Examination of Witness (Questions 40-52)
BARONESS WILLIAMS
OF CROSBY
5 NOVEMBER 2008
Q40 Mr. Horam: I am very interested
in what you said about the frustration on the part of the non-nuclear
powers, and how that has built up to a point where it has become
something that the nuclear powers have to take seriously. I am
sure that the nuclear powers would say, "That is all very
well, but what we are really concerned about is the possible rogue
states such as Iran, and the difficulty that we face over there.
That is a real threat. The threat does not come from us; it comes
from Iran or North Korea." How do you see the situation between
those two perhaps conflicting viewpoints? The major powers are
concerned about Iran and North Korea, and are probably less concerned
about the frustrations of the non-nuclear powers.
Baroness Williams: I have attended
about seven or eight conferences at which substantial numbers
of non-nuclear weapon powers were present, and I have to say that
they do not see Iran in the same way as the United States and
the United Kingdom do. That is not particularly because Iran has
done a very good job at diplomacy with them; Iran tends to be
a rather remote power that does not go out of its way to build
friendships. Having said that—I am talking not about Islamic
countries but about non-Islamic ones—it is probably true
that the sense of alarm that is felt here is not felt in the same
way by other non-nuclear powers, including some European non-nuclear
powers. I will come back, if I may, to why. I do not know, Mr.
Chairman, whether you want me to go any further into Iran. I am
happy to do so.
Q41 Mr. Horam: We are interested
in why you think that that is the case, so please go further now.
Baroness Williams: Okay. I have
recently been in Iran. There is a very strong argument about what
Iran's real motivations are and whether they resemble those of
Iraq, in the sense that you hide the information because you do
not want your bluff called, but it is a bluff. The second argument,
strongly advanced by Dr. el-Baradei, director of the IAEA—including
in a conversation with me a couple of months ago—is that
one of the main reasons for Iran being obscure and leaving open
the question of whether it is or is not developing nuclear weapons
is that, because until very recently the United States was not
prepared to talk directly to it or to recognise it diplomatically,
it has been unable to establish a diplomatic presence in the region,
so it uses the obscurity about whether it has a weapons programme
as a way of compelling people to recognise its role in the region.
Its real intention is to be taken as a serious regional power,
not to develop nuclear weapons particularly.
It is interesting that Mr. James Dobbins, whom
I know quite well, and is a director at the RAND Institute, which
many of you will know has a highly sophisticated and very capable
military intelligence centre, takes the same view. I thought that
you might ask a question of that kind, so I brought a document
from him for you to see. He says that he believes that the fear
in Iran of a possible military strike, somewhat strengthened a
few weeks ago by Israel's consideration of such an action, has
made Iran a very defensive and very secretive power. However,
if it were possible to have direct discussions with Iran, one
would be able to find out much more about what Iran's real intentions
were. Dobbins argues that there should be a diplomatic initiative,
which was not possible under the Bush Administration but might
be under a new one.
When I want to Iran a couple of months ago,
I found that there were two unending problems. One was that the
relationship between Ahmadinejad and the supreme ruler was very
obscure—incidentally, his proper description is the Supreme
Guide. He certainly seemed to be busily building up both sides
of the argument in Iran itself, perhaps to strengthen his hand.
In that context—and now I will make a
remark that may or may not appeal—I regret the fact that
the Government did not welcome Dr. Larijani's approach, when he
asked for a select parliamentary group to meet with the Iranian
Majlis to discuss issues between the west and Iran. I say that
because of my impression that the Iranian Administration is not
only layered, but divided, and that there are voices such as that
of Larijani—who of course is the speaker of the Majlis and
was so elected—who very much want a peaceful outcome to
the divisions. This is only an impression and I do not want to
put too much credence on it. There are others, such as Ahmadinejad,
whose popular base is based upon making frightening and extreme
statements. One has to make a difficult judgment about those two,
but it is not in our interest not to welcome statements by, what
one might call, the deliberately moderate-minded and internationalist
element in the Iranian Government more than we do. Beyond that,
it is hard to discover people who you can talk to there who will
not revert to obscure and, in many cases, theological comments,
which were rather hard to follow at the seminar that I recently
attended.
