rearranging the plumbing." "American policy was not Manichaean," said Daniel Poneman, senior director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council, "but we did not have the luxury of assuming an innocent explanation."

Publicly, the IAEA began pressing for wider access, insisting that inspections for the sole purpose of maintaining its monitoring equipment would not satisfy its concern that no diversion of nuclear material was occurring. Although Washington was quietly urging the IAEA to agree to the limits, the agency was reluctant to settle for less than full-scope safeguards. During a mid-October visit to Seoul, Blix said, "Safeguards are not anything you have a la carte, where a customer orders hors d'oeuvres and dessert. It is a whole menu."

To expand its access, the IAEA now resorted to brinkmanship. In September, the monitoring cameras at Yongbyon had run out of film, leaving the North freer to divert spent fuel to bomb-making. That was partly the inspectors' own doing. According to a Defense Department official, "They set the cameras to run as fast as possible so that they could go back in. It was a game of chicken." Once the film in the monitoring cameras was exhausted, the IAEA could insist on a thorough inspection of the reactor and reprocessing plant in order to assure that no diversion had taken place. During a meeting of the IAEA's General Conference in September, Blix rejected "token safeguards measures" and told members the "area of noncompliance" was widening. On October 1, the conference voted 722 for a resolution calling on North Korea to "cooperate immediately" in fulfilling its safeguards obligations, but setting no deadline. On October 12, Pyongyang announced it was suspending consultations with the agency.

On October 28, North Korea notified the agency it was willing to host an inspection for routine maintenance of the monitoring equipment, but again insisted that wider access would depend on progress in talks with the United States. Four days later Blix told the UN General Assembly that as a result of North Korea's noncompliance with its safeguards agreement, a number of verification measures had been delayed and the "continuity of some safeguard-relevant data has been damaged." Blix stopped short of saying that continuity had been broken, which would have required him to seek sanctions, thus derailing the U.S.North Korean talks. The General Assembly, by a vote of 1401 (the "nay" cast by North Korea), called on Pyongyang to cooperate with the IAEA. Of the nine abstentions, China's was critical. The IAEA's bluff was called; without a credible sanctions threat it soon would have to accept limited inspections or remain in the dark about the North's nuclear activities at Yongbyon.

 

A New U.S. Policy Evolves

While the IAEA remained committed to inspections to get at North Korea's nuclear history, the Clinton administration in October began gravitating to a policy first suggested in March by Steven Fetter and proposed to Defense Secretary Les Aspin in May: Give priority to stopping further bomb-making by North Korea before trying to determine how many bombs, if any, it may have produced in the past. Pentagon officials began to spell out what had to be done to dismantle the existing North Korean nuclear program and what access inspectors would need to satisfy its objectives. The dominant view was that while special inspections should be deferred, ad hoc and routine inspections were required. "The primacy of the dismantlement objective seemed so obvious on the merits that it started us thinking about how valuable the special inspections were anyway," said Ashton Carter. U.S. experts concluded that special inspections were not the best way to get at North Korea's nuclear past.

At a mid-October deputies' committee meeting, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gallucci, who led the U.S. delegation during the New York high-level talks, took the lead in moving in the same direction. Raising doubts whether the step-by-step approach was getting anywhere, he recommended adoption of the comprehensive approach.

Gallucci advocated canceling Team Spirit on the condition that North Korea allow the IAEA to complete the August inspection. He also talked about reordering U.S. objectives along the lines of recent thinking in the Pentagon. "I was aware, as was [the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency], that we couldn't defend a deal that failed to deal with the past and Blix would never stand for it," Gallucci said, "But it was nuts to nail down the eight or two or no kilograms from the past and then have the North accumulate hundreds of kilograms in the future. That was technical arms control gone crazy." Gallucci favored inspections for the purpose of safeguards continuity, nothing more, but he was loath to negotiate with North Korea on behalf of the IAEA. The IAEA, however, was demanding not only ad hoc and routine inspections, but also special inspections, which North Korea had insisted were a matter for negotiation in high-level talks with the United States.

Now it was South Korea's turn to impede diplomatic give-and-take. The United States and North Korea had been nearing agreement on announcing a date for the resumption of high-level talks and on the suspension of Team Spirit exercises once Pyongyang and the IAEA agreed on inspections and working-level North-South talks resumed at Panmunjom. Although Seoul had approved the idea, South Korean President Kim Young Sam surprised President Clinton by reversing himself during a November 23 White House meeting, insisting that high-level talks and the suspension of Team Spirit be conditioned on the North's sending a presidential envoy to Seoul and engaging in "serious" talks. That led the United States to renege on the position it had taken in talks with North Korea. Washington was again setting preconditions for talks, this time at Seoul's behest, and tacitly threatening to resume Team Spirit if Pyongyang did not go along.

The IAEA was also increasing the pressure on Pyongyang. On December 2, Blix told the Board of Governors that the agency's safeguards in North Korea could not provide "any meaningful assurance of peaceful uses" of the North's declared nuclear installations and materials. That was his oblique way of saying that the film and batteries in the IAEA's monitoring cameras at Yongbyon had been exhausted. In a slap at both Washington and Pyongyang, Blix told the board the next day that safeguards obligations "are not subject to the course of discussions with other parties." That comment prompted Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Robert Einhorn to fly to Vienna to ask Blix for "clarification." A senior IAEA official later recalled that "the concern on the administration's part was we should not make any statement that would be interpreted by the hawks in Washington" as reason to call off negotiations.

On December 3, during working-level talks in New York, North Korea agreed to allow inspectors into all seven declared nuclear sites, but limited their access inside the reactor and reprocessing plant to assuring that no spent fuel was being diverted. Ad hoc and routine inspections would have to await progress in high-level U.S.North Korean talks. Pyongyang's offer met the administration's recently revised aim of inhibiting further plutonium production. "Whatever happened in 1989," Aspin said during a "Meet the Press" interview at week's end, "the situation is not deteriorating now. They are not developing more plutonium in order to be able to make more nuclear bombs."

But the IAEA was openly dissatisfied. "There must be unrestricted access to all declared sites," insisted the agency's spokesman, David Kyd. "Restrictions on the two facilities are not negotiable." The IAEA was holding out for nothing less than North Korea's full compliance with its safeguards agreement and did not want to resort to deal-making to achieve it. The agency preferred to have Pyongyang abandon the NPT altogether rather than remain partially in and partially out. As Bruno Pellaud, the IAEA's deputy Director-General, put it in July 1994, the North's departure from the treaty would at least clarify its noncompliance status.

 

The Collapse of 'Super Tuesday'

U.S. and North Korean negotiators reached agreement by telephone December 29. The North was "prepared to take the steps necessary to assure the continuity of inspections," but the details were left for it and the IAEA to work out. Pyongyang had told the IAEA December 20 that if it accepted inspections "for maintaining the continuity of safeguards" and if Team Spirit 1994 is stopped, a third round of high-level U.S.North Korean talks could be held. If there is agreement on a package solution in those talks, North Korea said it would "accept the agency's full inspection" and consult on arrangements. It said it was also "ready to discuss and permit, within a reasonable scope, more inspection activities required" in order to "recover the period in which the surveillance equipment was out of operation."

Having settled for inspections to maintain the continuity of safeguards, the United States now insisted that "the number and scope of inspections required is a matter for the IAEA, not the United States, to decide." By saying so, said one State Department official, the United States "became a prisoner of the IAEA."

The IAEA was determined to uphold its right to conduct ad hoc and routine inspections. On January 7, 1994, Pyongyang invited IAEA inspectors to Yongbyon to work things out "on the spot." The agency rejected the offer, saying inspections had to be agreed to in advance and could not be limited to "containment and surveillance." On January 10, the IAEA gave North Korea a detailed list of what it wanted to do; Pyongyang refused to accept the full list. While it would allow inspectors "to verify non-diversion of nuclear material from the nuclear facilities since the last inspection" and allow them to do what they required "to remedy the gaps" in the continuity of safeguards because the cameras had stopped taping, the North insisted that inspections "not exceed the scope which was permitted in the past." On January 20, the IAEA went public, saying that North Korea had balked at "a significant number of measures on the list," and adding that Blix had made it clear to the North that the agency would not send an inspection team unless there is full agreement. A State Department spokesman backed the agency, saying, "If the IAEA is unhappy, we are unhappy."

Pyongyang was unmoved. On January 24, it told the IAEA that the agency's proposal "goes beyond the scope of the present consultation and is the same as the scope of routine and ad hoc inspections under the safeguards agreement." One day later, U.S. officials disclosed that the Pentagon was "looking favorably" on shipping about three dozen Patriot antimissile batteries to South Korea. President Clinton had not yet made a decision on the missiles, but was expected to approve the deployment if the North had not agreed to inspections by February 21, the date that the IAEA Board of Governors was scheduled to reconvene.

On January 31, a spokesman for the South Korean Ministry of Defense stepped up the pressure, saying Seoul would seek to resume Team Spirit exercises in 1994 unless the North agrees to full nuclear inspections. Pyongyang reacted immediately, issuing a statement that same day accusing the United States of reneging on the December 29 agreement and accusing the IAEA of ignoring its unique status—partly in and partly out of the NPT. The North also accused the agency of delaying consultations until its monitoring cameras had run out of film.

On February 2, Gallucci sent a message to his North Korean interlocutor in high-level talks, First Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Kang Sok Ju, in an attempt to reassure the North that the inspections sought by the IAEA for the continuity of safeguards "are designed to ensure non-diversion of nuclear material since the previous full inspection." But the IAEA was seeking more. On February 7, a senior IAEA official said the agency had repeatedly told North Korea that "neither you, nor the United States, nor the two of you together, should decide what safeguards are requisite."2

The increasingly public battle led The New York Times to publish an editorial February 11, entitled "Who Is Running Our Korea Policy?" The editorial began:

The Clinton Administration insists it will never subcontract its foreign policy to any international institution. Yet it is doing just that in its nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. It is letting the International Atomic Energy Agency decide how to carry out a deal Washington reached with Pyongyang. By changing the terms of that deal, the IAEA could embroil the United States in a dangerous confrontation on the Korean peninsula.

As threats reverberated in Washington, Seoul tried to sound conciliatory. President Kim Young Sam held a well-publicized meeting of his national security advisors on February 8, which put off the Patriot deployment. Meanwhile, China was rebuffing demarches by the United States, Britain, France and Russia to threaten Security Council sanctions. With the pressure off North Korea, the IAEA relented and agreed on February 15 to an inspection for the purpose of verifying that, in its words, "nuclear material in these facilities has not been diverted since earlier inspections."

Both North Korea and the IAEA declared victory. According to the North Korean Foreign Ministry, "The U.S. and the IAEA secretariat voluntarily withdrew their demand for routine and ad hoc inspections and said they would seek an inspection exclusively for the continuity of safeguards, and this made it possible to decide upon the inspection scope." According to IAEA spokesman David Kyd, "They simply agreed to all of the measures." The stage was set for trouble.

On March 1, or "Super Tuesday" as some officials called it, the simultaneous steps agreed to December 29 finally took effect. Two days later, with IAEA inspectors in Yongbyon, the United States released the text of the U.S.North Korean "agreed conclusions":

Pursuant to the consultations, both sides have agreed to take four simultaneous steps on March 1, 1994 as follows: 1. The USA announces its decision to agree with the Republic of Korea's suspension of Team Spirit '94 joint military exercise. 2. The inspections necessary for the continuity of safeguards as agreed between the IAEA and the DPRK on February 15, 1994 begin and will be completed within the period agreed by the IAEA and the DPRK. [Emphasis added.] 3. The working level contacts resume in Panmunjom for the exchange of North-South special envoys. [Emphasis added.] 4. The USA and the DPRK announce that the third round of U.S.DPRK talks will begin on March 21, 1994 in Geneva.

Each of these simultaneous steps is required for the implementation of these agreed conclusions.

The State Department also made public a U.S. unilateral statement, which said, "The undertaking of the United States regarding Team Spirit '94 and a third round of U.S.DPRK talks are based on the premise that the IAEA inspections will be fully implemented and the North-South nuclear dialogue will continue through the exchange of special envoys." [Emphasis added.] Needless to say, a unilateral statement by Washington was not the same as an agreement with Pyongyang.

