 Abbas y Gluwch chi, dwi'n ddweud allwch gweithio'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r profesi yng Nghymru yn George Town University, ac rydyn ni'n gweithio unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw. The first going to cherry pick too. One of the...this is...he led...he was chief from the US negotiator in the 1994 negotiations between the US and North Korea, which is really iconic in my head, because it moved the world from a situation fraught with high confrontation, to one that was simplified by cooperation. A oeddech chi'n gwroedd, dyfodol yng Nghymru, yng Nghymru Unedigol yng Nghymru, ac ymddech chi'n ziwyddod o'r Ffyrifiadau Ffyrif ym Yrach, yng Nghymru. Felly mae'n gofio eich gofio. Mae'n angen i ddechrau ar y prosiecteb academa, mae'n angen i gynnalu ar y teimlo. Mae'n angen i'n mynd i'n gofio eich gofio'r effaith. Rwy'n ddod. If I were going to give the theme for my remarks, it really would be something like international security and nuclear weapons, they're back. What I hope to do in a few minutes here is talk about quickly an overview from 30,000 feet of where we've come and how we think about nuclear weapons over the last four decades or five decades, what's happening these days, and finish with a perspective on what at least the United States of America thinks now ought to be done about what's happening with nuclear weapons around the world. So, the first decade, 1950s, was a period in which the United States, for those who were witting about things, discovered that we were, for the first time in our history as a country, not a very long history, but history. First time we were defenseless, that the United States of America had no defense, and we'd been accustomed to having a defense since about 1814 when, I don't mean to bring up bad thoughts, when the British were rude enough to burn Washington. And subsequent to that until 1945-ish, that period, the United States could mount a defense. Actually, the way the strategist uses the word defense, which means defense by denial, could deny people access to the United States of America. All of a sudden, with the introduction, thanks to the Germans in Germany of the V2 and the Germans in the United States, creation of nuclear weapons, put these two things together, one weapon, one bomb, one city, no way of stopping an incoming, inocontinental ballistic missile. We had no way of stopping them in 1945, nor do we in 2019, actually. So, all of a sudden, the first point to make about this period of nuclear weapons is that there is no defense. The second point is, nuclear weapons got very big. If you think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as being in the kiloton, thousands of tons of TNT equivalent, and usually Hiroshima is thought to be about 10,000 tons or 15,000 tons, Nagasaki about 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent. By the time we get into the real first decade of the 50s, we have gone to 100 times that size for the nominal thermonuclear weapon of a megaton or more of yield. Which is very much larger than what were considered citybusters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also in the 1950s, we were trying to figure out what nuclear weapons were good for in terms of, for Americans, American defense. And it meant not only continental defense, but defense of Europe and our allies. Our first instinct was to make them good for everything. So, we figured, we've heard the phrase, massive retaliation. Someone is doing something we don't like, we've threatened them with these massive nuclear weapons. And we rapidly figured out when we were ignored that this doesn't work, that we were not, and here's a key word for the world we live in, credible. We were not credible to use thermonuclear weapons to deal with the Vietnamese who had surrounded the French at Dien Bien Phu. That's no way to intervene. So, we understood we needed other means and nuclear weapons had to be good for something. And what we figured must be good for is for the concept that we had used to replace defense, since I said you defense was gone. The concept to replace defense was deterrence. And we started to come to a more textured view in the 1950s of what deterrence meant. The first thing deterrence meant was that one needed to have a capability to punish, that that was the essence of deterrence. The phrase will never be uttered by a strategist that a good defense is a deterrent. No deterrence purely for the strategist is punishment. If you propose to deter me, not defend against me, you are going to get whacked by me if your deterrent fails. And then your deterrent threat was to whack me back so now I am sorry I whacked you. But it's punishment. There is no denial in deterrence. And so the first sophisticated appreciation for the implications of deterrence was its delicacy, a wonderful piece sort of written by Albert Wilstead of 1957, the delicate balance of terror. It was this odd theory that deterrence was like two scorpions in a bottle. It is not like that. The delicate balance of terror means that the stability of the deterrent relationship, the effectiveness of your deterrent, depends upon your ability to survive an attack and still punish. So it depends on your, what the strategy is called, second strike capability. It doesn't matter what your first strike capability is. If it's vulnerable to being destroyed, you don't have a deterrent or you don't have a deterrent you should rely on. So the delicate balance of terror. And that told us something and we developed a triad. And the triad has been developed subsequently by the Soviets, the Russians and the Chinese. And if you look around at new nuclear weapons states like for example Pakistan, India and North Korea, they are moving in that direction too. So you have land-based systems, you have aircraft, you have missiles that are fixed, you have missiles that are mobile, you have missiles at sea. So you have these various ways of delivering nuclear weapons in order that you meet the critique of the delicacy of the balance of terror. So that's how we finish the first decade. We go into the second decade and we recognize something else about deterrence. It's entirely psychological, unlike defense. Defense, if I want to defend against your attack, I don't need to think about what you're thinking about. If I have inadequate defense, attack me. It'll be adequate. If it's inadequate, I don't have to worry about what you're thinking about, you'll prevail. In deterrence, it all depends on what you're thinking. I may have no deterrent, but if you think I do, you're deterred. If you don't think I do have a deterrent, what I do, I'm dead. So deterrence entirely is psychological. If deterrence is delicate, it's also irrelevant. If the person you propose to deter values your death more than his life. Or he's somehow otherwise prevented from rationality. So when we started thinking about the proliferation of nuclear weapons to new states and we worried maybe they wouldn't be as rational as we were presuming the Soviets were. Lord help us. And the people we were most worried about at that point in New York were the Chinese. So we were developing, therefore, a defense, we said. We were going to have a real defense against attack. So we moved from deterrence to defense. And we held on to that for a good five years. We deployed the system sentinel and safeguard, two missiles. One missile goes up exo-atnysferically, the other proximate. And they all were designed to shoot down missiles as they came over the pole from the Soviet Union to attack the United States. And when you looked at the view graphs which we had in those days, these arrows going back and forth looked terrific. Americans loved this, this. The Canadians were not so hot on the idea. But to us it looked terrific. The only problem is it only worked in the view graphs. We actually couldn't shoot down these missiles. So we were pretty enthusiastic about doing something about this because, A, we couldn't have a defense. So we were back to deterrence. And B, defense was pernicious because it only led to greater offense to overcome the defense. And greater offense to overcome the defense, the offense would always win because of something called the offense-defense cost exchange ratio. An increment of offense is cheaper than an increment of defense. So we went into the 1970s back to deterrence, the third decade. We went into the 1970s back to deterrence. Enthusiastic about creating stability, so arms control, salt one. And also banning defense which was destabilizing, hence the ABM treaty. So that was the 70s. However, we live in a state of nature and we don't trust this. So we build. And they build. And we build. And they build. So by the time we get to the next decade, which is now we're moving here to the fourth decade, we are both building a lot. So what does a lot mean? If you took the numbers at like 1982, 1983, we deployed around 31,000 nuclear weapons warheads, countable warheads. The Soviets did about the same. So together, we deployed about a little over 60,000 nuclear weapons. Now, I just did a little calculation on current urban figures. If you had seven thermonuclear weapons, nominal yield, two megatons, and attacked America's seven largest urban centers, you could kill 