By John Minnis
Legal News
While Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were briefing reporters in Washington on President Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review, international law students and faculty at Wayne State University Law School were receiving their own briefing.
In probably the most timely of the presentations offered in the Winter 2010 Speaker Series, hosted by the WSU Law School Program for International Legal Studies and the International Law Students Association, Deepti Choubey, deputy director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment, provided an up-to-the-minute report on the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review and the president’s plans to fly to Russia to sign a new arms-control agreement.
She also opined on what to expect out of the upcoming Global Summit on Nuclear Security in Washington, D.C., and the quinquennial Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in May.
“The Obama administration today released its Nuclear Posture Review,” said law professor Gregory Fox, director of the Program for International Legal Studies. “I think we perfectly matched the perfect expert with timely events. We can’t always do that.”
President Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, in part, for his for his promotion of nuclear nonproliferation.
Obama also called for a nuclear security summit meeting next month that will be the largest gathering of world leaders by an American president since the United Nations was founded 65 years ago.
“Law students are in a position to understand what is at the heart of nuclear nonproliferation,” said Choubey, who is not an attorney. She earned a master’s degree in international studies at Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in government at Harvard University. “This is one area lawyers with their training are better equipped to handle the issues involved.”
Choubey said the first thing the Obama administration has to do is restore America’s standing in the nuclear nonproliferation community.
How well the new president will do that will be evident at next month’s summit, she said.
“Under Bush,” she said, “you got the impression that all treaties were in the dustbin. That is not true.”
The nuclear policy expert said that there are some around the world who thought the 40-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was “fraying around the edges,” especially after North Korea and now Iran.
She said Obama is pushing for a nuclear-weapon-free world but realizes it will not likely happen in his lifetime.
The president further insists that America maintain a nuclear deterrence while at the same time reducing nuclear warheads and preventing proliferation.
“The president is probably the most progressive person in his administration on these issues,” she said. “The rest of his staff is not where he is. He has to drag his administration along.”
The Nuclear Posture Review was months late in being released, The New York Times reported the same day Choubey spoke at Wayne State, because the president had to personally intervene between those who feared he was not making significant enough changes and those who feared the changes were too precipitous and would embolden adversaries.
The Nuclear Posture Review is mandated by Congress. Obama’s review is the third released since the end of the Cold War.
The Clinton administration conducted the first review in 1994. Bush performed the second review in 2001, shortly after 9/11. His included a second, classified version.
Choubey marveled that Obama’s review was released “100 percent unclassified.”
She explained that under the NPT, month-long reviews are held every five years. 2005 was the most disastrous review year, she said, with John Bolton leading the U.S. delegation to the U.N.
“In 2010,” Choubey said, “expectations are high. The idea is that the U.S. is all that counts. That’s not true. You need all states involved.”
The NPT encompasses 189 party states, including five nuclear weapons states: United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France and China. In addition, there are non-party countries with nuclear weapons: Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.
Choubey said the NPT’s quinquennial reviews are important in that they give the small, non-nuclear countries a chance to be heard.
She said there has been much sympathy among nonaligned countries with Iran’s claim that its nuclear ambitions are for energy only and that it is being prevented from acquiring nuclear energy by the superpowers.
She hoped that last September’s discovery of Iran’s ongoing efforts to build a secret uranium enrichment plant deep inside a mountain would cause some smaller, non-nuclear countries to question their allegiances.
All decisions at the quinquennial review conferences, however, have to be unanimous, making change impossible.
Still, Choubey believes some good can come out of the review and summit next month.
“I think some progress is possible,” she said, “especially next week when Obama talks at the summit and privately to some leaders.”
Choubey says she measures success not by what happens at the review conferences but what happens afterward.
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