The United States views the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a bedrock of its nonproliferation efforts, says Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance Paula DeSutter.

It is important because there are many countries that are parties to the NPT, she says, and therefore "It is not just the United States that has an interest in securing that regime."

Pointing to the "blatant violations" of the NPT by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, DeSutter said Pyongyang's "walking away" from its obligations and commitment under the treaty represent "an attack" against the NPT and the nonproliferation approach it represents.

"I don't think that we can rest assured that any nuclear weapons that they possess or will possess over time would not, then, be proliferated," she said during a recent interview with Washington File Security Affairs Writer Jacquelyn Porth. "It's bad enough worrying about them proliferating to another rogue state, but given the way that they have ignored international norms (of behavior) already, why should we be confident that those weapons wouldn't fall into the hands of entities even more dangerous than rogue states -- that is terrorist organizations?" asked DeSutter.

Those with a stake in the NPT also have a stake "in trying to shore it up and to persuade North Korea to change its behavior in major and significant ways: in essence to agree to dismantle completely, irreversibly and verifiably its nuclear programs," the assistant secretary said.

For that reason, DeSutter said the United States seeks the involvement of those most directly affected, followed by "a broader community of countries." But that isn't to say that other nations who believe that it is an important regime "shouldn't be weighing in as well," she said.

In the nonproliferation area, DeSutter said "we are trying to change people's cost-benefit analysis" since many nations proliferate for reasons that might make sense to them, such as generating revenue or garnering goodwill, or they may be unaware of the consequences of their proliferation actions. As an example, she said the United States asked China to regulate its behavior more carefully, but Chinese proliferation continued. "What we wanted to do is say: this isn't cost free," the assistant secretary added.

DeSutter's bureau of 70 employees is tasked with taking the lead in deciding what is entailed in and required of all arms control agreements, commitments and obligations. Drawing on intelligence from the broader government community, these technical experts look for compliance, errors, unintentional oversights, and outright violations.

Plans are under way, she said, to emphasize compliance diplomacy more than ever before because of existing and "disturbing noncompliance," such as North Korea's withdrawal from the NPT. The renewed emphasis on compliance diplomacy stems from the desire on the part of the United States to articulate and fully explain its concerns and the reasons behind them, DeSutter said. This means doing "a better job of explaining what the problems are and why it is important that other nations comply," she added.

Since assuming her position in August 2002, DeSutter said she has spent considerable time examining countries' missile proliferation commitments, and she described the North Koreans as "probably the worst proliferators of missiles in the world."

Ultimately nations must decide whether they want to trade with proliferators or trade with the United States, DeSutter said. It only makes sense, she added, because "morally you would want to trade more with countries that are doing good than with a country that is potentially going to sell weapons of mass destruction to a country that might someday use them against us."

The assistant secretary also talked about the importance of using sanctions as part of the U.S. nonproliferation toolkit. "It sends a message to the country and the entity that we are watching them closely, that their proliferation behavior is not acceptable, and it will have an impact on their ability to trade with us," she said.

In addition, DeSutter pointed to the Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative
as another useful tool. It brings together 11 nations to articulate "a common approach to interdicting trade in materials for weapons of mass destruction" by land, air, or sea.

Asked about Iran, she said it must do more than just say it doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. Iran should sign the Additional Protocol to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear safeguards agreement and then fully implement it, DeSutter said.

On Iraq, she said she has no doubts that former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay will succeed in demonstrating "that there was, indeed, a significant weapons of mass destruction program." While Kay has indicated that he hopes his Iraq Survey Group will have major elements of Iraq's WMD program articulated within the next six months, DeSutter said: "We are certainly hoping that it is sooner rather than later."

More information about U.S. arms control policy in available on the Web at http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/arms/

Question: The Bureau of Verification and Compliance is the newest bureau under the jurisdiction of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Can you tell me a bit about its portfolio?

Answer: I'd be happy to. It's probably one of the newer Bureaus in the entire Department. When the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) existed there was a Bureau of Verification and Intelligence, and when ACDA was merged into State in 1999, Congress felt strongly that it was important there be an independent verification and compliance bureau within the Department of State.

So the Bureau (www.state.gov/t/vc) was created by law. It was charged with three primary responsibilities. The first is to be the Bureau that assesses other nations' compliance with their arms control and nonproliferation agreements. As part of that mandated responsibility we prepare an annual report to Congress on other nations' compliance with arms control and nonproliferation commitments and agreements.

