Conference on disarmament statements

CONFERENCE ON DISARMAMENT HEARS STATEMENTS FROM AUSTRALIA, JAPAN, RUSSIA, SOUTH AFRICA, CANADA, FRANCE, SRI LANKA, CHINA AND NEW ZEALAND

24 June 2008

States News Service

The following information was released by the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG):

The Conference on Disarmament today heard statements from Australia, Japan, the Russian Federation, South Africa, Canada, France, Sri Lanka, China and New Zealand on Presidential proposal CD/1840 to end the impasse in the Conference and on regional nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament efforts.

The incoming President of the Conference, Ambassador Christina Rocca of the United States, said it was unquestioned that CD/1840 was a compromise, and thus by definition, unable to meet anyone's goals perfectly, but it was well-suited to advance everyone's interests and to get the Conference back to work. If it was adopted, all would win much and lose a little. While the United States would continue to focus on CD/1840 as the desired outcome of this year's activities in the Conference, with the support of the P6, they proposed a series of informal meetings during the third part of the 2008 session of the Conference in late July and in August. The United States had asked the seven Coordinators to resume their roles and to chair the discussions. The full exchange of views in these renewed informal discussions would help refresh all the issues in Members' minds, would help advance consensus on CD/1840, and would help inform the Conference on its final report.

Australia informed the Conference of an announcement made by the Australian Prime Minister in a speech in Japan on the establishment of an International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. In a joint statement with the Japanese Prime Minister, Australia and Japan had renewed their determination to strengthen the international disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation regime and to cooperate closely to achieve a successful outcome to the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. The objective of the Commission was to enhance global efforts to strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty by paving the way for a successful Review Conference in 2010.

Japan said that, on 12 June, the Japanese Prime Minister and the Prime Minister of Australia had released a joint statement to reaffirm the particular importance of the Japan-Australia relationship and to strengthen further the comprehensive and strategic partnership between the two countries. Both leaders had renewed their determination to strengthen the international nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime. Japan had also welcomed the Australian Prime Minister's proposal to establish an international commission on nuclear non-proliferation. On CD/1840, Japan believed it was a well-balanced compromise.

The Russian Federation said not everything in CD/1840 suited the Russian Federation and it was sure that all other delegations were not fully satisfied either. The Russian Federation wanted a stronger focus on prevention of an arms race in outer space which was a priority for the country. The Russian Federation was interested in having a negotiating mandate for the Ad Hoc Committee on the prevention of an arms race in outer space. Nevertheless, the Russian Federation was prepared not to oppose it with the view of ensuring the quickest return of the Conference to work.

South Africa said the consensus rule in the Conference had often been mentioned as the main reason why the Conference had not been able to negotiate anything in the last couple of years. But was it not perhaps the misuse of the consensus rule, rather than the rule itself, that had created the problem. The consensus rule did not apply itself, it was the Members of the Conference that chose when and how to apply it. When it was used to block the commencement, not the finalization, of negotiations, one could perhaps understand why some referred to the "tyranny of consensus". South Africa did not believe that CD/1840 was perfect. However, it represented that which was possible and practical under the present circumstances. South Africa stood ready to join a consensus on CD/1840.

Canada, speaking also on behalf of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), presented to the Conference the report on a conference entitled: "Security in Space: the Next Generation", that had taken place earlier this year. The conference had been the latest in a series of annual conferences held by UNIDIR on the issues of space security, the peaceful uses of outer space and the prevention of an arms race in outer space.

France referred to the statement by the President of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, on 21 March in Cherbourg proposing an ambitious disarmament plan, saying that these transparency measures were unprecedented for a nuclear weapon State. The President of France proposed to invite international experts to come and witness the dismantling of the fissile material for weapons facilities in Pierrelatte and Marcoule. Today, France renewed this invitation, and a visit to these facilities would be organized on 16 September. All Member States were invited to send representatives.