The U.S. unilateral statement was a blank check to South Korea, which immediately cashed it. Seoul insisted it would not call off Team Spirit until a North-South exchange of special envoys took place, according to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Hubbard, who said Seoul "tightened the conditions for the exchange of envoys very stiffly." Kang Sok Ju said the agreement only mentioned renewed talks about an exchange of envoys between the two Koreas and "did not touch on fulfillment of the exchange." Pyongyang insisted that Team Spirit be suspended unconditionally before it agreed to an exchange of envoys. That was consistent with the agreed text, but South Korea said otherwise and Washington backed Seoul. Worse yet, South Korea made the suspension contingent on completion of the IAEA inspections, again stretching the terms of the U.S.North Korean agreement to the breaking point. Once again, Washington publicly backed Seoul. At a March 3 State Department press briefing, Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord said, "These inspections have to be successfully carried out . . . . And if that happens and if the North-South envoy exchange happens, then we will go to a third round, and then the Team Spirit decision will kick in." [Emphasis added.] His interpretation was based on the U.S. unilateral statement, not on the U.S.North Korean agreed statement.

Pyongyang, in turn, barred inspectors from taking smear samples at a hot cell for handling spent nuclear fuel, citing "external factors," a reference to Seoul's refusal to suspend Team Spirit and its insistence that the exchange of North-South special envoys precede the reconvening of U.S.North Korean high-level talks. North Korean negotiator Kang wrote Gallucci offering to resume inspections if South Korea retracted its demand for a North-South exchange of special envoys.

Most U.S. officials believe that North Korea deliberately picked a fight with the IAEA. While the agency insisted it needed these samples to determine whether any recent reprocessing had taken place, Pyongyang correctly concluded that they would also help the agency to clear up discrepancies in its initial declaration. North Korea assailed the IAEA for giving its inspectors instructions "inconsistent" with the February 15 agreement, which it interpreted as permitting inspections solely for the purpose of continuity of safeguards. Sampling at the hot cell, the North insisted, "contradicts the IAEA document which says that 'this inspection does not include verification of the completeness of the initial inventory of nuclear material.'" The smear samples, however, were on the list of IAEA activities to which the North had agreed.

In Gallucci's view, "The North Koreans probably made a bad deal." Yet, one experienced Korea watcher in the State Department thinks the North Koreans were just retaliating for South Korean efforts to change the terms of the February 24 agreement, and were surprised when on March 15 the IAEA abruptly withdrew its inspectors, saying it was unable to verify that no diversion had taken place. The next day the United States canceled high-level talks with the North. The IAEA was once again forcing the issue.

On March 21, the IAEA Board of Governors passed a resolution urging North Korea "immediately to allow the IAEA to complete all requested inspection activities and to comply fully with its safeguards agreement." [Emphasis added.] The Board then voted 251 to refer the dispute to the UN Security Council. Libya cast the only opposing vote; China and eight other countries abstained. China was not about to press North Korea or back sanctions. President Jiang Zemin made that clear to President Kim Young Sam in talks in Beijing on March 28.

Having set its aim of constraining North Korea's future plutonium production, the Clinton administration was trying to abandon the crime-and-punishment approach but was having trouble doing so. By going along with IAEA and South Korean attempts to get at Pyongyang's past production activities and reneging on its agreement with the North, it allowed itself to be sidetracked from high-level talks. As a result, the United States would not hold a third round of talks with North Korea until July 1994, a year after the second round. In the meantime, it came perilously close to war.

 

Stumbling Toward War

As the United States began lining up support for sanctions, Seoul was not about to be blamed if war should break out. It dropped its insistence on an exchange of North-South envoys before U.S.North Korean high-level talks could be held. After consultations with Gallucci and Defense Secretary William Perry, Seoul also deferred a decision on rescheduling Team Spirit. That cleared the way for Pyongyang to let the IAEA to complete its March inspection.

North Korea told the IAEA it was ready to let the agency resume the March inspection, even to permit smear samples "as a special exception," in return for dropping the precondition on exchanging North-South special envoys. It was also willing to have inspectors witness the refueling of the Yongbyon reactor to verify that spent fuel was placed in nearby cooling ponds and not diverted to bomb-making. But it balked at ad hoc and routine inspections and refused to let the inspectors remove 300 fuel rods (a cross-section of the 7,500 rods in the reactor) for analysis.

The North was also unwilling to set aside a sample for subsequent analysis. "We can never permit these activities," the Ministry of Atomic Energy told the IAEA, because they go "beyond the . . . agreed scope of the inspection activities for the continuity of safeguards," disregarding Pyongyang's "unique status based on its temporary suspension of the effectuation of its declared withdrawal from the NPT." He added that "these activities would be permitted after a package solution to the nuclear issue is achieved at the next round" of U.S.North Korean talks.

A senior official made the Clinton administration's priorities clear: "We are obviously interested in a historical inquiry, [but] if the risk is losing track of a large quantity of plutonium, then the agency should accept the North Korean plan. Any approach that would squander the opportunity to sample at a later time, we would oppose."3 The IAEA did not share those priorities. It was determined to apply its preferred sampling procedures and to conduct ad hoc and routine inspections, and it did not want to go to Yongbyon just to observe the defueling. In a cable to the IAEA, the United States asked that the agency send inspectors and "be the eyes of the world."

In late March, Blix told Secretary of State Warren Christopher that in the IAEA's estimation, forcing North Korea out of the NPT was preferable to bribing it to comply. The IAEA was run by lawyers like Blix who were preoccupied with the precedents it would set by treating North Korea differently. Moreover, a new director had just taken over the agency's safeguards division and was determined to maintain a tough line with the North.

The IAEA's approach encountered resistance in Pyongyang, which warned the United States May 2 that it was about to begin refueling the Yongbyon reactor. The North may have had good technical reasons for shutting down the reactor, but not for removing spent fuel. Once the reactor was shut down, the spent fuel could remain in it indefinitely. That same day, Gallucci sent a reply to negotiator Kang Sok Ju urging the North to defer discharging the fuel rods to a later date and to contact the IAEA about any safety problems arising from the delay. Gallucci proposed that the disposition of spent fuel be dealt with in the third round of high-level talks "in the context of converting to light-water-reactor technology." He warned that the United States would break off high-level talks: "If the reactor is unloaded without IAEA presence, we will be forced to conclude that the DPRK no longer wishes to resolve the nuclear issue through dialogue. Thus it will be impossible for the United States and the DPRK to continue our efforts to pursue negotiated resolution of the nuclear issue."

On May 4, the IAEA rejected the North's proposal to allow monitoring of the refueling in order to forestall diversion of spent fuel, but not to set aside a sample of fuel rods for future analysis. The following day Gallucci sent another note to Kang warning, "If the DPRK begins to discharge fuel without allowing the IAEA to simultaneously select and store some fuel rods for future measurements it will forever destroy the ability of the IAEA to take such measurements. We will have to conclude that the DPRK has no intention of leaving open the possibility of resolving the nuclear issue through our broad and thorough discussions." That warning redrew a red line Washington had drawn a year earlier. Understandably unwilling to repudiate the IAEA, the United States now had to back the agency's preferred method for getting at the North's nuclear past. In his reply, Kang, insisting that the issue had to be negotiated with the United States, said, "We can never permit the storage of some fuel rods because of the DPRK's unique status." On May 12, the North notified the IAEA that it had begun removing the fuel rods from the reactor. The agency's hand was forced. It decided to send inspectors to consult on sampling the fuel rods, to complete the March inspections and, above all, to observe the defueling. On May 20, with about 5 percent of the fuel rods in the cooling ponds, the IAEA reported to the Security Council that North Korea's discharge of spent fuel without an agreement on sampling "constitutes a serious safeguards violation." That same day, the Clinton administration decided to offer a resumption of high-level talks on the condition that the North allow the March inspections to be completed, admit inspectors to observe the removal and storage of spent fuel, and preserve the possibility of eventually clearing up the anomaly in its initial declaration to the IAEA about past reprocessing. It took courage to hold open the possibility of diplomatic give-and-take in the face of the domestic political reaction to North Korea's about-face.

After the decision, Defense Secretary Perry tried, once again, to direct attention to the North's nuclear future, and away from its nuclear past. "The IAEA, in fact, has told us that it is confident that there has been no diversion of the fuel that has just been discharged," he told reporters. Senior U.S. officials depicted the North's action as a "technical violation" of IAEA protocols. With North Korea scheduled to resume consultations with the IAEA on May 25, even Blix held out hope, saying, "It still seems possible to implement the required safeguards measures" because the key fuel rods had yet to be removed from the reactor. Perry and Blix were both acting on the premise that it would take North Korea three months (the CIA's estimate) to six months (the IAEA's estimate) to unload all the fuel rods, allowing time for diplomacy to take its course. The estimates were based on how many damaged fuel rods were in the reactor and on how long it had taken North Korea to unload two damaged rods in the past. Both agencies' estimates proved to be wrong.

On May 27, as the North continued defueling at a very fast pace, the IAEA alarmed Washington by telling UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali that its ability to "verify the amount" of plutonium accumulated in the past would be "lost within days." At a meeting with mid-level U.S. representatives in New York that day, North Korea rejected a proposal to resume high-level talks on the grounds that it was unwilling to satisfy the IAEA by segregating selected fuel rods for future analysis. In an interview, Gallucci warned Pyongyang that continued defueling would "force us to go back to the Security Council where sanctions would be one of the options."

The Security Council president issued a statement May 30 urging the North to discharge the reactor "in a manner which preserves the technical possibility of fuel measurements, in accordance with the IAEA's requirements." North Korea sidestepped the request. "The refueling is going on. It cannot be stopped," declared Yun Ho Jin, the North's chief representative.

Obscured in the ensuing uproar was the fact that IAEA inspectors could still witness the defueling, allowing detection of diversion of the fuel rods to potential bomb-making, and that Washington was again letting the preoccupation with North Korea's nuclear past take precedence over concern about its nuclear future. President Clinton told a June 2 press conference in Rome, "If the IAEA certifies that the chain of proof is broken, that they cannot establish what has happened, then the question of sanctions will have to be moved to the UN Security Council." In a statement released a few hours later in New York, where it was sure to get attention, the IAEA asserted that Pyongyang "has now made it impossible to select fuel rods for later measurements which would show whether there has been any diversion of fuel in past years."

The North's nuclear history was not in fact irretrievable. A U.S. technical team went to Vienna to show the IAEA ways to retrieve it. One way was to assay the 21 damaged fuel rods that the North had previously removed from the reactor. Another way was to analyze a larger sample of fuel rods than the structured sample the IAEA had hoped to draw. In a June 2 report to the UN Secretary-General, Blix acknowledged the agency might have other options. "The agency has concluded that the limited opportunity which had remained for it to select, segregate, and secure fuel rods for later measurements in accordance with agency standards has been lost," he wrote. [Emphasis added.] "Accordingly, the agency's ability to ascertain, with sufficient confidence, whether nuclear material from the reactor has been diverted in the past has also been lost." [Emphasis added.] But Blix hinted at other ways to get at the past: "For the agency to be able to verify non-diversion, it is essential for the agency to have access to all safeguards relevant information and locations. To achieve that, a paramount requirement is the full cooperation of the DPRK."

Pyongyang was trying to appear cooperative, but, as usual, on its own terms. A North Korean diplomat in Vienna said the fuel rods were being put in the cooling ponds "after writing the location and serial numbers on the rods, with monitoring cameras operating." A Foreign Ministry spokesman claimed that "the refueling is taking place in such a manner as to fully preserve the technical possibility of measuring the fuel rods at a later date as requested by the IAEA when our unique status comes to an end." The spokesman added that "it will be possible to reconstruct the channels and positions of any fuel rods and measure them correctly in the future."

On June 3, Gallucci outlined three options for uncovering the North's past reprocessing activities: "One way is by additional information that could be provided by the DPRK. A second way is by special inspection at the radioactive waste sites and by sampling. And a third way was to reconstruct the reactor operating history through nondestructive analysis of fuel when it was discharged from the reactor." The latter option—the IAEA's preferred technique—was now precluded, however. Carefully choosing his words, Gallucci said the overall ability to get at what happened in the past has been "seriously eroded, [but] that does not mean destroyed."

