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Atlanta Consultation III
The Carter Center
Atlanta , Georgia
January 21, 2010
(transcript)
Thank you, you are kind. I have to say I came to this conference with prepared remarks but when I saw the list of participants and realized how many of you were old and new colleagues and friends who have heard me discuss non-proliferation and the NPT in greater depth, I realized that my remarks were wholly inadequate. So I’m going to speak from some really rough notes if you will bear with me. I would first like to thank the Middle Powers Initiative and Douglas Roche, the Global Security Institute and the Carter Center for sponsoring this meeting. These meetings are terribly important for bringing together government and non-governmental officials to talk about issues of critical importance to all of us and to the world so we can brainstorm, hopefully in a congenial environment, on how we can individually and collective move forward on the agendas we all share and make progress on this which is very timely.
I had not realized the history of this with the NPT, this is my first opportunity to participate in such a meeting but this is very timely with the NPT conference only a few months away. It was a particular honor to be here with President Jimmy Carter. I started my government career in the Carter administration so there was a little bit of sentimental value in that but he also was one our greatest disarmament advocates at the time; I had a quote from his inaugural address where he said, “We pledge perseverance and wisdom in our efforts to limit the world’s armaments and we will move this year towards the elimination of all nuclear weapons on this earth.”
My whole career has been devoted to arms control and non-proliferation so this is something, with the exception of the last four and a half years, but this is something that is a passion of mine. Last year President Obama gave a speech in Prague which we are all very familiar with, I carry it with me all of the time, its eloquence is really quite tremendous. I think as he describes the devastation we would face from the use of nuclear weapons, there’s no doubt and there should be no doubt that this man is deeply committed to making progress on the disarmament and non-proliferation agenda. And his description of this has to be taken very seriously and he laid out a program which I will touch on briefly, but he also talked about the role of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. What struck me, because we don’t necessarily have input into statements like this and I was not confirmed at the time that he made this speech, but he talked about the bargain of the NPT, he described it and I think for those of us who have worked on the NPT over the years it was very important to hear the President of the United States talk about the basic bargain is sound: Countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament. Countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy. To have the President of the United States understand the basic bargain of the NPT and articulate it in such public forum was very gratifying for those of us who have spent decades buttressing the regime of the treaty.
I think it’s important to put this into context in the papers and I’ve read the Middle Power Initiative papers and they are really quite good. I have to say that there are issue in which the U.S. will not be able to agree at this time and there are other issues in which we will be able to agree but the focus has been very much on disarmament and I appreciate that that is the pre-eminent concern right now. As we approach the Review Conference and look at the NPT and the whole notion of fulfilling the NPT, we have to be more mindful for the three pillars of the agreement. For those of you how have heard me talk about this please bear with me again. As we look at this and as senior officials have described this we have made clear that the three pillars are disarmament, non-proliferation and peaceful uses are integrally related, they are inter-dependent and I use the term mutually reinforcing but I’ve heard others use that as well. Ambassador Duarte used that term in Rio, which they are mutually reinforcing. And it’s important to remember that as we make progress in one area we need to make progress in the other areas as well.
As it’s been explained and described in public forums by senior officials and by myself, what we’re saying is without non-proliferation it becomes too risky to expand nuclear energy, now we are talking about nuclear power worldwide and with proliferation that undermines our disarmament. Without disarmament and this is the important statement that U.S. officials are saying, we understand that without disarmament international support for non-proliferation will be insufficient to meet the challenges that the regime is facing today, challenges of non-compliance, challenges of access to sensitive materials, withdrawals from the treaty and finally without safe access to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, a key element of the basic bargain of the NPT is called into question. So we have these three pieces and while I understand that the focus here is on disarmament it is important that as we look at this, the United States is looking at the treaty in its totality. That the treaty is more than the sum of its parts and how all these pieces fit together for the betterment of the international community. And as we approach strengthening the NPT and looking the Review Conference, in the first instance our efforts to renew the nuclear bargain require us to reinvigorate the disarmament portion of the NPT, and the president has spoken very eloquently on that matter. He understands that that needs to be done and he has said in Prague and as others have quoted, he is seeking to reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons, he is seeking to reduce the role of nuclear weapons. He is committed to working on a new START agreement. He and President Medvedev are personally involved in that negotiation and it will be finished. He is committed to securing the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and as I said earlier the United States is not testing, hasn’t tested and has no intention of testing and we are committed to working multilaterally in the CD to negotiate a new treaty which ends the production of fusible materials which he has called the building blocks of nuclear weapons. So we have a bilateral initiative, a unilateral which is the CTBT which is in the hand of our Senate, not of our president and a multilateral commitment all on the agenda.
