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| Speakers: | Charles D. Ferguson, fellow, science and technology, Council on Foreign Relations |
|---|---|
| Peter Huessy, senior associate, National Defense University Foundation | |
| Presider: | Carla A. Robbins, chief diplomatic correspondent, The Wall Street Journal |
April 28, 2005
Council on Foreign Relations
Council on Foreign Relations
Washington, DC
CARLA ROBBINS: Are we all ready? The food is particularly good today, so it’s hard to get people to come in here. [Laughter] I’m Carla Robbins, I’m the chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal, and we are—have a very timely session today. We are going into what for arms-control weenies is basically the holiday season. We’ve got the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] Review Conference that starts on Monday in New York for month-long festivities on all the different articles and who’s cheating whom and then after that, in June, we have the Nuclear Suppliers Group [of 44 nuclear-supplier states] meeting, where President Bush’s proposal will be hotly debated on the question of denying fuel-cycle technology to everybody else. And then, of course, we’ve got the G-8 [group of eight industrialized democracies] summit meeting where the administration is helping to make genuine progress—hi, John—genuine progress on President Bush’s proposals for reforming what he and most everyone else believes is an increasingly shaky nonproliferation regime.
So to talk about all of that today, we have two extremely experienced people who have promised not to come to fisticuffs, at least not across me. And the format is going to be, first of all, on the record, which is a rare thing for the Council on Foreign Relations and, of course, in a situation which I’m not allowed to take notes. And we’re going to begin with the discussion with the panelists for 25 minutes or so, and then it’s up to you all to ask even more trenchant questions and threaten my career as a journalist.
On my right, inappropriately, but on your left is Dr. Charles Ferguson, who is a science and technology fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and adjunct professor in the [Edmund A. Walsh] School of Foreign Service at Georgetown [University]. Very well-respected expert, lots of experience, graduate of the Naval Academy, and has a Ph.D. in Physics from Boston University, and I always think people who talk about nonproliferation who know something about physics have an edge on the rest of us.
Peter Huessy is a senior defense associate at the National Defense University [NDU] Foundation and also the president of Geostrategic Analysis and writes and talks an enormous amount about these issues and including about North Korea, which perhaps we’ll get into today. In 1985, Peter was ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, which is called ECOSOC, and I had to get that in because I love saying it—ECOSOC, ECOSOC—and he also served as director of research at George Washington University Center for Public Policy Analysis; he’s a columnist at the Washington Times and a variety of other impressive experiences and, as I said, has written an enormous amount about this.
So I thought what we would do is to start—and I must admit to some collusion because we did talk about this yesterday—by just with a little opening conversation about how badly broke is the regime and—the—how much of a crisis is it really in, or is this something that we all do to keep ourselves employed talking about crises in the NPT? Peter, you want to go first?
PETER HUESSY: Well, let me thank you, Carla, and also, [Council Washington Program Coordinator] John [Havens], I want to thank you for inviting me. And, Charlie, for our conversation yesterday. I think the first thing we might say, as I said yesterday, is that the NPT should not be asked to do too much. It should be asked to do what it can do and do well, and because this is bigger than the NPT. It also involves the Cooperative Threat Reduction Act and Nunn-Lugar. It also involves the whole nuclear energy business, which can’t be differentiated from energy itself. It also has to do with U.S. nuclear arsenals and the arsenals of other countries, as well as the whole issue of things like [the] Proliferation Security Initiative and trying to get rogue states, if you want to call them that.
So I think the NPT has got problems, because we’ve got two nations that are members—or were members—in the NPT, Iran, and North Korea, whom everybody believes either has nuclear weapons or is in the process of getting them. And that does cause a lot of people to stay up at night, including myself, and I think a lot of people have genuine concern, and it’s a well-placed concern. And how do you put that genie back in the bottle, particularly things that [Nonproliferation Policy Education Center Executive Director] Henry Sokolski writes about, which is, do you really want to have reprocessing and enrichment facilities and technology which you really can’t safeguard? And the president has addressed that by saying we ought to have a moratorium, which I support, but that’s just the first step of saying, “OK, where are we with the stuff that’s out there?” So, yes, the NPT has got problems.
Can it be fixed? I don’t think it can be fixed solely by reference to the NPT, but that doesn’t mean that the NPT, either, shouldn’t be strengthened or maintained. It has some holes in it, but those holes are long-standing, and they go all the way to the enrichment issue and the reprocessing issue. Should that really be someone’s inalienable right to be entitled to stuff to bring you that close to a nuclear weapon, when the treaty itself says, “Well, you’re not meant to get that close to a nuclear weapon”?
So I think, yeah, we have some work to do, but as Charlie and you and I talked about yesterday is, I’m much more interested in looking at, where can we find the things we can do together to solve these problems and move closer to a solution than pointing fingers at where we either have fallen down or maybe haven’t done as good a job as we might otherwise do. Because this is a threat to all of us; it doesn’t work.
ROBBINS: But let’s go back a little bit, and rather than just talking about the treaty to start—and we should talk about the conference ‘cause it’s going to be intriguing for the next few weeks, but—not just the treaty itself, but are we in a moment of particular crisis? We have, or is it just Iran and North Korea? We did have India and Pakistan, but then, you know, we’ve had Israel over the years, and more countries have been tempted and have been wooed back from the brink than have broken out, although is the trend now going in the wrong direction? How big a crisis is this really, and are we at—potentially at a tipping point, in which we’re going to have President [John F.] Kennedy’s vision of a world in which you’re going to have 20 nuclear-arms states or more?
CHARLES FERGUSON: Well, there’s a certain back-to-the-future quality of this whole topic. In preparation for this event, I went back and looked at articles written in the late 1970’s in Foreign Affairs and said, “OK, what were the deep-thinkers back then writing about?” You know, guys like [Professor] Joseph Nye [at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government], [former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner] Victor Galinsky—and you’d see many of the same themes 30 years ago that we’re seeing today, so in some sense, it’s deja vu all over again. So I can say OK, is there a really more acute crisis than there was back then? I think in some sense there is. There is a crisis of compliance with the NPT. Now we have almost all the countries in the world signed up as signatories and have either ratified it or acceded to the treaty. We only have outlier states right now. Peter mentioned one big one we’re concerned about—North Korea—but there are three states that have always been outside the system: India, Israel, and Pakistan, and those are very tough nuts to crack. We don’t really know how to bring them in to resolve that problem. So that’s a crisis that we’ve had hanging over us for a number of decades.