Nevertheless, Washington seemed trapped by its crime-and-punishment approach. Having told North Korea that a condition of continuing the dialogue was that the IAEA had to be satisfied, the United States once again became a hostage to the agency's confrontation with Pyongyang. On June 9, Gallucci testified that the administration had yet to obtain agreement on sanctions. China was still openly opposed to imposing sanctions. To get around a possible Chinese veto, the United States, in consultations with Japan and South Korea, broached the idea of imposing economic sanctions without Security Council endorsement. The United States had drawn up a set of sanctions to be phased in gradually, and both countries were ready to go along with the first phase of sanctions, but they were unenthusiastic about going ahead without Security Council approval. After the three issued a joint statement that the United Nations should "urgently consider an appropriate response, including sanctions," President Clinton did not sound too eager to impose them, when he said on June 4: "There's still time for North Korea to avoid sanctions actually taking effect if we can work out something on the nuclear inspectors." Although U.S. officials still used the threat of economic sanctions as a way to put pressure on Pyongyang, the administration decided to apply political pressure on the North, postponing any sanctions decision.

On June 10, the IAEA suspended technical assistance to North Korea. Pyongyang reacted by notifying Washington of its intent to withdraw from the IAEA, which was not the same as withdrawing from the NPT and therefore not a violation of one of the red lines drawn earlier by the United States. On June 13, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman declared that "the inspections for the continuity of safeguards, which we have allowed in our unique status will no longer be allowed. Any unreasonable inspections can never be allowed until it has been decided whether we should return to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or completely withdraw from it." The spokesman strongly reaffirmed the North's position that "UN sanctions will be regarded immediately as a declaration of war." Not the same as the start of hostilities, a declaration of war did portend an end to talks. "Sanctions and dialogue are incompatible," the spokesman said. "It is our inevitable option to counter expanded sanctions by hostile forces with expanded self-defense measures."

The drumbeat of war was sounding louder and louder in Washington. The news media exploded with war talk. "War—conventional sooner or nuclear later—is topic A," wrote New York Times columnist William Safire on June 9. "Let's hear from him now, in prime time and sober detail from the Oval Office, about our risk and his resolve," he wrote. In The Wall Street Journal, Karen Elliott House was ready to risk war with China in order to stop North Korea from bomb-making. "The administration has to be willing not only to go to war on the Korean peninsula but also to put the U.S.China relationship on the line," she wrote in a June 15 editorial. "[I]t must tell Beijing privately that the U.S. is prepared to sink any Chinese ship that approaches North Korea and bomb any Chinese transport as soon as it crosses the border into North Korea." War cries were even coming from usually sober voices. That same day, The Washington Post ran an op-ed by former Bush administration officials Brent Scowcroft and Arnold Kanter that sought to toughen the administration's stance. Pyongyang is "on the brink of pulling out of the NPT" in preparation for resuming the reprocessing of spent fuel to extract plutonium, they asserted. "It is also hard to imagine that the 'phased' economic sanctions being proposed by the United States—if and when they are imposed—could possibly be effective in time to slow or halt possible North Korea reprocessing plans," they wrote. Demanding "more decisive action," Scowcroft and Kanter proposed issuing an ultimatum to Pyongyang: "It either must permit continuous, unfettered IAEA monitoring to confirm that no further reprocessing is taking place, or we will remove its capacity to reprocess." Acknowledging that bombing the reprocessing plant and spent fuel in the cooling ponds could launch a second Korean war, they urged a military buildup in South Korea. The administration itself was doing its share of war talk as well. In an unusually explicit reference, Assistant Secretary of Defense Carter said in a speech on June 10 that the Pentagon was "significantly increasing our intelligence assets" in Korea and studying "scenarios" in which North Korea might use nuclear and other forces if confrontation led to war.

The risks of the crime-and-punishment approach were becoming apparent. With Washington on the verge of dispatching reinforcements, there were signs of panic in Seoul. The South Korean stock market plummeted and shoppers emptied store shelves of provisions. As one State Department official remarked shortly thereafter, "This is what it looks like when two countries blunder into war."

 

The Carter Mission

It took the intervention of Jimmy Carter to derail the sanctions strategy and put the high-level talks back on track. Once he did that, the United States and North Korea took just four months to negotiate the Agreed Framework of October 1994 which, if faithfully implemented, will eliminate North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

Carter had a longstanding invitation to go to Pyongyang and was determined to go. He had no authority to speak for the United States, but was going, in his own words, "without any clear instructions or official endorsement." Before his departure Carter was thoroughly briefed on the current situation and administration policy, and he wrote out his talking points and read them to Gallucci. A determined ex-president was not someone who could be tied down by negotiating instructions from a mere ambassador. Gallucci proposed no changes.

To North Korea, which had just been denied a meeting with an assistant secretary of state, the presence in Pyongyang of a former president, especially one who had tried to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula when he was in office, was a token of American respect. Carter was someone Kim Il Sung could do business with.

To the Clinton administration, the Carter mission was a gamble. If he freelanced, he could always be disowned, but not without political repercussions. Even if he succeeded, the administration would be open to criticism by congressional Republicans and South Koreans who disparaged Carter's willingness to take risks for peace. Yet, turning down the former president was also risky, especially if it came to be portrayed publicly as a missed opportunity to avoid war. In the end Carter won Clinton's assent.

Carter publicly repudiated sanctions. Although the Clinton administration pressed on with its sanctions campaign, countries that had previously been unenthusiastic about coercive diplomacy were now firmly committed to temporizing, and Security Council support for sanctions evaporated. After repudiating sanctions, Carter obtained Kim Il Sung's personal pledge to freeze North Korea's nuclear program, allowing IAEA inspectors to remain in place and monitor compliance, and to discuss dismantlement of its reactors and reprocessing plant in high-level talks with the United States. The deal was firmed up in an exchange of notes.

Washington's new-found willingness to deal led to a rapid resolution of the crisis. In October 1994, the two sides concluded the Agreed Framework, an elaborately choreographed series of reciprocal steps to resolve the nuclear stalemate. In December 1995, North Korea and the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, the international consortium created to implement the denuclearization accord, signed a supply agreement for the construction of the two light-water reactors that will be built at Sinpo. As of mid1997, North Korea has lived up to these agreements.

Looking back over this troubled history, the United States proved remarkably resistant to cooperating with North Korea to reduce nuclear risks in the region. Instead, from late 1991 until the summer of 1994, it reflexively favored coercion over dialogue. Washington treated the IAEA as an instrument through which it hoped to impose its will on North Korea. Because the IAEA cannot go where a sovereign NPT state-party will not allow it, this approach ensured a never-ending series of confrontations with little or no recourse for diplomatic give-and-take. Nor were sanctions likely to compel North Korea to give the IAEA access to its nuclear sites. Sanctions did serve as a shield against accusations by domestic critics that the administration was unwilling to stand up to North Korea. Having prodded the IAEA to act as witness for the prosecution, a role it was unsuited to perform, the United States found itself hostage to an IAEA that became relentless in investigating the North's nuclear past.

The United States undoubtedly will again face the choice of whether to choose cooperation or coercion. The Clinton administration's current posture of isolating Iran is impeding attainment of its own nonproliferation objectives. Washington should be cooperating with Russia and other potential nuclear suppliers to confine Iran to a once-through nuclear fuel cycle for its power-generation system with no associated uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing facilities. In addition, the United States should be working cooperatively to ensure that Iran does not build weapons fabrication plants, high-explosive test sites or other sensitive nuclear-related facilities, and that Tehran offers maximum transparency in its nuclear activities.

Instead, the indiscriminate campaign against Iran has alienated other nations. Even worse, by intensifying Tehran's economic crisis, Washington could drive it toward nuclear arms as a cheap substitute for conventional forces. As long as the United States persists in criminalizing proliferation and demonizing so-called rogue states in order to confront them, it will leave itself with politically unpalatable alternatives, to live with more nuclear-armed states or to disarm them, perhaps only temporarily, by force. The lesson of U.S. nuclear diplomacy with North Korea is clear: in trying to stop proliferation, cooperation worked where coercion failed.

 

NOTES

1. The fuel rods are clustered in channels. Knowing precisely what channel a rod came from was important to the IAEA for two reasons. First, it was looking for "discontinuities" in burn-up history, such as would occur if some rods were replaced with others during the life of the core. If the inspectors do not know where the rods were, however, they cannot predict the burn-up they would see and cannot, therefore, confirm that the rod is original. Second, the North Koreans had identified one channel where they had replaced the rods early in the reactor's operating history. Rods removed from this channel could be a very useful tool for confirming the early operating records of the reactor.

2. R. Jeffrey Smith, "North Korea Faces Inspection Deadline," The Washington Post, February 7, 1994, p. A1.

3. R. Jeffrey Smith, "North Korea Refuses Demand to Inspect Reactor Fuel," The Washington Post, February 8, 1994, p. A22.

CFE 'Flank' Accord Enters into Force; Senate Warns Russia on Deployments

 

Sarah Walkling

THE CONVENTIONAL Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty "Flank Document" entered into force on May 15, one day after the Senate unanimously approved a resolution of advice and consent to ratification of the document. The flank accord brings into effect new, higher limits on Russian battle tanks, armored combat vehicles (ACVs) and heavy artillery deployed or stored in the now-reconfigured flank zone.

Finalized at the May 1996 CFE Treaty Review Conference, the flank document adjusts the original CFE Treaty flank limits to alleviate Moscow's difficulties absorbing Russian forces formerly stationed in Central and Eastern Europe and responding to internal security threats, especially the Chechnyan uprising. (Russia had met its aggregate but not its flank limits by the November 1995 deadline).

The new document reduces the size of the flank zone, without changing the numerical limits on ground equipment within the zone. Moscow, which agreed in May 1996 to freeze its treaty-limited equipment (TLE) deployments in the original flank zone, must now reduce these levels by May 31, 1999, to meet its new limits. (See box p. 31) Russia is permitted to use "to the maximum extent possible" treaty provisions for temporary deployment outside its territory and TLE reallocation among parties to achieve the reductions. (See ACT, May/June 1996.)

The flank agreement requires Russia and the other flank states on its troubled southern border to work out ways to accommodate Moscow's reductions. The concerns of four former Soviet republics (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) about Russian deployments prompted the Senate to add conditions to its resolution, which make clear that the United States opposes any attempt by Moscow to deploy forces in other former Soviet republics without the consent of those states-parties to the CFE Treaty.

In a "finding" included in the resolution, the Senate said, "armed forces and military equipment under control of the Russian Federation are currently deployed on the territories of States Parties without the full and complete agreement of those States Parties." One condition, therefore, requires presidential certification of NATO affirmation that without the "freely expressed consent," of the parties involved, the flank agreement does not allow any party to station or temporarily deploy TLE on another's territory, or to reallocate weapons quotas between parties. The condition also requires affirmation of all parties' rights, under the document, to their maximum weapons allotments. On May 15, President Clinton notified Congress that NATO had made these affirmations, quelling the fears of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine that Russia could abuse the flank agreement to increase its own weapons entitlements or legitimize deployment of its equipment on their territories.

Another Senate condition requires the secretary of state to open new discussions to secure the immediate withdrawal of all Russian-controlled forces and equipment deployed on the territories of other CFE states-parties without their consent. In the ongoing negotiations between Russia and Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, which began last year, the Senate insists that the United States participate as an intermediary to protect the rights of these states to "reject or accept conditionally" any Russian requests to temporarily deploy weapons on their territories or to reallocate their weapons allotments with other states.

To discourage future Russian attempts to strong-arm its neighbors and exploit the flank agreement, the resolution states that the Senate "expects" the executive branch to brief the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the speaker of the House at least four times a year on CFE Treaty compliance issues. Also, every January 1, the president must submit three unclassified reports addressing compliance issues, the withdrawal of Russian troops from the territories of its neighbors and "uncontrolled" TLE transferred to secessionist or paramilitary groups. Finally, by August 1, 1997, the president must submit an unclassified report on whether Armenia violated the treaty by allowing the transfer of Russian arms through its territory to the separatist movement in Ngorno-Karabakh.

At the April 29 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the flank agreement, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) asked for assurance that the agreement would not legitimize Russia's military presence outside of its borders. Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) said, "one of the unspoken concerns up here is that [the Clinton administration] made a deal to keep Russia in line as it relates to NATO expansion.... We want to know, did you sell out the Caucasus in order to get Poland in?" Clinton administration officials responded that Russia would go totally unchecked without any flank limits and that ratification of the new flank agreement was necessary to sustain the momentum for conventional force reduction in Europe. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Lynn Davis emphasized that the agreement highlighted Russia's right "to take advantage of flexibilities built into the treaty that all parties can take advantage of," but did not give Moscow the right to station armed forces in other CFE parties.

