Disarmament Diplomacy

Documents & Sources

John Bolton Interview

John Bolton, US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, interview with US State Department (Washington File), August 14, 2001.

"Question: 'How important are arms control issues in the Bush administration, and what is the level of commitment to arms control?'

John Bolton: 'Arms control, as part of an overall strategy of advancing American interests, remains a very high priority. Arms control can be an important part of American foreign policy, but I think the real question is what advances our national interest. And in those cases where, for example, arms control treaties are ineffective or counterproductive or obsolete, they shouldn't be allowed to stand in the way of the development of our foreign policy. And I think that's part of what we're trying to articulate as we go through reviewing some existing treaty obligations and considering whether or not to get into potential new obligations as well.

Question: 'The US has been criticized by some as being isolationist for steps it has taken in the area of arms control, such as going ahead with plans for missile defense despite opposition from friends and allies and declining to support the Biological Weapons Protocol. How do you respond to this criticism, and what do you see as the role of multilateral diplomacy in arms control?'

John Bolton: 'I don't think it's isolationist at all. I think it's a question, on a kind of case-by-case basis, of whether we consider different foreign policy tools as being useful. In the case of the ABM Treaty, it's a 30-year-old treaty that was established between the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, and was designed to prevent missile defenses that would frustrate the other's strategic offensive weapons capability. ... [W]hat we want to do is break free of the constraints of the ABM Treaty that preclude us from developing limited missile defense systems to protect our national territory against the launch of weapons of mass destruction by rogue states. I think it's the full intention of the administration that as the technology for missile defense develops, we'll make it available to friends and allies who are interested in participating in it, through NATO and through other alliance structures. I think that shows a decidedly internationalist bent to the policy. In terms of some of the other positions we've taken, such as on the BW Protocol, the United States remains committed to the underlying Biological Weapons Convention. Certainly it's a matter of great concern to us. We're probably more vulnerable to BW attack than any other country in the world. Our concerns about the draft BW protocol were that it did not really add any verification capability to what we already have. It didn't do anything to stop states that are parties to the underlying Biological Weapons Convention and which are lying about their commitments and violating it right now. It didn't provide any prospect of bringing them into compliance with the obligations they undertook 30 years ago, and the protocol posed major risks to our biological warfare defense capabilities, to our system of export controls that are intended to prevent dual-use technologies from falling into the hands of potential proliferators, and it posed grave risks to important intellectual property concerns of our pharmaceutical and biotech industries. So the US position on that didn't have anything to do with the issue of multilateralism or not; it had to do with our cost-benefit analysis of the draft treaty and our conclusion that it provided essentially no benefits and had a lot of downsides.' ...

Question: 'Could you explain and elaborate a little more on a recent statement you made? It's, "From little acorns, bad treaties may grow."'

John Bolton: 'That's something I said, actually, in a press conference in New York after I gave my speech at the UN Conference on Small Arms and Light Weapons. And the question on small arms and light weapons was that the conference was considering a draft program of action that had many different steps, not all of which, not even most of which, were recommendations to enter into binding treaty obligations. What I was trying to convey was that even seemingly innocuous provisions in things like this draft program of action can sometimes take on a life of their own, and that if you don't explain early and clearly what your concerns are with proposals, they can develop a momentum that carries them forward when people never intended it. And I said to the UN press corps, you of all people ought to know how it works here, where you start off with half of a sentence in a preambular paragraph in an obscure resolution in an obscure conference on an obscure subject, and over time the half of a sentence becomes an operative paragraph in another resolution, then it becomes the subject of a General Assembly resolution, then it becomes the subject of communiqués, then it becomes the subject of a major international conference, and then it becomes the subject of a treaty document, which, it turns out, we find is unacceptable and we have to reject it. And people say, "But everybody else accepts this treaty. For 10 years this has been going on and you never expressed objection to it." ...'

Question: 'Are there arms control treaties which you feel have lasting value?'

John Bolton: 'Yes, I think the Treaty, which has resulted in the elimination of that entire category of weapons, has been a success. I think, for example, the Chemical Weapons Convention has been important, although it's now running into difficulties in its administration and operation that we're paying a lot of attention to. I think START I and START II were valuable treaties. I think the compliance mechanism, especially in START I, is something that you can point to as being successfully implemented. ...'

Question: 'Fighting missile proliferation has required multilateral diplomacy in the past. Is the United States now saying that a multilateral military defensive response is required, and to what degree should the two approaches be balanced, or is it one or the other?'

John Bolton: 'There are a number of multilateral regimes in the area of weapons of mass destruction that are anti-proliferation in nature - the Australia Group, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Wassenaar Arrangement, the Missile Technology Control Regime - all of which have had desirable effects, but all of which have had problems as well, which means that they're not as effective as they might be. This was an issue that Secretary Powell raised in Beijing on his recent trip - whether the Chinese have been compliant with their November 2000 commitment not to ship missile parts or technology, effectively in violation of the MTCR. So it's an ongoing problem. ...' ...

Question: 'How do you envision fulfilling the president's concept of achieving lower levels of nuclear weapons? Do you see this evolving unilaterally, bilaterally, through traditional negotiations, or a combination of these?'

