Progressive Initiatives
Honorable Gareth Evans
May 6, 2009

Thanks Rhianna for that introduction. Let me begin by thanking Christie Brinkley because very few foreign ministers that I have ever had to deal with could deliver a presentation as compelling as Christie just did and I think that we are all very grateful for that. She and Rhianna both said that after 10 years after sleepwalking, this really is a breakthrough moment when it comes to nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. This new United States leadership under President Barack Obama is showing leadership and that commitment in a way that no other United States presidency has, to genuinely achieving a world without nuclear weapons. That inspiration that he has been articulating has been repeated now by a number of other world leaders, the United Nations Secretary-General, and President Medvedev from Russia is taking up the challenge for deep strategic arms reductions in the near future. Other Prime Ministers, like Gordon Brown, are also taking up this challenge.

But for all the momentum that is being generated top-down in this way, for all the momentum that we are seeing being built up again by the peer group of states, at least in the context of the NPT review process, are also being helped by initiatives like MPI and Seven Nations Initiative, and maybe a rebirth of the New Agenda Coalition. For all that is happening at the peer group level, and for all the reawakening and reassertion of a role by civil society that thankfully we are now witnessing, I think that we all do know how hard the task is going to be, particularly on the disarmament side. Essentially because of that extraordinary psychological attachment that the nuclear arms states seem to have to their nuclear weapons, despite the best advice of the best military establishment that know war can never be fought with such weapons and no war can be won with such weapons. That extraordinary ability psychologically to accept the indefensibility of claiming the critical on going security role for the nuclear weapons, and at the same time refusing to see that any other country could possibly have a legitimate claim to equal protection. And we all know that given that set of attitudes that have all been so entrenched in even the most progressively minded nuclear arm state, the contradiction in tone, we all know how that is played into the debate on the nonproliferation side. Because people are human and countries behave in a way that is responsive to the psychological environment that is created for them. And it is very difficult to respond with equal enthusiasm on the nonproliferation track when there is not that evident commitment on the disarmament side.

It is going to be very difficult to do what we know needs doing to strengthen the nonproliferation regime. When it comes to safeguards and verification along with compliance and enforcement, and even when it comes to strengthening institutions like the IAEA, we know how hard it is going to be to achieve results unless we see movement on the disarmament side. That is where I think this new International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament comes in. We recognize the critical salience of top-down leadership along with the absolutely indispensable role that United States leadership, under President Obama, is going to have to play in moving things forward. But we also know that it is critical that there be buy-in by the wider international community and engagement of course by civil society as well and what we want to do in this commission is assist that process by bringing together all of the pieces of the debate and the argument in a systematic way and articulate the case for disarmament and articulate the case along the way for nonproliferation in a way that is genuinely compelling to the world's political leaders. We want to energize a high-level political debate and harness the energy that is out there, intellectually and otherwise, and try to create very explicit action plans for the short-term, the medium-term, and the long-term, which will actually deliver on all of this. It is a pretty heroic ambition.

Not since has there been much blue-ribbon panels and commissions in the past, but let me tell you briefly how we are going about this task and why I think there is a fighting chance that some of that ambition will be realized. The initiative for this Commission is dating back to last year from the joint decision of the Japanese and Australian Prime Ministers to start a new exercise of this kind. Japan got involved of course of because of the history of the country as a victim, being the only victim of nuclear weapons. Australia is the world's biggest supplier of uranium and must deal with all of the moral responsibility that goes with that. Both of us have a pretty strong track record, a few periods of time under Tory governments and in my case (Australia), a real energetic commitment to multilateral disarmament processes. The one thing that we needed to do, we knew, was not just build some kind of regional exercise based in Australia. We have to create a genuinely worldwide enterprise that would have this capacity to energize a worldwide political leadership audience. We have a commission that is constructed with a terrific set of people of very high stature in terms of their geopolitical experience, people like Bill Perry, representing the United States, Gro Harlem Brundtland from Norway, and Ernesto Zedillo from Mexico. We also have very senior people from Russia, China, India, Pakistan, the Middle East, and all around the world. There is a very comprehensive character and a high quality character to the commission that will be a fruitful in terms of the impact of its recommendations. Moreover, the Commission is being supported by a worldwide network of associated research centers with a range of NGO advisors gathering up between them.

With all of the energy and expertise that is out there in civil society, we are meeting all over the world. We have already met in Australia and Washington D.C. and have planned further sessions of the commission in Moscow and Japan and we have begun a program of regional outreach with major meetings. One was just held in Santiago for Latin America. More meetings are coming: one is planned in Beijing for Northeast Asia, one in Delhi for South Asia, and one in Cairo for the Middle East. So there is a lot of infrastructure going into the enterprise, targeting the production of a major report by the end of this year, which will feed into the NPT Review process, but the Commission's life will go well into next year with the ongoing advocacy role that is associated with getting the stuff actually heard and articulated. Also, the need for the follow through activity in realizing that the NPT Review Conference is not the be all and the end all because we have at least three big elephants aside the NPT room in India, Pakistan, and Israel. There is a big task to embrace them and have a process of disarmament and nonproliferation going forward, which is genuinely globally embracing.