Also attached to the resolution of ratification was a condition requiring the president to submit to the Senate any agreement that would add parties to the 1972 ABM Treaty. (See p.32.)

Russian CFE Flank Limits

The numbers listed below represent aggregates of active and stored equipment, as per 1990 CFE Treaty definitions. The flank agreement also places individual limits on ACVs deployed in the four oblasts (military districts) removed from the original flank zone, effective May 31, 1999.

  Tanks ACVs Artillery
Original Limits 1 (now apply to the redrawn flank zone) 1,300 1,380 1,680
May 1996 Limits (apply to the original flank zone) 1,897 4,397 2,422
May 1999 Limits (apply to the original flank zone) 1,800 3,700 2,400
1 As negotiated by the former Soviet republics at Tashkent, May 1992.

Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security Between NATO and the Russian Federation

Paris, May 27, 1997

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its member States, on the one hand, and the Russian Federation, on the other hand, hereinafter referred to as NATO and Russia, based on an enduring political commitment undertaken at the highest political level, will build together a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic area on the principles of democracy and cooperative security.

NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries. They share the goal of overcoming the vestiges of earlier confrontation and competition and of strengthening mutual trust and cooperation. The present Act reaffirms the determination of NATO and Russia to give concrete substance to their shared commitment to build a stable, peaceful and undivided Europe, whole and free, to the benefit of all its peoples. Making this commitment at the highest political level marks the beginning of a fundamentally new relationship between NATO and Russia. They intend to develop, on the basis of common interest, reciprocity and transparency a strong, stable and enduring partnership.

This Act defines the goals and mechanism of consultation, cooperation, joint decision-making and joint action that will constitute the core of the mutual relations between NATO and Russia.

NATO has undertaken a historic transformation—a process that will continue. In 1991 the Alliance revised its strategic doctrine to take account of the new security environment in Europe. Accordingly, NATO has radically reduced and continues the adaptation of its conventional and nuclear forces. While preserving the capability to meet the commitments undertaken in the Washington Treaty, NATO has expanded and will continue to expand its political functions, and taken on new missions of peacekeeping and crisis management in support of the United Nations (UN) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), such as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to address new security challenges in close association with other countries and international organizations. NATO is in the process of developing the European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI) within the Alliance. It will continue to develop a broad and dynamic pattern of cooperation with OSCE participating States in particular through the Partnership for Peace and is working with Partner countries on the initiative to establish a Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. NATO member States have decided to examine NATO's Strategic Concept to ensure that it is fully consistent with Europe's new security situation and challenges.

Russia is continuing the building of a democratic society and the realization of its political and economic transformation. It is developing the concept of its national security and revising its military doctrine to ensure that they are fully consistent with new security realities. Russia has carried out deep reductions in its armed forces, has withdrawn its forces on an unprecedented scale from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries and withdrawn all its nuclear weapons back to its own national territory. Russia is committed to further reducing its conventional and nuclear forces. It is actively participating in peacekeeping operations in support of the UN and the OSCE, as well as in crisis management in different areas of the world. Russia is contributing to the multinational forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

I. PRINCIPLES

Proceeding from the principle that the security of all states in the Euro-Atlantic community is indivisible, NATO and Russia will work together to contribute to the establishment in Europe of common and comprehensive security based on the allegiance to shared values, commitments and norms of behaviour in the interests of all states.

NATO and Russia will help to strengthen the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, including developing further its role as a primary instrument in preventive diplomacy, conflict prevention, crisis management, post-conflict rehabilitation and regional security cooperation, as well as in enhancing its operational capabilities to carry out these tasks. The OSCE, as the only pan-European security Organization, has a key role in European peace and stability. In strengthening the OSCE, NATO and Russia will cooperate to prevent any possibility of returning to a Europe of division and confrontation, or the isolation of any state.

Consistent with the OSCE's work on a Common and Comprehensive Security Model for Europe for the Twenty-First Century, and taking into account the decisions of the Lisbon Summit concerning a Charter on European security, NATO and Russia will seek the widest possible cooperation among participating States of the OSCE with the aim of creating in Europe a common space of security and stability, without dividing lines or spheres of influence limiting the sovereignty of any state.

NATO and Russia start from the premise that the shared objective of strengthening security and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area for the benefit of all countries requires a response to new risks and challenges, such as aggressive nationalism, proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, terrorism, persistent abuse of human rights and of the rights of persons belonging to national minorities and unresolved territorial disputes, which pose a threat to common peace, prosperity and stability.

This Act does not affect, and cannot be regarded as affecting, the primary responsibility of the UN Security Council for maintaining international peace and security, or the role of the OSCE as the inclusive and comprehensive Organization for consultation, decision-making and cooperation in its area and as a regional arrangement under Chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter.

In implementing the provisions in this Act, NATO and Russia will observe in good faith their obligations under international law and international instruments, including the obligations of the United Nations Charter and the provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights as well as their commitments under the Helsinki Final Act and subsequent OSCE documents, including the Charter of Paris and the documents adopted at the Lisbon OSCE Summit.

To achieve the aims of this Act, NATO and Russia will base their relations on a shared commitment to the following principles:

 

  • development, on the basis of transparency, of a strong, stable, enduring and equal partnership and of cooperation to strengthen security and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area;

     

  • acknowledgement of the vital role that democracy, political pluralism, the rule of law, and respect for human rights and civil liberties and the development of free market economies play in the development of common prosperity and comprehensive security;

     

  • refraining from the threat or use of force against each other as well as against any other state, its sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence in any manner inconsistent with the United Nations Charter and with the Declaration of Principles Guiding Relations Between Participating States contained in the Helsinki Final Act;

     

  • respect for sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security, the inviolability of borders and peoples' right of self-determination as enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act and other OSCE documents;

     

  • mutual transparency in creating and implementing defence policy and military doctrines;

     

  • prevention of conflicts and settlement of disputes by peaceful means in accordance with UN and OSCE principles;

     

  • support, on a case-by-case basis, of peacekeeping operations carried out under the authority of the UN Security Council or the responsibility of the OSCE.

II. MECHANISM FOR CONSULTATION AND COOPERATION, THE NATO-RUSSIA PERMANENT JOINT COUNCIL

To carry out the activities and aims provided for by this Act and to develop common approaches to European security and to political problems, NATO and Russia will create the NATO-RUSSIA Permanent Joint Council. The central objective of this Permanent Joint Council will be to build increasing levels of trust, unity of purpose and habits of consultation and cooperation between NATO and Russia, in order to enhance each other's security and that of all nations in the Euro-Atlantic area and diminish the security of none. If disagreements arise, NATO and Russia will endeavour to settle them on the basis of goodwill and mutual respect within the framework of political consultations.

The Permanent Joint Council will provide a mechanism for consultations, coordination and, to the maximum extent possible, where appropriate, for joint decisions and joint action with respect to security issues of common concern. The consultations will not extend to internal matters of either NATO, NATO member States or Russia.

The shared objective of NATO and Russia is to identify and pursue as many opportunities for joint action as possible. As the relationship develops, they expect that additional opportunities for joint action will emerge.

The Permanent Joint Council will be the principal venue of consultation between NATO and Russia in times of crisis or for any other situation affecting peace and stability. Extraordinary meetings of the Council will take place in addition to its regular meetings to allow for prompt consultations in case of emergencies. In this context, NATO and Russia will promptly consult within the Permanent Joint Council in case one of the Council members perceives a threat to its territorial integrity, political independence or security.

The activities of the Permanent Joint Council will be built upon the principles of reciprocity and transparency. In the course of their consultations and cooperation, NATO and Russia will inform each other regarding the respective security-related challenges they face and the measures that each intends to take to address them.

Provisions of this Act do not provide NATO or Russia, in any way, with a right of veto over the actions of the other nor do they infringe upon or restrict the rights of NATO or Russia to independent decision-making and action. They cannot be used as a means to disadvantage the interests of other states.

The Permanent Joint Council will meet at various levels and in different forms, according to the subject matter and the wishes of NATO and Russia. The Permanent Joint Council will meet at the level of Foreign Ministers and at the level of Defence Ministers twice annually, and also monthly at the level of ambassadors/permanent representatives to the North Atlantic Council.

The Permanent Joint Council may also meet, as appropriate, at the level of Heads of State and Government.

The Permanent Joint Council may establish committees or working groups for individual subjects or areas of cooperation on an ad hoc or permanent basis, as appropriate.

Under the auspices of the Permanent Joint Council, military representatives and Chiefs of Staff will also meet; meetings of Chiefs of Staff will take place no less than twice a year, and also monthly at military representatives level. Meetings of military experts may be convened, as appropriate.

The Permanent Joint Council will be chaired jointly by the Secretary General of NATO, a representative of one of the NATO member States on a rotation basis, and a representative of Russia.

To support the work of the Permanent Joint Council, NATO and Russia will establish the necessary administrative structures.

Russia will establish a Mission to NATO headed by a representative at the rank of Ambassador. A senior military representative and his staff will be part of this Mission for the purposes of the military cooperation. NATO retains the possibility of establishing an appropriate presence in Moscow, the modalities of which remain to be determined.

The agenda for regular sessions will be established jointly. Organizational arrangements and rules of procedure for the Permanent Joint Council will be worked out. These arrangements will be in place for the inaugural meeting of the Permanent Joint Council which will be held no later than four months after the signature of this Act.

The Permanent Joint Council will engage in three distinct activities:

 

  • consulting on the topics in Section III of this Act and on any other political or security issue determined by mutual consent;

     

  • on the basis of these consultations, developing joint initiatives on which NATO and Russia would agree to speak or act in parallel;

     

  • once consensus has been reached in the course of consultation, making joint decisions and taking joint action on a case-by-case basis, including participation, on an equitable basis, in the planning and preparation of joint operations, including peacekeeping operations under the authority of the UN Security Council or the responsibility of the OSCE.

     

Any actions undertaken by NATO or Russia, together or separately, must be consistent with the United Nations Charter and the OSCE's governing principles.

Recognizing the importance of deepening contacts between the legislative bodies of the participating States to this Act, NATO and Russia will also encourage expanded dialogue and cooperation between the North Atlantic Assembly and the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation.

 

III. AREAS FOR CONSULTATION AND COOPERATION

In building their relationship, NATO and Russia will focus on specific areas of mutual interest. They will consult and strive to cooperate to the broadest possible degree in the following areas:

 

  • issues of common interest related to security and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area or to concrete crises, including the contribution of NATO and Russia to security and stability in this area;

     

  • conflict prevention, including preventive diplomacy, crisis management and conflict resolution taking into account the role and responsibility of the UN and the OSCE and the work of these organizations in these fields;

     

  • joint operations, including peacekeeping operations, on a case-by-case basis, under the authority of the UN Security Council or the responsibility of the OSCE, and if Combined Joint Task Forces (CJTF) are used in such cases, participation in them at an early stage;

     

  • participation of Russia in the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and the Partnership for Peace;

     

  • exchange of information and consultation on strategy, defence policy, the military doctrines of NATO and Russia, and budgets and infrastructure development programs;

    arms control issues;

     

  • nuclear safety issues, across their full spectrum;

     

  • preventing the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and their delivery means, combatting nuclear trafficking and strengthening cooperation in specific arms control areas, including political and defence aspects of proliferation;

     

  • possible cooperation in Theater Missile Defence;

     

  • enhanced regional air traffic safety, increased air traffic capacity and reciprocal exchanges, as appropriate, to promote confidence through increased measures of transparency and exchanges of information in relation to air defence and related aspects of airspace management/control. This will include exploring possible cooperation on appropriate air defence related matters;

     

  • increasing transparency, predictability and mutual confidence regarding the size and roles of the conventional forces of member States of NATO and Russia;

     

  • reciprocal exchanges, as appropriate, on nuclear weapons issues, including doctrines and strategy of NATO and Russia;

     

  • coordinating a program of expanded cooperation between respective military establishments, as further detailed below;

     

  • pursuing possible armaments-related cooperation through association of Russia with NATO's Conference of National Armaments Directors;

     

  • conversion of defence industries;

     

  • developing mutually agreed cooperative projects in defence-related economic, environmental and scientific fields;

     

  • conducting joint initiatives and exercises in civil emergency preparedness and disaster relief;

     

  • combatting terrorism and drug trafficking;

     

  • improving public understanding of evolving relations between NATO and Russia, including the establishment of a NATO documentation centre or information office in Moscow.

