America's arms control hypocrisy
Bush wants other countries to comply with weapons inspections, but the US won't, writes Simon Tisdall.
George Bush was not pulling his punches. In a definitive policy speech earlier this year on preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the US President declared: "The greatest threat before humanity today is the possibility of secret and sudden attack with chemical or biological or radiological or nuclear weapons.
"America will not permit terrorists and dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most deadly weapons," he went on. "We're determined to confront those threats at source. We will stop these weapons from being acquired or built. We'll block them being transferred. We'll prevent them ever being used."
The US position, it seems, could hardly be clearer. So how to explain, and how conceivably to justify, a little-noticed demarche last week by Bush's officials at the United Nations conference on disarmament in Geneva? What the US did, in effect, was torpedo a new global treaty banning the production and supply of materials essential to the building of nuclear weapons.
It is known as the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty. It has been under discussion for years, strongly supported by the EU. Its main aim is to strengthen the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the cornerstone of the international effort to curb the spread of WMD. It is specifically aimed at nuclear-armed states such as India, Pakistan and Israel, which are not party to the NPT.
But by seeking a global halt to the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons, its wider aim is to reduce the chance of such materials being obtained by irresponsible regimes or non-state terror groups.
While dismaying, the Bush Administration's stance was not totally unexpected. Bill Clinton backed the fissile material treaty in 2000, but once in office the Bush Administration dragged its feet. Last year it announced a review of its position, thus delaying further talks.
They place the safeguarding of an uncompromised American sovereignty ahead of global arms control.
Last week the US ambassador to the conference, Jackie Wolcott Sanders, finally gave the go-ahead for negotiations, but with a fatal caveat attached.
The US would back the treaty in principle, but it would not support the inclusion of binding monitoring, verification and inspection provisions.
A State Department statement said the proposed inspection regime "would have been so extensive that it could compromise key signatories' core national security interests, and so costly that many countries will be hesitant to accept it".
But as the US knows very well, any new treaty is all but unenforceable without effective monitoring and verification. Inspections are essential, say arms control experts, if such treaties are to work.
That is a view with which the British Government, for example, wholeheartedly agrees. In private, British Foreign Office officials are hard put to conceal their disappointment at the US stance.
Stated American concern about security and cost does not wholly explain it. At the nub of the issue is Washington's fundamental objection to opening up American military bases and industrial plants to international, especially UN, inspection.
For the neo-conservatives and ideologues around Bush this is a visceral objection - even a matter of principle. Put plainly, they appear content to place the safeguarding of an uncompromised, untrammelled American sovereignty ahead of effective global arms control.
And they have plenty of form. In 2001, for this same basic reason, the Bush Administration scuppered a proposed inspections regime to police the Biological Weapons Convention.
For much the same reason, perhaps, key aims of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention remain unfulfilled. Between them the US and Russia possess more than 97 per cent of the world's known chemical weapons material, but neither will remotely meet the 2007 deadline for its full destruction, according to the US government accountability office. It says more inspections are needed to enforce the CWC, especially at dual-use chemical plants.
For much the same reason, the Bush Administration has set aside the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and is pressing ahead, beyond international scrutiny and in defiance of the NPT, with the development of new generation nuclear weapons.
Iranians and North Koreans are under intense US pressure to co-operate with inspectors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. But to Bush, it seems, international verification procedures are a one-way street. What happened in Geneva last week underlined that.
The very same US Government that went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein did not fully comply with UN weapons inspections unilaterally rejects similar control over its own WMD arsenal.
Simon Tisdall writes on international affairs for The Guardian, London.