31 March 1999
TRANSCRIPT: HOLUM ON STATE, ACDA INTEGRATION, MARCH 31
(Arms control now more central to U.S. foreign policy) (3210) Washington -- The merger of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) into the State Department may be a product of ACDA's success, because the work it does has become more central to U.S. foreign policy, says John Holum, ACDA director and Acting Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. At a March 31 news briefing on the future of ACDA's work as part of the State Department, Holum noted that beginning at midnight he will serve as "a senior advisor" to the Secretary of State, and in that capacity he will continue to advocate, where appropriate, an independent point of view that may sometimes disagree with that of the Secretary of State. But he noted that the current Secretary -- Madeleine Albright -- "is very supportive of having the arms control view at the table." Holum said he believes the ultimate outcome of the merger will be "a stronger power center for non-proliferation and arms control" and "more forceful advocacy." Holum noted that he has been nominated for the new under secretary position, but the nomination must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Following is the State Department transcript of Holum's briefing: (begin transcript) U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Office of the Spokesman March 31, 1999 ON-THE-RECORD BRIEFING ACTING UNDER SECRETARY FOR ARMS CONTROL AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS JOHN HOLUM ON INTEGRATION OF ACDA AND DEPARTMENT OF STATE Washington, D.C. HOLUM: Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be back here. Something unusual is going to happen at midnight tonight; and that is that a federal agency will disappear. The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency will go out of existence after a very productive 38 years, including such arms control innovations and achievements as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the decision to make it permanent, strengthen nuclear safeguards and other non-proliferation tools, a partial test ban and then a permanent Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, Biological Weapons Convention, SALT, START, INF, a whole range of confidence-building and transparency measures all over the world. ACDA also has implemented and verified those agreements, where the security benefits agreed to on paper are actually realized in weapons coming down or being averted. ACDA has a tradition and a responsibility historically for conveying/broadcasting inconvenient truth in its compliance reports to the Congress and other non-proliferation reporting. The agency has spawned several generations of arms control professionals, who are now found not only in ACDA but in the State Department, the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and elsewhere in the government, as well as in the NGO community. It has a remarkable core of talent that will be coming into the State Department, including negotiators, substantive and technical experts, a great deal of historical knowledge about all the treaties I referred to, legal skills, public and congressional affairs and a variety of others. An independent agency for arms control in 1961 and in 1995, when we fought this issue in the early '90s, was a good idea. Yet the merger is happening by consent. Why? Essentially because Secretary Albright strongly supports this cause, and so supported a merger arrangement that preserves the key values of this organization. A number of studies going back to the late '80s, early '90s have concluded that the primary reason for an independent Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has been independent advocacy. The perspectives that we had to offer were so important that they shouldn't be muffled or compromised down within a single department, but rather should be brought to the table at the highest levels. The Secretary has agreed and the President has approved and the legislation establishes the principle that the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, under the merged structure, will also be a senior advisor to the President and the Secretary of State on arms control and non-proliferation; and therefore, will continue to be present at these meetings, advocating, where appropriate, an independent point of view that may disagree with that of the Secretary. The Under Secretary will also be able to communicate directly with the President through the Secretary when necessary. The compliance review function has been attached to the Under Secretary's office in order to preserve the integrity of its reporting. Leadership on non-proliferation comes back to the State Department from the NSC, and the new bureaus will also have an enhanced role in leading the interagency process on arms control. We're also consolidating arms control functions that have grown up elsewhere in other bureaus in the State Department into the new bureau structure. There will be a new associate legal advisor and a new assistant legal advisor for arms control. The plan, as an interesting and uncomfortable side bar is not yet final. The plan for integration was submitted to the Congress last December, where it was to lay over 90 days before it becomes final. There are likely to be some changes in the overall plan that includes integration of USIA and some elements of the Agency for International Development. But as it stands now -- and I expect this will continue -- we'll have three new bureaus in the Department of State replacing the four bureaus of ACDA and one bureau in State previously -- a non-proliferation bureau, an arms control bureau and a political/military affairs bureau that will do traditional security-related matters. Finally, just let me note what I think has been an exceptional performance by ACDA's professionals during the course of this integration, negotiation and process to get ready for it. There was, as you would expect in any organization, considerable unhappiness at the conclusion that ACDA would be merged into the State Department. At the same time, there has been unqualified support for the efforts to make it work in the most effective possible way. I think that's due to the commitment to the mission of this agency that ACDA's professionals and