Polishing Up the Story on the PSI

Michael Roston

It has been a full year since President George W. Bush announced the establishment of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) in Warsaw, Poland.  The PSI is a central pillar of the current U.S. strategy to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.  The initiative works for concerted action among interested states, using their national capabilities to develop tools to interdict shipments of items on land, sea and air that could contribute to WMD programs.  On May 31, 2004, a two-day meeting was convened in Warsaw, engaging 85 states in broadening the development of the PSI and its activities.  

By some measures, the PSI has been a remarkable success.  The core group of states has reached 15, with Russia announcing its membership on May 31, and the presence of 70 more states at the Warsaw conference is testimony to wide international interest in elevating this nonproliferation mechanism to a higher level in diplomacy.  Liberia and Panama have completed agreements that now allow the U.S. to board the enormous number of ships registered under their flags if they pose proliferation dangers.  The State Department points out that PSI parties can now board approximately half the ships involved in international commerce.

The Bush Administration has simultaneously elevated another important principle in international affairs:  even if a foreign policy vehicle has broad international backing, its worth is low if it does not work.  Toward this end, the administration officials have therefore pointed to successful operations carried out within the context of PSI’s Statement of Interdiction Principles.  Yet, upon examination, the PSI’s effectiveness has not matched the administration’s rhetoric.  Though marginally effective, the PSI has not led to the resounding non-proliferation victories trumpeted.

President Bush first announced a successful operation in the February 11, 2004 rollout of his approach to nonproliferation.  In the address, he detailed the October 4, 2003, interception by Germany and Italy, using U.S. and U.K.-supplied intelligence, of a vessel in the Mediterranean on its way from Malaysia to Libya.  The German-owned boat carried components for a “turnkey” uranium enrichment centrifuge factory produced with the expertise of the illicit nuclear technology sales network led by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan.

Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, the administration official who has led the implementation of PSI, testified to members of Congress on March 30, 2004, about how this successful operation drove negotiations with Libya.  Although Libya refused to engage in “serious conversation about the importance of verifying” the elements of its WMD program, the PSI interdiction persuaded it to assent to “discussions on what became a very extensive series of inspections and visits [by U.K. and U.S. officials] proceeded.”  After the October and December 2003 inspections, Libya agreed to permanently dismantle its WMD programs on December 19.

Libya’s disarmament commitments represent an undeniable accomplishment in nonproliferation.  The astonishingly rapid pace at which Libya has divested itself of its nuclear and chemical weapons infrastructure deserves no second-guessing of any kind.  However, the October 2003 interception of the Libyan nuclear equipment is the only publicly disclosed instance demonstrating the effectiveness of the PSI approach and is offered as a justification for its expansion.  With Undersecretary Bolton arguing that the Libya operation was “the most recent example” of successful cooperative interdiction efforts, a closer look is required by the diplomats returning from the Warsaw meeting.

Initially, U.S. government officials drew no connections between the nonproliferation achievement in Libya and the PSI’s operations.  While crediting the U.S. intelligence community and its existing coordination efforts with foreign governments for putting the pieces together on the Libyan program, the State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher explained on December 22, 2003 that the PSI was “a more recent development,” although it did provide additional tools to combat WMD proliferation generally.

The link between the PSI and Libya’s disarmament was only made clear in President Bush’s February address.  However, the president’s own statements suggested that the PSI was not essential to intercepting the Libya shipment.  The principles undergirding PSI interdictions had only been agreed to on September 4, 2003.  Bush, however, explained that “over several years,” American and British intelligence agents had “pieced together” the network of nuclear proliferation emanating from Pakistan and used this information to track the Libya-bound vessel just one month after the PSI’s procedures had been formally agreed to by the core parties, including Germany and Italy. 

The President and other administration officials have offered no clear explanation of why the years of investigation that preceded the operation were trumped by one month of authorized exchanges of information and cooperative interdiction activities under the PSI.  Moreover, it is difficult to imagine that the U.S. would have found much resistance in recruiting Italy and Germany to stop a vessel that it was certain contained materials of concern.