But back in the 1970’s, we had the so-called “dirty dozen” of countries and various regions that we were concerned about. We were concerned about South Korea. We were concerned about Taiwan. We were concerned about India and Pakistan, obviously. We were very concerned about Argentina and Brazil, and there were other states, even some European states, that may cross the nuclear threshold. So in that respect, 30 years ago looks worse than it is today, because today we’re saying “Well, how many states are we really that concerned about? Iran, North Korea, and India are three states that have always been outside the treaty system. So, in some sense, the problem has shrunk a little bit. We can focus our energies on just Iran and North Korea and deal with them maybe on a case-by-case basis, and there might be some generalities that we—that are pointing at how we need to strengthen the treaty.
ROBBINS: So I don’t want to get into agonizing detail about the review conference, but—this is the way I see it and so just lay it out. We’re going to have a four-week conference in New York. There’s still a question of how high a level of delegation the U.S. is even going to send to this. Secretary [of State Condoleezza] Rice may be too busy, according to her aides, to go, but I would suspect also the administration hasn’t made up its mind about much attention it really wants to [give to] this, because it could be a somewhat unpleasant experience for them. On the other hand, they have a very strong message they want to make, which is that—I believe—that there is a genuine crisis of compliance out there.
There isn’t probably much that can be achieved at this conference itself, but it is potentially a chance for people to at least form their arguments, at least get it out to a broader audience, and to go into what is a spring of other meetings in which there’s probably more of a chance to make some genuine decisions, because you’ve got smaller groups, but—whether it’s a Nuclear Suppliers Group or it’s [an] even smaller G-8.
What do you think are—if you were the administration, and I know you’re a supporter of them, what are the three points that they need to make when—whether it’s [Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control] Steve Rademaker or Secretary of State Rice—when they get up there, with complete, concise clarity.
HUESSY: I think the first thing is that the NPT can’t survive if you have one tier of members that shouldn’t have nuclear weapons, but either are seeking them and we know it, or have them and admit them like North Korea and then steps out of the treaty, though I don’t think it’s fair to say that they then end their obligations that they had while they were in the treaty. That’s No. 1, and I think the heightened problem is the fear that—in the Cold War, I don’t think we thought India would develop nuclear weapons and then sell them to somebody. Now we’re worried that they’ll either sell them or give them, and that those somebody’s are not going to be a country with rockets aimed at us, but folks who would like to put it somewhere in a truck, or a train, or something and smuggle it into the country. And contrary to popular belief, I think that is a very serious problem, which I work on about half my day. But there are 1,500 ballistic missiles around the world—bigger than the inventory of the tanks, armies, airplanes, submarines, and surface ships of our enemies—and unless people are spending all this money on ballistic missiles just for fun, that’s also a threat. That’s No. 1.
No. 2, that we have to have a moratorium on any more reprocessing, or any more enrichment. We have a bad enough problem making sure that we can monitor the stuff we already have out there, and it’s tough to say, but it is true. We can’t really monitor it unless we have total voluntary compliance, because we have very few levers of compliance. That’s the second one.
The third one—and I know this will be somewhat controversial—but our obligations on the NPT to stop the arms race, we did. To move towards disarmament is somewhat of a fuzzy requirement, because there’s not a time frame. But, we have moved from 12,000 nuclear weapons—as [retired Air Force General] Larry Welch said yesterday at a seminar I hosted—down to 2,000, and he says that if you look at our obligations, we’re abiding basically by the terms of the CTBT. We are not having any nuclear yield [inaudible].
ROBBINS: Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty.
HUESSY: Test-Ban Treaty. We’re abiding by basically the rules of START II [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty]; we’re de-MIRVing [multiple independently launched re-entry vehicles] our land-based [missiles], and we don’t have to. We’re going down there and the tipping point, Jon—I hope I’m not mispronouncing your name, sir—Wolfsthal—who wrote for Foreign Affairs just recently [ ”The Next Nuclear Wave“]--[inaudible] was a book saying that if you really examine the test cases of people that moved away from nuclear weapons, they did so not because the United States diminished our nuclear arsenal, but in the case of Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, because we had a nuclear extended deterrent. In the case of the others, [a] very interesting review, he said, ”We really didn’t make a difference whether we—because we can blow countries up whether we stop doing everything on nukes“—so that the argument, I think, we’re going to hear at the review is the United States should stop all these—or go down to another 1,000 below where we are now—and that will make all these countries like North Korea and Iran behave themselves which is, I think, as Larry Welch said, nonsense.
ROBBINS: Article VI nonsense [laughter].
HUESSY: No, no. That’s not fair, Carla. [Laughter]
ROBBINS: Not my job to be fair—to be provocative. What do you think?
FERGUSON: Well, I don’t want to make Peter’s position out to be like a [Tom] Toles cartoon in the Washington Post or anything, it’s not. I mean, he was, I think, giving a lot of nuance, and—but I’d like to now push back on some of the things he raised. You know, his second point about moratorium on uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, would that apply globally, or just apply selectively?
HUESSY: Globally—
FERGUSON: So we would say to—
HUESSY: New facilities—
FERGUSON: New facilities—so we say that corporations here in the United States interested in enriching uranium—
ROBBINS: Wait, wait.
FERGUSON: Put a stop to it, or—
ROBBINS: I’m not sure everybody here is as much of a weenie as we are, so let’s put some context here. The basic problem here is that Article IV in the Nonproliferation Treaty guarantees non-nuclear states access to all peaceful nuclear technology. The problem is, it’s real hard to tell what’s peaceful and what’s not; and as we were seeing with Iran, the same technology—whether it’s enrichment or reprocessing that can produce fuel for a nuclear reactor—can also produce fuel for a nuclear bomb. So the debate has really come down to now about, how do you stop it? How do you—what President Bush says is the big loophole problem in the NPT—the proposal he has made is actually not a moratorium. He wants a complete, across-the-[board] ban. He says the world is awash in enriched uranium; that we can figure out other ways—although he hasn’t spent anywhere enough time, to my mind, talking about other ways to fuel countries to make sure they feel they have a secure supply; that they will not be subject to some sort of political blackmail.