We just submitted to Congress the most recent of those reports and it is the first Bush administration report to Congress on this subject. It's provided in classified and unclassified (www.state.gov/t/vc/rls/rpt/c9725.htm) fora. It covers primarily the period of 2001. There was another report that was due in 2003. We're working on that now and hope to have that up to Congress as soon as possible.

So that's the first area of responsibility. The second area is that we participate early on in the negotiating process and throughout the negotiation of an agreement or a commitment in order to ensure that agreements and commitments are as verifiable as possible. And if an agreement is submitted to the Senate for advice and consent, we will submit at the same time an assessment of the verifiability of that agreement. The most recent case of that was when the Moscow Treaty was submitted.

The third area, which is very closely related to the other two, is that we are the primary liaison to the intelligence community for verification and compliance matters. The reason for this is that we want to make sure that our ability to monitor and get intelligence information on matters related to verification and compliance is as robust as possible.

So those are the three primary responsibilities, and others stem from each of those. The Verification and Compliance Bureau has become more involved in the sanctions determination process because that flows from our compliance assessment responsibilities. And we also are usually authorized money in order to participate in the funding projects within the intelligence community to verify agreements and commitments that we think are important.

So those are the main things that we do. We report to the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. While I think the Department was not initially -- when the Bureau was created --- tremendously enthusiastic, the support, encouragement, resources that we're provided by the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary are just fantastic. The support that we get from the Under Secretary is tremendous. So it's really coming of age.

The Bureau has a staff of roughly 70 who tend to be more technical than a lot of the people in the Department because what we do is take the obligations or commitments that somebody has made and we weigh that against the intelligence and any other information that we might have to understand whether or not somebody has violated an agreement.

Once that has happened, we try to participate in trying to make sure that countries understand what our problems are by working closely with the Nonproliferation (http://www.state.gov/t/np/) or Arms Control Bureaus (http://www.state.gov/t/ac/).

One of the things we are going to start doing much more than we have in the past is working compliance diplomacy. We're seeing a lot of disturbing noncompliance: North Korea's withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is an example. And what we want to do is make sure we can fully articulate and explain to people why we are concerned and what the basis for those concerns are.

Our first job is to make sure that we've analyzed it in the most rigorous possible way. The next is to try to do a better job of explaining what the problems are and why it is important that other nations comply.

Q: What other government agencies and international organizations do you work with to carry out your verification mandate?

A: We work with the usual national security interagency groups and agencies. We work very closely with the intelligence community. In our process of assessing compliance, we view them as official or unofficial co-chairs. We also obviously work very closely with the Department of Defense: both the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And, when it's a nuclear issue, certainly with the Department of Energy.

On international organizations, we primarily play a support role, and right now I think there is a lot of interest in the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) because of the nuclear proliferation that we're seeing.

Q: Do you work at all with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)?

A: Yes. In fact, when we were ACDA we provided the principle deputy for DTRA, but now it's a less formal relationship. But we certainly work with them.

Q: How about UNMOVIC (the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission)?

A: The Nonproliferation Bureau is the primary liaison with UNMOVIC.

Q: How is verification being handled with respect to the 2002 U.S.-Russian Moscow Treaty, or SORT (Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty)?

A: The Moscow Treaty represents a fundamentally different approach to an arms control agreement. The United States had said this is something we want to do, and we saw a reciprocal agreement by the Russian side and basically reflected it at the presidential level.

The Moscow Treaty in and of itself does not contain any kind of on-site (verification) provisions. It provides for dialogue at the Bilateral Implementation Commission. But it does specifically draw upon the agreement we already have in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), and that verification regime will continue.

When I say verification regime, this is something that is important for people to understand -- a verification regime isn't an on-site inspection regime. That's one of the fallacies that had been generated. I don't know how.

A verification regime entails not only any possible on-site measures, but also any national intelligence collection as well as other information we can acquire: information we can get through dialogue. You know if somebody tells us what they're doing we clearly know what's happening.

But it's also important in the sense that the verification regime can be the structure of the agreement. It can be what it's going to draw upon. It can be using one type of wording versus another type. Before the fact, you try to structure the agreement so that both sides have a clear understanding of what is expected of them.