Q42 Mr. Horam: That is interesting.
You may be aware that this Committee went to Iran.
Baroness Williams: A year ago.
Mr. Horam: Yes, and we recognised some
of the points that you are making. We said in our report, with
certain qualifications, that we wanted talks to take place, not
entirely without preconditions—
Baroness Williams: I thought that
you were very nuanced.
Mr. Horam: We were giving a clear signal
that we would like it to happen the way that you describe. As
you said, we are at a significant moment with Obama being elected
President of the United States, and the United States is the key.
One lesson that we have learnt from all these talks with the Iranians,
both in Washington and in Tehran, is that the United States is
the key to unlocking this. If it does not play a role, everybody
else—all the European powers—can talk until they are
blue in the face but they will not necessarily make a difference,
because that is what Tehran understands to be the power of the
situation. Do you not think, therefore, that given what Obama
has said, we are at a significant moment where some real progress
could be made in relation to Iran?
Baroness Williams: I do. I would
hope that our Government could encourage the new President, and
perhaps even more so those people around him, such as the Secretary
of State and the new Secretary of Defence—or perhaps the
same Secretary of Defence—to consider sitting down and talking.
There was one element of breakthrough a month or two ago, when
the United States agreed to the presence of an observer on the
one plus three discussions. That was encouraging.
There have also been back-channel discussions
between individuals with a lot of knowledge of nuclear issues.
They are, of course, not able to be publicly acknowledged, but
they are known about by the American Administration without any
doubt. Some of them are serious middle east and Iranian experts
who are, in a sense, acting individually, apparently on their
own. They are acknowledged in the American Administration but
there is not any official acknowledgement.
I am hopeful of that. It is terribly important—and
your Committee recognised it when you visited—that there
has been no official diplomatic relationship with Iran since 1980,
which is quite extraordinary. It is one of the major powers in
the world. As we all know, when the leader of the Iranian Administration
was rather liberal, Iran made deliberate attempts to reach across
to the United States, particularly in 2002 and in 2004—perhaps
an unfortunate year—to try to talk about the possibility
of discussing how the two countries could deal with Iraq and how
they should deal with the general troubles in the region. One
of the problems is that those approaches were rejected by the
Bush Administration. That tends to build up a sense of paranoia
among the Iranians because they feel that there is no way that
they can reach a formal exchange of views which are officially
recognised. The sensitivities are huge. Iran feels itself to be
a great civilisation. It feels that it is not recognised as such
by the major powers in the west.
Q43 Mr. Horam: To finish with
this point on Iran—I am sure we do not want to carry on
too long—one point that has been made to us by the experts
on Iran, in the context of the Iranian push for nuclear weapons,
or perhaps not nuclear weapons, is that when our Secretary of
State, David Miliband, came to office, he failed to make an early
visit to Tehran, when he could have done so. Because of the importance
that the Iranians still attach to British opinion—it is
second to America, certainly, but still important—that would
have been well received. It is a pity that the UK Government did
not make that initial effort.
Baroness Williams: That is rather
my sense as well. That is why I said that I thought the opportunity
that was offered by the Larijani initiative only a couple of weeks
ago might have been one where we could at least have used the
phrase, "This sounds interesting enough to explore,"
or something of that kind. In fact, as far as I know, we said
nothing. That is immediately seen as another rejection by Iran.
I have only one other thing to add about that,
which is that cultural exchanges, and for that matter, inter-faith
exchanges with Iran could be very useful. That country is very
far away and isolated from the rest of us. When we were going
there, for example, there was a tight system of selection to decide
who would be allowed to have a visa to get to Iran. At that time,
rather sadly, all the American applications were dismissed, but
that was because America, in turn, had dismissed all the Iranian
applications to go there.
Mr. Horam: That is one issue that we
took up with them.
Chairman: I am conscious that we do not
want to spend too long on Iran because we have to get on to other
areas.