     

Other areas can be added by mutual agreement.

 

IV. POLITICAL-MILITARY MATTERS

NATO and Russia affirm their shared desire to achieve greater stability and security in the Euro-Atlantic area.

The member States of NATO reiterate that they have no intention, no plan and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members, nor any need to change any aspect of NATO's nuclear posture or nuclear policy and do not foresee any future need to do so. This subsumes the fact that NATO has decided that it has no intention, no plan, and no reason to establish nuclear weapon storage sites on the territory of those members, whether through the construction of new nuclear storage facilities or the adaptation of old nuclear storage facilities. Nuclear storage sites are understood to be facilities specifically designed for the stationing of nuclear weapons, and include all types of hardened above or below ground facilities (storage bunkers or vaults) designed for storing nuclear weapons.

Recognizing the importance of the adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) for the broader context of security in the OSCE area and the work on a Common and Comprehensive Security Model for Europe for the Twenty-First Century, the member States of NATO and Russia will work together in Vienna with the other States Parties to adapt the CFE Treaty to enhance its viability and effectiveness, taking into account Europe's changing security environment and the legitimate security interests of all OSCE participating States. They share the objective of concluding an adaptation agreement as expeditiously as possible and, as a first step in this process, they will, together with other States Parties to the CFE Treaty, seek to conclude as soon as possible a framework agreement setting forth the basic elements of an adapted CFE Treaty, consistent with the objectives and principles of the Document on Scope and Parameters agreed at Lisbon in December 1996.

NATO and Russia believe that an important goal of CFE Treaty adaptation should be a significant lowering in the total amount of Treaty-Limited Equipment permitted in the Treaty's area of application compatible with the legitimate defence requirements of each State Party. NATO and Russia encourage all States Parties to the CFE Treaty to consider reductions in their CFE equipment entitlements, as part of an overall effort to achieve lower equipment levels that are consistent with the transformation of Europe's security environment.

The member States of NATO and Russia commit themselves to exercise restraint during the period of negotiations, as foreseen in the Document on Scope and Parameters, in relation to the current postures and capabilities of their conventional armed forces in particular with respect to their levels of forces and deployments in the Treaty's area of application, in order to avoid developments in the security situation in Europe diminishing the security of any State Party. This commitment is without prejudice to possible voluntary decisions by the individual States Parties to reduce their force levels or deployments, or to their legitimate security interests.

The member States of NATO and Russia proceed on the basis that adaptation of the CFE Treaty should help to ensure equal security for all States Parties irrespective of their membership of a politico-military alliance, both to preserve and strengthen stability and continue to prevent any destabilizing increase of forces in various regions of Europe and in Europe as a whole. An adapted CFE Treaty should also further enhance military transparency by extended information exchange and verification, and permit the possible accession by new States Parties.

The member States of NATO and Russia propose to other CFE States Parties to carry out such adaptation of the CFE Treaty so as to enable States Parties to reach, through a transparent and cooperative process, conclusions regarding reductions they might be prepared to take and resulting national Treaty-Limited Equipment ceilings. These will then be codified as binding limits in the adapted Treaty to be agreed by consensus of all States Parties, and reviewed in 2001 and at five-year intervals thereafter. In doing so, the States Parties will take into account all the levels of Treaty-Limited Equipment established for the Atlantic-to-the-Urals area by the original CFE Treaty, the substantial reductions that have been carried out since then, the changes to the situation in Europe and the need to ensure that the security of no state is diminished.

The member States of NATO and Russia reaffirm that States Parties to the CFE Treaty should maintain only such military capabilities, individually or in conjunction with others, as are commensurate with individual or collective legitimate security needs, taking into account their international obligations, including the CFE Treaty.

Each State-Party will base its agreement to the provisions of the adapted Treaty on all national ceilings of the States Parties, on its projections of the current and future security situation in Europe.

In addition, in the negotiations on the adaptation of the CFE Treaty, the member States of NATO and Russia will, together with other States Parties, seek to strengthen stability by further developing measures to prevent any potentially threatening buildup of conventional forces in agreed regions of Europe, to include Central and Eastern Europe.

NATO and Russia have clarified their intentions with regard to their conventional force postures in Europe's new security environment and are prepared to consult on the evolution of these postures in the framework of the Permanent Joint Council.

NATO reiterates that in the current and foreseeable security environment, the Alliance will carry out its collective defence and other missions by ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces. Accordingly, it will have to rely on adequate infrastructure commensurate with the above tasks. In this context, reinforcement may take place, when necessary, in the event of defence against a threat of aggression and missions in support of peace consistent with the United Nations Charter and the OSCE governing principles, as well as for exercises consistent with the adapted CFE Treaty, the provisions of the Vienna Document 1994 and mutually agreed transparency measures. Russia will exercise similar restraint in its conventional force deployments in Europe.

The member States of NATO and Russia will strive for greater transparency, predictability and mutual confidence with regard to their armed forces. They will comply fully with their obligations under the Vienna Document 1994 and develop cooperation with the other OSCE participating States, including negotiations in the appropriate format, inter alia within the OSCE to promote confidence and security.

The member States of NATO and Russia will use and improve existing arms control regimes and confidence-building measures to create security relations based on peaceful cooperation.

NATO and Russia, in order to develop cooperation between their military establishments, will expand POLITICAL-MILITARY consultations and cooperation through the Permanent Joint Council with an enhanced dialogue between the senior military authorities of NATO and its member States and of Russia. They will implement a program of significantly expanded military activities and practical cooperation between NATO and Russia at all levels. Consistent with the tenets of the Permanent Joint Council, this enhanced military-to-military dialogue will be built upon the principle that neither party views the other as a threat nor seeks to disadvantage the other's security. This enhanced military-to-military dialogue will include regularly-scheduled reciprocal briefings on NATO and Russian military doctrine, strategy and resultant force posture and will include the broad possibilities for joint exercises and training.

To support this enhanced dialogue and the military components of the Permanent Joint Council, NATO and Russia will establish military liaison missions at various levels on the basis of reciprocity and further mutual arrangements.

To enhance their partnership and ensure this partnership is grounded to the greatest extent possible in practical activities and direct cooperation, NATO's and Russia's respective military authorities will explore the further development of a concept for joint NATO-RUSSIA peacekeeping operations. This initiative should build upon the positive experience of working together in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the lessons learned there will be used in the establishment of Combined Joint Task Forces.

The present Act takes effect upon the date of its signature.

NATO and Russia will take the proper steps to ensure its implementation in accordance with their procedures.

The present Act is established in two originals in the French, English and Russian language.

The Secretary General of NATO and the Government of the Russian Federation will provide the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Secretary General of the OSCE with the text of this Act with the request to circulate it to all members of their Organizations.

The NATO Russian Founding Act

Jack Mendelsohn

On May 27 in Paris, Russian President Boris Yeltsin joined President Bill Clinton and the leaders of the 15 other NATO member states in signing the "Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation." (See p. 21.) In December 1996, NATO foreign ministers agreed to seek an agreement with the Russian Federation on arrangements to deepen and widen the scope of NATO-Russian relations, primarily to offset the largely negative impact on those relations caused by NATO's decision to enlarge. Negotiations between NATO Secretary General Javier Solana and Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeni Primakov during the first part of 1997 led to the Founding Act which, despite its intention "to overcome the vestiges of past confrontation and competition and to strengthen mutual trust and cooperation" (in the words of Solana), is viewed by many in Russia and NATO with decided ambivalence.

As its preamble notes, the Act "defines the goals and mechanism of consultation, cooperation, joint decision-making and joint action that will constitute the core of the mutual relations between NATO and Russia." The Act establishes a NATO-Russian Permanent Joint Council which is to begin functioning by the end of September. The Act also contains NATO's qualified pledge not to deploy nuclear weapons or station troops in the new member states and refines the basic "scope and parameters" for an adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.

The first section of the Act elaborates the basic principles for establishing common and comprehensive security in Europe. These principles include strengthening the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), responding to new risks and challenges "such as aggressive nationalism, proliferation..., terrorism, [and] persistent abuse of human rights...," and basing NATO-Russian relations on a shared commitment to democracy, political pluralism, the rule of law, respect for human rights, and the development of free market economies. NATO and Russia also pledge to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other or other states, to respect the independence and territorial integrity of all states and the inviolability of borders, to foster mutual transparency, to settle disputes by peaceful means and to support, "on a case-by-case basis" [Emphasis added], peacekeeping operations carried out under the UN Security Council.

In the second section, which contains the only concrete action in the Act, NATO and Russia establish the NATO-Russian Permanent Joint Council. The Council is intended as "a mechanism for consultations, coordination and, ...where appropriate, for joint decisions and joint action with respect to security issues of common concern." The Council is to meet "at various levels and in different forms"—specifically in two meetings a year at both the foreign and defence minister level, two meetings a year of chiefs of staff, and monthly meetings at the ambassadorial and military level. However, neither the Council nor anything in the Act will "provide NATO or Russia, in any way, with a right of veto over the actions of the other [Emphasis added] nor do they infringe upon or restrict the rights of NATO or Russia to independent decision-making and action."

Section III lays out the areas for NATO-Russian consultation and cooperation. These include the obvious: "security and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area;" as well as conflict prevention; joint operations including peacekeeping; defence conversion; combatting terrorism; preventing proliferation; nuclear safety issues; and arms control. Of more specific interest among the areas listed for potential consultation, cooperation and increased transparency are theater missile defence, exchanges of "information in relation to air defence and related aspects of airspace management/control," and "reciprocal exchanges... on nuclear weapons issues, including doctrines and strategy of NATO and Russia."

In the final section of the Act, which deals with political-military matters, NATO restates that it has "no intention, no plan and no reason," to deploy or store nuclear weapons on the territory of new members. NATO and Russia also recommit themselves to concluding "as expeditiously as possible" an agreement adapting the CFE Treaty to take into account the new security environment in Europe, lowering the total amount of treaty-limited equipment in the treaty area, enhancing military transparency, and establishing national (as opposed to the current group) ceilings.

Immediately after the discussion of CFE treaty adaptation, the Act notes that NATO will "carry out its collective defence and other missions by ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces." [Emphasis added.] But, the Act cautions, NATO "will have to rely on adequate infrastructure commensurate with the above tasks." NATO and Russia agree to strive for greater transparency, predictability and mutual confidence with regard to their armed forces, to fully comply with the Vienna Document of 1994 (covering confidence building measures), and to use and improve existing arms control regimes. Finally, NATO and Russia agree to expand political-military consultations and cooperation through the Council and by an enhanced dialogue between senior military authorities.

The reception of the Act has been widely varied. President Clinton hailed it as marking "an historic change in the relationship between NATO and Russia..." and the Western press generally saw it as "burying" a Cold War rivalry and signalling Russian acquiescence to NATO expansion. President Chirac, host of the signing ceremony in Paris, praised the Founding Act as opening "a new chapter in the history of Europe, a chapter without precedent in that it expresses a common vision of the future." And even President Yeltsin claimed the Act "will protect Europe and the world from a new confrontation and will become the foundation for a new, fair and stable partnership, a partnership which takes into account the security interests of each and every signatory to this document."

Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric in Paris, some confusion remains over the actual significance of the Act. At the signing ceremony, for example, Yeltsin described the Act as containing "an obligation not to deploy NATO combat forces on a permanent basis near Russia," and as "a firm and absolute commitment for all signatory states."Administration officials, on the other hand, made it very clear they consider the Act to be only politically, and not legally, binding and therefore not requiring Senate approval. Jeremy Rosner, Special Assistant to the President for NATO Enlargement, said, "the Founding Act itself states explicitly that the Act does not limit NATO's ability to act independently, and it does not apply—it's not legally binding [Emphasis added]—doesn't apply any limitations on NATO's military policy from the outside."

Henry Kissinger, in a post-signing commentary, expressed at length his concern that the "so-called Founding Act... seeks to reconcile Russia by diluting the Atlantic Alliance into a UN-style system of collective security." His main criticism is that Russia would have too much of a voice in NATO councils and that "Russia has a veto no matter how often administration spokesmen repeat that 'Russia has a voice, not a veto.'" Kissinger "confess[es] that, had I known the price of NATO enlargement would be the gross dilution of NATO, I might have urged other means to achieve the objective." Rosner, speaking for the administration, tried to blunt Kissinger's criticisms by arguing, "they derive from some misperceptions about what the Founding Act says and does."

