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This week, on the same day that Vice President Cheney belittled the UN inspections and warned Iraq that "this time, deception will not be tolerated," Secretary of State Powell said the inspection process was "off to a pretty good start." These contradictory appraisals reflect a deeper division within the administration on war with Iraq. President Bush's comment that "the signs are not encouraging" seems to embrace the hard-line views of Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. But, as in the past, his actions may not follow his tough rhetoric.
The following excerpts are from IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei's keynote address at the 2002 Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference, November 14.
Major problems are delaying the otherwise successful collaboration between the U.S. and Russia to prevent the theft of poorly-secured weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and related materials, technologies and expertise in the former Soviet Union. Government failure to correct these problems threatens to leave vast stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons and biological agents vulnerable.
The United Nations Security Council has ordered inspectors back into Iraq with a sweeping new mandate to search everything everywhere. The question is: can they do the job? With the Security Council united and the credible threat of war should Iraq obstruct inspections there is a good chance that they can-- but only if the UN now gives the inspectors the resources they will need to disarm Saddam Hussein.
North Korea's recent disclosure of an active nuclear weapons program has led members of the Bush Administration and many observers in Washington to suggest that the North's program constitutes a violation of four international agreements. The implications of these violations depend on the details of the North Korean program, many of which remain unknown. In particular, the question of how advanced North Korea's efforts have progressed must be answered in order to determine whether North Korea is actually in violation of the letter of the following four agreements.
North Korea’s admission that it has an active nuclear weapons program in direct violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the 1994 Agreed Framework with the United States and the 1991 North-South Korean Denuclearization Agreement is a stunning development. North Korea’s open pursuit of nuclear weapons has the potential to quickly and permanently destabilize the security situation in East Asia and beyond. While it is still not clear if North Korea is currently producing weapons-grade materials, its renewed and now open admission that it is seeking nuclear weapons requires the United States, its allies and the entire world to quickly develop ways to confront North Korea’s program and prevent it from continuing.
In recent weeks, several assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs have been released to the public. The following analysis compares the report from the U.S. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), the dossier released by the government of the United Kingdom, the report from the Institute for Interational Strategic Studies and the Iraq chapter from the Carnegie study Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction.
America's security remains under constant threat today from the Al Qaeda terrorist network and other Islamic extremists. Recent statements by the Director of Central Intelligence affirm that hundreds or thousands of Al Qaeda members are dispersed throughout the world, have re-established communications and support networks, and are actively planning new attacks against the United States. This is an enemy that operates from dozens of countries, from Hamburg to Manila, Khartoum to Karachi, and Buffalo to Portland. The single most important strategic criteria for military action against Iraq is whether or not such a course will aid or hinder U.S. efforts to prevent terrorist attacks.
The lack of a Russian consensus on its interests in Iraq does not imply ready Russian support for U.S. military action. On the contrary, Russian experts stress both that the United States will have to go it alone and that U.S. forces should not expect a repeat of the easy time that they had in toppling the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. As Alexei Arbatov commented in an interview in May, "Using aerial bombardment alone in Iraq will not do the trick; the United States will need a ground operation. In Afghanistan, the ground operation was carried forward by the Northern Alliance, under the leadership of Russia and the USA. But in Iraq, no one will want to do this dirty work for the Americans."
We must continue to focus on the control and reduction of nuclear weapons. This issue is not the highest agenda item in U.S.-Russian relations any more, however, we need continued high-level interactions that result in policy tools to effect control and reductions, in the first instance legally-binding treaties and agreements like the Moscow Treaty.
The panelists detail the options offered in the new Carnegie report, "Iraq: A New Approach," which proposes "coercive inspections" in which a multinational military force created by the UN Security Council would enable international inspections teams to operate effectively in Iraq.
The report provides a middle ground between the two existing approaches to Iraq: continue to do nothing, or pursue an overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
U.N. Resolution 1284, adopted in December 1999, calls for the streamlining of economic sanctions and for their eventual suspension once UNMOVIC has reported that Iraq is cooperating with U.N. resolutions on dismantling its WMD. This resolution remains the legal basis for continuing to control Iraq's assets, but Iraq has refused to allow UNMOVIC on the ground, insisting that the sanctions should be lifted since it has disarmed to the extent called for by U.N. resolutions. U.N. Resolution 1284 places no limits on the volume of petroleum that Iraq can export for humanitarian needs.
Many well-meaning political figures have made the mistake that Senator James Inhofe made on Meet the Press on August 18: "Our intelligence system has said that we know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction -- I believe including nuclear.
The Iraqis focused their efforts on developing an implosion-type weapon, whose basic design involves surrounding a subcritical mass, or core, of fissile material (in this case, highly enriched uranium) with conventional high-explosive charges. The charges are uniformly detonated to compress the nuclear material into a supercritical configuration. Iraq's weaponization program was in its early stages at the time of the Gulf War. In spite of making progress in the high-explosive testing program, Iraqi scientists were still struggling to master the high-explosive charges that must be precisely fabricated in order to produce homogeneous shock waves against the core after ignition.
Iraq ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty on October 29, 1969, pledging not to manufacture nuclear weapons and agreeing to place all its nuclear materials and facilities under IAEA safeguards. Iraq violated its NPT obligations, however, by secretly pursuing a multi-billion-dollar nuclear weapon program. Iraq's near-term potential to develop nuclear weapons has been curtailed by the implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 687, adopted in April 1991, following Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
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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.
Toby Dalton is a senior fellow and co-director 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 lecturer at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Nicole Grajewski is a Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research examines Russian and Iranian policies in the global nuclear order, with a particular focus on Russian nuclear strategy, Iran’s nuclear decision-making, contestation in the non-proliferation regime, and nuclear deterrence.
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 a 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.
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.
Lindsay Rand is a nonresident scholar in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Carnegie in 2022-2023.
Todd S. Sechser is a nonresident scholar in the Nuclear Policy Program and the Pamela Feinour Edmonds and Franklin S. Edmonds Jr. Discovery professor of politics and public policy at the University of Virginia.
Anne Stickells is a Stanton pre-doctoral fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Dr. Lauren Sukin is a nonresident scholar in the Nuclear Policy Program and an assistant professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Ülgen is a senior fellow 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 with the Nuclear Policy Program and Carnegie China.
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