Another question that has been neither asked nor answered concerns the content of the negotiations with Libya prior to the October interception.  If Libya was reluctant to allow the scope of its weapons programs to be verified, it is hard to understand why American officials would allow unproductive negotiations with Qaddafi to proceed for seven months.  Moreover, it is even more difficult to see why Libya would permit such sweeping inspections to occur within weeks of having its nuclear weapons capability cut-off in transit. 

Administration officials might respond that it appears Libya was simply caught in the act and feared the repercussions of having its nuclear weapons program revealed to the world unfavorably.  Sweeping inspections were then the only way for Libya to save face in a difficult situation.  However, statements by the president and Energy and State Department officials have been much less severe in their explanation of how the successful PSI operation created the series of events that led to Libya’s pledge. 

Additionally, this circumstance raises another serious question:  why would Qaddafi place an order for such a large nuclear material production capability either simultaneous to or after initiating discussions on giving up his weapons capability?  Former UN weapons inspector David Albright speculated to USA Today in April that the Libyans “were hedging their bets” and hoping to use the centrifuges as a bargaining chip.  It seems equally plausible that the Libyans made the order for the equipment with some knowledge that it would be intercepted, or even possibly intending such an outcome. 

Rather than putting a positive spin on a difficult situation, Libya may have calculated that it could force the U.S. to choose between ongoing icy relations and the possibility that it could use Libya’s information to dismantle the A.Q. Khan network.  While the benefits of shutting down Pakistan’s proliferators are undeniable, the PSI may not have been the chief driver behind this accomplishment.  Instead, this operation looks more like the tests of the national missile defense system in which the interceptors are pre-programmed to know the location of their targets before they launch.  Although it proves the system works under ideal circumstances, real world conditions might create greater barriers to success.

The challenging nature of real world conditions was also revealed in the weekend just before the Warsaw conference.  The Washington Post and New York Times both revealed on May 29, 2004 that additional shipments of uranium enrichment equipment arrived in Libya.  Although the components were turned over to American investigators, the incident demonstrates that the PSI’s cordon around the world’s proliferators is much less air-tight than might be hoped.

The Bush administration has made the operation to interdict nuclear equipment bound for Libya an important metric of the success of the PSI approach, hoping to promote these activities as a central component of international nonproliferation efforts.  In the meanwhile, PSI has proven itself to be a time-consuming affair.  Diplomats from some core states are devoting significant amounts of time to engaging additional states to the initiative’s principles of information exchange and cooperative operations.  In its first year, PSI parties have already conducted ten different exercises.  Moreover, the PSI appears to be high on the agenda at the Group of Eight Summit at Sea Island, Georgia. 

All of this activity comes at a time when the world of nonproliferation policy is more crowded than ever.  States must consider a great number of potential activities in addition to the PSI, many of which may be essential to rejuvenating the nonproliferation regime.  These measures include better control of the nuclear fuel cycle, prevention of the proliferation of biological weapons, expanding the number of Nunn-Lugar/Cooperative Threat Reduction programs to new targets, deepening the control of the export of technologies that might contribute to WMD proliferation and responding to specific regional proliferation hot spots. 

In his remarks before the Warsaw conference on May 31, Undersecretary Bolton explained that the “PSI is an activity, not an organization,” and added that it builds upon existing nonproliferation treaties.  However, he also made it clear at this year’s Preparatory Committee for the 2005 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that these non-proliferation regimes are experiencing a “crisis” of non-compliance.  Overcoming this crisis will require restoring and reinforcing the existing international framework, a task that the PSI cannot accomplish alone.  For nonproliferation efforts to function, the PSI cannot be the only effort moving forward.

Certainly, many of the principles behind the PSI are laudable.  But if its procedures turn out to be less useful than other proliferation prevention activities, states should direct their finite time and manpower to the areas of concern where it can best be spent.  More details should be provided about the PSI’s contribution to preventing Libya’s acquisition of nuclear program components, and better evidence of the PSI’s ability to prevent proliferation must be brought forward.

Michael Roston (michaelroston@yahoo.com) is a nonproliferation policy researcher in Washington, DC.