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Atlanta Consultation III
The Carter Center
Atlanta , Georgia
January 21, 2010
We are blessed with an American President who has long supported the arms control process and international cooperation as the best way of creating a new, stable and peaceful international order. We all hope 2010 will be a decisive year in the long battle to rid the planet of nuclear weapons.
President Obama’s Prague speech, the passage of Security Council Resolution 1887, and his scheduled summit on nuclear issues are all important steps in the right direction. Moreover, U.S. and Russian negotiations are well on the way to complete a new and verified arms reduction treaty. Those of us who share his views are rightly heartened. This is a different face of America than the one we have seen for the last eight years. We have an Administration which has gotten us back on the track of multilateral engagement. We are all better off for it.
That having been said much remains to be done. The real proof of progress will be accepting the goals which the President has set out. The challenges are huge and the outcome is not clear at this time.
President Obama has outlined a number of goals in the nuclear area. Politifact’s* Obama-meter produced a scorecard on progress to date on a number of these goals. I want to run through them briefly.
1 - To phase out highly enriched uranium from the civil sectors. Some progress has been made.
2 - To strengthen the Proliferation Security Initiative. Again some progress has been. And more is likely.
3 – To appoint a White House coordinator for Nuclear Security. This has been done.
4 – Enact measures to prevent nuclear fuel from becoming nuclear bombs. Some steps to establish nuclear fuel banks have been taken. More will follow.
3 – To secure nuclear weapons materials in four years still a work in progress, but progress is being made, so far so good.
4 – Four goals identified by Politifact can be lumped together as “under negotiation” as we speak.
1. Work with the Russians to move nuclear weapons off hair trigger alert.
2. Seek verifiable reductions in nuclear stockpiles.
3. Extend monitoring and verification provisions of the START Treaty.
4. Stand down nuclear forces to be reduced under the Moscow Treaty.
There is confidence that substantial progress on all these is being made. Hopefully Senate and Duma Ratification will follow in short order. I’ll comment on Senate prospects a little later on.
As noted earlier, another goal of a nuclear summit has been called for this spring.
The outcome on other goals: Securing ratification of the CTBT; organizing a successful NPT review conference; leading an effort to negotiate a verifiable FMCT Treaty; strengthen the IAEA and double its budget in four years; strengthening the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty; and stopping the development of new nuclear weapons are also characterized by Politicfact’s Obama-meter as “works in progress.”
But the outcomes here are far from clear. Presidents and U.S. administrations can propose lots of initiatives but in the domestic and international arenas there are procedures and regimes which pose numerous obstacles which are difficult to overcome.
Let me digress first about the domestic constraints the President faces. He is struggling with a worldwide recession, the most dramatic economic downturn since the Great Depression. We are engaged in two wars. The budgetary drain caused by the downturn and the wars have racked up enormous deficits and additional resources may be needed to create new jobs.
Too much democracy in which after due deliberation the majority can’t effectively govern means an obstinate minority can keep the system from functioning simply won’t work. Its one thing to exercise due deliberation, but it’s quite another to shut the whole system down.
If the political system here is not fixed, the private sector will begin to fall behind as well. Lord Carrington, the former British Foreign Secretary and NATO Secretary General, said he loved the British Parliamentary system because it was unfair. The candidate with the most votes won period, and the party with the majority could govern effectively.
Like most world leaders President Obama is acutely aware that the international community must act collectively now if we are to contain climate change from drastically altering the global environment.
Finally, he is trying to establish a health care system that covers most Americans. Something that has been debated and fought on since 1914. In short while our issues are high on the agenda, many others demand attention as well. And we are only one year into his administration. To add to his burdens he is faced with an obdurate opposition party whose taste for unilateralism, disdain for strengthened government regulations of our financial institutions got us into this mess in the first place. Their answer to the President’s repeated attempts to work collectively on all these issues have to date been resoundingly negative.
Moreover, we now have in the U.S. a political system which is in many respects obsolete. Here are some examples. The once vibrant state of California is in dire straits through a combination of public referendums and constitutional amendments. It now requires 66% of the legislature to agree to new budgets or taxes. The private sector is still a vibrant engine of change but the state’s infrastructure and the educational system are starved for resources.
