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The Washington Post’s David Ignatius this week calls France “Bush’s new ally,” noting the increased cooperation between the two nations in several key areas. We can add one more to his list: India. France sees several benefits to opening up nuclear trade with India, as President George Bush wants. Even though it could setback global nonproliferation efforts, it would increase French-Indian trade and investment. There is a catch: while President Bush sees the deal as a way to expand U.S. influence, France sees it as a way to check that influence.
Here is the problem for both the United States and France. The U.S.-India “global partnership” proposed on July 18, 2005 by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will violate Nuclear Supplier Group (NSG) comprehensive safeguard guidelines. Changing NSG guidelines to give India a permanent exception to the rules requires group consensus, but the president has run into resistance from a number of key NSG members. At an October 2005 meeting of the NSG, France, Russia and the United Kingdom showed support for dropping nuclear trade restrictions on India, but Austria, Sweden and Switzerland “registered strong reservations,” according to Wade Boese of Arms Control Today. (Read More)
In a candid January 18 press conference, Carnegie Vice-President George Perkovich and Visiting Scholar Pierre Goldschmidt discussed the current Iran crisis with reporters. Goldschmidt said he is urging officials to take a generic proactive approach that could solve other potential or actual cases of noncompliance:
“The UN Security Council should adopt a generic resolution saying that when the IAEA has found a country to be in noncompliance and if the IAEA requests more verification authority, the UN Security Council would immediately, under a Chapter 7 resolution, provide this additional authority.”
Unfortunately, the “international community” has a tendency “to only react to crisis,” Goldschmidt said, which puts him in an “uncomfortable” position trying to “solve one specific case, which is Iran.” He offered two solutions that, by involving the UN Security Council, would make Iran’s current voluntary commitments legally binding:
(Read More)“The minimum for me is to report [Iran] to the Security Council to request Iran to immediately resume the suspension of all enrichment-related activities, and, second, [for the Security Council] to provide the IAEA with a significantly increased verification mandate and authority. Once more, this has nothing to do with sanctions.”
Iran is moving to restart its suspended uranium enrichment program. Negotiations with the European Union have collapsed and the crisis is escalating. Does the United States -- or Israel -- have a military option?
The same neoconservative pundits who campaigned for the invasion of Iraq are now beating the drums on Iran. Urging us this week to keep military options open, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol said Iran’s “nuclear program could well be getting close to the point of no return.” Writing from the same talking points, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said, “Instead of being years away from the point of no return for an Iranian bomb…Iran is probably just months away.”
Do they reflect the thinking of senior officials closely aligned with these political currents? No official has indicated that they do. But just one year ago, Vice President Cheney seemed to be thinking along exactly these lines when he told radio host Don Imus on Inauguration Day, "Iran is right at the top of the list." Cheney came close to endorsing military action, noting that "the Israelis might well decide to act first and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards."
There is no need for military strikes against Iran. The country is five to ten years away from the ability to enrich uranium for fuel or bombs. Even that estimate, shared by the Defense Intelligence Agency and experts at IISS, ISIS, and University of Maryland assumes Iran goes full-speed ahead and does not encounter any of the technical problems that typically plague such programs.
This is not a nuclear bomb crisis, it is a nuclear regime crisis. US Ambassador John Bolton has correctly pointed out that this is a key test for the Security Council. If Iran is not stopped the entire nonproliferation regime will be weakened, and with it the UN system.
But it will have to be diplomats, not F-15s that stop the mullahs. An air strike against a soft target, such as the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan (which this author visited in 2005) would inflame Muslim anger, rally the Iranian public around an otherwise unpopular government and jeopardize further the US position in Iraq. Finally, the strike would not, as is often said, delay the Iranian program. It would almost certainly speed it up. That is what happened when the Israelis struck at the Iraq program in 1981. (Read More)
Nonproliferation experts Goldschmidt and Perkovich discuss next steps and options for UN Security Council.
The Bush Administration has imposed sanctions at a significantly greater rate than the Clinton Administration, raising important questions about how the United States should approach the spread of technology in a globalizing world. Do more sanctions result in more security? A preliminary look into the case of the two Indian chemical firms suggests the answer may be no.
