19 December 2003
Bolton Says Proliferation Security Initiative Has "Twofold Aim"
PSI seeks to reduce WMD, increase costs of trafficking
By David Anthony Denny
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- The new Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) has a twofold aim -- to reduce the quantities of WMD in the world and to raise the political and economic costs of trafficking in WMD, says Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton.
Bolton described as successful the December 16-17 meeting in Washington attended by representatives of governments participating in the PSI.
In an exclusive Washington File interview December 18, the under secretary noted that the PSI is intended to keep weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their means of delivery out of the hands of state and non-state actors of concern. He said that during the two days of meetings at Fort McNair, military officers (along with some law enforcement and intelligence officials and representatives of Japan's coast guard) talked about lessons learned from several interdiction exercises that had already taken place.
In addition to the 11 governments that originally formed the PSI (Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States), Canada, Denmark, Norway, Singapore and Turkey also sent representatives to the Washington meetings.
Bolton said the group analyzed and discussed maritime interdiction exercises led by Australia in the Coral Sea and by Spain and France in the Mediterranean, and a "table top" air interdiction exercise in London led by the British. There also was discussion of interdiction exercises to be held in the first four or five months of 2004, Bolton said. Plans call for a maritime exercise in the Arabian Sea in January, led by the United States, followed by ground interdiction exercises led by Germany and Poland. Italy will lead an air exercise and another Mediterranean Sea exercise in the spring, Bolton said, to be followed by another one there led by France.
"The purpose of these exercises is to give the military people the experience of how to handle different scenarios when they get actionable intelligence about a particular shipment, whether it's by sea or by land or by air," Bolton said. "What do they need to do? How do they coordinate among various countries involved? What steps need to be taken? What are the risks?"
He said the exercises are "developing a command-and-control capability for all of the PSI participants that will then be transmitted ... across all the pertinent combatant commands, so that people can get the benefit of the exercises ... [and] when they're confronted with the possibility of an interdiction in the real world, they're not starting from scratch," said Bolton.
"I think the exercises also send an important political signal," Bolton said, "because they show to the proliferators -- both the sellers of WMD and WMD-related materials and the buyers -- the buyers being the states that are seeking to acquire WMD capabilities -- that PSI is not simply diplomatic rhetoric. This is real: a real change in the approach that we are taking to trafficking in weapons of mass destruction."
Bolton said the idea is "to go beyond the national criminal provisions and the international export control regimes and engage in actual interdiction." He hastened to add that national statutes and export control regimes are still important, but that "PSI is in addition to that."
"We talk, generally, about non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," said Bolton. "PSI is counterproliferation. This is taking affirmative steps to disrupt -- and stop where possible -- the trafficking in weapons of mass destruction," he said. There is a twofold aim behind the effort, he said: to reduce the quantities of WMD in the world, but also to raise the political and economic costs of trafficking in WMD.
He said PSI will increase the risk that "a purchaser who wires a substantial amount of money to a numbered account in some bank haven will find that the money's gone and the goods don't arrive. That raises the transaction cost at a minimum." PSI also will play "a substantial deterrence and dissuasion role," he said. "Countries looking at whether they see a benefit in seeking a WMD capability will see this new initiative of the President and the increased risk and cost that it poses, and that may have a role -- hopefully, will have an important role -- in convincing them they just don't want to get into the WMD business at all," he said.
Bolton noted that the initiative was first publicized by President Bush in his speech in Krakow, Poland, on May 31, and the fact that both National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz spoke to participants during the meetings is indicative of the importance the President places on the PSI.
There will be another meeting of the plenary group of the original 11 PSI countries and perhaps a couple of others, in Portugal in early March, Bolton said. Also, the operational experts group will meet again in the early part of next year, hosted by Canada. Over 50 countries have indicated that they endorse the statement of interdiction principles agreed to in Paris on September 4, and are prepared to cooperate, which Bolton described as "very, very substantial support" for the plan.
Asked whether the interception of a ship carrying North Korean Scud missiles to Yemen earlier this year may have been the first PSI interdiction, Bolton said, "The interdiction of the So San was a very important step, because it showed we had both the capability and the support in international authorities and the political will to engage in interdiction." He noted that both the United States and Spain participated, and "other countries indicated to us that they thought it was exactly the right thing to do."
"We learned a lot in that experience," he said. "Although we had been thinking of a variety of counterproliferation techniques that we could use, [the So San interdiction] was certainly one of the factors that led us to think that we do need to do this on a broader basis and have it be more systematic and be better trained and prepared, and get more other countries involved."
Asked whether there will be an attempt to widen the membership of the PSI, Bolton said, "PSI is an activity, not an organization. We're not going to have a secretariat and a headquarters building. We're going to try to build political support for the initiative and solicit countries that support the statement of interdiction principles to work with us in a variety of different capacities."
Discussing the connection between PSI and the global war on terrorism, Bolton said the post-9/11 effort to reach out to other governments to cooperate on sharing information and intelligence on suspicious people and activities has provided "very substantial assistance" to the PSI effort.
"We've established new liaisons where they didn't exist before," he said. "We now have habits of trust and communication that we didn't have before."
Noting that the countries on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism "are by and large the same states that are WMD aspirants," Bolton said "the nexus between terrorism and WMD already exists. The fear that we have that the weapons will actually come into the hands of the terrorist groups is very close at hand, and it's the greatest fear that everybody in the counterterrorism enterprise now has. The president has spoken to this when he said we cannot allow the world's most dangerous weapons to be possessed by the world's most dangerous leaders. That issue is right there, and everybody is well aware of it. So a lot of what we've been able to do in the wake of September 11 directly benefits and enhances the PSI."
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
This page printed from: http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2003&m=December&x=20031219153030ynnedd0.8253748&t=usinfo/wf-latest.html
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