20% of the American population. That's about 60 million people. And this is prompt. And this stuff, you have prompt deaths and you have protracted prompt. Prompt is from the first second on to about three to five days. So in each seven to destroy one in five people in the United States, we had together deployed 60,000. So you get a concept of overkill here. This is where that word came from. So at that point, while we had talked about the fence again, the United States began to think about the fence again. And we discovered something which is you can sell anything to a president. And the one thing that was sold was Star Wars or the Strategic Defense Initiative. And those of you who were alive in the 1980s may recall the enthusiasm for Star Wars or for the Strategic Defense Initiative, not the movie. And the idea was through some new physical principles and very often lasers were involved. Some was space-based, some was terrestrial. But we could defend the United States of America. We couldn't, you understand. We never deployed a speck of this technology. But the Soviets were petrified. I mean petrified by the idea that since we were relying on mutual vulnerability, mutual assured destruction, we had embraced vulnerability. We're in a deterrent world. We were going to deploy a defense which denied them the method of achieving their security. So they built and built and built more to overcome something we didn't have. Our colleague of mine said it was a great decade. We deployed view graphs. They deployed SS-18s to overcome our view graphs. Fortunately for everybody, the Soviet Union collapsed and we moved into the next decade. The next decade was kind of a happy decade in my little story here. U.S. and Russian, I was talking to David Hannah before, U.S. and Russian cooperation never was as good as it was in certainly the early Yeltsin years, even all the Yeltsin years before or since. And U.S.-Russian relations were excellent. We cooperated in all kinds of ways. We celebrated the end of history. You may recall the Hegelian process and out of all this Hegelian movement of the means of governance of liberal democracies, we're going to prevail around the world forever. We discovered globalization and the nation state was going to wither away. You may remember about that too. These things actually didn't happen, but it was a thought. And we embraced not only negotiated arms control, aimed at stability, but we also embraced de facto virtually unilateral disarmament. Remember those high-level 60-some thousand? We dumped, we and the Russians dumped over 80% of those weapons. Most of that unilaterally. I mean we were watching what the other side was doing and they were, but that was an incredible reduction down to something in the 5,000, 6,000 range for both sides. Even proliferation, which was a major concern, was not so bad. I mean we were aware of proliferation in South Asia, India and Pakistan, but they didn't seem to be moving anywhere in the 90s. We were aware of the Middle East, but nothing seemed to be happening in the Middle East. Iraq, we fought a war and disarmed them. I was on the ground leading inspections in Iraq. David Hanna was at the United Nations at the time and it was pretty successful. We took that program apart. In Northeast Asia there was a deal done with North Korea that I had something to do with, very good. We thought it was good anyway. Okay, remarkably also during this period, we had rollback and for what Dan is going to talk back, scrap. It's important to recognize we've had rollback, that there were three states of the former Soviet Union that had nuclear weapons on their territory. Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, and all three gave up their nuclear weapons at Lisbon. And South Africa had six nuclear weapons, gave those up. Okay, circumstances, special and all that, but we had not only an appeared stable position on proliferation, but we actually enjoyed rollback. Relevant, I think, to what we're about to talk about. In the next decade, the 2000s or the aughts, as it's sometimes known, America comes to understand terrorism in a new way as we are hit. And we understand nuclear weapons in a new way as we put these two circles together into a Venn diagram and make nuclear terrorism out of it. And we start seeing our vulnerability without a defense because we can't defend our borders. And without a deterrent because we're not modeling like we'd be attacked by people who don't care about being attacked back. But we may not know exactly who did it. And if we can find out who did it, they may not live anywhere in particular. So no defense, no deterrent, nuclear terrorism, very bad vulnerability. And then India and Pakistan, they begin to engage in what we would call an arms race, a genuine nuclear arms race. Then is Iran, and Iran is revealed to have a rather robust nuclear weapons program embracing not only enrichment for highly enriched uranium, but a track, have you what a moderated reactor to produce plutonium for a plutonium track? Not only that, but we have a president who starts off his administration by abrogating the ABM Treaty and the constraints on defense are offed. And not only that, but we're sort of back to the Star Wars situation in which the United States is talking about two things it has fallen in love with. One, the idea of defense again without any defense, and the idea of something that's also spooky to the Russians and the Chinese. And it's sometimes called prompt global strike, sometimes conventional prompt global strike. And it means the American capabilities strike any target on the earth within 24 hours. Now, we also don't have that capability, but it's something we talk about. So both defense and the idea that we could launch a disarming first strike is truly threatening to the security of both Russia and China. So if you look at what we have in our decade, we have a U.S.-Russian relationship, which is quite bad. I would say that we, the United States has looked at what the Russians did in Georgia, in Ukraine, Crimea, and what it does not with invasion, but activities in the Baltics and we are not amused. We have looked at what they did to us in the 2016 elections. And before you point out that the Americans have messed in other people's elections before, I know that. That doesn't stop us from being outraged at what the Russians did to us. If you look at Putin's speech in March of 2018, it is extraordinary. I just did that recently and the whole thing. And he's talked about these mega torpedoes to attack cities on the coast of the United States with nuclear weapons. He talked about nuclear-powered cruise missiles that fly all over the world over both poles before they attack something. He talks about hypersonic glide vehicles and no way of intercepting these with your ballistic missile defense system. Little does he apparently know. We don't have a ballistic missile defense system. Yes, we've deployed some launchers in Vandenberg Air Force Base in Alaska, but very few, and they can't hit much. Even if you tell them when the target is coming and there are no decoys, it still doesn't hit it. So once again, the Russians are reacting to our declaratory policy, our wish list. At the same time, the United States has, along with I'd say the Russians and the Chinese, embraced activity which is objectively from the criteria of the strategist embracing instability. Anytime you develop capabilities that are designed, at least in part, to destroy command and control by the other side, you are attempting to mess with their capability to control the use of their forces. So when we deploy and they deploy cyber and counter space activity, we are both messing with our ability to secure a strategic balance. We are attacking stability and that's what we're doing. The United States has done the things that have made headlines with its withdrawal from the INF Treaty for what I would regard as a technical violation, a violation but a technical violation by the Russians. The Chinese are doing very interesting things in the south and east China seas. They are really working on the Taiwan scenario with anti-access and area denial technologies. At the same time as we look around the world at the Chinese, US and the Russian US relationship is getting more fraught, we see the fastest growing nuclear weapons program on the planet right now in Pakistan and the Indians are moving to match it. North Korea has developed a very robust capability over the years so that it is on the edge, if not over the edge, of being able to put a thermonuclear weapon on an American city. And remember, we have no real defense, only deterrence, which is why you have the President of the United States flying around the world for meetings that don't actually work. And with this all, we have the reality of US policy to deal with Tehran. We had kind of a little respite with the JCPOA but this President has decided he can do better. There is on top of all this still some enthusiasm for the use of plutonium and nuclear fuels for commercial nuclear power. This enthusiasm exists in Russia, some in India, some in Japan, certainly in China and still in France. This is regrettable if you care about nuclear terrorism. And then there is the American response, the so-called nuclear