John Bolton: 'Well, a lot of this is part of the Nuclear Posture Review, and since we don't know the outcome of that, it's hard to say what levels would be recommended. But the basic premise, I think, is that we don't see that we're in a Cold War situation with Russia any more; we don't see them as inevitably in an adversarial relationship. And therefore, in a different kind of environment, you don't need the extensive system of offensive weapons that we've had. And that was recognized as long ago as the first Bush administration, which is why we were able to negotiate START I and then START II. Now, how that works, whether it's through the sort of traditional arduous arms control negotiation, with weeks and months in Geneva, or whether we can do a kind of unilateral but parallel reduction along the lines of the presidential nuclear initiatives, again in the first Bush administration - that's our preference. It's easier, it's more flexible. Ultimately it may be more economical. You don't get locked into artificial numbers. You're not, in effect, in a Cold War competition about what the agreement looks like. Each side decides for itself what's in its own security interest. ...'

Question: 'When do you think the administration's review of the CTBT will be finished? And what do you see as its flaws?'

John Bolton: 'I don't know that I can pinpoint a time on it. There are a lot of things to consider. The questions that led the Senate to reject the treaty and for the president to oppose the treaty during the campaign are still there. The questions about the verifiability of the prohibition on testing and the concerns about the safety and reliability of our nuclear stockpile remain. These are all being addressed at the scientific and technical level, at the military level. You know, we're continuing a very active review. And the president has said that he's going to continue the moratorium on testing. ...' ...

Question: 'On non-proliferation, what are some of the elements of this strategy that the administration is endorsing or pursuing?'

John Bolton: 'I think one thing that we want to look at perhaps most carefully is tightening up the international non-proliferation regimes. It was one thing during the Cold War, when you had the COCOM [Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls] system, which had a fairly limited membership, fairly strict rules, fairly tight enforcement, and a fairly clear target of concern - the communist countries, which we didn't want to advance on us technologically. In a post-Cold War world, there is more disagreement among potential suppliers about what the problem states are, and more disagreement about what really amounts to a problematic dual-use technology or weapons sale. There are different sorts of geostrategic assessments among them. There's pressure to expand the membership of the regimes, which makes sense if you want to get more suppliers in, but if you expand the membership, you may be reducing the consensus about what the problems are and so on. So these are some very difficult trade-offs, and I think we're going to be looking at all of the non-proliferation regimes to see if they can be made tighter. And one of the things we want to look at most particularly is whether, in addition to the traditional tools for non-proliferation, counter-proliferation activities make sense as well.' ...

Question: '... Could you comment on...your view of the general US policy on landmines and attempts to ban them?'

John Bolton: '... We conduct our landmine operations in the same, I think, highly responsible fashion that we conduct all of our military operations. There are a lot of other people out there who don't conduct military operations in a responsible fashion, whether it's landmines or anything else. And we also have some critical needs that other countries don't have, specifically on the Korean peninsula. That's one reason why even the Clinton administration didn't sign the Ottawa Convention. And other states that have particularly sensitive defense needs didn't sign the Ottawa Convention either. My favorite is Finland. Everybody would say, well, certainly Finland would be one of the sponsors, but given their history and their geographical location, they have declined to sign it. In fact, the Finnish negotiator in the run-up to Ottawa once responded to criticism from somebody from Sweden who said they just can't believe Finland isn't going to sign the convention. And the Finnish negotiator said - I'm paraphrasing now - but he basically said, that's easy for Sweden to say, they think Finland is their landmine. So, the effort at Ottawa about banning landmines didn't really take into account the demining problem that remains in places like Cambodia, parts of Africa, Central America, Afghanistan...' ...

Question: 'We have been involved in helping Russia to destroy its stock of chemical weapons. What exactly has been our role in this, and what's the future of this effort?'

John Bolton: 'This is another subject we want to discuss with the Russians because they've said they perceive difficulties in meeting the targets, the destruction targets that are contemplated in the Chemical Weapons Convention, which would pose a further problem under the CWC in terms of its implementation. ... I remain hopeful that the Russians will remain just as intent as we are on complying with the Chemical Weapons Convention, on destroying their stocks. And I think we're prepared to support additional US resources to help them do that, assuming we can see the level of commitment from them that we need, and assuming that some of our European friends, in particular, put up some financial resources as well. ...'

Question: 'What benefits do you see from the program of action that was approved at the recent UN Conference on Small Arms and Light Weapons and what future steps does the US envision, either alone or in concert with other nations, to address the problem of the illicit trafficking in small arms?'

John Bolton: 'I think one of the major points that we wanted to make in New York was that there were activities that the UN could undertake that would be useful in the international arena to help control the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons, and that one of the things we were concerned about was getting diverted into domestic policy gun control debates. ... I see lots of possibilities for follow-on activities I expect we'll be very much involved in. Where I don't think we'll be involved is in attempting to take what is fundamentally a matter of domestic politics and trying to internationalize it.'"

Source: Interview - Under Secretary John Bolton on US Arms Control Policy, Washington File, August 14.

© 2001 The Acronym Institute.