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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