President Bush's New Plan to Stop Proliferation

["Gerry Blackwood" <gpblackwood@justice.com>]

President Bush's New Plan to Stop Proliferation



Will his unilateral approach and the budget shortfall make it all

bark and no bite? 



Joseph Cirincione 

YaleGlobal, 13 February 2004 



http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=3332

 

Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran: The Bush administration wants to

stop Iran and other nations from making fuel for such reactors. 

 

WASHINGTON: Like an investor watching his returns plummet,

President Bush is rebalancing his proliferation portfolio. The

huge cost of the Iraq war and his sinking poll ratings seem to

have convinced the president that he has invested too heavily in

military operations and unilateral initiatives and that it is

time to move some political capital to international

organizations and cooperative ventures. 





President Bush's February 11 speech was a step in the right

direction. The measures he announced would, overall, help forge a

stronger, more effective, and more international

non-proliferation policy. Many of the initiatives, if

implemented, would increase the ability of the United States and

the international community to stem the spread of nuclear

weapons. It remains to be seen, however, if the President will

put his money where his mouth is. 





The key initiatives announced by the President include: 



. Making all exports from the 40-member Nuclear Suppliers. Group

conditional on recipients adopting new, tougher inspections by

the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 



. A ban on exports of technology that could help states produce

enriched uranium or plutonium (key elements in nuclear weapons) 



. Expanding the Nunn-Lugar programs (initiated with broad

bi-partisan support in 1991) that finance the elimination of

nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the former Soviet

Union 



. Enhancing the IAEA.s capabilities to detect cheating and

respond to treaty violations 



. Expanding efforts to interdict illegal shipments of

weapon-related technology. 





But will the President.s policy pronouncements translate into

government action? The record on that score, and the budget

projections, are not encouraging. The administration.s budget for

the coming fiscal year actually cuts funding for Nunn-Lugar

programs by ten percent. Nor is there any increase in the US

contribution to the IAEA. 



  

 

 

 

This is not surprising. The administration is still dominated by

officials who have long hated the non-proliferation regime that

their Republican and Democratic predecessors struggled over fifty

years to create. Several key officials, such as Undersecretary of

State John Bolton, reject the entire concept of non-proliferation

treaties and most of the multilateral system, including the

United Nations. In the wake of the September 11 attacks these

officials successfully revived and implemented several previously

proposed but controversial policies. 





All previous presidents, including George H.W. Bush, had treated

the weapons themselves as the problem. This administration

shifted the focus from eliminating weapons to eliminating

regimes. Whereas then-President Clinton warned of threats .posed

by the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons

and the means of delivering such weapons,. President Bush framed

the issue this way in 2003: .The gravest dangers facing America

and the world is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear,

chemical, and biological weapons. (italics added). In effect, the

administration moved from .what. to .who. the threat is. The

country possessing the weapons was a more serious threat than the

weapons themselves. This change in strategic vision led directly

to the Iraq War. 



  

 

 

 

Even though the strategy claims it has .three pillars.

(counter-proliferation, non-proliferation, and consequence

management), counter-proliferation by far has captured the lion.s

share of the Bush administration.s attention and funding. 





The FY 2002 budget gave counter-proliferation, mostly in the form

of missile defense, approximately $8.5 billion, compared to about

$1.5 billion for non-proliferation efforts and $13 billion for

homeland security programs. 





In FY 2004, however, the war in Iraq and $10 billion for missile

defense boosted counter-proliferation budgets to $81 billion and

homeland security grew to $41 billion, while non-proliferation

increased modestly to $2 billion. These figures underscore the

dramatic imbalance in the attention, emphasis, and roles assigned

to the three pillars. 





The President has now made a verbal corrective, but, as noted,

has yet to match his words with dollars. Moreover, the imperious

way the new policies are announced will certainly feed into the

belief in many nations that the United States seeks to lead by

fiat, not example. 



  

 

 

 

The president is absolutely right that we must find a way to stop

countries from building factories that can produce nuclear fuel

one day and nuclear bombs the next. But it will be difficult for

the United States to persuade others to go along with new

restrictions on nuclear fuel technology that appear to establish

a new double standard. In addition to the existing standard where

some nations are allowed to have nuclear weapons and some not,

now the president proposes that some nations are allowed to manufacture

the fuel for nuclear reactors and some are not. The president

would freeze the current situation in place: allowing those with

existing full-scale plants to continue to make nuclear fuel,

those without such plants would be barred forever from building

them. The ban would be enforced by agreement of those nations in

the Nuclear Suppliers Group not to sell the necessary technology

to non-compliant states. 





This approach is doomed to failure. The only way this will work

is if it applied universally, so that, for example, no nation has

independent national nuclear fuel facilities. All existing plants

could be put under international control, as the director of the

IAEA has suggested, or international consortia could be created

to sell the fuel to all customers at prices cheaper than any

nation could produce on their own. 



  

 

 

 

The United States could also signal its willingness to give up

its own nuclear ambitions, such as the program now underway to

develop new nuclear weapons for battlefield use. As long as other

countries think the United States is just trying to preserve its

nuclear hegemony, some nations will rise to challenge that

arrangement. We all have to be moving away from nuclear weapons.

It cannot be just a US diktat that everyone else goes in one

direction while we go in another. 





The good news is that this could all be done cheaply. We are

awash in bomb material . the plutonium and highly-enriched

uranium left over from the Cold War nuclear weapons binge. We are

not producing any more of this fissile material now and have no

need to in the future. We could work towards a global agreement

to end the production of these materials as part of a new,

global, nuclear deal. The Nunn-Lugar programs to secure and

eliminate nuclear stockpiles are cheap compared to other defense

programs. The United States now provides $1 billion a year to

these efforts, but many proliferation experts believe the United

States should triple that spending. For the price of three weeks

of operations in Iraq, we could make tremendous progress on

removing exactly the weapons and materials lying in often

poorly-guarded facilities that terrorists are most likely to

seek. 





If President Bush backs up his speech with just a fraction of the

funds spent on other defense programs we would make some real

progress. But if he matches the demands he makes of other nations

with new commitments to cut US weapons stockpiles and stores of

bomb material, he could have a program that many would beat a

path to his door to buy. 



Joseph Cirincione is Director of the Non-Proliferation Project at

the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 



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