Shunning The Talks Table

Prospect: Bush's Refusal To Talk Nukes Blocks Negotiations

(The American Prospect)  This column was written by Wade Boese.

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By Bush administration officials' accounts, there is no greater threat than nuclear terrorism, and no government takes that danger more seriously than ours does. Yet the administration's insistence on getting its own way and refusal to discuss other countries' security concerns are blocking treaty negotiations aiming to limit the amount of nuclear-weapon materials worldwide that terrorists could buy or steal.

The 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva is trying to launch negotiations on a fissile material cutoff treaty (FMCT), which would forbid governments from producing plutonium and highly enriched uranium for weapons purposes. On their own, terrorists lack the capacity to produce these two materials, at least one of which is needed to make a nuclear bomb.

Despite publicly supporting an FMCT, the administration has been the chief culprit in blocking negotiations. Given that the conference operates by consensus, no negotiations can move forward without U.S. support.

Forestalling the start of FMCT negotiations is the administration's refusal to consent to parallel talks (not negotiations, just discussions) on issues important to other governments. Specifically, fellow conference members want, or at least do not object to, talks on preventing an arms race in outer space, nuclear disarmament, and assurances by states possessing nuclear weapons that such arms will not be used against states without them.

U.S. opposition to these three issues is not new. The Clinton administration also resisted foreign entreaties to tackle these subjects. However, at that time, other countries sought formal negotiations on nuclear disarmament and outer space; now, they say they would settle for informal talks.

Still, the Bush administration argues that even this is too much. The concern is that talks could open the door for further action. Emblematic of this deep-seated sentiment is then-Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton's July 2001 admonition that "from little acorns, bad treaties grow."

Other countries, even close U.S. allies, find the Bush administration's inflexible position preposterous. Chris Sanders, a veteran Dutch ambassador to the conference, has complained, "I fail to see how discussions on improving security in space or how discussions on dealing with the subject of nuclear disarmament could threaten anyone's security interests."

The United States said for years that it would be willing to entertain talks on outer space in exchange for FMCT negotiations, but Beijing would not bite because it argued that the two subjects deserved equal treatment. Yet now that China has compromised and is willing to accept simply talks, "the Bush administration rejected it out of hand, effectively blocking any forward movement on an FMCT agreement," explains Ambassador Robert Grey, who represented the United States at the conference from 1997 through 2001.