posture review. There is more than one document but this is my favorite, came out in March of last year. And it has the United States building the following. A new set of SSBNs, of submarines that carry our ballistic missiles, of virtually new land-based missiles, Minuteman 3. A new air-launched cruise missile to put aboard our standoff bomber, still the B-52. A new penetrating bomber to replace the B-2, the flying wing. New dual-capable fighter aircraft to replace the F-15. New sea-launched cruise missiles, again with nuclear weapons, which we had abandoned nine years ago. And something brand new, which is to put some low-yield nuclear weapons aboard a strategic system, which is a strategic submarine, so that one of those tubes on a submarine would have aborted a tactical nuclear weapon, small-yield nuclear weapon, to use in a tactical contingency. And to fit all this capability, the one thing that we needed was something that would be better in the realm of what's called the B-61 bomb, which is the B-61 Mod 12. Here's why this is important and isn't just arcane nonsense. The whole idea here, at least from some of our perspectives, with these nuclear weapons, is as long as we have them, make them safe, make them secure, and make sure we don't use them. And that's why there's a big push against making nuclear weapons more usable. So when the Russians are doing what they're doing, and Putin is saying, not only is all what I described in systems true, but we have a policy of escalate to de-escalate. We will, in a contingency where our country is threatened, we will use nuclear weapons first, first use, early in the conflict. And we will de-escalate the conflict because you will not join us in the use of nuclear weapons. So we will deter you from conventional force use and from nuclear weapons use. So what's our response? Remember state of nature? Our response is, oh yeah, that's very destabilizing what you did. So we'll meet your one and raise you one. We are going to deploy a whole range of nuclear weapons aboard a whole range of different systems so we can engage you at a low level where nuclear weapons use might be more acceptable in terms of yields. So if I said a few minutes ago, 15 kiloton, 10 kiloton, this is kiloton and maybe even sub-kiloton. But it's still a nuclear yield far greater than anything you get from a conventional weapon. That's what we're doing. And we're saying explicitly, this is not for war fighting. This is not lower than a nuclear threshold. But what I want to argue to you, it is for war fighting and it is to lower than a nuclear threshold so that we can meet them at that level and deter them. There's a logic, a deterrent logic to what the U.S. is saying. It's not stupid. I believe it's risky, dangerous and wrong-headed, but it's not stupid. In terms of the logic of deterrence, if they can do something we can't do, then you could argue one thing we might want to do is be able to do it too. But we'll call our doing it stabilizing. When they do it, it's destabilizing. There's an alternative to all this and that's why Dan is here. That's why I stop at this point. For me, I like the alternative. My career started in an agency called the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. It doesn't exist anymore, but it did once. And I still like the idea of meeting security needs hours and the international community's security needs with arms control and disarmament agreements that limit destabilizing innovations and eventually get us to reductions as much reduction as we can. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Well, lots to think about. Slightly depressing. Thank you very much. I'm now going to hand over to Dan Flesh, who is the director of the Centre of International Studies and Diplomacy here at SOAS. And that's built on a long career in academia and the non-governmental sector that's been integral to all sorts of conversations and processes that have contributed to international arms control and disarmament. So I'll hand you over to Dan now. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much, Bob, for that presentation. If you want to purchase, you can. And for joining the committee for the strategic concept for the removal of arms and proliferation along with almost an august list of members, as yourself. I see in the audience some old friends and some new ones and a good number of students. Like a good priest, a file for one text to take away for the student body, it would be Hans Morganfow, not what you usually get taught, but Hans Morganfow's final work of the 1960s, a new foreign policy for the United States, in which in contrast to everything he's argued earlier and in contrast, therefore, to what you all get taught, he makes, as a IR theoretician, much the same argument and dilemma as Bob, which he says that nuclear weapons have indeed changed everything, that they mark a sea change in global politics, unlike anything we've seen before, and that politics has, as you put it, taken or chosen to deal with the wrong horn of the dilemma. It has chosen to try to integrate nuclear weapons into normal politics. And what we see in the latest rounds from the Trump administration is a further example of that. He argues that societal change, attention to the United Nations, collective security organisation becomes a realist necessity. And why, one can argue it in different ways, we study civilisations at SOAS. The famous historian of ancient Greece, Thucydides, is quoted with respect to the phrase of Thucydides, the gap with a rising power China get into a war with an old power United States. But what the opponents of any arms control, and there's plenty of reasons to be sceptical, would have us believe is that of any historical moment in the past as we get taught in, let us say, the Peloponnesian War, if you introduced nuclear weapons into the hands of all the people involved in the Peloponnes, that they would have been at peace and that never would have been a war since. But once you put in those terms, you see this is our nonsense, that we have at least have a trajectory of management and according to countless speeches and agreements of an intent towards abolition. Now, in our project, we looked at these issues as hard as we were able. And I think, again, in talking to student bodies some years ago, the whole of the issues become quite overwhelming. For the non-specialist, if they managed to keep up with the alphabet soup and Bob was admirably restrained, but the alphabet soup of nuclear weapons, arms control agreements and so forth, it appears completely overwhelming. And yet, I again tried to put it in the clearer terms as possible, broadly speaking, there is agreement that we need to re-engineer the global economy to deal with climate chaos and global warming, global heating, as we now think of it. In comparison to re-engineering the global political economy to accommodate that phenomenon, the management of the world's weapons systems is, from a technical perspective, much simpler. Now, I emphasise from a technical perspective because obviously politically it is even more fraught than the issues to do with climate. These issues are much more of state politics and high power as we tend to think of them. But that isn't the way in which we're led to think about it. We generally led to think that anything to do with weapons control is far too complicated and far too obstrous. And indeed simple people like us need to be gently petted on the head until it's all rather too complicated and we appreciate your morality and your sense of concern, but leave it to us, we'll sort it out. And indeed we see the consequences in what Bob has described to us. What we have thought to do in the SCRAP project is to describe a maximalist position of highly intrusive and effective verified weapons control. And in contrast to when I got into this business and Bob in a different way in the 1970s, when any kind of hope of control was really fantastical, we now have an extremely sophisticated body of international practice, some of which has been allowed to decay, some of which is still being used. And without getting into the whole alphabet soup, we have produced a document on the website which is here, enough to frighten anybody with its weight, which is a compendium of the proven mechanism for weapons control as they have existed in the past. And these cover nuclear weapons and we have some affection for the system imposed on Iraq because it was by and large highly effective, highly intrusive. And for those who say we can't actually verify weapons of mass destruction, if one wanted to, here is a highly effective system. And there are other specialist mechanisms that we can adopt. And even with the breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the breaking of the taboo on chemical weapons by the Assad regime, still in large part there was a very significant effective control and elimination of a large part of the Syrian stockpile at that time. So we have a range of mechanisms for the world's worst weapons that we could use if we wanted to. And despite the fact that they decay, again if we are looking at weapons that are doing the killing today and I'm delighted to have my colleague Martin Butcher from Oxfam who has been instrumental in the court