Mr. Horam: Can I broaden out one question?
Chairman: On Iran?
Mr. Horam: No.
Chairman: In that case, Fabian wants
to come in on Iran and then we can move on.
Q44 Mr. Hamilton: Baroness Williams,
you touched on the point that just before we went to Iran last
November, we were in Washington. As I recall, we had breakfast
with the late Tom Lantos, who is sadly missed. At this breakfast
with the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, he told us that he
and a number of other Congressmen and women had applied to go
to Tehran because they felt, independently of their Government,
that they needed to talk to the Iranians—Iranian parliamentarians
and people like Larijani—but they were told that there would
be no visas. When we were there, we challenged people on why they
were not given visas. They were going to go there to talk to the
Iranians against their own Government's wishes. They were peaceful
elements of the American Administration and the Iranians would
not even talk to them because they would not give them visas.
Has that changed?
Baroness Williams: Yes, I think
that it has changed. I completely agree with you, and you are
absolutely right. It was very foolish to refuse those visas, but
you will remember that the Iranian Administration at that time
was very much divided. There was the rise of Ahmadinejad, who
had just recently come back as the President, and there was the
attempt to move Larijani from the Administration altogether. He
was later saved by the supreme ruler and brought back as his adviser
on nuclear proliferation, and he is now showing signs of rising
in the Administration. As I mentioned earlier, I suspect that
the supreme guide does not discourage divisions between those
around him. It is not a unified Administration, so now is a good
time to revisit that because you have the initiative coming from
Iran, albeit through the Larijani channel, but you are clearly
not going to get it through the Ahmadinejad channel at the moment.
Mr. Hamilton: Thank you for your very
clear analysis of Iran.
Q45 Mr. Horam: I want to look
at the whole NPT situation and get away from the issue of Iran
for a moment. We asked the two previous witnesses what they saw
as the weaknesses of the present international arrangements for
controlling nuclear weapons, and one answer was that we had not
been tough enough on some of the people who threatened not to
comply with them. Unfortunately, Iran is one of them, but I do
not want to go on about that. Do you agree that we have not been
tough enough with some of them?
Baroness Williams: I will step
back for a moment and look at that word "we". We are
by no means a completely united group, in the sense that France
clearly follows a rather different line than the Bush Administration
in the US does. I might put that in stronger terms than those
that you have used so far, because I think that the Indo-US nuclear
treaty was seen by many non-nuclear powers as a coach and horses
going right through the middle of the NPT, and I rather agree.
At that time the US did not exact from India
the requirement that the additional protocol apply to its military
installations, for example, but allowed it to refuse any access
to military installations. They proudly said that they would accept
access to civil nuclear facilities, but that was not the point.
We do not allow Iran to say, "You can have access to our
civil nuclear facilities at Bushehr, but do not come and ask us
about anything to do with the military." That would make
a nonsense of the NPT. Although I am, personally, deeply pro-Indian,
I though that that was a very unfortunate and damaging case of
double standards.
America was offering such a good deal on access
to nuclear materials in almost every circumstance, so I would
have thought that the US Administration could have exacted a heavier
price—if not membership of the NPT, then at the very least
full adherence to the NPT requirements of inspection. However,
they did not do that. Among other things, of course, that has
made Pakistan, at an internal political level, argue that it has
been treated quite differently from India and far less favourably.
It is not a happy moment for that kind of attitude to be taken
in a democracy that is clearly very frail at present.
Q46 Mr. Horam: Thank you, Baroness
Williams. With our previous witnesses we discussed, as you might
have heard, dirty bombs, their associated problems and the business
of the wrong material getting into terrorist hands. Have we succeeded
in making the acquisition of nuclear weapons and other weapons
of mass destruction by terrorists less likely?
