Previewing a Conference

Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher this morning laid out the Obama administration's goals for next week's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference at the United Nations in New York.

"We are going to New York with our eyes wide open," Tauscher said in a speech to the Center for American Progress, adding that the nuclear nonproliferation regime "is under great stress and is fraying at the seams" due to efforts by North Korea and Iran to develop atomic weapons.

Next week's conference "is not a silver bullet or an end in and of itself," Tauscher warned in her prepared remarks. "It is one of several tools at our disposal to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Other tools include multilateral and unilateral sanctions, extended deterrence, and other mechanisms like United Nations Resolution 1540" that the U.N. passed in 2004 which established for the first time binding obligations on all U.N. member states to enforce measures against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, their means of delivery and related materials.

Tauscher was somewhat less sanguine about the prospects of the conference's turning out a "final document" encompassing the views of all 189 countries that are signatories to the NPT Treaty:

A final document, which can only be reached by consensus of all 189 nations -- and yes, that includes Iran -- can be valuable. It can energize our efforts, but it cannot change the substance of the Treaty. In our view, whether there is a consensus Final Document should not be the measuring stick to judge the success of the Review Conference. As I said, a Final Document can easily be blocked by the extreme agendas of a few.

Tauscher then went on to list the administration's goals for the conference:

First, we want to make it clear that the United States is living up to its obligations under the Treaty. President Obama has jump started arms control as a goal and as a process – everyone in this room has read his speech in Prague last year. Not only is this good for our own security interests, it gives us leverage to ask more of other states to strengthen the Treaty’s nonproliferation obligations at the Review Conference. So we’re not going to shy away from claiming credit from taking these steps to point out that we follow through on our NPT obligations.

Second, we seek to demonstrate broad consensus in support of strengthening the Treaty’s nonproliferation pillar. So we will offer more support for the IAEA to obtain the tools and authorities it needs to carry out its mission.

We will push for universal adherence to the Additional Protocol. The current Director General, Yukiya Amano, and his predecessor, Mohammed El Baradei, have said that this is critical. The IAEA must be able to provide credible assurances that not only declared nuclear material under safeguards is not being diverted for military purposes, but that there are no undeclared fissile material and nuclear weapons activities.

We will push to make sure that there are real consequences for those states that choose not to comply with their nonproliferation obligations.

We will work to prevent states from cynically violating the Treaty and then exercising their withdrawal rights to evade accountability.

Finally, we intend to engage in a vigorous and high-level discussion of these issues at the Review Conference. Some believe that it is critical that we “name names” when discussing noncompliance. That’s a tactical decision, but nobody should be mistaken who we are discussing when we raise compliance concerns.