case, at least temporarily preventing British government arms transfers to Saudi Arabia. But that treaty and the broader concept of control of conventional just not nuclear weapons is essential because of their widespread use in conflict. And unfortunately much of the political agenda we have today to do with let us say small arms or land mines was based upon the romantic idea after the Cold War that we wouldn't have to worry about major war anymore. So we're faced with some efforts to deal with nuclear, some proven prototypes on weapons of mass destruction in general and a growing problem of not just nuclear, but conventional arms racing and conventional weapons use. Now again I shouldn't have used the word conventional. Winston Churchill, we can't talk in England without mentioning Winston Churchill, in the atomic age was horrified that his American allies started to use the word conventional. He said these weapons gave us World War II. How conventional is that? But these weapons at the moment have no negotiating framework or proposal apart from ours in the NGO community for the control of major weapons systems. And yet one of the mechanisms that brought an end to the Cold War were a set of east-west agreements which controlled and indeed spectacularly chopped up thousands of pieces of army, navy and air force weapons in the whole Euro-Atlantic area. Now with the decline in politics these agreements have been allowed to decay. But my point to you is for a considerable period of time these were effective mechanisms that gave Europeans at least and Russians for a while the peace dividend and which to the delight of some of my students specified that if you wish to destroy a tank one way to do it is to get a wrecking ball and smash the turret off it. Another way is to take a missile and saw it into three meter pieces. This graphic description of arms control nitty gritty verification. These are sets of procedures which we put into a format here linked to controls on weapons of mass destruction and including naval forces and said well actually diplomats leaders this is not a moral concern. This is not as with the nuclear ban treaty a question where we're looking to have a new norm. Actually we want global effective controls of all forms of weaponry elimination of WMD but controls of all forms of weaponry and pretty much we know how to do it because guys you did it before you just kind of forgot or you know if that a fashion. And this we put on the table in Geneva and other fora and if you're interested in the advocacy side we would like you to come and to come and join us in taking this forward because it ought to be clear by now that while the nuclear developments and conventional developments have continued and the occasion I get run up by a journalist and say what's new. I said well not much is new. The weapons continue and we've had this build up going on for decades but occasion you guys notice and ring us up and Bob may have the same thought. These dangers have been there but international political dangers political dangers are perhaps greater than they've ever been. The warnings from international organisations if they're not heated keep coming. There are colleagues who like to think we can make nuclear weapons states responsible. Well here we have United States, United Kingdom. Are these any more can we say these countries with responsible political leaderships, stable political systems and these were absolute givens of the last decades and again you put it into the context with the acidities and the ancients. It's perfectly clear as with climate that we have to get to grips. Now what we bring to you are a set of proven prototypes and systems for the control of all forms of weaponry at different levels which changes the debate from one of panic, one of confrontation with the contrasting political competitions one of a desperate attempt to understand all the dozens of acronyms and concepts to one where those of us who have been working on these issues for perhaps too much of our lives would want to offer you a precision tool a precision political demand to say actually get negotiating on the scrap treaty it doesn't mean we have to wait for everyone to agree to control everything but it shows that a realistic benchmark is practical and then we can look at different components and we're told also well you mustn't rush it's a step by step process as Bob knows far better than I from his experience I was an outsider at the time in the late 1980s and 1990s I know it's a very long time ago now the major powers conducted multiple negotiations in parallel they did nuclear weapons over here they did smaller nuclear weapons over here they did chemical weapons over here and different components were dealt with in parallel there were no linkages, no treaty was held up by another but obviously there were political connections and if we look at the regional crises that concern us today in South Asia, in North East Asia, in the Middle East in US Russian bilateral relations at the moment there's no global context for this you can talk to Israelis and they say well why pick on us in the Middle East where is the global plan you talk to people in other regions similarly they'll say well there's no overarching project now the UN Secretary General for the first time and we've been involved with him to a degree has developed a comprehensive agenda in different components but what we offer is a I wouldn't be so perhaps so glib to say one-stop shopping but if you really want to see a way to get to grips with global armaments provide a pull factor for other agreements provide a context for what needs to happen in different regions then that is something that we offer today and the arms trade treaty and the judgment in the British courts give an indication perhaps even in this political environment that we can look to develop the rule of law so I don't think we have to feel overwhelmed or helpless in the cause of instability and there are I think well Putin's speech other developments there are enough wake-up calls and Bob if I can retrieve that paper I gave you earlier just to wave around which is out on the web and colleagues in Washington found it a day or two ago this is just the 11th of June a Pentagon doctrinal paper on nuclear operations and frankly for the first time and you can say well the Russians are doing the same and they should be admonished absolutely but it's a wake-up call to the reality of political-military thinking and in the document it specifies that for example nuclear weapons use should be integrated with the use of special operations forces now quite why you want your men in the Balaclava helmets you know absailing out of the helicopters to be integrated with nuclear weapons detonation what kind of tactical scenario is it that you envisage well they're pretty clear that nuclear weapons can be employed to influence opponents to secure good political outcomes for the United States to secure strategic stability by using nuclear weapons using tactical in regional and in the global environment and I'm sure there are Russian counterparts if not Chinese to these documents so when we think well it's all relatively stable in the end that no one would really do it the tragedy is that there are tens of thousands of personnel who will get documents like these coming down the command chain and will learn and grow up and gain promotion by preparing to carry out these actions and that is not a stable or safe world and I think if you perhaps are offered a choice between the world of nuclear operations or a world of the scrap treaty at the very least perhaps we can use such refined political military proposals on the control of weapons to hold back and change the political process that has brought us this without frankly too much of a say so and those of us who are in Europe I would ask that one perhaps takes both documents into the European Union and one takes both documents into NATO and the OSCE and if we are engaged I know some colleagues here with the African Union perhaps to consider taking a document like this and putting it on the table with the European Union because the European Union is adept at lecturing Africa on what it should do about its security and weapons systems and perhaps they also should be brought to account so as an old friend said I should draw this to a close and if you have been, thanks for listening Thank you very much Grann Thank you Another fascinating talk We're now going to have a five-minute inter-panel discussion and I'm going to start off by just reflecting on some of the themes that have emerged from both your talks from my point of view It seems to me you've both made a case for arms control and disarmament in different ways Bob you had this really fascinating historical broad perspective about the interplay defence, deterrents, offensive escalation and the one way to break that difficult cycle is to have safe disarmament whereas Dan you were talking about the realist position being it being a nation's best interest to disarm safely and then you presented a bulk of evidence about ways that it has and can be done in the future so bearing all that in mind bearing in mind what we know about the rollback from the delicate balance of treaties that we've had