Baroness Williams: No, we have
not. We have not given that anything like the necessary attention,
but I would question slightly the use of the word "terrorist",
and you will see why. I have just looked at a very interesting
report called "Securing the Bomb", which the Committee
might want to look at, which was put out by the Belfer Centre,
of which I am a board member, and written by Malcolm Bunn, a brilliant
man and one of the centre's experts in the field. The report points
out that since 1993 there have been approximately 1,800 attempts
to seize, sell or trade nuclear materials. Of that 1,800, only
18 have been serious attempts to seize highly enriched uranium.
Most of the other incidents involved poor security or attempts
by people—but not serious terrorist groups—to seize
or steal.
So far, the most serious breaches that we know
of among those 18—those that are on a substantial scale—are
quite astonishing because they had nothing to do with terrorists.
One involved the deputy chairman in charge of security at nuclear
sites who was himself a Russian citizen. He was sacked from his
job for attempting to smuggle and steal nuclear materials and
sell them abroad. The second one, which is almost as troubling
and is also mentioned in the report, was an attempt by certain
senior figures in the Pakistani military to get hold of nuclear
materials to sell them to al-Qaeda. The breaches were discovered,
and in both cases the people concerned were sacked, but because
we have concentrated so much on terrorism—I am not saying
that that is wrong, but you see my point—there have been
in some ways much more organised and much more serious internal
betrayals involving nuclear materials and nuclear knowledge and
understanding than any terrorist has so far succeeded in bringing
about. It does not mean that they could not do so, but one has
to look inside as well as outside—possibly even more inside
than outside.
Very quickly on the broader issue, at the Nuclear
Threat Initiative we think that about 55% of the Russian nuclear
installations have been raised to what are called high security
standards. That means that 45% are not there yet—they have
not got that high. In the case of research materials using highly
enriched uranium, there is very little proper security. The amounts
are small, but even so, there is very little security.
One of the things that NTI is anxious to do
wherever possible is to exchange, free of charge, lowly enriched
uranium and a pledge to continue the supply for the highly enriched
uranium that is being used in the many—literally, hundreds—of
small research reactors, mostly in universities in the rest of
the world but often in countries with no knowledge at all of the
dangers of nuclear weaponry.
Mr. Horam: Thank you.
Chairman: That is very helpful. Some
of the members of the Committee went to Russia on a previous inquiry
and visited a nuclear research reactor. We saw what I would say
was woeful security, but it was being improved with the support
of Global Partnership and British Government money. That was just
two years ago, so the issue that you mentioned is important.
Q47 Sir John Stanley: Baroness
Williams, in the context of the NPT review process in 2010, what
is your view as to what the British Government's policy objectives
should be? What should we try to achieve in that review?
Baroness Williams: That is a huge
question, but I will try to answer it quickly, because I know
that you are a bit short of time.
The first thing is that in order to get the
strengthening of the NPT on track before 2010, we really have
to encourage an initiative by the United States and the Russians
together. Questions were asked earlier about the reduction of
nuclear arsenals, and there is no question about the need to do
that in a major way. That would begin to get some of the sense
of there being sharp divisions between non-nuclear and nuclear
back on track again.
Let me say quickly that I heard the earlier
interchange with Malcolm Chalmers and Mark Fitzpatrick. I was
present at a very interesting meeting in Harvard of experts from
Russia and the United States. It was held under the aegis of the
Gorbachev Foundation at the time, but they were not Gorbachev
people. They were mainly scientists and technicians. I do not
pretend to be able to know whether what they were saying was right,
but it was very interesting that the Russian and American scientists—the
meeting was held two years ago—agreed that both sides could
reduce their nuclear warheads to 500, and that that would be a
more than sufficient deterrent. At present, the United States
has 10,000 nuclear warheads, and the Russians have 16,000. The
point about that is that it is so far beyond the deterrent required
that there is a wide-open invitation to accessibility to the parts
that are not needed and not well protected, but could certainly
be the source of materials for other powers. One of my strong
senses is that it would not be difficult to get towards the point
at which you could have major reductions, without even Britain,
France and China being affected, because they are well below these
figures. That would go a long way to rebuild trust.
