Today begins a critical opportunity to combat what George W. Bush has said is the greatest threat the United States faces: the spread of nuclear weapons. For the next four weeks, the United States and nearly all the other 188 states-parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) will meet in New York to assess the state of the treaty and look at ways to strengthen the accord. But this chance to bolster global support for U.S. efforts to deny certain regimes and terrorists the arms they desire may be squandered by the administration's own intransigent approach and mixed record on fulfilling its commitments.
Negotiated in 1968, the NPT rests on a bargain that commits the five nations armed with nuclear weapons at that time -- China, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom -- to eventually eliminate them and all other countries to forswear such arms. By the treaty's terms, its adherents meet every five years to review its implementation.
The Bush administration aims to use this review conference to turn up the heat on Iran and North Korea for their nuclear transgressions and make it tougher for potential cheaters to use civilian nuclear programs as cover to illegally acquire nuclear weapons. But the administration's goals are likely to be frustrated by its dismissive and inflexible attitude toward many other countries' concerns and its own treaty obligations. Specifically, other capitals complain that Washington is not doing enough to pursue the elimination of its nuclear arms.
Criticisms of the United States, administration officials insist, are unfounded and detract attention from the NPT's real noncompliance problems. As proof of U.S. disarmament bona fides, they point to the administration's May 2002 treaty with Russia to reduce operationally deployed nuclear warheads, as well as its plans to almost halve the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal of more than 10,000 warheads by 2012.
Nevertheless, a United Nations-commissioned high-level panel of experts, which included former President George Bush Senior's national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, recently faulted the five nuclear-weapon states for their “lackluster disarmament.” While commending Washington and Moscow for their past and planned nuclear reductions, the experts said, “Such progress has been overshadowed by recent reversals.”
A particular gripe is the repudiation of a series of disarmament actions, known as the “13 steps,” that all NPT states-parties agreed to at their last review conference in 2000. The Bush administration has reversed two of these steps by opposing a treaty banning nuclear testing and by withdrawing the United States from a 1972 agreement prohibiting nationwide missile defenses. It has taken other contrary moves, too, such as declining to include warhead destruction provisions in the May 2002 U.S.-Russian agreement and objecting to verification measures for a proposed treaty to end production of the essential materials for building nuclear weapons.
Seven states known as the New Agenda Coalition -- Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, and Sweden -- have condemned this “a la carte” approach, noting that “nuclear disarmament and nuclear nonproliferation are mutually reinforcing processes.” Visceral complaints about the U.S. nuclear record are also frequently lodged by the more than 100 members of the Nonaligned Movement, although this group itself has some members, such as Iran and Pakistan, with deplorable nonproliferation credentials. Still, even close U.S. allies -- such as Australia, Japan, and Canada -- have found themselves at odds with the Bush administration's stance on some of the 13 steps.
The international goodwill the administration should have been able to derive from its nuclear-reduction plans has been offset not only by its rejection of some of the 13 steps but also by U.S. exploration of new and modified nuclear weapons, such as so-called bunker busters to destroy targets deep underground. Coupled with this research have been initiatives to revamp the U.S. nuclear complex so it is more capable of preserving existing weapons and, if necessary, producing and testing new ones.
Brazilian Ambassador Sérgio de Queiroz Duarte, who will preside over the New York meeting, has cautioned the nuclear-weapon states about creating the impression that they are perpetuating their reliance on nuclear weapons. Along with the United States, China, France, and Russia are developing new nuclear-delivery systems.
The Bush administration is not helping its cause by the style and diplomatic approach it has adopted. In an April 19 interview with the monthly publication Arms Control Today, Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker deemed the U.S. NPT record as “unassailable” and “indisputable.”
Rademaker all but ruled out U.S. willingness to take actions or make concessions to meet other countries' concerns. “We are not approaching this review conference from the cynical perspective of, ‘We are going to toss a few crumbs to the rest of the world and, by doing that, try to buy goodwill or bribe countries into agreeing to the agenda that we think they should focus on rather than some other agenda,'” the assistant secretary said.
What many other countries want, however, is for the United States to do a better job of meeting its own obligations. Measures that the administration could compromise on without diminishing U.S. security include abandoning research into new and modified nuclear warheads, reporting regularly on its nuclear holdings, destroying excess nuclear warheads instead of storing them, reversing its opposition to the treaty banning nuclear testing, and reassuring NPT states-parties without nuclear weapons that the United States would never use its nuclear stockpile against them. Progress on even one or two of these items would have a positive impact on the conference.
Without making any of these accommodations, though, the administration will have a hard time building consensus on stricter conditions under which countries can use nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes and withdraw from the NPT. Delay in raising these bars only provides more time for Iran and other countries looking to hedge their nuclear-weapon options to acquire all they need to make such arms and then opt out of the accord.
Many nongovernmental experts and former U.S. government officials see the administration's strategy as a recipe for failure. Ambassador Robert Grey, who previously represented the United States at key arms-control gatherings, told reporters on April 5 that if the United States is “not prepared to honor our part of the bargain, or at least make a passing reference to it, it's inconceivable that we're going to get the kind of cooperation we need” to secure U.S. objectives. Grey condemned the administration's current approach as a “radical departure from past American practice.”
A failure by the Bush administration to drop its blinders during the review conference and take other countries' viewpoints into consideration will result in more than an acrimonious conference. It will prevent the administration from advancing its laudable aims of clamping down on nuclear proliferators and combating what the president has singled out as our gravest danger.
Wade Boese is the research director at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Arms Control Association, which publishes the monthly journal Arms Control Today.