I wonder do you have any feelings of optimism or feelings of opportunity about where there might be possibilities for movement next, yeah So in the world of optimism let me tell you how much of an optimism optimist I am, I came in and I was disappointed that the room wasn't frigid as Dan had promised me it would be and then I sat down and I looked over to my left and I saw the bottles and to my eye they looked a lot like absolute vodka bottles and my heart absolutely soared and I said well they don't have air-condition but they are making up for it Yes anyway so I would, as we used to say on Long Island where I come from a moment of serocity here Dan referred to IR theorist in the national relations I learned my IR theory from a professor by the name of Kenneth Waltz who's famous as a structural realist maybe the structural realist and I was his teaching assistant and then he was my advisor on my PhD thesis and so I don't come to this issue the security issue from a I would say a moralist perspective though I like to think morality is not unknown to me but it's not how I approach international politics and so the way I want to start to answer your question, your challenge here is to say that I am attracted at this moment in history particularly to scrap and to what Dan is talking about and proposing and pursuing because it seems to me it, as I try to work towards it sets out an alternative to one type of realist approach to the thinking that motivates governments now and I was trying to say is that the thinking has varied quite a bit and is a difference at least from my perspective between the instinct of the Obama administration which you heard at the when you went to Hiroshima and you heard at other moments Prague speech he gave and the instinct that is captured in the NPR of 2018 for the United States I think both were realists both were not naive about the international community about the nature of international politics about what the state of nature as a metaphor for international politics means we are all responsible for our own security here what it does not mean is that one can lump every effort at managing, controlling limiting and indeed reducing armament as unrealistic and indeed once you start thinking that as we did when I think when we were moving towards arms control particularly in the mid to late 60s and 1970s that it was a legitimate way of addressing the security dilemma which all countries face is a term of art in international politics and arming is one way to respond to the security dilemma but of course it leads to the other side arming and similarly if you can manage reductions it's called disarmament and as a subset of the effort called arms control what I'm getting to here in maybe a too long winded way is that I sometimes worry that when you all and others look at scrap you see something that is maybe morally virtuous but quote unrealistic and Dan was arguing not so and what I want to do as a card-carrying realist I mean I spent over 20 years working for the US government I think you can see I'm not an ethicist so I think what we're talking about here is another way of achieving your security objectives it's going to involve verification and monitoring and transparency and all this other stuff that goes with arms control but it's a far better way of dealing with the security dilemma and what scrap does is two things one and I can't really talk in detail about this but Dan will you can disaggregate scrap into pieces that have their separate virtue and make sense particularly in terms of the history but you can also put it all together if someone asks the question as people do in my experience well okay I understand you want new start I want new start two to be to follow on you can have one follow on in the language of start one of new start one and well where is this going well if you it's good to have scrap to know where it all could go but it doesn't have to as Dan and I were talking I said I don't want the best to be the enemy the good if I can't buy it all can I buy pieces he said yes you can buy well what we've been doing is buying pieces over decades well we're selling pieces I want to start buying pieces again I want to achieve legitimate security goals of states ours others through means of control negotiated control and unilateral steps we did a lot unilaterally I was trying to point that out unilaterally doesn't mean blindly it means it's not a negotiated settlement but negotiated settlements have their own virtues because they build momentum I resist saying Dan they build trust because over 20 years of doing actually the politics lots of negotiations in my background with Iraqis North Koreans and Serbs and others I never really got much trust I think out of any of this but you got expectations you got an understanding you get things from negotiating that are of value so I'm this is not an optimistic pessimistic thing this is a realist thing I think that Dan and his colleagues are onto something and I hope you think about it thank you I would concur I would just say to the wider audience here that the only positive things that I've seen come about in this arena have come because there has been public mobilisation such as we see nowadays about climate and that it's the actions of members of the public of universities and so on who actually get this moving and bring it on to the agenda so I think that's my area of optimism and there are many pessimistic things to look at but if we look at some elections in Denmark or people on the streets of Prague or in Hong Kong it isn't all bad news and what we're trying to do here is to put a precision tool into people's hands and we a lot of these agreements here fell into something in 1990 called the Charter of Paris it's like a throw party for negotiations and they had another one which is the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and we would like to offer this as a suggestion to the French or anybody else is to have a third great Charter of Paris to start to get to grips with global weapons so that would be my points of optimism and maybe we can open it up now right, thank you so I'm pleased there are some moments of optimism there's a feeling that we can have an incremental we don't have to have an all embracing scrap treaty to have useful momentum and the public mobilisation might really stimulate some actions now so now I'm going to open the questions up to the floor so if you put your hand up if you have a question and I'll ask you to say your name and where you're from first please can we start with you please oh we've got a microphone thank you sorry but yeah my name is Adrian I study architecture at the Arts University Bournemouth just working in London got a couple of weeks off well please see here more on your vacation time but yeah thank you very much for the talks what I wanted to ask though was maybe going in a more pessimistic way in the future which nations or institutions or organisations do we see actually acquiring nuclear weapons where they didn't have any before if there's any chance of that happening shall I start so I think I should say that when I first met the government we had something it was politically incorrect but there was a movie that referred to the dirty dozen was the movie and there were about 12 what we called then threshold states I think now for those of us who were in that particularly focused on the proliferation and the problem the horizontal proliferation as opposed to us in the Russians vertical proliferation there's one I don't want to say only one quite but there's one threshold state and that's Iran to the best of the knowledge of those of us in the United States at least Iran has no nuclear weapons the best of our knowledge are on had a very robust nuclear weapons development program and when the JCPRA was being negotiated one of the metrics that was used was time to weapon time to first weapon and we wanted to move it from one year out two years three years four years whatever if you said okay I got Iran I've been following that well North Korea is not a threshold state anymore it probably has 30 to 50 nuclear weapons so if we looked around at other countries countries that have in the past been of concern to us they were on that list Libya was on that list Argentina Brazil Taiwan South Korea all were on the list they're not anymore to the best of my knowledge of anybody's lists we do talk about something else and put out a put out a piece on threshold states states who to the best of our knowledge have no active nuclear weapons development program but have capability and the first country that comes to mind is Japan and Japan comes to mind not because we think there's any enthusiasm among the Japanese public for nuclear weapons acquisition but because they have something that's sometimes called plutonium overhang and that is tons and tons of plutonium it takes it 5 kg to make a single weapon so if you have tons of plutonium you have a potential arsenal of nuclear weapons and then you ask well what do you need beyond the physical material well you need the triggering package but does anybody doubt that Japan could build something the United States built in 1945 could not build it right now better, quicker, smaller hum like a Honda so there's