UNKNOWN: Yeah, I would go with that. I don’t have a problem with that.
ROBBINS: The president was just talking about a complete ban. Mohammed ElBaradei, at least as of right now the director general of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] at least for a few more months, has suggested a five-year moratorium and has begun talking about potential ways of guaranteeing supplies themselves.
The third idea that’s out there right now, which is basically everybody else from the G-8, which is the idea of criteria in which you would say certain countries could get—you could have new countries, but they have to meet some very stiff criteria. The criteria the French and the Canadians have come up with right now basically say you have to have a proven record of compliance, you have to prove that you really need the fuel cycle in the first place, and you also have to live in a safe neighborhood. Basically, what they’re really saying is, if your name begins with an ”I“ and it ends with an ”n,“ you can’t have it. [Laughter]
So I mean, that’s really basically—that’ll be criteria No. 4. So those are the ideas that are out there right now. I don’t think the administration’s going to push them very hard, because I think—I think that this—because of the sacrosanct nature of Article IV, it’s not going to come up all that much. They’ll make their presentations. I think they’re going to push much more on the question the initial protocol and inspections and all that. But it will be the main focus of the Nuclear Supplies Group meeting and the G-8 when they talk about it. So, with that little bit of context here, the [inaudible].
Let’s go back to talking about the fuel cycle, which is probably the hottest topic right now on the question of reforming it. So you were saying—you were raising the question—complete ban?
FERGUSON: Right, what options would you favor? I mean, also President Bush talks about grandfathering in Brazil, Japan—countries—for those who don’t know, Brazil is pursuing a uranium-enrichment plant and Japan is pursuing a very large-scale commercial plutonium-reprocessing plants at [inaudible], and these facilities have been in the works for a number of years. So these countries say, ”We’ve already invested heavily in these particular facilities and so how dare you ask us to roll it back now? Of course, we’re not going to do that.“ It’s not in their interests. You know, ”We have sovereign rights to go ahead and use these facilities under the NPT and we believe we do have economic interests at stake.“
ROBBINS: So—but is this really just a way to stop Iran from getting—finding a justification to deny Iran something that they say is guaranteed to them under Article IV and other people would dispute? Or, [do] we also need to do this because we want to remove the temptation from other countries that may be tempted, whether—particularly if their regions get a little more unstable? The South Koreans, very interesting. What were they really doing? Was the X-box broken on a Saturday night so they decided to enrich just a teeny bit of uranium? Or the Egyptians? Interesting sets of questions there.
FERGUSON: I [think] that’s called an insurance policy, but—
ROBBINS: But, but the question becomes, do—is the issue—should President Bush push for the maximalist position because it’s not just Iran, but it’s the temptation of others—Taiwan and other countries? Or should we start with criteria and build up to it? Is it unreasonable? The French don’t like the idea of a ban, the Canadians and the Australians don’t like it, because they have uranium, and they’re saying an across-the-board ban isn’t a good idea for the good guys, and that the NPT is invidious to start, so let’s just make it a little more invidious.
HUESSY: Yeah, well ElBaradei has a paper that he’s going to release to the review conference—not that we have to make a decision on that paper—but he has three major options in there and some of them you already mentioned, but another option is that any new facilities would have to be jointly owned—multinationally owned—and so, that way you could have more controls over the facility; make sure a particular nation isn’t going to break out with nuclear-weapons capability.
ROBBINS: But do we say an across-the-board ban?
HUESSY: So one nation would be the only people supplying the fuel?
ROBBINS: Correct.
FERGUSON: It couldn’t just leave.
ROBBINS: So do we all agree that an across-the-board ban is the—should the administration continue to push for that?
HUESSY: My view is, if your end result is that you get to—and I go back to Henry Sokolski—Henry I think is right. If you can’t monitor and safeguard it, no one should have the stuff. But if it’s a matter of, well this country can—the problem is the NPT treats everybody the same, OK. But if you have a country [for] which there isn’t a prayer on God’s green earth that they’re going to safeguard that reprocessing facility, because they won’t voluntarily let you come in and look at what they’re doing, then for God’s sake don’t give it to them. But then they argue, ”Well if I don’t get it, then you don’t get it.“ And you—Japan, Britain, and everybody already have it and you have either—and that’s the fear of some people—that the system will break down.
My view is, if your goal is to have reprocessing enrichment only where you can safeguard it, fine. But then where it can’t be, we have to step up to the plate and say, ”No, we’re not going to provide this technology.“ I would go one step further. I would say anybody who provides this technology to the countries that are proliferators of either missiles or weapons of mass destruction contrary to their obligations should be denied access to American capital markets and Japanese capital markets. That’s about 75 percent of the capital markets of the country and Wall Street just went down 50 points, but I think that should be done.
Roger Robinson has taken $18 billion out of Chinese bonds and stocks in the last year in part because Yale and Harvard had divested themselves of money that they had invested in Chinese companies, which then they found out were using that money to not only build ballistic missiles, but help proliferators and beat the hell out of people in the Sudan. And I think that transparency’s wonderful, but that ought to be—I mean, talk about putting teeth in something—really serious about this. I think one of the things is you have—I mean, who are the people who put the money up behind the con network that built the factory in Malaysia that produced the 4,000 centrifuges that the Proliferation Security Initiative nabbed on the high seas with the help from the Italians, the Germans, and a couple of other folks, OK? I mean, then I—if you really want to be serious, because arms control per se—if this is a threat, which it is, I agree. It’s a serious threat, Carla. I think we ought to go there.
ROBBINS: OK, so we’re going to go to the audience, but let me take it out a little, just to sort of sum up. Right now, President Bush has a set of proposals—the fuel-cycle one is perhaps the most ambitious one, which we’re going to see debated. He’s also—the U.S. is going to make the point at the meeting—probably not get anywhere, but that the [1997] Additional Protocol [to the NPT] should become the mandatory standard and perhaps even tougher inspections for countries that have been caught cheating—[by] itself, that’s a very interesting idea—and also talking about reforming the IAEA itself.