In terms of the Moscow Treaty there is an awful lot of information that we gain through the Cooperative Threat Reduction Programs and programs like that where we can gain information and certainly understand what is being eliminated on the Russian side.

Q: I know that you work to verify adherence to agreements, treaties and conventions, but I'm intrigued by this notion of commitments that you have to verify. I wonder are there formal and informal ones? And do certain ones require more energy and oversight?

A: Certainly one of the areas where we have spent an awful lot of time since I got here last August is on missile proliferation commitments that other countries have made. You can view it as a very new thing, but in reality it's consistent with the way it was done in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency long ago.

We used to report, for example, on the first interim SALT 1 (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) agreement and SALT II even when they hadn't entered into force because there were exchanges of commitments by the presidents. And so a presidential commitment isn't the same as an internationally recognized agreement, but particularly in the case where the United States is basing its behavior or thoughts or security on a commitment made by another country, it's important for people to understand whether or not that country is complying with its commitments.
Q: How does your compliance work break out percentage-wise in terms of dealing with a carrot and/or stick approach versus more traditional diplomacy?

A: One of the things that is certainly true is that, over the past decade or so, what we've seen is there are two types of entities that have compliance problems. We knew when we signed START, for example, that it was a very long, complex treaty with complex requirements. And we knew that there were going to be some errors.

When you look at something and you believe that it is in error, it's far easier to say: "Look, here's an error, could you please correct it?" Those kinds of errors, you expect to happen. Then, you have activities where you don't necessarily know whether another country is doing something intentionally or not. But you need to raise it with them to say, look, it's really important that you address that. In those cases, the behavior in response to an expression of concern may indicate to you whether they just don't care or they are doing it intentionally. In both of those cases you would try to come up with different approaches.

Certainly in the nonproliferation area we are trying to change people's cost-benefit analysis. Many countries proliferate for reasons that would make sense to them: there is a lot of money to be made on the proliferation market, unfortunately. Or, they can gain the goodwill of the nations to whom they proliferate. Or, they may be unaware of the consequences of their proliferation.

In the case of China what we sought was that they would regulate their own behavior more carefully. And when we've continued to see ongoing proliferation, what we wanted to do is say: this isn't cost free.

Q: In terms of the relationship?

A: In terms of the relationship and financially. Under Secretary [of State for Arms Control and International Security John] Bolton (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/2976.htm) recently said that countries, and certainly entities within countries, have to make a decision whether they want to trade with proliferators or with the United States. And that only makes sense. Morally you would want to trade more with countries that are doing good than trade with a country that is potentially going to sell weapons of mass destruction to a country that might someday use them against us. That's just not the way you want to go. We believe that is especially important.

Q: Under Secretary Bolton has been visiting Asia (end of July): China, South Korea and Japan. How did you help prepare him for his bilateral meetings in those countries and what is the thrust of his message?

A: The meetings in China were part of a broader strategic dialogue; proliferation was going to be one of the topics. When the President says: "We want verifiable dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear program," it's this Bureau -- as part of its mandate responsibilities for verifiability -- that takes the lead in saying: what does that mean, what does that entail, what does that require? So we worked on those issues with the Under Secretary as well as our other State Department colleagues.

Q: How does the United States hope to curb North Korea's nuclear ambitions and their missile technology transfers?

A: This administration, I think, frequently takes criticism for not wanting to participate in bilateral dialogue with the North Koreans. But that is exactly the right approach.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is a bedrock of our nonproliferation efforts. It is important. There are many, many countries that are parties to that treaty. It is not just the United States that has an interest in securing that regime. North Korea's blatant violations of that agreement, their walking away from their obligations and commitment, are an attack, in essence, on the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the approach to nonproliferation that it represents.

For those who have a stake in that agreement, they also have a stake in trying to shore it up and to persuade North Korea to change its behavior in major and significant ways: in essence to agree to dismantle completely, irreversibly and verifiably its nuclear programs. It is for that reason that the United States is seeking the involvement first of those most directly involved and then of a broader community of countries. But that isn't to say that other nations who believe that that is an important regime shouldn't be weighing in as well.

Q: Isn't the verifiability going to be the hardest part? I mean the North Koreans can come in and agree, but given it's such a closed society?

