Source: Carnegie

For Immediate Release: May 22, 2003
Contact: Jayne Brady, 202-939-2372, jbrady@ceip.org

U.S. and Russian Security Experts Outline Agenda for June 1 St. Petersburg Summit

A point paper released by leading Russian and U.S. security experts urges Presidents Bush and Putin to focus their meeting on a few, critical tasks to fulfill two missions: Fighting the war on terrorism and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The authors-Rose Gottemoeller, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Vadim Razumovsky, director of the Institute for Applied International Research (IAIR) in Moscow; Yury Fedorov and Andrei Zagorsky, both IAIR deputy directors-released their paper yesterday at a Carnegie Endowment seminar. The full text of the paper follows.

New Security Missions
· Despite fall-out over the war in Iraq, the United States and Russia continue to agree that cooperation on two interrelated security missions is fundamental: fighting the war on terrorism and preventing weapons of mass destruction proliferation.

· President Bush and President Putin, at their upcoming summit in St. Petersburg, should focus on a few urgent tasks that serve to fulfill these two missions.

· The first is to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear weapons state and a source of nuclear weapons and materials for proliferating states and terrorist clients. The U.S. and Russia, working together with regional partners China, Japan, and South Korea, should develop a clear policy focusing on verifiable and comprehensive denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. In return, they and their partners would provide cooperation to remove the nuclear capabilities, assure the security of both Korea's, and supply North Korea and the region with energy. The U.S. and Russia should also engage the UN Security Council to take all necessary and practical legal steps to ensure implementation of the denuclearization program.

· The second urgent task is to address the discovery of fuel cycle facilities in Iran. The United States and Russia should join efforts to convince Iran to join the Additional Protocol to the Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA and refute its program to acquire a full fuel cycle capability. They should offer to cooperate in reducing weapons of mass destruction capabilities and threats in the Persian Gulf region-as is already happening with the Iraqi programs that so threatened Iran in the past. The Presidents may, in pursuit of the overall goal of security for the region, wish to engage Iran in the post-war reconstruction of Iraq, with a view to providing stability in that country.

· The third urgent task is to embark on measures to strengthen the nonproliferation regime overall. As a long-term measure, the Presidents should agree to work together to make proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery means illegal, in the same way that trafficking in heroin or trade in slaves is illegal. In the shorter term, they should launch an initiative to make the IAEA Additional Protocol to the Safeguards Agreement mandatory for all parties to the NPT. They should also reinvigorate efforts to ensure enforcement of the ban on biological and toxin weapons, by establishing a working group to develop practical measures to do so.

· Finally, the Presidents should ensure that this agenda of urgent tasks is underpinned by an adequate infrastructure, that is, effective mechanisms for cooperation within their two governments. Such mechanisms as special high-level task forces, supported by expert "tiger teams," with strong endorsement and support by the Presidents, would help to streamline implementation of policy.

New Framework for Strategic Cooperation
· In addition to these urgent security missions, the two Presidents should recommit themselves to the compelling but unfinished business from their previous summits: establishing a new framework for strategic cooperation between the United States and Russian Federation.

· At the top of this agenda is ensuring smooth and rapid implementation of the Moscow Treaty, entry into force of which should follow hard on the heels of the St. Petersburg summit. The Presidents can press for early progress on additional transparency measures to support the treaty, as well as missile defense and nonproliferation cooperation.

· The Presidents should also press for additional confidence-building measures, ranging from general activities, such as discussions of nuclear doctrine, targeting and force posture, to specific activities, such as enhanced notification of nuclear weapon developments and operations.

· Finally, the Presidents should endorse enhanced cooperation that engages the private sector, from technology projects in the aerospace arena, to projects in the realm of threat reduction. A commercial approach, for example, might be used to finance the dismantlement of Russian general-purpose submarines, an item that has been high on President Putin's agenda for threat reduction cooperation. Enriched uranium from the submarines might be processed into fuel for commercial power plants and sold, thus partially financing the submarines' dismantlement.

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