Sri Lanka said CD/1840 was a good basis for discussion, Sri Lanka had no doubt about that. However, Sri Lanka wished to draw attention to some underlying structural anomalies which had to be addressed if this effort was to be successful. CD/1840 privileged one agenda item over others. This particular item elevated over the others involved certain Member States more than certain others. If those Member States felt that their fundamental national interests were at variance with the spirit of CD/1840, then it was not a question of a handful of holdouts. Those countries concerns had to be seriously engaged with. If it was the perception of these States that their core strategic interests were at stake, then the Conference had to do better. Doing better could mean looking afresh at the other agenda items.

China hoped that the relevant parties would continue to make efforts to further conduct a constructive dialogue and consultations so that they were able to narrow the differences and reach consensus on a programme of work which was acceptable to all. In general, China was ready to make joint efforts with all the relevant delegations to push forward progress in the Conference.

New Zealand supported the President's comment that moving forward to reach consensus on the basis of CD/1840 was the best basis for advancing the work in the Conference. As far as its national position was concerned, New Zealand would be happy to commence negotiations on any of the core items before the Conference. As a non nuclear weapon State and as a State which had taken strong positions on nuclear weapons, New Zealand particularly wished for the start of negotiations on nuclear disarmament. The reality was that no delegation here was in a position to begin serious negotiations on all the core issues before the Conference. A Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty would contribute to nuclear disarmament. New Zealand would like to see the treaty deal with verification and existing stocks and would argue in the negotiations in favour of including verification and existing stocks.

According to draft decision CD/1840 by the 2008 Presidents of the Conference, the Conference would appoint Chile as Coordinator to preside over substantive discussions on nuclear disarmament and the prevention of nuclear war; appoint Japan as Coordinator to preside over negotiations, without any preconditions, on a non-discriminatory and multilateral treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, thus providing all delegations with the opportunity to actively pursue their respective positions and priorities, and to submit proposals on any issue they deem relevant in the course of negotiations; appoint Canada as Coordinator to preside over substantive discussions dealing with issues related to prevention of an arms race in outer space; appoint Senegal as Coordinator to preside over substantive discussions dealing with appropriate arrangements to assure non-nuclear weapon States against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons; and would request those Coordinators to present a report to the Conference on the progress of work before the conclusion of the session. The Conference would also decide to request the Coordinators for the agenda items previously appointed by the 2008 Presidents (i.e., new types of weapons of mass destruction and new systems for such weapons, radiological weapons; comprehensive programme of disarmament; and transparency in armament) to continue their work during the current session.

Draft Decision CD/1840 builds on an earlier proposal submitted by the 2007 P-6 (CD/2007/L.1), and its related documents CRP.5 and CRP.6, combining those three texts in a single document.

The Conference on Disarmament will hold a public plenary at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, 25 June, to listen to a statement by Javier Solana, High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and Secretary-General of the Council of the European Union. This will be the last public plenary of the second part of the 2008 session of the Conference. The third and last part of the 2008 session of the Conference will be held from 28 July to 12 September.

Statements

CHRISTINA ROCCA (United States), Incoming President of the Conference on Disarmament, said it was an honour to preside over the Conference. The common sense of purpose shown by all members of the Presidency, their joint aim in getting the Conference back to work, the genuine collegialitiy, was all impressive and gratifiying. It was a demonstration of how harmony could be created from disparate voices, given the will to do so. Some delegations had questioned the need for the differentiation among the key issues shown by CD/1840. It was unquestioned that CD/1840 was a compromise, and thus by definition, unable to meet anyone's goals perfectly, but it was well-suited to advance everyone's interests and to get the Conference back to work. If it was adopted, all would win much and lose a little.

read the rest here.

The Road from Washington to Karachi to Nuclear Anarchy
Are You With Us… or Against Us?

by Jonathan Schell

The journey to the martial law just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed president, the dictator Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to meet with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps the earliest preview of the global Bush doctrine then in its formative stages, telling him, “You are either one hundred percent with us or one hundred percent against us.”