A: I wouldn't want to underestimate the difficulty of getting North Korea to agree to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But certainly, it won't be something that would happen rapidly or easily. We've looked carefully at South Africa as an example. And in that case where South Africa had made the commitment to eliminate its nuclear weapons program, it took an awful lot of time. It is a difficult process. You have to understand what all is there; where it all is and then start the dismantlement process. And make sure it is not reconstituted.

Q: The United States has faulted China for failing to enforce nonproliferation regulations. What has the U.S. asked the Chinese to do to fix the problem and has any form of assistance been offered?

A: We've asked China to implement rigorously their export regulations. We've asked them to look at specific entities which we refer to as "serial proliferators."

Q: How long has the term "serial proliferators" been around?

A: It's one of those phrases that I don't remember when I first heard it, but it works pretty well.

Q: And are we offering China any technical assistance?

A: Well I think the Nonproliferation Bureau has been in dialogue with them about that.

Q: Is the U.S. only concerned about missile technology transfers by China to specific nations such as those identified in President Bush's axis of evil speech -- or are all transfers considered problematic?

A: We probably wouldn't be concerned if North Korea were transferring missile components to Britain. And there are countries of concern beyond the three axis of evil states. There are a number of countries that we are quite concerned about.

Q: Can you make reference to them?

A: Not comfortably.

Q: The U.S. has imposed economic sanctions against companies that have flaunted nonproliferation norms. How effective are sanctions?

A: We think sanctions are a very important tool in the nonproliferation toolkit. It sends a message to the country and the entity that we are watching them closely, that their proliferation behavior is not acceptable, and it will have an impact on their ability to trade with us. In some cases these entities don't trade with the United States. In the recent NORINCO (China North Industries Corporation) case, however, there had been very extensive trade between NORINCO and the United States. They manufacture an awful lot of other things besides missiles and there has now been a ban on imports from NORINCO. I think the figure is $160 million. It's a significant impact. And I think the message will get out there. And we are hoping the message will go out, not just to that particular entity, but to any other entity that's considering the same thing.

That tool is important, but the other tool that this administration has recently announced is the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) that is headed up by the Nonproliferation Bureau. It is a terrific initiative. There are 11 countries working together as the core group to come up with a common approach to interdicting trade in materials for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) whether they are going by land, by sea or by air. That approach will also, I think, over time send a signal.

Q: What is the status of the PSI and which countries are participating?

A: The participants are Australia, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. They met in Australia July 9-10.

Q: Going back to the sanctions issue, are you involved in making recommendations to sanction?

A: Yes, along with the Nonproliferation Bureau.

Q: What would Iran have to do to come into compliance with U.S. nonproliferation expectations?

A: The United States has been concerned for at least a decade about Iran's nuclear ambitions. Certainly when they had the last NPT Review (1995), Tom Graham, the U.S. representative to the conference, said the U.S. is very concerned that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. So the point is, these concerns are fairly abiding and we think that what Iran should do is do more than say that they don't have a nuclear weapons program.

They should give up their nuclear weapons ambitions, demonstrably. The first step would be signing an Additional Protocol to the IAEA.

Q: And then?

A: And then we would have to continue to work with them. Signing is not enough. You need to fully implement it. And you need to implement it in good faith.

Q: Under Secretary Bolton said in June that you (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/12812.htm) would be very involved with the under secretary of defense for intelligence in verifying Iraq's WMD program. How is that going? Are you receiving any feedback from David Kay's current survey operation in Iraq?

A: Within State our Bureau has the lead on the question of finding Iraq's WMD program. We are recipients of information rather than participants in the field because, for one thing, we are very small, and for another thing, the process has been turned over to David Kay, who is a former UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) weapons inspector. He is very bright and highly knowledgeable about verification issues. He is leading the effort out in Iraq supported by the intelligence community and DOD. He is in town this week testifying at the Senate Intelligence Committee today (July 31) and I have no doubt that he will succeed in successfully demonstrating that there was, indeed, a significant weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq.

He said in an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw that they hoped to have the major elements of that program articulated within six months. We are certainly hoping that it is sooner rather than later.

Q: Do you expect to be meeting with him?

A: I met with him July 29.

Q: How much time do you spend interacting with foreign counterparts and is that picking up?

A: I have not done that as much as I'd hoped to, in part because this being a fairly new Bureau there were things we wanted to do to shore ourselves up. But I probably will be doing a lot more of that -- focusing on compliance diplomacy.