all of its personnel maintain and to their professionalism as good public servants. With that, let me welcome your questions. Q: I'm interested in the idea of ACDA being independent all these years. Has there been or have there been ACDA directors who have been at odds with the position of the Secretary of State? HOLUM: Yes. Q: Can you cite some examples of that? HOLUM: There have been some very good examples that I'd rather refer back to previous Administrations. But I guess the original decision to support the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was resisted by the Department of State in the late 1960s. The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, it's widely known in the case of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program in the 1980s and 1990s, made the case that the President could no longer certify that Pakistan wasn't pursuing a nuclear weapons capability. That had implications under the Pressler Amendment. That was naturally resisted by the country relations interests of the Department of State. Ultimately, President Bush agreed with the ACDA view. I don't want to go, for obvious reasons, into a lot of specifics; but I will tell you that it happens frequently, during my tenure, that the Department of State and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency have had different perspectives on issues and have brought them to the table. That will change to some extent, operationally. And I've thought a lot about this -- the ACDA approach traditionally has been sort of a reflexive expression of an independent viewpoint. In the new structure, it will be more reflective in the sense that it has to be an important issue. It's a bigger step now for an Under Secretary to take issue with the Secretary, but it will still happen. It has happened on occasion when I've been dual-hatted, and I think the process works very well. The Secretary is very supportive of having the arms control view at the table. Q: Are you still acting? HOLUM: As of right now, I am ACDA Director and Acting Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. As of midnight tonight, I'll be neither of those things. My name has been submitted for the new under secretary position, but I would still have to be confirmed. So in the interim, I'll be a senior advisor to the Secretary. Q: Do you see any change in the way that you're going to approach specific issues with this realignment -- the three bureaus instead of five or whatever there were? HOLUM: No, I think the basic analytical approach and advocacy approach will be very similar to what it's been in the past. The people who have been in ACDA working these issues will be at the same table with people in State who have been working them. I've always thought the competition of ideas with the State Department has been less with the non-proliferation experts in the non-proliferation -- in the political/military affairs bureau and more with the regional perspective. That's where the tension comes. What I think the outcome will be is that we'll have a stronger power center for non-proliferation and arms control in the State Department, more forceful advocacy. The character, the center of gravity, will shift a bit in the Department of State; not because ACDA is a huge organization coming in, but because we're bringing new resources, new capabilities to bear on these issues. We're brining in reinforcements to the existing structure, and a lot more, I would suggest, really long-term, deep, technical expertise. Most of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency is civil service, people who have been working on the same kinds of issues for 15, 20, 25 years. There are people in ACDA who know the operational history of every aspect of the International Atomic Energy Agency. There are experts on chemical weapons that know the chemical make-up of the compounds that are useful as chemical weapons. That's going to reinforce the State Department's ability to handle these issues both internally and also in the interagency process. Q: I wonder if you can forgive me. With everything that's going on in Kosovo and your lengthy expertise on arms control issues, I wonder if you could discuss what impact, what's going on in Kosovo and whether there is success or failure -- what impact that could have on arms control around the world, what message it could send to countries like North Korea or other nuclear threats to the US, if you could respond? HOLUM: Well, it's very hard to isolate, particularly at this stage, what the long-term impact would be. I think the horrors that are occurring in Kosovo now obviously underscore the importance of legal structures and also informal structures confidence-building -- to limit and control arms. We, globally, are behind the curve, I think, in dealing with conventional arms. There are conventional arms regimes, and Europe is the leading site of progress on conventional arms. But nonetheless, they are hard to control and they are obviously being used to cause most of the damage that occurs worldwide. I've often said that we rightly pay attention to nuclear and chemical and biological weapons and missiles because they have the potential to wipe out whole cities at a time. Conventional arms, as we're seeing now, are wiping out whole cities, a few people at a time. So we need a great deal more work on that. More broadly, there may be some impact, plus or minus, on our efforts to negotiate international regimes on weapons of mass destruction, on our negotiations with Russia. But I think it's too early to specify what that will be. I suspect it will mostly be short-term rather than long-term. Q: To go to that point, the Russians have said they're going to put off START, the debate on START again. Have they indicated that this is another sort of temporary delay for a month or so, or have they just said we're putting it off full stop? HOLUM: From what I understand, the Duma was preparing to vote on START II on April 2 or in that time frame or toward mid-April, and that will not now occur. But I think the point to underscore is that START II remains very much in Russia's interest as well as in our interest. It's the opening to negotiate START III. We need to continue this process of reducing strategic arms. Over time, I suspect the Russians will take that same