New nuclear strategy
The summit itself turned out to be a tame affair since the Americans had worked hard to achieve a consensus among the participants before they arrived in Washington.
By Shahid Javed Burki
Tuesday, 21 Apr, 2010
PAKISTAN was one of the 47 states that participated in the nu clear summit called by President Barack Obama. It was represen ted by Prime Minster Yousuf Raza Gilani who arrived in Wa shington with his hands strength ened by the passage of the 18th Amendment to the constitution.
This will transfer to parliament and through it to him many of the powers wielded by President Asif Ali Zardari. The command of the authority that con trols Pakistan’s nuclear weapons was handed over to him earlier even before the political agreement on the constitu tional amendment was reached.
The nuclear summit was held in Washington and took place after the American president signed a new and far-reaching arms control agreement with his Russian counterpart President Dmitri Medvedev. The signatures were put on the new treaty on April 8 in Prague, the city where President Obama had initially laid out his plans to bring under control the spread of nuclear weapons and material in the world.
The Washington conference was also meant to prepare the way for a major UN gathering scheduled for May at which the parties to the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT) would review the NPT with the aim of updating it. Pakistan, not having signed the NPT, will probably be under pressure to accept the main strictures imposed by the treaty.
On the eve of the Washington summit the United States made public the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a document that revealed the country’s approach towards the use of nuclear weapons. The NPR took a long time to prepare; there were sharp differences within the administration about the size of the US arsenal and its possible upgrading. The final draft of the review calls for major new investments in nuclear weapons laboratories and facilities to maintain the aging arsenal. However, these weapons would not be upgraded as called for by the strategy developed by President George W. Bush. Pursuing that approach would have gone against the basic purpose. It would have started another arms race. The review also recommends tighter penalties on nuclear rogue states — a matter that would be taken up in New York.
That he would work to make the world a safer place by reducing the number of nuclear weapons around the globe making it difficult for countries that did not have them to acquire them and that he would specify the circumstances in which the US would use them were some of the promises candidate Obama made during his bid for presidency in 2008. This was a difficult posture for a presidential candidate who faced experienced opposition in the fight for his party’s nomination as well as in the presidential election itself.
Both Hillary Clinton, his Democratic challenger, as well as John McCain the Republican candidate were supposed to have a better appreciation of America’s strategic interests than the inexperienced neophyte Barack Obama. The latter won the election, and devising a new nuclear strategy not only for the United States but for the world at large became one of the several matters of deep concern for the new president.
In the first week of April, the president sat down with the press to give an insight into how he wished to conduct his country’s nuclear policy and how he would be pushing other nuclear powers and those who were near to crossing the nuclear threshold to follow suit. He said he intended to revamp the American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the US would use nuclear weapons.
The country would forswear the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries. But the president included a major caveat. The countries must be in compliance with their non-proliferation obligations under international treaties. That loophole means that Iran will remain on the potential target list. Iran could be attacked if it developed nuclear weapons since that would be in defiance of the NPT it had signed decades ago.
The new policy specifies that the US weapons are for the purpose of deterrence but does not go as far as the leftwing of the Democratic party wished Obama to go. It wanted the president to take out the option of first-strike altogether; the weapons would only be used if the US was under threat of attack or was actually attacked. Going as far as some of the fellow Democrats wanted him to would have unnerved some of America’s European allies who lived under the US protective nuclear umbrella.
The summit itself turned out to be a relatively tame affair since the Americans had worked hard to achieve consensus among the participants before they arrived in Washington. The communiqué issued after the meeting promised several actions by the participating countries which will be reviewed by a follow-up summit two years later.
The summit accepted President Obama’s goal of securing all loose nuclear materials worldwide within four years. In the summit’s opening session, the American president drew the attention of the world leaders to the threat posed by not fully securing nuclear material. “Nuclear materials that can be sold or stolen and fashioned into nuclear weapons exist in dozens of nations,” he said. He called for action to “lock down” such materials — highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium. “For the sake of our common security, for the sake of our survival, we cannot drift.” Pakistan was in the spotlight throughout the summit having been involved in nuclear proliferation through one of its scientists. While the summit was on some American newspapers revealed that Pakistan had activated a new facility to manufacture additional nuclear weapons material. Also, the impression exists that the government’s repeated assurances notwithstanding, extremists in the country could lay their hands on some of the material the country has accumulated. It was in the light of these concerns that Prime Minister Gilani’s commitment to strengthen port security and prevent nuclear smuggling was well received at the summit.