Q: Does your Bureau continue to have concerns about biological weapons programs in Cuba, China and elsewhere?

A: Our findings are in the unclassified Noncompliance Report. This is an area of tremendous concern to us. When the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was signed (1972) and the United States became a party, part of how that happened is the United States had made a unilateral decision again that we did not want to possess biological weapons and we did not want them in our military inventories. As a part of that, we wanted to see if we could stop these weapons before they proliferated and a lot of countries had them. And so joined by the United Kingdom, and at that time the Soviet Union, we led the development of the Biological Weapons Convention. When then-director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Fred Ikle testified about the BWC before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, what he said was: understand that this isn't highly verifiable, and yet what we also believe is that other nations will make the same decision as the U.S. that these are not useful weapons of war and that any nation that pursued them and was discovered pursuing them would have the weight of world opinion fall down upon their heads.

Two things have happened. One, other nations, and unfortunately terrorist organizations, have understood biological weapons in a way different than we do. They see them as useful as weapons of terror. They are horrific weapons. And some of these countries, such as Iraq, perceive them in a way that we haven't for some 35 to 40 years. They are unusable. One doesn't do this.

Another thing, when noncompliance with the Biological Weapons Convention was uncovered with regard to the Soviet Union's offensive weapons program, the weight of world opinion did not fall down upon it. And that's unfortunate. Another instance is Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). And what you see over time is that there are consequences for not responding to these kinds of provocations.

There are almost always consequences for the responders in the short-run. It's difficult. No one wants to go into another country and say harsh words against them, but the consequence over time of the Soviet Union's biological weapons program not being stopped as soon as we found out about it -- I mean then-Soviet President Boris Yeltsin agreed to eliminate the program but we believe that the vestiges of it continue --- is that, perhaps, other countries saw this and thought: it's cost free. Other countries probably looked at Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran and thought it, too, was cost free.

And the consequence of that is that despite the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions, we have ongoing offensive weapons programs in both areas. It's important not just for the United States to articulate the noncompliance but for other countries to say: this is not acceptable to us.

Q: When you have to worry about verifying nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their delivery mechanisms, do you have to prioritize how you focus your attention or do you give them all equal weight?

A: We probably give them different weight. The difference is the resources available to use. Biological weapons are pretty difficult but we have been looking at a number of countries over a period of years and so I think our findings in those regards are pretty solid as far as they go. There may be undetected noncompliance. One of the things that is certainly true of the Noncompliance Report is that there is no violation of an arms control or nonproliferation agreement or commitment that we have ever cited in the President's report that has ever been undermined by subsequent evidence. Subsequent evidence is always additive to what we've found. So that is important to be the case -- that analysis be rigorous, that findings of noncompliance be based on solid evidence in a solidly analyzed case.

They are all very important to us. Certainly, some countries' violations are going to be of greater concern to us than others. Yes, we are concerned about the finding we reached with regards to Russia and the Biological Weapons Convention. We think there is still a program. But nobody is staying up tonight wondering if Russia is going to use its biological weapons against the United States. We have a relationship. We have a dialogue. We have a history of non-use of weapons of mass destruction against each other.

That's not the case with some of these rogue nations. We simply can't rely on their understanding of how to behave as a country in the world. That's why the United States is so concerned about North Korean's nuclear program. We've seen them proliferate missiles. They are probably the worst proliferators of missiles in the world. We have seen them undertake activities blatantly violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty, throwing out the inspectors (and) undertaking a number of provocative actions.

And I don't think that we can rest assured that any nuclear weapons that they possess or will possess over time would not, then, be proliferated. It's bad enough worrying about them proliferating to another rogue state, but given the way that they have ignored international norms already why should we be confident that those weapons wouldn't fall into the hands of entities even more dangerous than rogue states -- that is terrorist organizations?

Q: Can you cite a highlight from the latest Compliance Report?

A: I am especially worried about two things: biological weapons and missiles: those are the two areas that stand out. This is the first time that missile proliferation has been addressed in the report. (The Biological Weapons Convention has been included in the Report in the narrow context of the Soviet Union since 1984, but in the broader context of other nations, probably since 1993 or '94.) The combination of biological weapons and missiles is not a happy thought.

Q: So you are concerned about the melding of the two together?

A: With biological weapons you can use a smaller-warhead with greater range so that possibility increases the threat well beyond that of a conventional weapon.