The next day, the administration, dictating to the dictator, presented seven demands that a Pakistan that wished to be “with us” must meet. These concentrated on gaining its cooperation in assailing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which had long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan and had, of course, harbored Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps. Conspicuously missing was any requirement to rein in the activities of Mr. A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, who, with the knowledge of Washington, had been clandestinely hawking the country’s nuclear-bomb technology around the Middle East and North Asia for some years.

Musharraf decided to be “with us”; but, as in so many countries, being with the United States in its Global War on Terror turned out to mean not being with one’s own people. Although Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999, was already a dictator, he had now taken the politically fateful additional step of very visibly subordinating his dictatorship to the will of a foreign master. In many countries, people will endure a homegrown dictator but rebel against one who seems to be imposed from without, and Musharraf was now courting this danger.

A public opinion poll in September ranking certain leaders according to their popularity suggests what the results have been. Osama bin Laden, at 46% approval, was more popular than Musharraf, at 38%, who in turn was far better liked than President Bush, at a bottom-scraping 7%. There is every reason to believe that, with the imposition of martial law, Musharraf’s and Bush’s popularity have sunk even further. Wars, whether on terror or anything else, don’t tend to go well when the enemy is more popular than those supposedly on one’s own side.

Are You with Us?

Even before the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, the immediate decision to bully Musharraf into compliance defined the shape of the policies that the President would adopt toward a far larger peril that had seemed to wane after the Cold War, but now was clearly on the rise: the gathering nuclear danger. President Bush proposed what was, in fact if not in name, an imperial solution to it. In the new dispensation, nuclear weapons were not to be considered good or bad in themselves; that judgment was to be based solely on whether the nation possessing them was itself judged good or bad (with us, that is, or against us). Iraq, obviously, was judged to be “against us” and suffered the consequences. Pakistan, soon honored by the administration with the somehow ridiculous, newly coined status of “major non-NATO ally,” was clearly classified as with us, and so, notwithstanding its nuclear arsenal and abysmal record on proliferation, given the highest rating.

That doctrine constituted a remarkable shift. Previously, the United States had joined with almost the entire world to achieve nonproliferation solely by peaceful, diplomatic means. The great triumph of this effort had been the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, under which 183 nations, dozens quite capable of producing nuclear weapons, eventually agreed to remain without them. In this dispensation, all nuclear weapons were considered bad, and so all proliferation was bad as well. Even existing arsenals, including those of the two superpowers of the Cold War, were supposed to be liquidated over time. Conceptually, at least, one united world had faced one common danger: nuclear arms.

In the new, quickly developing, post-9/11 dispensation, however, the world was to be divided into two camps. The first, led by the United States, consisted of good, democratic countries, many possessing the bomb; the second consisted of bad, repressive countries trying to get the bomb and, of course, their terrorist allies. Nuclear peril, once understood as a problem of supreme importance in its own right, posed by those who already possessed nuclear weapons as well as by potential proliferators, was thus subordinated to the polarizing “war on terror,” of which it became a mere sub-category, albeit the most important one. This peril could be found at “the crossroads of radicalism and technology,” otherwise called the “nexus of terror and weapons of mass destruction,” in the words of the master document of the Bush Doctrine, the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

The good camp was assigned the job not of rolling back all nuclear weapons but simply of stopping any members of the bad camp from getting their hands on the bomb. The means would no longer be diplomacy, but “preventive war” (to be waged by the United States). The global Cold War of the late twentieth century was to be replaced by global wars against proliferation — disarmament wars — in the twenty-first. These wars, breaking out wherever in the world proliferation might threaten, would not be cold, but hot indeed, as the invasion of Iraq soon revealed — and as an attack on Iran, now under consideration in Washington, may soon further show.

…Or Against Us?