a great capability there and those of us who have been in this business don't want the Japanese to believe they need nuclear weapons we want them to achieve their security objectives in the context of the alliance with the United States there are other countries that have accumulations of physical material but to the best of our knowledge no intent I guess that's the best I can do thank you, it's very clear do you have anything to add if I have a question here please my name is Lyndon Burford I'm a researcher at King's College London thanks very much for two excellent presentations I thought Ambassador Gallucci your summary of the nuclear age was fascinating and concise and incisive and thanks very much for this Dan what looks to be a really fascinating proposal I'll probably do something rather than just talking about these things with that in mind I just was wondering if there's been any discussion with the Swedish Foreign Ministry on June the 11th same day as that report actually the Swedish Foreign Minister Mabur Wallström launched a 16 nation initiative to inject high level political momentum into the nuclear disarmament process in the United States from around the world NATO allies non-aligned states neutral states so I just think they might perhaps be a really good audience for this type of thing so has there been any discussion with that or would you be open to discussion around that and I see there's a couple of colleagues here from basic who have been deeply involved in the process of working with the Swedish government on that so they might also like to comment a little piece of shameless self-promotion I encourage you all to read a piece I published today on the European Leadership Network on the idea of establishing a global commission on military nuclear risk in order to actually assess in a globally representative way what these specific risks are and that might help you to do a little more targeted shopping as to what are the mechanisms that you want to use to address specific risks so it's called a risk driven approach to nuclear disarmament well we've been talking to a lot of states a lot of states seem to be more worried about doing anything than about war in general and worried about their relations I think the Swedish initiative is an important one but it remains the case that there's no proposal on the table from any state for controls on non-WMD systems and as soon as you start that discussion never mind the intricacies of treaty language as some aficionados will know about this matter in non-proliferation that many states have regional concerns security concerns, confident building concerns which a nuclear only approach doesn't deal with and I think it is a little sometimes difficult for people to take on a comprehensive approach but David Owen had some who was on the work with the Swedish government in 1980s has been talking also with us with the Swedish government a year or two back but there remains a great deal of caution and I think the attempts almost to bridge political divide between non-nuclear signing countries and the weapon states such the Swedish initiative are good but they I don't think they answer the case as having got involved in these issues in the late 1970s for the first time scrap offers if you like a dramatic ban the bomb ban landmines style a campaigning slogan the acronym is not an accident Reagan eventually decided to do something about arms control and his mind has turned salt into a start and they had momentum because they had start so we started with what we want where we want to scrap the weapons and then work that back into a strategic concept so I think we need something much more dramatic as a game changer that middle-ranging states like Sweden can react to and the deterioration of the international environment is so rapid and so dire that intricate policy initiatives such as I myself spend a lot of time on aren't enough and that we need something much clearer and more far reaching and having created basic back in the mid 1980s perhaps we can team up again thank you so the next person on my list to ask a question is Martin Butcher but I just wonder as soon as we've got Paul Ingram here and basic has been mentioned a couple of times do you want to come in on this or yeah okay in a minute thank you well Martin then who's just here if you want to pass the microphone down thank you thank you my name is Martin Martin Butcher and I'm Oxfam's global lead on arms conflict and international humanitarian law I'd like to thank you Ambassador Gallucci first of all for the presentation which was very interesting and also your words on optimism which between that and your reminder of the arms control and disarmament agency brought to mind the fact that when I moved to Washington DC to work with Dan and basic the day I arrived the first thing that happened straight off a plane I was dragged to the state department for a rather drunken wake for the arms control and disarmament agency which turned out to be a very good evening indeed although a sad one but in the face of events like that optimism is really the only course Oxfam has been very pleased to support the development of the SCRAP initiative and I've put in some work with Dan and with the students on this and we'll be doing more in the future the reason for that why would a humanitarian and development agency get involved in a massive global disarmament project after all the reason for that is we don't have a lot of choice and the South Africans in getting involved in championing the nuclear ban treaty stressed the theft of resources from the poorest and most vulnerable people of the world going into armaments, nuclear weapons but other arms as well in my job for Oxfam I am daily working on appalling crises which are entirely human made and mostly these days to do with conflict rather than climate driven or other crises although those obviously happen as well and then spark more conflicts and Oxfam has for the last 20 years been involved in arms control from the land mines treaty on notably the arms trade treaty and other agreements because the imperative is to stop the waste of resources and is to prevent the conflict which drives things like 65 to 70 million people being displaced from their homes from their home countries and to allow us to build towards a better world through sustainable development goals that Oxfam also champions so that's all exposition that's a statement of support for scrap as much as anything else and I guess to come back to the optimism point if there's a question out of all of this if if if we move forward with this what optimism would you have that we can anyway succeed in the current environment ? I think in small pieces rather than globally or I said to Dan earlier that if you did this mathematically I'm not and haven't been through those decades in government service a believer that you make important moves as a step function it's a curve and you want to look at the slope of that curve rather than expecting a step function to capture the movement so I don't think we're going to leap to scrap in one move it's good to know where you're going if you hope eventually to get there but along the way there are going to be pieces and if you ask me okay what are the next pieces I I could be optimistic that the United States could lead the way in the extension of new start I could be optimistic that the United States representatives could get together with Russian representatives and find a way back into the INF Treaty I mean remember this is what I did for living for a long time and I think this is all negotiable and I by the human beings who are currently around I'm not putting here well this person has to be elected or that person has to be elected it's got to be a national decision whoever makes that but I think the the international politics of those kinds of moves are very permissive domestically it really depends and I don't particularly want to go there myself but I don't think the I mean because I think when it's tempted to say about you know the end game here that it's as Dan was saying it's not technical it's political I think those are among his last words okay and what I'm saying here the politics of this don't require a global change to get to not even the ABM part I mean I as far as I'm concerned ballistic missile restraints restraints on the systems that Putin talked about in the New York Times two days ago that the US was pursuing hypersonic glide vehicles that restraints on all these things are quite politically plausible these are not I mean there are things that are less plausible I think global peace is not politically plausible as the next step but what I'm saying is that you don't need that you might want that you might want a reduction in tensions you might even believe that if you got what I was describing as technical steps on a slope of a curve it would lead to a better relationship than we currently have yes I could be optimistic about the little steps though just to get back to where we were so I'm I don't I don't see myself going into government again but I teach at you know what I do for living now I teach graduate students and undergraduates and I see my students as going in a lot of them want to go into government service