If you do not mind, I shall move on from that
for one minute. You asked a question—I probably do not agree
with my own Government on this—about the possibility of
moving towards huge reductions in arsenals, taking weapons off
alert status, with very few exceptions to that rule, and a much
more manageable nuclear proliferation situation that we could
probably cope with. That has suffered very much at the hands of
the deterioration in relations between Russia, the United States
and ourselves. The issue that you raised—ballistic missile
defence—is absolutely central there. I cannot help wondering
whether the price that we are paying for that is not much too
high.
Q48 Sir John Stanley: Thank you.
Rightly, in my view, you highlighted the huge scope and critical
importance—preferably before 2010—of trying to get
real substantive progress between the US and Russia in reducing
their nuclear weapons stockpiles. We have a change of American
President, but it remains to be seen what degree of priority this
will have for President-elect Obama. However, from your knowledge
of the Putin Government—he is now Prime Minister—and
how they have moved, do you believe that there is a realistic
possibility of getting them to move into an altogether more co-operative
stance towards the United States and to talk really serious numbers
in terms of reducing their own stockpile, if there are equivalent
reductions by the Americans?
Baroness Williams: I think that
there is. I spend a fair amount of time in Russia, because I am
on the board of something called the Moscow School of Political
Studies, which is a fairly democratic body, with all the parties
of Russia in there, training young elected members of the Duma
and the regional and major city dumas—that is to say, the
next generation of Russian democrats, if there is a Russian democracy.
The school is supposed to be for young people between the ages
of perhaps 25 and 40, and they are almost all elected councillors
or parliamentarians, but—although they are mostly pretty
pro-American—I have never encountered such an absolutely
united sense of hostility towards the United States and the UK
over the recent installation of ballistic missiles, which are
not necessarily nuclear, in Poland and the Czech Republic.
If one thinks for a minute about the history
of Russia—with respect to my American colleagues, not many
know it—it is a history that leads to paranoia. This is
a country that has been invaded and invaded and invaded, and has
gone into a sort of state of what one must almost call a security
obsession. I think that whatever we may say rationally about this—"It's
not really threatening Russia"—the Russians are not
going to be persuaded of that. They really believe that it is
a threat to Russia. When they look at Iran or North Korea—well,
"It's a funny place," one might say.
What could we do? Personally, I think that the
United Kingdom Government could do two important things. One,
investigate the Russian proposal for linking up the radar screens,
which you may remember that they made at an earlier stage. They
said that we could link our radar screens to the Russian radar
screens and have a common missile defence, which would go a long
way to persuading them that it was not aimed at them. It would
be well worth trying to explore that. The second, which I think
the UK Government have been very good about, is the work done
on verification—because verification dies out in 2009, which
I think Malcolm Chalmers pointed out. There is no international
verification system whatsoever after the START agreement comes
to an end in 2009. Therefore, the British, who have been working
hard on verification issues, including at a technical level in
the Atomic Weapons Establishment, could put forward a proposal
for seeing whether these missile protection schemes can be brought
together.
I shall make a final point quickly—if
I seem to have been controversial, forgive me. We are very fortunate
that the possibility of Ukrainian membership of NATO has been
put on to the back burner. It would have been seen by the Russians
as a disastrous form of offensiveness because, whether we like
it or not, Ukraine is clearly still seen by them rather like Ireland
is seen by us—as being part of the same area of political
interest, entity and so forth. They feel very strongly about it,
so it would have been silly to go ahead with Ukrainian membership
at the present time.
Q49 Chairman: You referred to
the policy of the British Government in different ways. Wearing
your hat in your special role, will you say whether the Government
are doing enough on nuclear disarmament?
Baroness Williams: In some areas,
they are doing a major job that has not been publicised much.
I have mentioned the verification issue, so I shall refer to the
very interesting proposal of the Ministry of Defence for a summit
between the laboratories. Your earlier witnesses mentioned, for
example, the importance of defining what is a warhead. Of the
16,000 Russian warheads, which are effective and which are just
there to fill in the gaps? We have been able to do that sort of
technical work, and we have done that well, both verification
and the lab proposal.