Vetting and sorting countries into the good and the bad, the with-us and the against-us, proved, however, a far more troublesome business than those in the Bush administration ever imagined. Iraq famously was not as “bad” as alleged, for it turned out to lack the key feature that supposedly warranted attack — weapons of mass destruction. Neither was Pakistan, muscled into the with-us camp so quickly after 9/11, as “good” as alleged. Indeed, these distinctions were entirely artificial, for by any factual and rational reckoning, Pakistan was by far the more dangerous country.

Indeed, the Pakistan of Pervez Musharraf has, by now, become a one-country inventory of all the major forms of the nuclear danger.

*Iraq did not have nuclear weapons; Pakistan did. In 1998, it had conducted a series of five nuclear tests in response to five tests by India, with whom it had fought three conventional wars since its independence in 1947. The danger of interstate nuclear war between the two nations is perhaps higher than anywhere else in the world.

*Both Iraq and Pakistan were dictatorships (though the Iraqi government was incomparably more brutal).

*Iraq did not harbor terrorists; Pakistan did, and does so even more today.

*Iraq, lacking the bomb, could not of course be a nuclear proliferator. Pakistan was, with a vengeance. The arch-proliferator A.Q. Khan, a metallurgist, first purloined nuclear technology from Europe, where he was employed at the uranium enrichment company EURENCO. He then used the fruits of his theft to successfully establish an enrichment program for Pakistan’s bomb. After that, the thief turned salesman. Drawing on a globe-spanning network of producers and middlemen — in Turkey, Dubai, and Malaysia, among other countries — he peddled his nuclear wares to Iran, Iraq (which apparently turned down his offer of help), North Korea, Libya, and perhaps others. Seen from without, he had established a clandestine multinational corporation dedicated to nuclear proliferation for a profit.

Seen from within Pakistan, he had managed to create a sort of independent nuclear city-state — a state within a state — in effect privatizing Pakistan’s nuclear technology. The extent of the government’s connivance in this enterprise is still unknown, but few observers believe Khan’s far-flung operations would have been possible without at least the knowledge of officials at the highest levels of that government. Yet all this activity emanating from the “major non-NATO ally” of the Bush administration was overlooked until late 2003, when American and German intelligence intercepted a shipload of nuclear materials bound for Libya, and forced Musharraf to place Khan, a national hero owing to his work on the Pakistani bomb, under house arrest. (Even today, the Pakistani government refuses to make Khan available for interviews with representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency.)

*Iraqi apparatchiks could not, of course, peddle to terrorists, al-Qaedan or otherwise, technology they did not have, as Bush suggested they would do in seeking to justify his war. The Pakistani apparatchiks, on the other hand, could — and they did. Shortly before September 11, 2001, two leading scientists from Pakistan’s nuclear program, Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the former Director General of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and Chaudry Abdul Majeed, paid a visit to Osama bin Laden around a campfire in Afghanistan to advise him on how to make or acquire nuclear arms. They, too, are under house arrest.

If, however, the beleaguered Pakistani state, already a balkanized enterprise (as the A.Q. Khan story shows) is overthrown, or if the country starts to fall apart, the danger of insider defections from the nuclear establishment will certainly rise. The problem is not so much that the locks on the doors of nuclear installations — Pakistan’s approximately 50 bombs are reportedly spread at sites around the country — will be broken or picked as that those with the keys to the locks will simply switch allegiances and put the materials they guard to new uses. The “nexus” of terrorism and the bomb, the catastrophe the Bush Doctrine was specifically framed to head off, might then be achieved — and in a country that was “for us.”

What has failed in Pakistan, as in smashed Iraq, is not just a regional American policy, but the pillars and crossbeams of the entire global Bush doctrine, as announced in late 2001. In both countries, the bullying has failed; popular passions within each have gained the upper hand; and Washington has lost much of its influence. In its application to Pakistan, the doctrine was framed to stop terrorism, but in that country’s northern provinces, terrorists have, in fact, entrenched themselves to a degree unimaginable even when the Taliban protected Al-Qaeda’s camps before September 11th.