The Honorable Shyam Saran, Foreign Secretary, Government of India provided the Indian government’s assessment of the July 18 Joint Statement, including its civilian nuclear energy component, and discussed India's relations with the United States in the context of both countries' common strategic interests.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s demagoguery has triggered a strong European backlash that may produce the Western unity long lacking in negotiations with Iran. European leaders have denounced Ahmadinejad’s screeds against Israel and his denial of the Holocaust, linked them to deep suspicions of Iran’s nuclear program and begun talk of sanctions and other actions to force Iranian compliance with its treaty obligations. Ahmadinejad’s radical statements did not start EU-US collaboration, but will strengthen their partnership in support of Security Council referral. EU-Iranian negotiations, set to begin December 21, will be the first time since August of this year that the EU (led by Britain, France and Germany) will hold direct talks with the Iranians. On August 5, the Europeans gave Iran a “Framework for a Long-term Agreement,” but negotiations stalled 3 days later when Iran restarted its uranium conversion program at Isfahan.
Administration officials have settled on a standard answer to questions about their pre-war claims of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq: “much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong.” This explanation ignores the central role senior officials had in creating, shaping and selecting the intelligence.
A compilation of information on fissile material around the world.
As 2005 comes to a close, there is good news to report on several government efforts aimed at stemming the spread of nuclear weapons. We are moving in the right direction, though not as fast nor as far as we could.
Earlier this week the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, an extension of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, reported on efforts to protect America from terrorists that seek nuclear weapons and materials. Their verdict was not a happy one. Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton cited “insufficient progress” in the race against time to prevent the world’s most dangerous people from getting the world’s most dangerous weapons. In short, they wrote, “the size of the problem still dwarfs the policy response.”
Kean and Hamilton reported that less than half of Russia’s nuclear material has received security upgrades. In real terms, this means that more than 300 tons of loose nuclear material remains unguarded in Russia and the former Soviet states. That is enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium for tens of thousands of crude nuclear bombs. In the past year, moreover, security improvements were completed twice as slowly as expected. The Department of Energy’s nuclear security administration now estimates that this work will not be complete until 2020. Securing nuclear material in the former Soviet Union is an essential front in the war on terror. We must progress at a faster rate. (Read More)
United States and India today are happily confronted by an unprecedented convergence of interests, values, and inter-societal ties in a way never experienced before in the close to sixty-year history of the bilateral relationship. Given India’s importance to the United States, the president should continue working with New Delhi toward a full partnership.
At Carnegie's 2005 International Nonproliferation Conference, Pierre Goldschmidt discusses a mechanism that he says could form the basis of a guaranteed fuel supply concept to deal particularly with cases in which a state is found in non-compliance with its IAEA safeguards agreement while ensuring against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The 2005 Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference attracted over 800
experts, officials, and journalists from around the world. The conference provided an open forum
for informed discussion on the most pressing nonproliferation issues facing the
world today, including
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Acton holds the Jessica T. Mathews Chair and is co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Fiona Cunningham is a nonresident scholar in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow in 2020-21.
Dalton is the co-director and a senior fellow of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment. An expert on nonproliferation and nuclear energy, his work addresses regional security challenges and the evolution of the global nuclear order.
Rose Gottemoeller is a nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. She also serves as the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Hibbs is a Germany-based nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. His areas of expertise are nuclear verification and safeguards, multilateral nuclear trade policy, international nuclear cooperation, and nonproliferation arrangements.
Kassenova is a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment.
Ulrich Kühn is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the head of the arms control and emerging technologies program at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg.
Jamie Kwong is the Stanton pre-doctoral fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Levite was the principal deputy director general for policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission from 2002 to 2007.
Thomas MacDonald is a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Perkovich works primarily on nuclear strategy and nonproliferation issues; cyberconflict; and new approaches to international public-private management of strategic technologies.
Ülgen is a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels, where his research focuses on Turkish foreign policy, nuclear policy, cyberpolicy, and transatlantic relations.
Tristan Volpe is a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and assistant professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Fumihiko Yoshida is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Tong Zhao is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program.
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