The administration’s been very fuzzy about which reforms they’re really talking about. They’re obviously not very happy with the consensus of the board, because they can’t get a referral on Iran itself. So those are all swimming in the pool of Vienna and New York.
What other things out there should we be thinking about? This [meeting] is called ”Nonproliferation in the Second—Policy [in] the Second Term.“ What other things need to be done themselves? And is there a need for further cuts in the U.S. arsenal as well—not on the demonstration issue, but on the fact that, wouldn’t the world be an even safer place if we had even fewer nuclear weapons?
FERGUSON: Yeah, let’s step back from the treaty itself, because we can get lost in the minutia of article such-and-such, and let’s think about: What are the threats? What are the nuclear threats that really affect America? And I see three of them. There is the threat of nuclear terrorism, and that’s the most likely of the nuclear threats—most likely that we’d actually see use for a nuclear weapon by a terrorist group. But it’s the least damaging, if you look at the other nuclear threats.
Next on my list would be threats from so-called rogue states like Iran and North Korea. They may use a nuclear weapon against us; we might be involved in a war with them that escalates up to nuclear use.
ROBBINS: Or they might sell it—
FERGUSON: Or they might sell it or transfer it to terrorists, OK. And then that’s more damaging, I would say, than [the] nuclear-terrorists threat if actual nuclear weapons were used.
And then finally, there is a threat of accidental nuclear war that’s still overhanging us more than 13 years after the end of the Cold War. We still have thousands of nuclear weapons that are on hair-trigger alert in both the United States and Russia, and those weapons could be launched in a matter of minutes. So within an hour, you know, we could be incinerated. I mean, I don’t want to be—sound paranoid here and be Chicken Little, but that is a possibility that hangs over us, and we need to do more to reduce that threat. And so, in that respect, getting to your question about reducing our arsenal further, yes, I would support deeper cuts, but deeper cuts are not enough.
We also need to make sure that when we do make those cuts, it’s done smartly and done in a way that we are not raising the risk of nuclear war either by design or by inadvertence or accident. And so that’s what I would support, and we need to have a really hard look at our nuclear posture. I know we just did that a few years ago, but we need to decide how many weapons do we really need and find a way to adjust our nuclear posture so it doesn’t look threatening to Russia, doesn’t look threatening to China, will still maintain a nuclear deterrent posture, and we also take a new look at how our—the path we’re going down to possible new nuclear weapons may affect other nations, may not directly convince them to build new nuclear arms, but we’re the leader in the world and we have the most powerful conventional military, so if we can’t take the steps to further reduce our nuclear arsenal, what message does that send to the rest of the world?
ROBBINS: Why don’t we throw it out and—
HUESSY: Give me 30 seconds to respond?
ROBBINS: No.
HUESSY: OK.
ROBBINS: You’ll do it in the first question anyway. Just also for those—there’s actually quite an interesting drama playing out today. I don’t know if you saw this on the wires, but there’s a ship moving toward Iran with a crane on it that came from Germany. The Germans have now determined that they think it’s going to Iran’s ballistic missile program, and there seems to be some question about whether or not they’re going to board it, whether they’re going to use PSI, or whether they’re going to let this thing go. So we are living in the real-time drama of proliferation at this very moment. If you will recall, PSI has had two [moments]--the one before its creation, when it let the ballistic missiles go on to Yemen and the other one, which was a great success when it got stopped—the BBC China—and it pushed the Libyans over the edge on their decision to disarm. So we’re in the third PSI moment, which was quite an intriguing one today.
Let’s go down to the audience. Can you say your name, and we don’t want too much filibustering here, we’re going to go to the nuclear option, so make your questions short.
QUESTIONER: My name’s [inaudible]. I’m happy that in the last second, terrorism and PSI were mentioned, because much of the discussion, as you so well pointed out, was, I thought, like [the] 1970s, where the main actors are states and non-state actors are not mentioned; where the assumption is that once you make a treaty with a government they are responsible and they are going to abide by it, which is all kind of history.
I’m surprised that—I’ll try to be as brief as I can—that you guys are talking about a compliance crisis. You can, as you mentioned in passing, completely comply with the treaty and give three months’ notice and keep the stuff. So it’s as flawed as anything can be and it’s like, ”Mr. Lincoln, otherwise, how did you like the play“? I mean, how much more flawed can you be? PSI—I’d like to hear if you’re willing to agree that it’s—provides a much more robust—not meetings at the United Nations and [inaudible] to other nations and Vienna. It says, in effect, as you just suggested, ”We won’t allow that to happen and it’ll be stopped on the high seas with the United Nations’ blessing.“
So the question is, is it too late to go back in fixing treaties and having a consultation with—if you take [it] seriously that there is a major threat here and—do we have to move to something much more robust that would not allow these things to be shipped? Now, about the high seas, once the United Nations can change the law of what you can do on the high seas—the last ship was stopped in an Italian port with German consent, but I don’t I don’t think that’s [inaudible] to go.
ROBBINS: So to—basically, is your question, should we keep trying to reform the treaty, should we go for—should we move on beyond it and basically have a coalition of the willing? And then I don’t think these two things are necessarily in competition with each other and there is perhaps the idea that maybe it would be easier to stop it on the high seas right now, if instead of just criminalizing it internally, which is what they managed to do at the U.N., but actually they added the idea of transporting weapons of mass destruction on the high seas to slavery, which gives any country a right to board any ship—not only a right but an obligation, which I know that the people that came up with this idea and pressed it—I think brilliantly in the Bush Administration, both [National Security Council Counter-proliferation Adviser] Bob Joseph and [U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations-designate] John Bolton, [who] are not big fans of international laws or was, until recently, of the United Nations, and so they didn’t decide to talk about this—but there was a potential doing it in the Law of the Sea. There’s lots of different ways you could possibly do this. So let’s raise this question here. If you’ve got a posse, maybe we should go for an international law to make it work.
HUESSY: The answer in my case is yes, yes, yes, yes. How much support do you want? I mean, I’ve been accused of being a cowboy because I support, you know, PSI and things like that and then my—
ROBBINS: It’s the way you dress.