notwithstanding reasons why they might not want to go into government service and I want them to go into government service and I want them to be optimistic realistic but optimistic about what they can accomplish so I I do have realistic optimism about what can be achieved but yeah you can't have that without understanding that not everybody not only doesn't share your optimism but they don't share your goals right we have and I will not talk about the government here but I'll talk about my government there are people in it who fundamentally oppose negotiated methods of reaching our security objectives they do not like, believe in I don't want to almost use the word trust I don't trust either I don't trust either international politics is not a place where I want to use the word trust but they don't believe you can achieve your objectives through negotiation so they oppose negotiated outcomes right at the very highest levels of the US government right now and that wasn't true before this is something that changes with elections so remember as you go into this optimistically that not only will you have people who aren't optimistic but you have people who fundamentally don't like your goals you got to deal with that thank you I think it's either optimism well the alternative is to kind of go off and be a lapdance or a pole dance or a merchant banker or or get on with the job so I'm optimistic I want to get on with the job I'm optimistic because I remember one of my early funders at BASIC gave me an incredibly hard time as to why I'd wasted $2,000 of a $10,000 grant on some obscure mechanism called a fax machine because nobody else in no other groups in Washington had this outrageous technology and of course we were using it then to take documents such as this and fax them to political actors in parliaments in Germany and so forth with great difficulty and we would take documents in army kit bags and drag them through airports to get any information moving internationally now the communications is hugely more sophisticated and I would as any optimism would be I would hope that colleagues in BASIC and Alps where would take this document and the nuclear policy review that Bob was talking about and ask well US forces in Germany in Italy nuclear weapons stations still in Turkey are all now governed by this notion that you could integrate nuclear weapons with commando special forces operations is that something which applies in NATO is that something that applies in your parliament does your parliament approve that or not and the European Union which is somewhat skittish on getting into hard security issues but without the British may have more room for manoeuvre does this also approve this will these facilities in British or other allied countries be permitted without parliamentary approval to carry out military operations against Iran or not and I think those questions in allied governments are things that we used to do without the benefit of anything more than the first class ML post by and large when I I find desperately sad that in later life I find myself in similar debates so my optimism is that with modern campaigning techniques and technology we can actually deal with these sorts of problems much more rapidly in a more sophisticated way than we did in the past and we got some results then thank you so next on my list is Paul Sholter at the front here Paul Sholter there's a microphone coming to her Grisel Disillusion former director of arms control in a small but perfectly formed nuclear state and disarmament commission for Iraq and I agree I'm very pleased with the scrap document I think it's a useful compilation I think that should be recognised as a reference material that's excellent I think it's important to draw the analytical distinction between the two things you've been talking about today one is the sort of meta history of Russian American arms control and it's collapsed that's a field where I think it is entirely conceivable you could have a sensible agreement between the two sides if only certain factions in each group would stop blocking it but that's a different thing from the huge division of scrap and the complications there and so I think it's we should distinguish between those when we discuss whatever it is we're here to discuss but on scrap I was impressed by the rhetorical flourish of holding up the two books there do you want this or do you want that but the trouble is what will fixate most states is the possibility that they might be adhering to the white scrap book while the other side is still using the black nuclear doctrine or chemical doctrine or armoured doctrine and they won't be able to do anything about it, they won't be able to disprove it and I think a problem for this discussion is that you haven't looked at the wider international framework I grew up and I think Frank did in just before that post-Colwar honeymoon where everything seemed possible and what we have to accept is that we have faced 10 or 20 years of the collapse of rule-based international order post-truth society David Millivan had a speech the other day about the age of impunity where there is no accountability he was writing about war crimes from an NGO perspective but that's where we're at when we thought in the chemical field we tried particularly and we had an internationally legally binding agreement the Hegelian stage moment which was the chemical weapons convention we find that its first serious test it breaks because the design problem of a partisan P5 member supported by another one is insuperable and we don't seem to manage that and we haven't brought it into our discourse about because it's undespectable to mention how fundamental to the challenge this is but in the meanwhile we go on talking about trust when the accumulating evidence is we cannot manage these situations of acute distrust and I suggest that that's it doesn't mean giving up hope but before becoming optimistic let's try and acknowledge the depth and breadth of the problems which have to be overcome by optimism and that loss of fundamental trust in good state behaviour including America of course in pulling out of the JCP away but a lot more I think Russia and China being duplicitous it's general and it's pervasive and I don't see that your your discussions evade it and yet it has to be dealt with I'm going to ask sorry I was just aware that I'm aware through the conversation I must say that she's completely explicitly said he's not using the word trust so this is going to be interesting but we both disavow trusted morality in favour of vodka if we can get it thank you I absolutely think it is not about minimizing the problems you describe but actually I think the recent actions by the chemical weapons organisation to enhance its inspection regimes are positive I think actually that the aged peace activist in Geneva former Soviet negotiation about Sarnov who introduced the idea of using the chemical weapons convention was vital to global security that if we had a war with a fully chemically armed Syria at that point then the world in the Middle East would have been a hugely worse place than it is now and the vast majority and the worst parts of the Syrian arsenal were disposed of under the treaty now yes horrible, disgusting and illegal things have continued and they breached the line but they are not what we would have had without it and that's where perhaps we differ on that case it is not I think that I don't want to agree there is a moment in the movie Doctor Strange Love when the general says well yes of course we'll get through and then he has a moment of revelation of course that means that he'll die that the war will happen so yes I could agree that it's all going to hell in a handbasket and everybody is evil but the end of that and that we're the only good guys but the end of that is an extremely pessimistic a realist outcome and that in fact we can do a lot better because indeed we have to have plenty more pessimism I think there's probably prior agreement don't quote me because that's what I think it's speculation speculation that's great I'm speculating that there's prior agreement between the Polish government and John Bolton to forward base INF missiles in Poland without any agreement with NATO and possibly with other central European countries who look more to Washington than to Brussels I don't think the movements the intellectuals and the essay writers have at all got to grips with that coming at us this autumn in a very few months time I think that a significant part of the American ideological elite in the present government do believe in the rapture literally they do believe that you need to get all the Jews together in Israel either convert them to Christianity or kill them and then there will be the second coming of Christ you hear looking that up on the internet you'll find plenty that indicates that that ideology that you see played out in American state houses is all too real in the belief system of some of the people approximating and close to the president now I would like to think we lived in a much more sane and rational world than that so those would be two examples why it could be a great deal less optimistic than even perhaps you are Paul but nevertheless you have to find a way through