Only 55 of the seats in the House of Representatives are likely to change in any given election. The others are safe in the hands of one or the other party because of the way the electoral districts are divided. The American people are resoundingly middle of the road. The House of Representatives is not.
A third example of the problem is compounded in the Senate where 60 Senators must agree before a peace of legislation can be taken to a vote. At the time the U.S. Senate was founded the most populous state had ten times as many people as the least populous one. Today the biggest, California, has 69 times as many people as the smallest, Wyoming. 41 votes is a blocking amount in the Senate and states with 12% of the population have that number of votes.
What difference does this make in the nuclear area? Lots! 41 Senators send a letter to the President expressing concern that they do not believe that significant reductions in nuclear weapons can be in the national security interest of the United States in the absence of a significant program to modernize our nuclear complex. It is clear that many in this group want a commitment from the President to agree to build a new generation of nuclear weapons in return for their support on new START agreement and on ratification of the CTBT. This in spite of the fact that a prestigious U.S. defense advisory panel, the JASONs found no evidence that aging posed any threat to the credibility of the present U.S. nuclear arsenal. These so called conservatives in a time of fiscal constraint want us to spend 150 billion dollars on new nuclear weapons and then expect the world to agree that this is a positive step towards nuclear disarmament!
It’s clear that ratification of the new START Treaty and the CTBT will depend on the votes of a few Republican Senators who can see for themselves that these treaties are in our national interest. We must have 67 votes to ratify them. At the moment we have at most 62. The outcome on these two treaties hinges on outcome of the Nuclear Posture Review, which will be completed early this spring. To be credible the NPR must fully support the key elements of the President’s Prague speech. A posture review which merely endorses prior commitments made in the Clinton Administration would simply not be credible for those senators who support the President and too high a price to pay for the votes of those who don’t. It is not enough to pay lip service to the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons without forward movement on nuclear disarmament and then expect non-nuclear states to adhere to more rules and prevent future nuclear proliferation.
Other stated presidential goals must overcome international institutional regimes and procedures which may no longer be adequate to today’s realities. They are strengthening the IAEA and doubling its budget, stopping the development of new nuclear weapons, negotiating an FMCT and successfully organizing an NPT review conference.
Let’s start with the FMCT. The practices and procedures of the CD make it difficult if not impossible to negotiate a successful FMCT.
After a lapse of 10 years, it’s important to make a good faith effort to reinvigorate the CD. But if it gets bogged down as it has recently, it’s time to establish another forum for FMCT negotiations. A group composed of nations which are serious about making progress and agree to start out negotiating with agreed procedures which make progress possible.
The NPT review conference members need to think serious about what constitutes success. My own view is that if the U.S.-Russian new START negotiation is successfully concluded, if progress is being made on CTBT ratification, if the outcome of the nuclear posture review reinforces the objectives of President Obama’s Prague speech, then the groundwork would be laid for strengthening the non-proliferation regime even if peripheral issues prevent the conference from reaching agreement on a final document. Whether these things begin within the next few months remains to be seen.
Efforts to strengthen the IAEA and double its budget face difficult procedural issues, such as raising individual contributions in the middle of a deep recession.
As for stopping the development of new nuclear weapons, a number of things must happen. First, the perception of an arms race in outer space and all that implies has to be addressed. If one side persists developing defensive systems against nuclear weapons its not unreasonable for others to build new weapons to overcome them. Second, new doctrines need to be concluded which make it clear that there is no longer a need to maintain large numbers of nuclear weapons, that they exist only to deter and that it’s time to devalue them.
All this will take time and the prospects are unclear, which underscores the possibility that it’s time to start serious discussions of a nuclear weapons convention as proposed by the SG.
Reforming domestic and international political and legal institutions is a daunting task, perhaps an impossible one. Coming up with new procedures to push towards a nuclear-free world while working to improve existing institutions may well be the only way forward. Most agree that global warming is an immediate problem which must be addressed now if progress is to be made in 50 years. Nuclear weapons elimination is an issue which must be addressed and acted on upon now. We can’t afford to wait for another 50 years.
*PolitiFact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times to help you find the truth in American politics. Reporters and editors from the Times fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups and rate them on our Truth-O-Meter. We’re also tracking more than 500 of Barack Obama’s campaign promises and are rating their progress on our new Obameter. >> More
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