HUESSY:—right-wingers don’t like me because I support arms control. But my view is, let’s say you got rid of everything and started over. You’re still starting with the same 200 countries you’ve got now, with the same nuclear weapons programs and the same terrorists and the same whack-jobs like North Korea and so forth, so you got the same actors to do whatever—so my view is, if you can interdict something on the high seas and make it akin to slavery, I think that’s a great analogy—you know, Bob Joseph and I worked at NDU for a long, long time and Bob’s fine with international law as long as you can enforce it and as long as it’s written correctly and that it’s not rewarding bad guys as opposed to keeping bad guys—making them able to do their thing.
ROBBINS: Now, why didn’t they make a genuine push on that? I mean this seems like such an obvious ratification for PSI. Given such incredible—they went through such contortions to get onto the Sosan [ship] and then let it go, which is the one for Yemen itself.
HUESSY: Well, the question—let’s say you go to the U.N., and then all of a sudden, they’ll form a committee and the committee will write up rules for when you can and cannot undertake a PSI action. By the time they get done with it—
ROBBINS: Yeah, but they got through the last one reasonably quickly.
HUESSY: Yeah, I know, but having worked at the U.N., and when I was 23 years old, [former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State] Dick Gardner said, ”Would you like to write a treaty on climate change?“ And being stupid I said, ”Sure,“ and I got a free trip to Bellagio. Well, by the time I [got] through [with] the treaty, it was that thick, and when the group that was looking at it—the Intergovernmental whatever they call themselves—it tripled in size and that’s, I think, that’s one of the concerns the administration—for good or for bad, that tends to be sometimes their view of things, Carla. But making [the] sending nukes all over the place, or parts of weapons of mass destruction, or the delivery vehicles a crime, like slavery; I’ll vote for it.
ROBBINS: I’m looking for gender balance here, I only see male hands out here. Oh well. Yes?
UNKNOWN: There’s Tom Graham in back.
QUESTIONER: My name is Khaled Dawoud. I’m from Egypt’s Al Ahram newspaper, and I just want to refer to the case of Israel, which remains to be the silent issue, I mean, apparently here in the United States, in particular. I mean, I just want to ask you whether in the framework of the upcoming conference there could be reached any formula whereby at least, you know, Israel could allow the International Atomic [Energy] Agency to inspect its installations and tell the outside world what’s the situation there, in order at least to convince other countries to comply or even put pressure on Iran to kind of give up its nuclear options if it wants to.
My second issue to just refer to the article in the Washington Posttoday about the nuclear bunker-buster bombs and, I mean, whether this would be actually another violation of the U.S. obligations according to the NPT.
UNKNOWN: No, those bombs were conventional. The ones that were going to go to Israel, OK?
ROBBINS: No, no, he’s talking about the [Arms Control Association] and [inaudible] study on the [inaudible] and how it could potentially [inaudible].
HUESSY: Let me answer that the way General Welch did yesterday. Without any of this being done, nothing new, we could blow away Iran, North Korea, any of the countries even with a thousand fewer nuclear weapons. They don’t worry about our nuclear weapons. That’s—[to] quote Larry Welch again, ”That’s nonsense.“ Iran and North Korea worry about our conventional forces. What did the Indian Foreign Minister tell [former Secretary of Defense] Les Aspin after the Gulf War when Les said, ”General, what is the lesson of the Gulf War?“ and he said, ”Don’t fight the United States unless you have nuclear weapons to deter the use of their conventional weapons.“ Now, if you want to go down that logic stream, we should get rid of our conventional weapons and then Iran and North Korea won’t feel threatened. I mean, if you really want to go, that’s the logic of it, OK?
Whether or not we can take out a bunker in North Korea is a question of deterring North Korea from using its nuclear weapons and conventional forces to attack the South or Japan. Whether or not we can threaten and destroy their society has nothing to do with whether or not you have [inaudible]. And it’s not a good question of new nuclear weapons; we’re talking about keeping the same number and reducing them, OK?
In the Cold War, we developed very elegant weapons, which people described as Swiss watches multiplied by a factor of [one] thousand, to have put 14 warheads on one missile. Now we don’t need that. It’s a totally different kind of situation.
ROBBINS: Where do you want to start?
FERGUSON: I know, there are so many things I can talk about to address. I think one point I want to get across to the audience is, let’s not get mesmerized by how many nuclear weapons the U.S. has or other nuclear arms states have. That’s important; I grant you that. But getting to the question of new nuclear weapons, you know, is it new wine in old bottles or some formulation like that?
The question is, are we making nuclear weapons more usable? As we go down to lower levels of operationally deployed nuclear weapons—and the Bush administration is doing that. I supported that; we should applaud them for that, but we need to ask—
ROBBINS: They’re also cutting the stockpiles.
FERGUSON:—and the cutting of stockpiles, exactly—that should be applauded. In that sense, they are living up to the Article VI obligation. However, are we on the slippery slope, where we’re eroding the firewall between conventional and nuclear weapons? I don’t have a definite answer to that, but I’m at least putting out that there’s that criticism. There’s at least a perception problem and—
ROBBINS: What you’re saying is, when you talk about a tactical utility for a nuclear weapon, which is what the idea of an earth-penetrator is, doesn’t it make—doesn’t it remove the bright line? Doesn’t it make—
FERGUSON: No.
ROBBINS:—it more tempting, more useful? And what is the deterrent value of an earth-penetrator? It’s a tactical weapon; it’s not a strategic weapon.
HUESSY: No, the deterrent value is not to allow North Korea or any country to have either their commanders or their nuclear weapons in a sanctuary where they believe they can remain without being harmed if they used nuclear weapons first.
When I talked to members of Congress who will use the same line, I said, ”Do you believe the United States should retaliate with a nuclear weapon if we were attacked with a nuclear weapon?“ And they go, ”Well, that’s war-fighting.“ I said, ”What’s the point of having the nuclear weapons for deterrence unless you’re willing to use them, if that’s what you need to do to retaliate and destroy your opponent or stop the opponent from going after you?“ And they said, ”Well, nuclear weapons are OK for deterrence, but not OK if deterrence breaks down.“
Well, as Elaine [inaudible] says, that’s [a] bluff, and if you say it loud enough, the bluff will in fact lower the threshold where nuclear weapons might be used and, Charles, I would argue the exact opposite: that by making your nuclear deterrent credible, you vastly lower the chances that it’ll ever be used. Similarly, when you make your conventional arsenal more credible to be used, you increase the threshold by which—you know, over which conflict will start.
