Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
12/5/2014
The U.S. State Department is partnering with the Nuclear Threat Initiative to start an international nuclear forum to increase understanding among nuclear- and non-nuclear-weapon states of the technical problems of and solutions to verifying nuclear disarmament. Rose Gottemoeller, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, announced the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification this week during the Prague Agenda 2014 Conference at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “We can all acknowledge that verification will become increasingly complex at lower numbers of nuclear weapons, while requirements for accurately determining compliance will dramatically increase,” she said. “Everyone who shares the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons should be devoting ample time and energy to address this challenge right now.” The new movement will draw from the public and private sectors of involved nations, Gottemoeller said.
The State Department-NTI partnership will focus on verification challenges posed by nuclear material production and control, warhead production, deployment, storage, dismantlement and disposition, according to a fact sheet released by the Bureau for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance. The bureau called on non-nuclear-weapon states to contribute to the verification partnership, noting that the future of disarmament will present myriad complicated challenges. “This need not be an area of engagement confined solely to the [nuclear-weapon states],” the release states. “A larger, more diverse group of states with technical expertise in nuclear verification or the related sciences will contribute to the discussion and provide a broader intellectual basis for determining solutions.”
The United States and Russia have the most experience with nuclear verification, and the rest of the world’s capacity to “meaningfully engage” in the arms control discussion is “limited,” an NTI press release says. “We applaud the U.S. government’s leadership in jump-starting an international dialogue on verification,” NTI President Joan Rohlfing said in the release. “This is the essential first step in a process to assess verification gaps and begin joint work to address them.”
Ongoing Engagement with Russia “Next Logical Move”
Russia should cooperate with the United States on arms control, including the INF Treaty they have been accused of abrogating, to ensure that nuclear weapons do not fall into the hands of terrorists in either country, Gottemoeller said, pledging that Washington will continue to engage Russia “on a full range of issues affecting strategic stability,” including its violation of the INF Treaty. “Given that the United States and Russia continue to possess over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, this is the next logical move,” she said. “Our objective is for Russia to return to verifiable compliance with its INF Treaty obligations, as the Treaty is in our mutual security interest and that of the globe.” While she highlighted certain arms control challenges, Gottemoeller also touted the nuclear verification regime, which has stood up in the face of bilateral tension and contributed to the lasting success of the New START treaty. “Both nations are now faithfully implementing the Treaty’s inspection regime,” Gottemoeller said. “Current tensions with the Russian Federation highlight the durability of the verification regime.”
U.S. Continues to Support Negotiations For FMCT
The United States will also continue to support negotiation of a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, as well as ratification and entry into force of a Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, Gottemoeller said, adding that over 3 metric tons of vulnerable highly-enriched uranium and plutonium material have been removed or disposed of, and 11 countries have removed all HEU from their territory since President Obama delivered his famous Prague speech in 2009. “We still need to strive for continuous improvement, because nuclear security is never ‘finished,’” she said. “As long as nuclear and radioactive materials exist, they require our utmost commitment to their protection.”
Gottemoeller also previewed during her speech U.S. participation in the Humanitarian Impacts Conference, to be held Dec. 8-9 in Vienna. The United States has a “clear understanding and recognition” of the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapon use, she said. “That is the message the United States will take to the [c]onference,” she said. “We are participating, not because our nuclear policy has changed – it has not. We are participating to reinforce the messages I have put forth here – that the practical path we have followed so successfully in the past remains the only realistic route to our shared goal of a nuclear weapons-free world. We cannot and will not support efforts to move to an amorphous nuclear weapons convention or the false hope of fixed timeline for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. … As President Obama said here in Prague, the United States also has a responsibility to lead efforts toward disarmament, and I can affirm to you that we will never relent in this pursuit.”