If the Bush Doctrine laid claim to the values of democracy, its man Musharraf now has the distinction, rare even among dictators, of mounting a second military coup to maintain the results of his first one. In a crowning irony, his present crackdown is on democracy activists, not the Taliban, armed Islamic extremists, or al-Qaeda supporters who have established positions in the Swat valley only 150 miles from Islamabad.

Most important, the collapsed doctrine has stoked the nuclear fires it was meant to quench. The dangers of nuclear terrorism, of proliferation, and even of nuclear war (with India, which is dismayed by developments in Pakistan as well as the weak Bush administration response to them) are all on the rise. The imperial solution to these perils has failed. Something new is needed, not just for Pakistan or Iraq, but for the world. Perhaps now someone should try to invent a solution based on imperialism’s opposite, democracy, which is to say respect for other countries and the wills of the people who live in them.

Jonathan Schell is the author of The Fate of the Earth, among other books, and the just-published The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. He is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute, and a visiting lecturer at Yale University.

Navy veteran questions why six nuclear missiles were flown on combat aircraft to staging area for Middle East

A retired lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve who served with the Navy's Supervisor of Salvage questioned in a little-noticed editorial Sunday why six active nuclear armed cruise missiles were being transferred to an active bomber base that "just happens to be the staging area for Middle Eastern operations."

"The United States also does not transport nuclear weapons meant for elimination attached to their launch vehicles under the wings of a combat aircraft," Navy veteran Robert Stormer wrote in the Texas-based Star-Telegram. "The procedure is to separate the warhead from the missile, encase the warhead and transport it by military cargo aircraft to a repository -- not an operational bomber base that just happens to be the staging area for Middle Eastern operations."

Six nuclear W80 nuclear-armed cruise missiles were flown to Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana where they sat for ten hours undetected.

"Press reports initially cited the Air Force mistake of flying nuclear weapons over the United States in violation of Air Force standing orders and international treaties, while completely missing the more important major issues, such as how six nuclear cruise missiles got loose to begin with," writes Stormer.

"Let me be very clear here: We are not talking about paintball cartridges or pellet gun ammo. We are talking nuclear weapons."

Stormer doesn't buy reports that the missiles were simply lost. The title of his piece is "Nuke transportation story has explosive implications."

"There is a strict chain of custody for all such weapons," he said. "Nuclear weapons handling is spelled out in great detail in Air Force regulations, to the credit of that service. Every person who orders the movement of these weapons, handles them, breaks seals or moves any nuclear weapon must sign off for tracking purposes."

"All security forces assigned are authorized "to use deadly force to protect the weapons from any threat. Nor does anyone quickly move a 1-ton cruise missile -- or forget about six of them, as reported by some news outlets, especially cruise missiles loaded with high explosives.

"This is about how six nuclear advanced cruise missiles got out of their bunkers and onto a combat aircraft without notice of the wing commander, squadron commander, munitions maintenance squadron (MMS), the B-52H's crew chief and command pilot and onto another Air Force base tarmac without notice of that air base's chain of command -- for 10 hours."

At the end of his editorial, he poses the following questions.

The questions that must be answered:

1 Why, and for what ostensible purpose, were these nuclear weapons taken to Barksdale?

2 How long was it before the error was discovered?

3 How many mistakes and errors were made, and how many needed to be made, for this to happen?

4 How many and which security protocols were overlooked?

5 How many and which safety procedures were bypassed or ignored?

6 How many other nuclear command and control non-observations of procedure have there been?

7 What is Congress going to do to better oversee U.S. nuclear command and control?

8 How does this incident relate to concern for reliability of control over nuclear weapons and nuclear materials in Russia, Pakistan and elsewhere?

9 Does the Bush administration, as some news reports suggest, have plans to attack Iran with nuclear weapons?

10 If this was an accident, have we degraded our military to a point where we are now making critical mistakes with our nuclear arsenal? If so, how do we correct this?