And again I tell people that so long as I’m making a statement before the Nuclear Posture Review is done I have nothing more to say on this issue. That’s where we are right now. The Nuclear Posture Review is looking at issues of numbers and of doctrine and I can’t predict what the outcome will be. So we believe that the stage has been set for important progress on disarmament and arms control and I’m happy to take questions about some of the other initiatives but right now this is a heavy agenda which the U.S. administration is pursuing intensively as many of you are aware. The non-proliferation pillar of the treaty and that is the prevention of nuclear weapons, needs to be a goal and without a strong and reliable and really dependable non-proliferation regime is hard to ask countries and their publics to disarm. We need to be working together on this to strengthen the non-proliferation pillar.
This first instance requires that we work towards full compliance and that has been and remains a concern. I saw from Doug Roche’s statement the point the myth that you can’t stop cheating. I think we can stop cheating I just don’t think we have been able to do it very effectively. This is an area where political will is needed, there is no technical fix to getting countries to stop cheating, you need political will and you need people to rally around this so there is an understanding that compliance by all states is important.
We’re also looking at strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency by making sure it has the resources financial, human and political. Strengthen the safe guard system and persuade countries to implement comprehensive safe guard systems, not all NPT parties have done that. Bring into force the initial protocol which the U.S. is now ratifying and look at whether there are other measures the IAEA should have at its disposal or measures and authorities that it has and is not using that could make it a more robust tool for enforcing and implementing the mandate of the IAEA.
As we look towards the conference we think that this is an opportunity to address these kinds of issues as well; Safe guards, verifications, compliance and strengthening the agency. The third pillar is international cooperation with peaceful uses of nuclear energy and in my travels it has become very clear that we have gotten very comfortable and taken very much for granted the way nuclear energy is used in civil society; in medicine and in agriculture and in industry. If you have to go for a thyroid scan or if your relative is being treated for cancer through radiation treatment, we take for granted and need to remember that it harkens back to the Atoms for Peace making sure that countries had access to these kinds of technologies and the nuclear science that we depend on for everyday needs. But the debate has gotten much more interesting now due to the renewed debate about nuclear power as a green solution for global concerns about climate change and energy security and that really requires us to take a fresh look at the implications of expanding nuclear power capabilities and nuclear reactors worldwide. How can we do that in a way that solves the energy problem but done safely; think Three Mile Island, think Chernobyl, done in a secure way so materials are not vulnerable to theft by non-state actors thus contributing to proliferation. So we look at these issues of peaceful nuclear uses and the full promise of article for of the NPT really will be realized if the regime is robust, dependable and reliable so that the people have confidence in it.
Two final points: one on the Review Conference. Though I am spending every waking moment working to prepare the U.S. position for the Review Conference it is a single point in time. It’s a very important event and a very important conference. Many of us here are devoting tremendous amount of time in order to prepare for it and we will go in May and do our best and try our best to find area’s of agreement so we can come away with something actual if you will. But when the Review Conference is over, hopefully successfully, the hard work of strengthening, reinforcing and building of the non-proliferation regime isn’t over. We will not solve all of the problems. We won’t have and answer on multilateral fuel banks. We won’t check all of the blocks on disarmament. That hard work will continue in Vienna at the IAEA, in Geneva at the CD, in New York at the U.N. It will happen in capitals, it will happen in discussions between us bilaterally and with multilateral groups. So while we focus on the NPT conference as a singularly important event, which it is, I would say that at the moment, to have the President of the United States, the Vice President and Secretary of State all very keenly aware of the NPT Review Conference, focused on it and talking about it, for us this a very important event. But the work won’t stop there. In fact in many ways I see it as a new point of departure for our renewed efforts collectively, and this is government and non-government continuing the hard work of reinforcing the regime.
And then my last point will be on reciprocal responsibilities. I’m struck by the focus on the United States. I don’t take it personally, but I do think that it is very important to remember at the moment that the president has made it very clear that he understands the role of the United States, he’s prepared to take a leadership role, he’s prepared to move out on this but in his General Assembly speech last year he made very clear that we cannot do it alone and to coin a phrase from my secretary, it will take a village. It will take the collective efforts of all of us to move us in the direction that we all seem to want to go and we are prepared to do our part on this but in the end we will not be able to deliver a successful Review Conference or any of these pillars on the agenda unilaterally. It really will require the support, the efforts and the creativity and the good will and the political will of all of our partners. As I look at this, the concept is an NPT collective. We have a collective of parties to this treaty; we have all joined this treaty for various reasons, primarily because we thought it would make us more secure. The Review Conference will be an opportunity to demonstrate to what some have called the cynics and the skeptics, that multilateral diplomacy is a vehicle for solving the problems of the globe and like climate change and like the economy, like pandemic flu, that we can come together in a large gathering and tackle some tough issues and produce some real results. So I will end there. |
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