point of view. That's why I think this more likely to be a short-term rather than a long- term impact. Q: -- What about CFE? There was interest expressed in trying to bring that to closure this year, as well. HOLUM: I think there's a pretty good prospect. Just yesterday in the joint consultative group, they made some considerable progress toward the final elements. I haven't reviewed the papers yet, but I think we're going to be briefing fairly soon on the outcome there -- not the completely adopted treaty but the basic elements of what the adaptation will entail. Q: -- Let me just ask again, in a way, I think one analyst was saying -- I was hearing last night -- that if there's no success here in Kosovo that the North Koreans will just go forward extensively and just sort of not take the US and other international threats seriously. I mean, is that blown out of proportion, or do you think there's a real concern there? HOLUM: No, there are a large number of very significant obstacles in the way of reaching a comprehensive agreement on all the problems we have with North Korea's nuclear missiles and many others. We've just completed another round of talks on missiles. I think the impact of Kosovo, if there is any, would be way down the scale of the difficulties we face there. We just have an enormous amount of work to do with North Korea. We've made some headway, as you know, on the Kumchang-ni site access, and there will be a first visit to the sites in May. The discussions with the North Koreans in Pyongyang that Bob Einhorn led have been useful, another step, the fourth meeting on missile issue. But we're a long way from a settlement, from an agreement on those issues. I don't think Kosovo has a significant bearing. Q: -- Could you flesh that out a little bit, about the talks that just ended in Pyongyang being useful? HOLUM: Well, useful in the sense that we made our views both on possible further flight tests and indigenous developments of missiles in North Korea and on their exports of advance missiles very clear. The discussions were candid and businesslike, as you hear frequently about discussions. They plan to meet again as soon as possible. There is no agreement coming out of this; I wouldn't expect that they'd come home with an agreement after four rounds of talks. But I think it's valuable that we are discussing the missile issue with them. We have broken the long period when it was hard to get this issue on the table. Q: I want to follow up on the merger. Senator Helms has said he hopes this will lead to budget cuts. How do you think this will shake out? HOLUM: Well, there have been budget cuts. One of the things that's been going on since 1993, '94, in part through the inspiration of the Hill and in part through Vice President Gore's Reinventing Government process, is we have done in ACDA and something similar has been done in the political/military affairs bureau -- a comprehensive review of positions and a systematic effort to reduce overlap, to eliminate duplication. So I think most of the savings -- at least in the near future -- have already been wrung out of the system; though there may be further savings over time. But one of the things that we've learned in particular as we've gone through the crosswalk, the identification of people and positions in the new bureau structure, in the new offices, is that to a very large extent, ACDA and State have done different things. The political/military affairs bureau and the Arms Control and Disarmament have complementary but different functions. Speaking broadly, for example, ACDA negotiates multilateral regimes and the State Department is not heavily engaged, for example, in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. The Department of State is much more active in what I would call the retail enforcement of those regimes -- using the Test Ban or the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a vehicle to persuade other countries to comply. So the functions, broadly speaking, are different. There isn't a lot of duplication and overlap. We'll continue to be looking at potential savings, but I don't expect massive reductions in personnel. Q: Can you quantify the savings to date? HOLUM: In ACDA's case, our personnel dropped this is in the context of missions going up -- our personnel dropped, I think, a total of 6 percent, with a great deal more work underway. This is not a case where we're consolidating and reducing because work is going away. We're also not consolidating or reducing because the agency has failed. In some respects, I think the merger is a product of ACDA's success, because the work it does is becoming more central to our foreign policy and becoming more a part of what the State Department does. You see that continuously in the State Department with how much of our time is devoted to things like North Korea, Iraq, Iran, the Russia-Iran relationships, the China-Iran relationships. This is really a central focus now of the Administration. The work is not declining; it's growing and becoming more important. Q: Before the Russian Atomic Energy Minister came here -- part of the trip was supposed to involve Primakov -- he gave an interview in which he said that Russia was going to decrease its involvement with Iran. I was wondering, did anything ever come out of that? Have they given you any new commitments to that effect? HOLUM: Well, I don't want to go into the specifics of our conversations. We had extensive discussions with Minister Adamov while he was here; in fact, after the Prime Minister's plane went back to Moscow. One thing that is very clear is that we signed the HEU agreement -- that issue which has been pending for a long period of time was resolved, a very important step. We also had some very good discussions and, I would say, made considerable headway on the issue of Russia-Iran nuclear relationships. I don't have an agreement to announce. I'm not going to talk about the specifics of that. Q: -- You won't define what headway means? HOLUM: Just further reason to believe that they are undertaking, in line with Minister Adamov's public statements, not to assist Iran's nuclear programs. Q: -- But they've not gone far enough to lift sanctions on those entities? HOLUM: Not yet. Thank you. (end transcript)
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