FERGUSON: You raise a lot of very good points, but let’s try to look at it from the other side’s perspective and them saying, ”Well, we also need to produce more credible nuclear weapons, because we’re in an insecure environment and we may have cause to believe that the U.S., with its overwhelming conventional forces, may attack us, may conduct a preventive [inaudible].“ And it’s enlightening. I’m just saying, one of the lessons they’re learning is, ”We need to get nukes. We need to have an asymmetric way of deflecting the U.S. threat.“ So what would you advise, you know, the leader of one of those countries? Should they develop these kinds of weapons?
HUESSY: Regime change. [Laughter] You know, [Libyan leader Muammar] Qaddafi, for whatever reason, and I’m not—you know, you can argue, ”How did you get in his head?“ but when [Representative] Curt Weldon [R-Pa.] took that congressional delegation of six Democrats and six Republicans from the House [of Representatives], and they sat there in the—whatever they call the Libyan—I don’t know if they call it a parliament, and Qaddafi went through all the efforts they’ve made for weapons of mass destruction and said this is the dumbest thing we ever did; talked about all the terrorism they supported and said it was stupid. We give it up, it’s over. It’s not good to have these weapons; they do not improve your security. I call that the Qaddafi option, much [more] preferable to the Saddam option. OK?
Now, North Korea, my belief is they want nuclear weapons to intimidate us, to break our relationship with the South, to withdraw from the peninsula. And the Chinese thought that that might be a good idea, but I think some Chinese are having second thoughts. The mullahs want weapons because they want to basically intimidate the Saudis. I think they’re agents of Iran. I know I’m a minority on this, but I think the only solution in Iran is regime change: 85 percent, 90 percent of the people hate them. All the polls show that, all the stuff we’re getting out of Iran shows that. I don’t see them [the mullahs] giving them [their weapons] up. I think the negotiations are a sham, but the NPT requires them. We’ve got to walk through these wickets. Maybe I’m wrong and maybe they’ll turn out to be—give them up.
But if it’s our conventional forces, Charles, they worry about, I don’t know anybody that’s suggesting we give that up.
ROBBINS: The gentleman actually asked the question about Israel.
HUESSY: Oh, that’s right. Exactly. Sure.
ROBBINS: So, you know, there is no national conspiracy here, OK? It’s like [laughter]--I mean, I know you’d like to believe this, but there’s no conspiracy here. Please, Charles, could you answer the Israel question?
FERGUSON: Well, the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is one of the worst-kept secrets in the Middle East, and every time I go on the radio to talk about nuclear proliferation, I always inevitably get, you know, the question about Israel’s nuclear weapons. I start out by saying I’m not making apologies for Israel’s nuclear weapons; however, they are in a pretty unique position. They’ve lived for decades in a state of existential crisis. We had a lot of surrounding Arab states saying they want to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. And Israel wasn’t saying that to the Arab states. And so Israel had this tremendous overhanging asymmetric threat. And so, if you were an Israeli, wouldn’t you want to have sort of an ultimate sort of an insurance card? And I’m not making excuses for nuclear weapons, so you’d gather I would like to get rid of them. But I can see from the Israeli perspective why they would want to acquire nuclear weapons.
Now, just so everyone’s on the same page, there have been proposals to have a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East, and the Arab states tend to support that position. No surprise there. They don’t have nuclear weapons; Israel does. They’d like Israel to get rid of their nuclear weapons, so it would be through a one-sided reduction.
Israel had a counterproposal saying, ”All right, guys, what about a zone free of weapons of mass destruction?“ And so then Israel can point to Syria and other states that may—you know, are suspected of having chemical weapons or biological weapons. So Israel says, ”Look, we don’t want any of these unconventional weapons threatening us or our neighbors, so that’s our option.“ And so they’re, you know, at loggerheads over those two counterproposals.
ROBBINS: You know, we should—and I want to move on, because I know Tom Graham, who knows more about this than all of us put together, has a question. But I do want to [put this] out there, this question of, what you do with the unofficial haves, and how do we go on for another generation, sort of acting as if India and Pakistan really aren’t there and Israel really isn’t there? Is there some way to bring them in so that we know they’re safer, more secure, less threatening, and behave in a more responsible way? But we can get back to it. Tom, did you have a question?
QUESTIONER: My question is sort of related. I’d just like to get the opinion of the panel as to how secure they think Japan and South Korea are and will remain in the treaty as the numbers of North Koreans’ weapons continues to go up. Supposedly they’re at 10 now. And what would happen [inaudible].
ROBBINS: I mean that is—you know, I asked that question today of a senior administration official, who said to me, ”There’s not a chance in the world that the Japanese would ever go nuclear,“ and that’s what the Japanese themselves say, but then you say, ”Well, why didn’t we store that money on that platonic separation? Was that really just because they want to recycle?“
HUESSY: Carla, I wouldn’t, I think as long as the United States maintains a conventional capability and a nuclear extended deterrent that protects both South Korea, Taiwan, and—the three of them, and Japan—that Japan and South—the Republic of Korea will not build nuclear weapons. That, I think, is one of the miscalculations the Chinese made when they kind of winked at the [inaudible] folks helping the South Koreans—I mean the North Koreans, which the North—the South Koreans have been told this.
And that—I know the Chinese have no interest in seeing Japan or the Republic of Korea go nuclear. And I don’t see—as long as our [security] umbrella’s there, as long as our forces are in Japan and the Republic of Korea, that won’t happen. Could it happen if we leave the peninsula? Yes. And I think that is the miscalculation that China and North Korea had, is that North Korea wants us out of the peninsula. They say it [in] every statement they can, because they think that then it would be easier to coerce the South in terms of reunification. The flip side of that is, that the Japanese and the South Koreans—some elements—would say, ”Oh my God, now we’re naked.“ So as long [as] we’re there, I think, as a deterrent, I think we’re OK. I’d also like to concur—I agree with what Charles said with respect to Israel.
