The administration changes tack
IT WAS Ronald Reagan who first coined the motto "trust, but
verify" to guide the decades-long slog by American and Soviet negotiators
to cut the size of their respective nuclear arsenals. Each was determined not
to allow the other an inch of cheating-room.
The current Bush administration has no patience with that approach. Early
on, it torpedoed an inspection protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention.
Its arms-cutting treaty with post-Soviet Russia is just a page long, with no
new checking mechanism--if Russia wants to waste its money on more nuclear
weapons than it needs, so be it. And this week American officials were
attempting to persuade 65 sceptical governments at the Conference on
Disarmament in Geneva that much delayed negotiations on a Fissile Material
Cut-Off Treaty, or "fiss-ban" (ending the production of fissile
material for military purposes), should proceed without considering any
verification rules.
Why? An 18-month review, say officials close to the exercise, showed that it
would cost more money to verify such a treaty than anyone is likely to want to
pay, and checks would have to be so intrusive they could compromise national
security. But arms-control enthusiasts smell a rat.
Daryl Kimball, of the Arms Control Association, argues that a properly
focused treaty could be monitored with confidence. He puts the reversal of past
American policy by the Bush team down to three less high-minded motives: their
aversion to multilateral agreements; the worries of Israel and Pakistan, two
allies that want to keep the option of adding to their stockpiles; and
opposition from the navy, which doesn't want inspectors snooping around to make
sure that nuclear fuel for powering submarines is not diverted to power
warheads.
The navy has long hated the idea of a fiss-ban, says Rose Gottemoeller of
the Carnegie Endowment, a think-tank, but under past administrations it was
held in check. As in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it has long
been assumed that a fiss-ban would make an exception for naval propulsion,
something more navies than America's have been counting on. Yet some
governments may well have opposed that. And some verification professionals
have long worried that such an exception would make the rest of the treaty hard
to monitor.
Naval concerns played a part in the review, but otherwise administration
officials deny that their judgment on verifiability was made on anything other
than technical grounds. No other country, they argue, has undertaken a similar
systematic review. And they point out that the only difference between
production of highly-enriched uranium for civilian purposes and for making
bombs is one of intent. That is something inspectors cannot be expected to
verify--as the current wrangle over Iran's true nuclear ambitions shows. In any
case, governments could still agree on transparency and confidence-building
measures to show they are keeping their commitment.
Why support the treaty at all? America stopped producing fissile material
for weapons 14 years ago. Yet it sees value in turning that into a legally
binding commitment for all, including Israel, India and Pakistan, which never
signed the NPT and which could now be brought into at least a part of the
non-proliferation regime. The five acknowledged nuclear powers promised a
fiss-ban at the NPT review in 2000, but it was meant to be an effectively
verifiable one. The next review, in May 2005, could prove a bad-tempered affair.