The question is always, when you start something like this, what is the value that can be added, given the Blix Commission and all of the other commissions, many of which I have been a participant of over the years. I think the difference on this occasion is several fold. One difference is the timeliness of it. We are actually riding a wave now, rather than resisting a tide, which has been the case in the past. Secondly has been the comprehensive character and representation of the Commission and the direction that we are going about our business as described. Thirdly is the approach that you will see us adopting in our report. That is, if the evidence of our meeting is any guide of what the final product will be. This is a group of very idealistic people who are genuinely committed to achieving a world without nuclear weapons. But at the same time, it is a group of pretty hardheaded pragmatists and realists who acknowledge that it is a pretty hostile political universe out there which remains to be persuaded and will not be moved by effective moral arguments or effective technical arguments about verification and so on. We have got to tell a story that is effective in geopolitical terms that we will actually relate to and that takes into account neighboring tensions, moving tectonic plates, the world at large, and people's perceptions of where they stand. The testosterone factor if you like. We also have to take into account conventional arms, which is increasingly coming into play when not having change when it comes to nuclear armories. All of that stuff is going to be part of it. I think that you will find that in the Commission's report, an articulation of these issues in a way that is sensitive to those realities and makes a case which is effective in the language in which decision makers are used to talking and used to listening. Final thing I want to say about the value added is that we are very conscious that this just cannot be another exercise of the nuclear priesthood; this has to be written in a language that is accessible to a group of policy makers out there. Far too often, the nuclear debate has gone whistling over their heads and we have to find ways of engaging them at that level.

I cannot say a lot about the actual reports that we have come up with because we are still going through the process of formulating them, but I think that the main thing to say very briefly is that all of this stuff will not just be analysis oriented but action oriented as well. We see the necessity to come up with action plans that are translatable into effective action about which everybody can be campaigning, including bottom-up civil society. So we are basically dividing it up into three successive sequences, a short-term action plan, a medium-term action plan, and a long-term action plan. The short-term one begins next year with 2010's NPT Review Conference, which we will be arguing for a particular package to be carried out with two specific recommendations. One recommendation will be on various issues such as safeguards, verification, compliance, and institutional strengthening and so on. Secondly, we come up with a re-articulation of the 13 Steps from 2000. What we need is some kind of new international nuclear consensus document, for next year in May, which will have the capability to be a kind of energizing charter for the long, ongoing task ahead. This will be capable of buy-in by the NPT weapon states as well. That is the immediate short term.

The longer-short term will take us to about 2012, in terms of a four-year time horizon with the achievement of a bunch of other things that desperately need to be achieved in the relatively short term. I am talking about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty coming into force, the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty hopefully coming into force, the resolution of the Korea and Iran problems, the real movement towards actual, initial steps of disarmament and the beginning of some kind of multilateralization of that disarmament process. I think that is a reasonable set of achievements that we can aim for in that time frame.

Thereafter, is the medium-time frame, which takes you through, on our judgment, to about 2025. That sounds horrifically far away from now from one point of view, but from another point of view it is just reflecting the reality that it takes forever to move any of these things. But we see it possible that by the end of that period to have a very defined disarmament objective really achieved by then. It won't be a world without nuclear weapons, because I think that is far too heroic, as much as we would want to articulate it. We hope it will be a world with a very minimum number of warheads out there, measured hopefully in the lower hundreds, where none of them are deployed or so few of them are deployed that there is not the same kind of anxiety about misuse, accident or otherwise. And we also hope there is an acceptance universally by the nuclear weapon states of a doctrine that says that if these things are going to exist at all, they will only do so for the purpose of deterring other countries from using nukes. There would be with military arrangements and structures for the application of that doctrine, implementing that particular view of the world. If we could get to a world like that, still not remotely perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than where we are at the moment.

The longer-term objective becomes the period after that, for actually getting to zero. We think that it is possible to, if not set a timetable of getting to zero, but it is certainly possible to articulate with a certain amount of precision, what the actual conditions are that are going to have to be satisfied in the real world to get that last big step. It is not just a matter of saying, "that's the mountaintop in midst and let's keep it in mind as a long term objective." Rather, it is a matter of being much more clearheaded about what the actual obstacles, the geopolitical, the verification, and the technical obstacles, are going to be, and seeing how far we can go in spelling all of that stuff out.

I have said more than enough in the time available, but I just want to spell out an accompanying political strategy that is going to be needed top-down by peer groups and also bottom-up by civil society. The last word on all of this is that it is absolutely critical that if we are going to move forward, I want to go back to Christie's point about the absolute need to harness our collective energy and collective commitment at all levels of society. This means ordinary men and women and ordinary civil society, need to harness somehow with the lifeline of the most progressive and the most enthusiastic governments out there to put together that peer group pressure to really make sure that combination of top-peer and bottom-up pressure produces results. It is a heroic set of ambitions, but that is the business that we are all in and I am looking forward to your support for the Commission when we finally produce our report at the end of this year. Thank you.