ROBBINS: What do you think?
FERGUSON: We have agreement.
HUESSY: Great. [Laughter]
ROBBINS: So, so all that—
HUESSY: Though I don’t [think] Israel [should have] to give their nuclear weapons up. It would just make the Middle East safe for conventional war.
ROBBINS: All those billions of dollars that they’ve [Japan] spent at Rokkasho [plutonium reprocessing plant], and they’ve now found out that, actually, it wasn’t cheaper to reprocess than it was to store, much to their surprise, and they sort of, like, lost the paper for 10 years? Is that really just because they’re tidy and recycling, or are they trying to make themselves a latent nuclear power? And do you consider it unthinkable, as long as United States is a good and reliable ally, and that the Japanese will be tempted, or as Tom says, ”What happens when, if the North Koreans blow one off?“
FERGUSON: Oh, I don’t think [it] is unthinkable that Japan would exercise the nuclear option. I think we need to play a lot of scenarios. We need to go through a sort of threat analysis and look at a lot of what-ifs, because right now, our relations with the South Korean government aren’t good; we’re not really communicating very effectively with them. They have [a] more liberal government in power right now.
Our relations with Japan, I would say, you know, are much better than relations with South Korea, and I don’t think South Korea will probably [be] the first to go nuclear if North Korea does an overt nuclear-weapons tests. Probably Japan would be the first domino to fall, and then probably South Korea because, I think, you know, South Korea very much sees itself kind of in a crosshairs.
You know, talking about deterrent relationships, it’s not only North Korea’s nuclear weapons that give it some kind of deterrent relationship with the United States, but there are also their conventional military, which has weakened somewhat in recent years. They still have a very massive conventional power, and I think that’s what we in the United States would fear unleashing if we did some kind of preemptive, preventive attack against North Korea. And I think that’s what’s been, you know, holding back some people who want to be more forceful with North Korea.
ROBBINS: I mean, the Japanese, of course, are the only victim of a nuclear weapon. It seems to me that they have a very strong cultural and political resistance to it. Is this something that we just make up, so that it keeps us in—keeps us all busy imagining that someday they might go nuclear?
HUESSY: I mean, Carla, I’ve lived for three—two and a half years in Japan and [in] Korea as a student—as an undergrad student. Maybe it’s too long ago, but I agree, I think the Japanese just—they’re not going nuclear so long as our deterrent’s there. It’s just that—I can’t—I see the government falling.
And the South Koreans—it’s fascinating when you talk to many South Koreans, they say, ”Oh, the North Koreans, they’re not going to drop their nuclear weapons on us. They’re our brothers.“ You just have to—you know, this is because, you know, 65 [percent], 70 percent of them don’t remember the Korean War. When I lived there in 1969 and ‘70, every one of my South Korean classmates was absolutely convinced—I mean, they knew North Korea was a threat. There wasn’t any doubt in their minds. And that’s changed, though I think the South Koreans—maybe they’ll come to their senses and understand that reunification is not going to be some simple thing that they go stand up [at the truce village] at Panmunjom and shake hands.
ROBBINS: I’m going to have some Germans talk to them about it. Judith?
QUESTIONER: Thank you, Carla. A quick comment on the question—
ROBBINS: Judith Kipper, Council on Foreign Relations, leading Middle East expert.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. [Laughter] Sorry. First, a quick comment on Iran: I happened to be in Iran when the Pakistanis tested their weapon, and I can tell you in terms of culture—high culture, low culture—and their perception of one another, that every Iranian from generals to mullahs to taxi drivers, waiters, et cetera, said, you know, shrugged their shoulders and said, you know, ”Can we possibly be less than Pakistan? After all, the Moguls came from Iran.“ So there’s a very, very important cultural pride deterrent component to it.
To talk about regime change, with all due respect, is just silly and out of the question. Regime change was possible in Iran because it was a one-man show with the Stalinist regime. Iran, whether we like it or not, is a country of institutions with 97 percent literacy. Our best friend, Pakistan, with the nuclear weapon, has 30 percent literacy and has very, very deep social, political, religious, military, security, terror problems, et cetera, et cetera. So, I think we need to have a more realistic view of Iran if we want to be effective in getting Iran to stop whatever may be [its] nuclear program.
To have heard the last few minutes of our discussion, of what you’ve all said, both of you, the real danger appears to be in Asia, and that North Korea being the kind of state it is, is not a country of institutions; it is not a country that has anything except its nuclear knowledge and weapons. Why do you think, Charles, that there is such a concentration in Iran and North Korea [that] is nowhere to be found in American policy-speak?
FERGUSON: I had to deal with that question when I was in South Korea at the end of January. The State Department sent me there to talk to a number of Korean groups about the Bush administration’s anti-proliferation policies in his second term. And I said, ”You want me [laughter] to go to talk about what the Bush administration is going to do?“
ROBBINS: He was co-opting you.
FERGUSON: Right. And—no, it was a very enlightening experience and just to respond—I’ll get to Judith’s question—just to respond to one of Peter’s comments about South Korean colleagues. A number of South Korean colleagues opened up to me over dinner and lunch, and they said they are very much internally conflicted. A lot of them are of split minds and one day they may say, ”We need to go in there and force regime change on North Korea;“ another day, it’s like, ”No. They’re our brothers. We need to cooperate,“ you know, ”We wouldn’t dare launch a nuclear weapon or launch a conventional attack against them.“ So I think we need to beware that we don’t step into some kind of monolithic view on behalf of our ally. No, I know you’re not saying that.
HUESSY: I absolutely know that.
FERGUSON: Right.