Peter Rodman of the Nixon Center, echoing conservatives in Congress and the press, argued that the Act "promises to complicate NATO decision-making in future crises in Europe or the Middle East." He acknowledges, "it's not at all clear that we bought Russian acquiescence in NATO enlargement..." but concludes, "having paid this price to the Russians, we have no choice but to go forward. The worst of all worlds would be to have paid this price and then not proceed with the NATO project to be launched at Madrid."

The Act's reception among Russians was equally diverse. While in Paris, Yeltsin praised the document. But on the eve of the Act's signature, Yeltsin cautioned that NATO would "fully undermine" its relations with Russia if it expanded to include any of the former Soviet Republics, generally understood to pertain to the Baltics and Ukraine. (Foreign Minister Primakov said Russia remains "categorically against" NATO expansion to include any former Soviet republics.) Sandy Berger, the president's National Security Advisor, when briefing the press four days after the Paris Summit, said, "We have made it very clear in the Founding Act and in all of our discussions publicly and privately with the Russians that we don't believe that any nation is or should be excluded from potential membership in NATO if they meet the criteria and they seek to be members."

Yeltsin, in his radio address to the Russian people on May 30, described the Act as an effort "to minimize the negative consequences of NATO's expansion and prevent a new split in Europe." He then described the agreement—inaccurately, according to Western officials—as "enshrining NATO's pledge not to deploy nuclear weapons on the territories of its new member countries¼not [to] build up its armed forces near our borders...nor carry out relevant infrastructure preparations."

Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of Russia's Communist Party, on May 29 called the Founding Act a "complete and unconditional surrender." Alexander Lebed, a retired General and the most popular potential presidential candidate in Russia, argued that "the Russian-NATO deal [gives] rise to political, legal and military risks. Russia received from the Soviet Union the role of guarantor of the postwar order in Europe. Any partial revision of that order places in doubt all the other components, including the inviolability of national boundaries and the rights to displaced cultural artifacts. . . ."

Sergei Rogov, Director of the Moscow U.S.Canada Institute, was upbeat about the Act, calling it "a fundamental step in the postwar settlement in Europe." As for tactical nuclear weapons, "we have had 95 percent, that is, almost maximum success in obtaining pledges from NATO.... As for conventional arms, let us not deceive ourselves: NATO will expand toward our borders. But I believe that we have managed to limit that expansion by about 70 percent. I am even more optimistic about the mechanism for strategic partnership between Russia and the West which is laid down in detail in the Act.... It effectively creates a parallel structure to NATO—a permanent joint council with working organs, political and military."

The main conclusion to be drawn from the discussion around the Founding Act is that there is no clear understanding as to its actual implication. There is obviously a difference of views in and between officials and observers in Washington and Moscow over whether the Act is legally binding or not, whether it gives Russia too much of a voice within NATO or not enough, and whether it has "bought off" Russia for just the first tranche of three countries or for NATO's expansion throughout Central and Eastern Europe. In any event, the Permanent Joint Council is scheduled to begin consultations in late September of this year putting the new Russian connection to the test before any new members are actually brought into NATO in 1999.

U.S., Russian Officials Voice Confidence In Russian Control of Nuclear Forces

 

Craig Cerniello

IN RECENT MONTHS, there has been renewed controversy about the state of Russia's nuclear command and control system. Uncertainty about the safety and security of the Russian nuclear arsenal emerged in early February when then-Defense Minister Igor Rodionov made the startling announcement that Russia could no longer guarantee that its nuclear command and control system was reliable. Although Rodionov subsequently backed away from this statement, concern flared again in mid-May when excerpts from a leaked CIA report questioning Russia's nuclear control appeared in The Washington Times—the same day Rodionov arrived in Washington for high-level talks.

These concerns were promptly refuted by several high-level U.S. and Russian government officials, including U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Rodionov. In late May, Russian President Boris Yeltsin replaced Rodionov with General Igor Sergeyev, then-commander-in-chief of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, as the new defense minister. This appointment takes on added significance not only because Sergeyev has consistently stated that the command and control of the Russian nuclear arsenal is safe and reliable but also because he has been a strong supporter of START II, which continues to languish in the Duma (the lower house of the Russian parliament).

 

The Controversy Emerges

In a February 6 news conference, Rodionov painted a dire picture as to the state of Russia's nuclear and armed forces. In what many observers believe may have been an attempt to generate support for increased funding, Rodionov warned that "Russia might soon reach the threshold beyond which its missiles and nuclear systems cannot be controlled." Even though Rodionov scaled down his comments the following day, renewed interest in the safety and security of the Russian nuclear arsenal quickly developed.

In order to put these concerns to rest, Yeltsin ordered Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to visit the command and control center of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces located outside Moscow. After visiting the center on February 21, Chernomyrdin, who was accompanied by Rodionov and Sergeyev, said the Strategic Rocket Forces are in "reliable hands" and "are capable of effectively carrying out all tasks entrusted to them." Then, in a March 17 briefing to Yeltsin, Rodionov reported that Russia's nuclear command and control system "answers all demands" and is "reliable and stable"—a clear shift in his earlier position.

 

The CIA Report

Despite these assurances, concerns about Russia's nuclear command and control system did not disappear. On May 12, the day Rodionov arrived in Washington for meetings with Cohen and other U.S. officials, The Washington Times published excerpts from a classified CIA report that calls into question the safety and security of the Russian nuclear arsenal. Citing a former officer of the Strategic Rocket Forces, the report said, "[c]ommand and control equipment often malfunctions and on more than one occasion has switched spontaneously to combat mode."

Nevertheless, according to the article, the CIA continues to believe that the risk of an unauthorized Russian nuclear launch is low under "normal circumstances," especially because "many safeguards" exist to prevent such an occurrence. The CIA report contends that the switching of nuclear missiles to combat mode "would not necessarily result in an unauthorized missile launch" because other steps are also required, such as supplying missiles with the necessary targeting information. However, the report cautioned that if the command and control system continues to deteriorate due to funding shortfalls and lack of proper maintenance, then concerns about an unauthorized Russian missile launch will increase.

U.S. and Russian government officials immediately addressed these concerns. In a May 12 background briefing, a senior Defense Department official argued that there is no credible evidence suggesting that the risk of an unauthorized or accidental Russian launch "has been raised." That same day, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said, "We believe that nuclear weapons in Russia remain under the secure and centralized control of the Russian government." Burns also pointed to the success of the Defense Department's Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program, which assists Russia in the dismantlement and secure storage of nuclear weapons, as well as to the START agreements, which make the control of nuclear weapons more feasible by reducing their numbers.

Cohen and Rodionov concurred with this sentiment during their joint news conference on May 13. Cohen said that based on his conversations with Rodionov and General Eugene Habiger, the commander-in-chief of U.S. Strategic Command, Russia's strategic nuclear forces "are under secure control" and that the sides should focus on achieving Russian ratification of START II followed by negotiations of START III. In addition, Rodionov dismissed the Times story and said Russia "will do everything possible to ensure that the safety and protection of [its] nuclear arsenals would never decrease."

 

Yeltsin Sacks Rodionov

Clearly dissatisfied with the state of the Russian armed forces and the pace of military reforms, Yeltsin fired Rodionov on May 22 and appointed Sergeyev as the acting defense minister. This appointment is especially significant because Sergeyev has been a consistent advocate of the START process. Furthermore, Sergeyev will have substantial credibility with the Duma because, as the former head of the Strategic Rocket Forces, he can convincingly argue that START II is in Russia's national security interests. There also was speculation by some U.S. and Russian observers that Rodionov's support for START II was only lukewarm at best.

Sergeyev has repeatedly maintained that Russia's nuclear command and control system is safe and reliable. In a recent interview with Moskovskaya Pravda conducted before his appointment as defense minister, Sergeyev refuted the comments made by Rodionov earlier this year. Sergeyev said the command and control system of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces is "under strict control" and that the present system "guarantees a very high level of nuclear security, which excludes not only unsanctioned launches, but all unsanctioned activity as well." Sergeyev also argued that the Strategic Rocket Forces today are "in the same state of combat readiness as they were 10 years ago."

The Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy


 

Executive Summary of the National Academy of Sciences Report

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a major policy report on June 17, entitled The Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy , recommending substantial changes in U.S. nuclear weapons policies and forces to bring them into conformity with the post-Cold War environment. The report's central recommendation is that the use of nuclear weapons be limited to a core mission of deterring the use of nuclear weapons by others.

The study calls for a program of progressive constraints to reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals to 1,000 total warheads each and then, if security conditions permit, to a few hundred warheads, provided adequate verification procedures and transparency measures have been implemented. Parallel steps are also necessary to reduce high alert levels and to substitute much more selective targeting than now incorporated in present war plans. While the path to the prohibition of all nuclear weapons is not yet clear, the report examines the conditions that would have to exist for this to be acceptable and suggests various ways it might be achieved.

The report was prepared by the NAS Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC), a group of distinguished scientists, retired senior military officers and experts policy analysts, most of whom have been closely associated with various aspects of nuclear security affairs. (See p. below.)

 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The debate about appropriate purposes and policies for U.S. nuclear weapons has been under way since the beginning of the nuclear age. With the end of the Cold War, the debate entered a new phase, propelled by the post-Cold War transformations of the international political landscape and the altered foreign policy challenges and opportunities that these changes are bringing about. This report—based on an exhaustive reexamination of the issues addressed in the committee's 1991 report on The Future of the U.S.Soviet Nuclear Relationship—describes the state to which U.S. and Russian nuclear forces and policies have evolved since the Cold War ended, the reasons why further evolution is desirable, and the shape of a regime of progressive constraints responsive to these reasons. It concludes with a discussion of the conditions and means under which, in the longer term, it could become desirable and feasible to prohibit the possession of nuclear weapons altogether.

 

THE CURRENT SITUATION AND THE REASONS FOR FURTHER CHANGE

The first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), signed in 1991 as the Cold War was ending and now being implemented by both the United States and Russia, will reduce the number of strategic nuclear warheads deployed by the two countries from 13,000 and 11,000, respectively, to about 8,000 each. START II, signed in 1993 and ratified by the United States in early 1996 but not yet (as of this writing) ratified by Russia, would further limit the number of deployed strategic warheads to 3,000 to 3,500 on each side. At the Helsinki summit in March 1997 Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin agreed to seek a START III treaty with a level of 2,000 to 2,500 deployed strategic nuclear warheads. Unilateral initiatives since the Cold War began winding down have also reduced very substantially the numbers of deployed non-strategic warheads, especially on the U.S. side. In addition, nuclear testing has ended, the United States and Russia have agreed not to target their missiles against each other on a day-to-day basis, and production of weapons-grade fissile material has stopped in the United States and is expected to stop soon in Russia.

These actions have unambiguously halted and reversed the bilateral nuclear competition that was the most conspicuous characteristic of the Cold War's military confrontation but, unfortunately, have not sufficiently altered the physical threat that these weapons pose. The reduced forces could still inflict catastrophic damage on the societies they target or could target, and the thousands of non-deployed and non-strategic nuclear warheads not addressed by the START process and likely to be retained without further agreements will pose substantial risks of breakout, theft, or unauthorized use. In addition, the United States and its NATO allies retain their Cold War "weapons of last resort" doctrine that allows the first use of nuclear weapons if deemed necessary to cope with non-nuclear attacks, and Russia has announced that it is abandoning the Soviet Union's no-first-use pledge in order to adopt a position similar to NATO's.

The basic structure of plans for using nuclear weapons appears largely unchanged from the situation during the Cold War, with both sides apparently continuing to emphasize early and large counterforce strikes and both remaining capable, despite reductions in numbers and alert levels, of rapidly bringing their nuclear forces to full readiness for use. As a result, the dangers of initiation of nuclear war by error (e.g., based on false warning of attack) or by accident (e.g., by a technical failure) remain unacceptably high. (On the Russian side, the dangers of erroneous, accidental, or unauthorized nuclear weapons use may be even higher than during the Cold War because of subsequent deterioration of the military and internal-security infrastructure and of morale.) The continuing competitive assumptions underlying some official discussions of the U.S. Russian nuclear relationship, when coupled with the postures of the forces and the potential for destabilizing deployments of ballistic missile defenses, pose the risk that the arms control fabric woven during the Cold War and immediately thereafter could unravel.