We have not been sufficiently willing to talk
about the BMD issue and NATO expansion. We could have risked saying
that we were not feeling happy about them, instead of which we
rather automatically backed the Administration. Because we have
so long been dealing closely with the Bush Administration, I am
slightly worried that we are not moving quite fast enough to see
what changes might occur with an Obama Administration. A lot will
depend on whom he appoints as Secretary of State.
My final point concerns the UK. There is one
huge contribution that we can make. You have not asked me the
question, so I shall ask it of myself. Strengthening the IAEA
at the resources and inspection level is absolutely crucial. It
is now pushed to its limits. The UK could be a very satisfactory
place for recruiting and training inspectors because ABWE is certainly
one of the best technical bodies there is and, because of our
well-known commitment to the IAEA and the United Nations, it is
an area where there could be a British initiative. It could be
very important. It could be helpful to America, which could not
make that initiative at the moment because it has still not got
the comprehensive test ban treaty through Congress. However, we
have, and we have built up all the treaties; it is something that
we could do in a major way and for which we could receive a great
deal of credit.
Q50 Chairman: We, as a Committee,
intend to look closely at what is happening in the IAEA. You referred
to strengthening, but is it just a question of resources or could
any other changes be made?
Baroness Williams: It is not just
resources. We could explore the sort of training that new inspectors
will need. They will need to be both civil and military to a much
greater extent than they have been up to now. Obviously, the IAEA
ought to expand to take in the inspection of potential proliferation
in the form of civil nuclear reactors in countries that have never
had anything to do with nuclear technology. There are an awful
lot of them, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. They
are all countries with virtually no knowledge, let alone people
who would be capable of inspecting. There is a huge need, and
the UK could help to fill that need. It is not just a matter of
financial resources although, God knows, that is important. The
level of experience is so low in human resources that the people
from Britain and, for that matter, France who understand such
matters, could do a useful job. In that context, you probably
know that the new director of the World Institute for Nuclear
Security—the NTI initiative for exchanging best practice
on nuclear security—will be the former head of the British
nuclear inspectorate, so that might be a useful link.
Q51 Chairman: One other area is
related to the action of the British Government. It is the suggestion
of a so-called enrichment bond. Do you have any views on that?
Baroness Williams: It is useful,
but it is useful essentially as a complement to a relatively small
fuel bank. It is another illustration of the distrust of non-nuclear
weapon powers. You probably know that, a couple of months ago,
they were advised by the IAEA to withdraw all support for fuel
banks. It asked their Governments not to assist in creating a
fuel bank. The reason for that was primarily sensitivity about
sovereignty. It thought that it was a step towards refusing all
non-nuclear weapon powers the ability to enrich uranium even up
to the permitted level. It is a very sensitive area. Personally,
I think that the only way in which we can deal with it is by leaping
over the whole of that argument and moving to an international
site for an enrichment plant—a nuclear Vatican—placed
somewhere that could not have sovereignty.
Q52 Chairman: Perhaps you should
not call it the Vatican in the context of Iran.
Baroness Williams: Of course,
you are right, but you know what I am trying to say. It has to
be placed somewhere where the sovereignty issue does not arise.
In other words, it must be ceded to the United Nations. It has
to be an international place, and that ceded place would probably
best be Switzerland next door to the existing UN structures. A
sovereign power must not be involved, because that power could
decide to take over nuclear installations unilaterally by an act
of nationalisation, which, after all, happened in the case of
the Suez canal a long time ago. Countries will not buy into that.
Going back to your question, my view is that
we should have an enrichment facility that is international and
internationally controlled, but it ought not to be on sovereign
territory except that of the United Nations, and it could then
be linked to our proposal for an enrichment bond, which is an
excellent complement to a fuel bank, but not a total substitute
for it. Sorry, that was a long answer.
Chairman: No, it was very helpful. Baroness
Williams, the proceedings have been extremely useful. We are very
grateful to you for coming along and for giving us your wide experience
of such matters.
Baroness Williams: Thank you very
much for inviting me. I am grateful to you, and good luck.
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