ROBBINS: But Judith’s question: Why are we spending so much time talking about Iran and North Korea? Is it because Iran—there’s a chance of stopping them and North Korea, the horses are already out of the barn, or—
FERGUSON: Well, that’s actually the main reason I gave the South Korean audience. I said—I think the Bush administration sees the window of opportunity and we know North Korea has some type of nuclear weapons arsenal right now. We don’t know, you know, how functional it is. They haven’t tested [it]. And as I mentioned previously, they have a conventional military threat overhanging one of our major allies. And, you know, there is that million-trillion nightmare that General Gary Locke fretted about in 1994, when the Clinton administration was drawing up war plans. The million-trillion referred to at least a million dead and $1 trillion in economic losses, and I don’t think the administration sees that kind of dire damage coming about if they do more forcible regime change on Iran, and that’s a danger there. So I see us on a slippery slope—that we see that Iran may be, you know, two or three years or so away from actually having a nuclear weapons capability. And so, now we need to really put on the pressure and now we see this coming about and trying to work with our allies to some extent to try to put more pressure on Iran.
But I agree with you, Judith, I think it’s nonsense to try to effect regime change for a number of reasons, and we can have a whole hour of discussion on that. But going back to an earlier comment about Libya and what made Libya change, well, you know, we’re not embracing the Libyan regime. It’s not like, you know, we admire Muammar Qaddafi’s former government, and we didn’t ask him to step down out of [his] seat of power, but we were able to negotiate with him. Yes, we used PSI effectively and we used other, well, hints of using force, but there are a lot of—there’s several years leading up to that with Britain—the court case, Lockerbie, Scotland, [1988] bombing of the airliner. Those were other means of pressure. We had lots of instruments we brought to bear on Libya, and we did a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiations, and it worked. And so, why are we afraid to do that kind of engagement with Iran or North Korea?
HUESSY: Charles, just to be fair about Libya, is that Libya denied in the summer just before Qaddafi gave it all up, that they had any nuclear program whatsoever. Only when faced with the goods, which is basically the bill of [inaudible] and the evidence, No. 1. And No. 2, I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that, literally the day before we got Saddam in the hole he was in—in the spider hole—I think that had a very major impact on Qaddafi. My comment about—
ROBBINS: But it doesn’t have to be one or the other. It’s an accretion of pressure
HUESSY: I understand. My comment about Iran was that, if I wanted to solve the problem in Iran—if I had a magic wand, I’d love to do regime change. It wasn’t that I either think it’s easy or doable. I tend to agree with [inaudible] that there’s a chance here, and I’ve met with student groups that have come from Iran—these are the students who actually led the takeover of the embassy; then there are the ones who led the reform, you know, under [President of Iraqn Mohammed] Khatami, and they got snookered by him. I don’t think we have to live with the mullahs, if in fact, as one congressman said, the mullahs are building nuclear weapons to prove the Persians are just as good as Jews. And they used that excuse when they did the Shahab [missile].
HUESSY: Well, if it’s not Israel and it’s not the Pakistanis, then how do you get them to give it up? If it’s a matter of Israel got them and Pakistan’s got them, we have to have them, then no negotiations at all are going to work.
ROBBINS: We now go into final jeopardy here, so is there one last question? Oh, John. No, I have to call on John. I’m sorry. I owe John a lot. I didn’t see you back there. [Laughter] Will you take my call later? [Laughter] And you can ask a question.
QUESTIONER: John Pike. I want to ask a question that Peter tried to answer earlier about the GBU-28 bunker-buster bombs that the United States agreed yesterday to sell to the Israelis. It seems to me that they have Natans written on them—
HUESSY: They [have] what written on them?
QUESTIONER: Natans, the uranium enrichment facility that the Iranians have tried to bury. Is this bluff or are they going to use them next year?
HUESSY: You know, I remember when the Israelis took out the [Iraqi] Osirak reactor, the hue and cry. I think some of it from the [Ronald] Reagan administration was, ”Well, I guess we have to, because the State Department said we should object.“ But I know that many of the people I know, at least on Capitol Hill, because that’s where I spend my life, cheered, including my 95-year-old grandmother, who is a refugee from Nazi Germany—had tears streaming down her face and said, ”Thank God for the Israelis.“ If they do it again, I’m not going to object.
ROBBINS: Charles?
FERGUSON: But the thing is, yeah, that drove the program underground. And we didn’t take out all the Iranian enrichment activities Iraq was doing throughout the 1980s. And they were under IAEA safeguards.
HUESSY: To be fair, the Gulf War drove North Korea underground and drove Iran underground, because of our precision bombing, and they’re going to go underground anyway. OK? I don’t think—I mean, then you ask [weapons inspector] Mr. [Richard] Butler from the U.N. if he hadn’t invaded Kuwait, would Saddam have had nuclear weapons? And he said, ”Yeah but six months later.“
And the question then is, well, don’t go to Kuwait because that’s going to drive Iran and North Korea underground and end up with Saddam having nukes. I mean, life is full of—I agree with you—ugly consequences, but I don’t think your option then is to say, ”Oh well, we’ll leave Saddam or we’ll leave, you know, the Gulf War,“ that ”we won’t go there. We’ll leave them in Kuwait.“
ROBBINS: OK, so we—let’s not even do India and Pakistan. Israel’s therefore too important to finish up with. Let’s do the predictions. By the end of the second term, will North Korea still have nuclear weapons—eight, 14, 20 by then—and still nothing will have been done about them and we’ll still [laughter] be talking about the six-party talks? Someone today gave me a pencil that said ”Six-party talks“ that the Chinese made up for their guest house, so they’ve clearly made infrastructure advancement in the process. [Laughter]
So, will North Korea basically be where it is? Will there be a new reformist or new, even more right-wing—or is it left-wing?--government in Iran still working its way there? Or are we going to see regime change and an attempt to take out at least some of the program to slow it down? What do you—where do you think we’re going to be with Iran and North Korea by the time [Governor] Jeb Bush [R-Fla.] is president of the United States? [Laughter]
HUESSY: Well, I don’t know. Predictions are hard, as Yogi Berra said, because it’s hard to see the future, but I believe that the key to the whole ball of wax are the Chinese, and particularly the Chinese financial problems. They’ve traditionally seen—given Korea more money. God, get us off the hook. Well, it’s causing them a lot of problems, in particular their divesting issues.
My prediction is that North Korea will be part of a deal in 2007 or 2008, and it will take a six or seven-year period to get full inspections, find out where the nukes are, and that South Korea will be making—writing checks of huge amounts into North Korea. Well, is that the best idea we can go to? I don’t know.
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