In addition, continued actions by the United States and Russia to reduce their nuclear arsenals—and to reduce the roles assigned to those arsenals—are needed to help bring the other declared and undeclared nuclear weapons states into the arms reduction process and to strengthen the global nonproliferation regime. The effectiveness of that regime depends on the full support and cooperation of a large number of non-nuclear weapons states in the maintenance of a vigorous International Atomic Energy Agency with the inspection powers and resources to do its job, in the implementation of effective controls on the transfer of sensitive technologies and in the creation of transparency conditions conducive to building confidence that proliferation is not taking place. The degree of commitment of the non-nuclear weapons states to these crucial collective efforts will surely depend at least in part on impressions about whether the nuclear weapons states are working seriously on the arms reduction part of the global nonproliferation bargain.

 

NUCLEAR DETERRENCE PAST AND FUTURE

During the Cold War, nuclear deterrence was the bedrock of U.S. strategy for preventing both nuclear war and major conventional war because a more effective alternative was not apparent: the adversarial U.S.Soviet relationship made it seem imprudent to rely on good intentions to preclude nuclear attack or massive conventional assault; the character of nuclear weapons and the diverse means for delivering them meant that attempts to defend the United States or its allies against nuclear attacks on their populations could be overcome with much less effort than would have to be invested in the defenses; highly survivable basing modes for significant parts of each side's nuclear forces made it impractical to execute a disarming first strike even if conflict seemed imminent; and concern about the powerful conventional forces of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (and, in Asia, those of China and North Korea) motivated the United States and its allies to adopt a first-use-if-necessary nuclear posture to deter large-scale conventional attacks.

But nuclear deterrence itself was (and is) burdened with an array of dilemmas and dangers. For example, deterrence is likely to succeed only if there are credible plans for what to do if it fails, but constructing such plans is exceedingly difficult, and attempts to make the threat of nuclear retaliation credible can be seen as aggressive advantage seeking by the other side. This raises tensions, stimulates arms races, or increases the chance of nuclear war from crisis instability or accident. In addition, the assertion by some countries of a need and a right to have a nuclear deterrent may encourage additional countries to assert the same need and right, leading to further nuclear proliferation.

This committee has concluded that the dilemmas and dangers of nuclear deterrence as practiced by the United States in the past can and should be alleviated in the post-Cold War security environment by confining such deterrence to the core function of deterring nuclear attack, or coercion by threat of nuclear attack, against the United States or its allies. That is, the United States would no longer threaten to respond with nuclear weapons against conventional, chemical, or biological attacks. Given adequate conventional forces, the active and conspicuous role given to nuclear weapons during the Cold War can be greatly reduced without significant adverse effect on the probability of major war or on this country's ability to deal effectively with regional conflicts where its vital interests and those of its allies are at stake. The committee believes that Russia and the other nuclear weapons states can be persuaded to reach a comparable conclusion.

In all likelihood the United States will consider it necessary to continue to rely on the core function of nuclear deterrence as long as nuclear weapons continue to exist in the possession of states that might consider using them against this country or its allies. The committee assumes that some—although it is hoped not all—other nuclear weapons states will similarly consider it necessary to retain some nuclear weapons for "core deterrence." But the size and scope of the efforts deemed necessary by the United States and others to fulfill the core function presumably will shrink in parallel with what the committee hopes is the declining plausibility that any state would consider mounting a nuclear attack on anyone. Moreover, there are strong reasons to make every effort to hasten the arrival of international conditions in which threats of nuclear attack are simply no longer thinkable, so that the practice of deterrence with all its dilemmas and dangers would no longer be necessary.

As long as nuclear weapons exist, this very existence will exert a deterrent effect— existential deterrence—against unrestricted conventional war among the major powers, since it will be recognized that, in a world with nuclear weapons, such conflicts might well lead to their use, with intolerable destruction as the result. Indeed, even the existence of the idea of nuclear weapons—more specifically, the ability of many states to make them—is enough to create an existential deterrent effect against large-scale conflicts of all kinds. That is not to say that this effect would necessarily always be sufficient to prevent conflict in the future, any more than it has always been in the past. But it could provide a part of the assurance required, in an international system much different than today's, that all-out wars are unlikely to occur.

 

A TWO-PART PROGRAM OF CHANGE

If only the core function of nuclear weapons retains validity, fundamental changes in the nuclear force structures and operational practices of the major nuclear powers become both possible and desirable. Accordingly, the committee has concluded that the United States should pursue a two-part program of change in its nuclear weapons policies.

  • The first part of the program is a near and midterm set of force reductions—together with accompanying changes in nuclear operations and declaratory policies and with measures to increase the security of nuclear weapons and fissile materials worldwide—to diminish further confrontational and potentially destabilizing aspects of force postures, to reduce the risks of erroneous, unauthorized, or accidental nuclear-weapons use, and to help curb the threat of further nuclear proliferation. In their early phases these measures are largely bilateral ones between the United States and Russia, and close cooperation between the two countries is essential for success.
  • The second part of the program is a long-term effort to foster international conditions in which the possession of nuclear weapons would no longer be seen as necessary or legitimate for the preservation of national and global security.
Nuclear force reductions and changes in nuclear operations would increase U.S. and global security in important ways.
  • First, reducing U.S. and Russian nuclear forces and revising operations for the mission of fulfilling only the core function will decrease the continuing risk of accidental, erroneous, or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons for several reasons. Smaller arsenals will be easier to safeguard and protect from accident, theft, and unauthorized use, not only by virtue of reduced numbers of weapons to monitor at a smaller number of sites but also by permitting retention of only those weapons with the most modern safety and security features. Reducing alert rates, decreasing capacities to use nuclear weapons quickly and with little warning, abandoning plans for the rapid use of nuclear weapons, and deploying cooperative measures to assure states that forces are not being readied for attack should reduce the probability and consequences of erroneous nuclear weapons use—for example, on false warning of attack. (Of course it is extremely important to take care that reductions in deployed nuclear warheads—and dismantlement of the warheads made surplus as a result—do not lead to countervailing increases in the dangers of theft and unauthorized use as a consequence of inattention to the challenges of safe storage of these weapons and the nuclear materials removed from them.)
  • Second, further reductions will bolster the nuclear nonproliferation regime. U.S.Russian nuclear arms reductions will not in themselves dissuade a state bent on acquiring nuclear weapons; today's undeclared nuclear powers and would-be proliferators are driven above all by regional security concerns. In such cases, the denial of material and technical resources and a combination of political and economic incentives and disincentives provide the greatest leverage. But U.S. and Russian progress in arms reductions helps shore up global support for anti-proliferation measures; and lack of such progress can strengthen the influence of those arguing for nuclear weapons acquisition in countries where this is under internal debate.
  • Third, continued actions by the United States and Russia to reduce their nuclear arsenals—and the roles and missions assigned to those arsenals—will help persuade the other declared and undeclared nuclear weapons states to join the arms control process. At planned START II levels, for example, under which it is estimated that the United States and Russia each would retain a total of about 10,000 nuclear warheads, deployed and in reserve, the other nuclear powers have little motivation to submit their much smaller arsenals to any form of control.

BUILDING A REGIME OF PROGRESSIVE CONSTRAINTS

The program that the committee recommends would shift the focus of U.S. nuclear policy. While preserving the core function of deterring nuclear aggression, nuclear forces would be reduced, their roles would be more narrowly defined, and increased emphasis would be placed on achieving higher standards of operational safety.

Building on past nuclear arms control agreements and the anticipated START III agreement, future bilateral U.S.Russian negotiations should center on specific means to achieve these goals. The first step is to encourage the Russian Duma's ratification of START II by beginning now to discuss a START III agreement limiting the number of deployed strategic warheads to about 2,000 on each side.

Establishing progressive constraints on nuclear operations is equally urgent; additional efforts should be pursued in parallel with, but not linked to, discussions of a START III agreement. Such constraints would include programs to reduce alert levels further and progressively to reorient nuclear doctrine away from the requirement to plan for rapid, massive response. Limits on ballistic missile defenses consistent with the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty would be maintained.

A continuing high priority effort is also needed to improve the protection of nuclear weapons and fissile materials in Russia. Joint U.S.Russian work along these lines, which has been going on since 1991 under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, complements and strengthens arms reductions and other changes in nuclear policies. (Because this committee and other NRC committees have recently offered detailed analysis and recommendations on this subject in other reports, the committee does not treat it in detail here.)

During the Cold War, reducing the risk of a surprise attack appeared to be more important than the risks generated by maintaining nuclear forces in a continuous state of alert. With the end of that era, the opposite view is now more credible. This has important implications for U.S. nuclear policy and calls for dramatically reduced alert levels. Elimination of continuous-alert practices should be pursued as a principal goal in parallel with, but not linked to, START III. As a related confidence-building measure, the United States and Russia should adopt cooperative practices to assure each other that they are not preparing for a nuclear attack.

With the Cold War over, planning to retaliate massively against a nuclear attack is not the appropriate basis for making responsible decisions regarding the actual use of nuclear weapons. Operational doctrine regarding the magnitude and timing of any actual retaliation in response to a nuclear attack should be revised. The United States should adopt a strategy that would permit much more selective targeting options and that would be based neither on predetermined prompt attacks on counterforce targets nor on automatic destruction of cities. The presumption instead would be that nuclear weapons, if they were ever to be used, would be employed against targets that would be designated in response to immediate circumstances—in the smallest possible numbers. Some changes in this direction have begun, but the move to a more flexible planning system should be accelerated.

Together, positive and negative security assurances and guarantees have been a useful policy tool to ensure that friends and allies of the United States are not penalized by foregoing nuclear weapons. The United States could do more, however, to make negative security assurances and guarantees serve nonproliferation interests. Most important, the United States should adopt no-first-use of nuclear weapons as its declaratory policy at an early date. Changing to a no-first-use policy will, of course, require consultation with allies to reassure them that the United States will meet, by non-nuclear means, its obligations to come to their aid in the event of a non-nuclear attack on them.

Efforts to ban nuclear weapons from specific regions or environments strengthened nonproliferation in the past and helped to limit the perceived utility of nuclear weapons. The United States should continue to support these agreements and sign them without reservations that undermine their basic purpose, consistent with the unequivocal no-first-use policy recommended above. A new nuclear weapon free zone in Central Europe would, for example, offer immediate security advantages to Russia as well as NATO.

The committee has concluded that the changed international security environment makes possible further reductions in nuclear armaments. After the reductions envisioned in a START III accord, reduction to about 1,000 total warheads each for the United States and Russia would be a logical next step. (All nuclear warheads—regardless of type, function, stage of assembly, associated delivery system, or basing mode—would then be included in the negotiated limits.) A force of this size could effectively maintain the core function against the most challenging potential U.S. adversaries under any credible circumstances. This reduction process must ensure stability at each rung of the ladder, requiring survivable nuclear forces not at risk from a first strike.

Verifying limits on total nuclear warheads is substantially more difficult than verifying limits on their delivery vehicles. Verifying numbers of non-deployed and non-strategic warheads, in particular, would require transparency measures regarding the production, storage, and dismantling of nuclear warheads, as well as a mechanism for exchanging and verifying information about the location and status of warheads. Since nuclear weapons can be small and portable and not easily detectable by technical means, however, a regime that would provide high confidence of locating a small number of hidden warheads would be extremely difficult to achieve. Even an imperfect verification regime would greatly reduce the uncertainties in present U.S. estimates of the number of Russian warheads.

Fulfilling the goals of current arms control initiatives and successfully providing for much deeper reductions will also require improved standards of accounting, transparency, and physical security for fissile materials. Efforts to control fissile materials must address not only the problems presented by military stockpiles but also by civilian use of such materials, in particular plutonium produced by reprocessing. A fissile material cutoff would be a significant nonproliferation measure and should continue to be strongly supported by the United States.

The ABM treaty will continue to play a crucial role in a world in which the numbers of nuclear weapons are drastically reduced and the role of nuclear weapons is restricted to the core function. Maintaining and enhancing its integrity in light of changes in offensive nuclear capabilities will require periodic evaluation. The focus of the U.S. ballistic missile defense research and development program should be to field a mobile system capable of defending relatively small areas against projected theater ballistic missile threats, which the committee believes will remain limited to a range of roughly 1,000 kilometers for some time.

The achievement of U.S.Russian reductions to a mutually agreed level of about 1,000 total warheads each should not represent the final level for nuclear arms reductions. There will still be powerful reasons to continue down to a level of a few hundred nuclear warheads on each side, with the other three declared nuclear powers at lower levels, or with no remaining nuclear forces.

