Examination of Witness (Questions 36-39)
BARONESS WILLIAMS
OF CROSBY
5 NOVEMBER 2008
Q36 Chairman: Baroness Williams,
welcome. We are pleased to have you come down from the other place
to give us the benefit of your great experience. You heard many
of the questions to our previous witnesses, and some of the issues
we will discuss will cover the same areas. May I begin by asking
you about your current role? You were appointed by the Prime Minister
as adviser on nuclear proliferation in July 2007. What exactly
do you do in that capacity for the Prime Minister, and do you
also have a relationship with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
with regard to those issues?
Baroness Williams: Thank you very
much. Right away, I should say that to many people this appointment
was an odd one. Some people probably thought that it was just
a case of bringing in more people to form the big tent. The Prime
Minister announced that he wished to broaden the big tent, and
I suppose that I was one of a number of examples of that, but
there was more to it than that. I spent 12 years as a professor
at Harvard, and I was on the board of the Belfer Centre for Science
and International Affairs, which has prime responsibility in the
university for looking at issues of security, with particular
emphasis on nuclear security.
I was invited to join the board of the Nuclear
Threat Initiative, which is directed by Sam Nunn, the former Senator
for Georgia and chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services
while he was in the Senate, which was a long period. He and the
other board members invited me to serve on the board and I have
been on it since 2001, which is a reasonably long period. In that
capacity, I have been to almost all the board meetings and a number
of the other projects that it undertakes. As you mentioned, those
are primarily in the context of securing nuclear materials worldwide,
with a particular emphasis on Russia.
I next got invited, partly because of this,
by Gareth Evans, President and CEO of the International Crisis
Group, who has now become the co-chair of the new international
nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament group (ICNND), along
with the former Prime Minister of Japan to become a member of
the Commission. In that context, I have been to many discussions
about nuclear security throughout different parts of the world.
What are my relationships within the Government?
I primarily work with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I was
present at the recent meeting that the Foreign Secretary had on
18 July to discuss the way ahead on nuclear security issues and
so forth. I see a great deal more of him than of the Prime Minister,
particularly since the economic crisis started. I often correspond
with the Prime Minister, but it would be fair to say that the
economic crisis in the last few months has tended to mean that
nuclear proliferation has moved more thoroughly under the aegis
of the Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister having rather limited
time for it. It is interesting that throughout the parts of the
world that I have been involved in, including the United States,
the preoccupation with the economic crisis in the last couple
of months has tended to push the nuclear issue on to the back
burner to some extent. One may regret that, but it is pretty inevitable.
Q37 Chairman: Thank you, that
is helpful. We will have some other questions in a moment from
John Horam. First, you have referred already to your role in the
new International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and
Disarmament. Are you there as a UK Government representative or
in a personal capacity?
Baroness Williams: I am invited
in a personal capacity, but I have the approval of the Prime Minister,
although I did not ask for it. He wrote me a very nice letter
saying he was pleased that I was on it. I think that I happen
to be the only person from the UK on it, but that does not make
me the Government's representative.
Q38 Chairman: What impact do you
expect this organisation to have, generally, given the renewed
upsurge of interest that there has been in nuclear disarmament
and related issues?
Baroness Williams: I am not a
believer in creating commissions for the sake of having them.
I think that the key role of the new commission arises, at least
in part, from what I would almost describe as the quite considerable
anger, or certainly irritation, of the non-nuclear weapons powers.
They have become a good deal more aggressive and frustrated by
their sense that article VI of the NPT has not been adequately
carried out. Part of that flows from the way in which some of
the initiatives by the nuclear states, with regard to the NPT,
are becoming more and more evident.
I have not often heard such outspoken comments
as I heard at the 2008 preparatory committee of the NPT in Geneva
a few months ago, particularly from some rather surprising countries.
Obviously Australia, with the change of government, has become
quite outspoken about its sense of frustration about what is happening
under the aegis of the NPT. Germany has a much stronger voice
than it used to have on similar issues. Indonesia and Egypt are
both finding their voices. In fact, it was clear at the meeting
of the review conference that Lord Malloch-Brown and I attended
in May, that there was a very powerful feeling that something
had to be done by the nuclear weapon states. Partly, that was
of course about the unilateralism of some elements of the Bush
Government's policy, most notably with regard to such things as
the move away from the anti-ballistic missile treaty (ABM) and
the growing strain between the United States and Russia. But part
of the purpose of the new commission is to try to create something
of a pressure group on the part of the non-nuclear powers to,
in their view, very much strengthen the NPT when the next review
conference is held in 2010.
Q39 Mr. Illsley: That is exactly
what I was going to ask about. Do you see that as a force for
encouraging the NPT? Do you see the role of the commission as
complementary, or is there a danger that the new commission will
get in the way of the NPT, duplicate some of the work and perhaps
create some resentment?
Baroness Williams: That is a very
interesting question. My impression is that these are people who
want a say in the NPT, to strengthen the regime, and they want
to compel the nuclear powers to look again seriously at such issues
as disarmament. They probably could be a very constructive force;
a lot of very sensible Governments are involved. We should recognise
that it is a real force, which has partly grown up—in my
view at least—because the other leading Asian nuclear countries,
namely India and Pakistan, have not really played a full part
in the creation of this rules-based system. They have stayed outside
of it, as we all know.
That means that there is a sense that, as the
global balance shifts towards Asia, from being largely western
based, there is not a sufficient voice for that part of the world
in the negotiations that are now going on. The case of Indonesia
is very striking. It is usually a fairly quiet power in discussions
of this kind, but there is now a strong sense that it ought to
exercise a louder voice, because it chose not to be a nuclear
power—the biggest international country to so desire. It
feels, I think, that it should have a greater say in the review
of the NPT.
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