The small numbers of nuclear weapons presumably now held by the undeclared nuclear states—India, Israel, and Pakistan—would become a key issue when the United States and Russia, as well as the other declared nuclear powers, consider reductions to very small numbers of warheads. High priority should be given to diplomatic strategies tailored to the security perceptions of each state in order to freeze or reduce and, if possible, eliminate these undeclared programs in parallel with the reduction programs of the nuclear powers.

The committee's analysis does not assume a fundamental change in the nature of international relations in order to achieve these low levels of nuclear arms. It does assume unprecedented cooperation and transparency among all classes of nuclear powers on the specific issue of nuclear arms reductions. A few hundred nuclear weapons would be sufficient to deter nuclear attack through their potential to destroy essential elements of the society of any possible attacker. These remaining nuclear forces would have to be survivable and their command-and-control structure adequately redundant and robust; and widespread and effective national ballistic missile defenses must be absent. The operational posture of the much smaller forces must be designed for deliberate response rather than reaction in a matter of minutes.

 

PROHIBITION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

The end of the Cold War has created conditions that open the possibility for serious consideration of proposals to prohibit the possession of nuclear weapons. It is not clear today how or when this could be achieved; what is clear is that comprehensive nuclear disarmament should be undertaken only in circumstances such that, on balance, it would enhance the security of the United States and the rest of the world.

The committee uses the word "prohibit" rather than "eliminate" or "abolish" because the world can never truly be free from the potential reappearance of nuclear weapons and their effects on international politics. Even the most effective verification system that can be envisioned would not produce complete confidence that a small number of nuclear weapons had not been hidden or fabricated in secret. More fundamentally, the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons cannot be erased from the human mind. Even if every nuclear warhead were destroyed, the current nuclear weapons states, and a growing number of other technologically advanced states, would be able to build nuclear weapons within a few months or few years of a national decision to do so.

A durable prohibition on nuclear weapons would have three main benefits:

  • It would virtually eliminate the possibility of use—whether authorized and deliberate or not—of nuclear weapons by states now possessing them. Viewed in light of the possibility of reconstitution of such arsenals in a crisis, prohibition can be seen as extending the dealerting measures recommended in the near-term part of the program—that is, increasing the time required to ready nuclear weapons for use from hours or days to months or years.
  • It would reduce the likelihood that additional states will acquire nuclear weapons. Although the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty currently enjoys almost universal adherence, the nuclear weapons states cannot be confident of maintaining indefinitely a regime in which they proclaim nuclear weapons essential to their security while denying all others the right to possess them.
  • It would deal decisively with the uncertain moral and legal status of nuclear weapons, as underlined by the recent advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice.
Nuclear disarmament poses risks as well as benefits, however:
  • The prohibition on nuclear weapons might break down via cheating or overt withdrawal from the disarmament regime. To reduce these risks, a disarmament regime would have to be built within a larger international security system that would be capable not only of deterring or punishing the acquisition or use of nuclear weapons but also of responding to major aggression.
  • Comprehensive nuclear disarmament could remove the moderating effect that nuclear weapons appear to have had on the behavior of states. The nuclear era represents the longest period without war among the major powers since the emergence of the modern nation state in the sixteenth century. Thus, it is argued that, if the major powers believed the risk of nuclear war had been eliminated, they might initiate or intensify conflicts that might otherwise have been avoided or limited. But there have been, and continue to be, profound changes in the structure of the international order that are acting to reduce the probability of major war independent of nuclear deterrence. Moreover, even if all nuclear weapons were eliminated, the inherent capacities to rebuild them could act as a deterrent to the outbreak of major wars.
If the preconditions for agreed prohibition of nuclear weapons are met, however, the committee believes that a path to eventual prohibition can be found. One possible path for managing the transition to comprehensive nuclear disarmament would involve having an international agency assume joint or full custody of the arsenals remaining during the transition to prohibition. Alternatively, nations might find it preferable to bypass the intermediate step involving an international agency and proceed directly to negotiations to prohibit nuclear weapons either globally in a single agreement or in steps involving successive expansions in the number and geographical scope of nuclear weapon free zones.

It will not be easy to achieve the conditions necessary to make a durable global prohibition on the possession of nuclear weapons both desirable and feasible. Complete nuclear disarmament will require continued evolution of the international system toward collective action, transparency, and the rule of law; a comprehensive system of verification, which itself will require an unprecedented degree of cooperation and transparency; and safeguards to protect against the possibility of cheating or rapid breakout. As difficult as this may seem today, the process of reducing national nuclear arsenals to a few hundred warheads would lay much of the necessary groundwork. For example, the stringent verification requirements of an agreement on very low levels of nuclear weapons and fissile materials might by then have led to some new or expanded international agency with vigorous powers of inspection. The committee has concluded that the potential benefits of a global prohibition of nuclear weapons are so attractive relative to the attendant risks that increased attention is now warranted to studying and fostering the conditions that would have to be met to make prohibition desirable and feasible.

In any case, the regime of progressive constraints constituting the committee's proposed near to midterm program makes good sense in its own right—as a prescription for reducing nuclear dangers without adverse impact on other U.S. security interests—regardless of one's view of the desirability and feasibility of ultimately moving to prohibition.

 


CISAC Study Panel

William F. Burns, study chair, Major General (U.S. Army, Retired)

John P. Holdren, committee chair, Professor, Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

John D. Steinbruner, committee vice chair, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies Program, The Brookings Institution

George Lee Butler, Vice President, Peter Kiewit Sons, Inc.

Paul M. Doty, Director Emeritus, Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University

Steve Fetter, Associate Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, College Park

Alexander H. Flax, President Emeritus, Institute for Defense Analyses and Senior Fellow, National Academy of Engineering

Richard L. Garwin, Fellow Emeritus, Thomas H. Watson Research Center, IBM Corporation

Rose Gottemoeller, Deputy Director, International Institute for Strategic Studies

Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., President, Arms Control Association

Matthew Meselson, Professor, Department of Molecular Biology and Cellular Biology, Harvard University

Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, Professor and Director Emeritus, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University

C. Kumar N. Patel, Vice Chancellor—Research, University of California at Los Angeles

Jonathan D. Pollack, Senior Advisor for International Policy, The RAND Corporation

Robert H. Wertheim, Rear Admiral (U.S. Navy, Retired)

Jo L. Husbands, study director, Committee on International Security and Arms Control, National Academy of Sciences

Copies of The Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy are available for $15.00 (plus $4 for shipping and handling) from the National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC, 20148 or phone 202-334-2138 or 1-800-624-6242.

U.S. Foreign Military Sales Agreements Up in 1996

U.S. government-to-government conventional weapons transfers increased slightly in 1996, keeping U.S. arms exports above Cold War levels, according to a June 4 Pentagon report. Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales and Military Assistance Facts, published by the Defense Security Assistance Agency (DSAA), reported that U.S. government foreign military sales (FMS) agreements increased from $8.8 billion in fiscal year (FY) 1995 to $10.4 billion in FY 1996. All regional markets for U.S. weapons grew except those in Canada, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The Near East and South Asia region comprised 40 percent of the agreements, replacing Europe as the leading region importing U.S. arms in 1996. Latin America and the Caribbean agreed to just under $125 million in weapons and defense equipment deals, trailed only by Africa with $12.3 million in deals. With $1.42 billion in FMS agreements, Egypt was the largest importing country, followed closely by Saudi Arabia with $1.3 billion and South Korea with $998.9 million.

From 1950 to 1996, U.S. FMS agreements averaged $6.1 billion annually, adjusted for inflation. After the success of U.S. technology in the Gulf War, they reached the unprecedented level of $32.4 billion in 1993. Since 1993, FMS agreements have steadily declined but still remain above their Cold War average.

U.S. Applies Sanctions for Chemical Sales

The United States imposed economic sanctions on five Chinese individuals, two Chinese companies and one company based in Hong Kong, for aiding Iran's quest to develop chemical weapons. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced the sanctions during a May 22 subcommittee hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee, admitting that the administration's efforts to prevent such transfers have been, "far from perfect." A senior administration official said the sanctions decision followed years of dialogue with China about the transfer of dual-use chemical precursors and production equipment by Chinese enterprises.

Applied under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991, which prohibits the export of chemical weapons and related equipment to terrorist nations, including Iran, the sanctions will affect an estimated $2 million in annual trade with these entities. The policy will be reviewed after one year to determine whether to extend or remove sanctions.

The Nanjing Chemical Industries Group and the Jiangsu Yongli Chemical Engineering and Technology Import/Export Corporation, in a May 23 statement, called the charges, "absolutely drawn from the air" and said the sanctions were "a brutal intervention in normal international trade and commercial activities." Albright said there is "no evidence that the Chinese government was involved." China and Iran, both Chemical Weapons Convention signatories, denied the allegations in separate statements.

U.S. 1996 Data for the UN Conventional Arms Register


Adopted in 1991 by the UN General Assembly, the UN Register of Conventional Arms is a confidence-building measure consisting of voluntary annual data submissions from UN members on their exports and imports of seven categories of weapons: battle tanks, armored combat vehicles (ACVs), large-caliber artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, and missiles and missile launchers. The U.S. submission for 1996, submitted on April 28, comprises actual weapons deliveries resulting from government-to-government sales. (Other countries include commercial transfers in their declarations.) The register also contains information on domestic military holdings and procurement and on national weapons transfer policies.

Overall, the United States reported exporting 2,352 weapons in the seven categories in 1996, down from 5,088 in 1995, though nearly even with the 1994 total. Many of the top recipients have records of human rights abuses, according to the State Department. In 1996, the State Department reported that Bahrain, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Peru and Turkey all had significant human rights abuse records.

A large reduction in missiles and missile launcher exports from 3,246 in 1995 to 737 in 1996 accounts for most of the drop in the number of exports declared in 1996. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. weapons went to the Middle East; Asia accounted for 19 percent. Overall, 28 states imported weapons from the United States. Saudi Arabia, with 475 weapons, was the top importer. Japan and Kuwait followed with 297 and 174 weapons, respectively.

The United States also reported receiving one battle tank from Bosnia-Herzegovina, 10 missiles and missile launchers from Israel and 53 missiles and missile launchers from Romania. As in previous years, the United States did not submit information on the makes and models of the weapons it transferred. The table below comprises only weapons exports.

For more information contact Wade Boese.

Region/Country Battle Tanks ACVs Large Artillery Combat Aircraft Attack Helicopters Warships Missiles & Launchers TOTAL
Africa 150
Egypt 60 072 0 0 0 2 16 150
Asia 646
Japan 0 0 9 0 0 0 288 297
Malaysia 0 0 0 0 0 0 21 21
Pakistan 0 0 24 0 0 0 0 24
South Korea 0 0 90 0 0 0 53 143
Taiwan 107 0 0 9 8 0 0 124
Thailand 0 23 0 13 0 1 0 37
Europe 460
Bosnia-Herzegovina 45 80 0 0 0 0 0 125
Finland 0 0 0 7 0 0 0 7
Greece 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 2
Italy 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 3
Norway 0 63 0 0 0 0 70 133
Spain 0 0 0 6 0 0 0 6
Switzerland 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 2
Turkey 0 25 0 12 0 0 35 72
United Kingdom 0 0 0 0 0 0 110 110
Latin America 21
Argentina 0 0 0 4 0 0 0 4
Brazil 0 0 0 0 6 0 0 6
Peru 0 0 0 11 0 0 0 11
Middle East 929
Bahrain 0 100 0 0 0 1 0 101
Israel 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
Jordan 60 0 0 0 0 0 0 60
Kuwait 174 0 0 0 0 0 0 174
Lebanon 0 108 0 0 0 0 0 108
Saudi Arabia 124 340 0 11 0 0 0 475
UAE 0 0 0 0 10 0 0 10
Other Regions 146
Australia 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 70 72
Canada 0 0 0 0 0 0 74 74
TOTAL 570 812 124 81 24 4 737 2,352
Sources: Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; Arms Control Association

U.S. Military Holdings and Procurement Through National Production
Category Military Holdings Procurement
Battle Tanks 9,976 0
Armored Combat Vehicles 22,731 0
Large-Caliber Artillery Systems 9,711 460
Combat Aircraft 4,014 23
Attack Helicopters 2,717 20
Warships 351 11
Missiles and Missile Launchers 123,731 1,816

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Arms Control Today