and I'll shut up and let Bo go on with it so I think you're right to observe that maybe I failed to draw a proper distinction between one type of arms control and another type of arms control that there is a I always shun multilateral diplomacy because I thought it was too hard and didn't work and I liked bilateral I liked dealing with North Koreans I like negotiating with Iraqis I like negotiating with the Serbs I like something because you get it done and it can be done and a lot of reasons how some ever as we say I don't think you're right about this works look at the arms control between us and the Soviets and then the Russians and you can conceive it and conceptualize it pretty easily but as soon as you want to go to a broad multilateral treaty particularly one which you dream of being universal on a scope well not so fast I want to say kind of both of them are in the same world to me of politics and I'm going to go back to that in a state of nature so when you bilaterally you're not going to overcome the fact that state is not, the other state is not going to anything which leaves its security dependent on trust that's not been our experience over a couple of thousand years here with nation states so it's not going to happen multilaterally either it might not happen multilaterally because the treaty is a lot less binding in a political consequences of non-compliance or less but therefore the incentives for the other countries are also less but they still have utility and that's going to be my rejoinder to you that if those multilateral arrangements that I think have value have failed in individual cases but they still have value if you were teaching about to upcoming graduate students from all over the world and you were going to say how should you think about the nuclear and amplification treaty it's been around now for 70 years or so has it worked always let me count the number of countries that have cheated on the NPT in a way that mattered well it is a bunch is it still useful, you bet still requires full scope safeguards ah what about the IAEA does anybody have cheated on safeguards yes are they still valuable, yes NPT is virtually 196 countries I think by last count that's virtually all of them they're a notable for that they're not in so what I'm saying to you here is that for the move the steps in scrap for example which is an example on the table the individual steps don't have to be perfectly implemented to have value to put us on the slope headed in the right direction but we all are going to be aware that we're in a world in which trust is not something that we rely on for our security we may rely on a real technical as we do in the states assessment of the degree of transparency we can achieve through verification and monitoring methods I think I can detect significant cheating in a timely way that doesn't sound like a lot of trust to me but that's how we actually think and for me the fact that there is a CTBT which the United States does not belong to and there are some other test ban treaties those gave a long time ago alright it's not universal is it good, yes is it good if a country adheres to it, yes is it a lock that they'll never test it, no it's good, it adds to something if you have a robust view of how states decide to do things then these international arrangements contribute to one view of what motivates governments they will reluctantly in some cases at least violate the treaty so I think in other words this puts us in headed in the right direction if I was communicating that I thought these were more than that I apologize and want to fix that I'm again a realist and states will always want to look at the capacity of your potential enemy not just as intentions his capabilities I taught for three years at the National War College if you don't think that is emblazoned on the eyelids of the American military officer you know look at intentions but count capabilities that's the way we look at it and the treaties you're talking about are different than bilateral treaties and I should have made that point but they go to intentions and they help us assess them they are not the same as capabilities although they may impact capabilities in terms of what people actually acquire, deploy or give up so it's a moderate acknowledgement of the point but also kind of a pushback I'd like on whether it's a killer point or not thank you good question next on my list is Rob for size in the middle here Rob is one of seven questions and we're at 235 so I'm going to invite everybody to be very succinct thank you Rob here good afternoon I introduced myself Robert Forsyth former subring commander subring captain I took Polaris to see in the 70s so a bit of an ancient mariner a recent convert perhaps from youth when mutually assured destruction was assured and we all believed in it not quite so sure now but it was the fashion of the time now we have sub strategic flexible response as our policy which the government says keeps us safe and doesn't sub strategic being a substitute for not strategic but probably tactical flexible response being something that can embrace everything including perhaps a first strike with the low yield weapon as a warning shot across the bow into troops deployed overseas so the government doesn't speak truth certainly to the services because I was in them and doesn't speak truth to the public and I think one of the problems that I sense here and I've sensed on a broad front I now have and I've any really seriously been approaching this problem for the last three, four, five years I probably have 100 people on the list who are all very authoritative but they all speak with a single voice today there's at least three initiatives being discussed in accepting the treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons scrap the wrist driven approach by kings and basic with its discussions with Sweden it's all very diverse I feel that actually you need more coming together a bigger coordinated approach and I also think you need to speak to the people what you're actually doing is taking power away from government and government doesn't like that and in this country certainly it's convinced the people that nuclear weapons are good it's a blanket comfort blanket that keeps them safe somehow or other you have to get the public behind you to understand why they should press the government to give up this power which doesn't do what it says and to get some facts on the table but it's too diverse you need to get a more coordinated approach it was impressive that the world court brought the 1996 advisory opinion together and it's impressive that ICANN managed to get the treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons together and I think there is a risk that this initiative which is good and the Swedish initiative and your initiative could just divert because governments are very good at dividing in order to conquer so more a statement than a question thank you would you like to respond to that Dan? Thanks Bob and it's been a pleasure working with you on our article together recently very briefly and we're going to be brief the panel should set an example I think some of these issues are complementary but they do serve different functions and I think I would say with respect to the ban treaty the ban treaty is a norm it doesn't attempt to have verification teeth and what we're offering is that and similarly the ban treaty doesn't deal with non-nuclear weapons at all and once you get into these discussions you see those come on the table so in that respect we would see ourselves as coming in parallel to the ban treaty and in that respect compared to the other ones you mentioned both the scrap approach and the ban treaty are formal ideas for negotiating text and indeed some language in the ban treaty comes from the scrap project Thank you would you like to add anything? Thank you Yes I've got two at the back now If the phone could go that way please Thank you for the presentation My name is Adity Mishra and I'm a student of Dr Dan Plash So I'll start by quoting two lines from the latest document that came out of DOD This presidential document states that nuclear weapons are the foundation of our strategy to preserve peace and stability by deterring aggression to the United States I want you guys to throw some light on this mindset behind such a statement at the beginning of this of a document of this importance Is there a tendency to view the rest of the world as an aggressor and thereby creating proliferating sustaining a culture of suspicion fear and unstability even if we came down from 60,000 nuclear weapons reducing by 80% there are still 12,000 just owned by the United States considering nothing changed out there So what is the mindset behind this kind of thinking and strategy? Thank you Thank you I'll start off on this The sentence A doesn't surprise me it actually doesn't even offend me which may horrify you but having claimed the mantle of a realist here and characterised the international system in a sort of classical 19th century way as a state of nature and also observed that security people in the United States and elsewhere I would say bless you, tend to think about capabilities wholly apart from what else you may say about the rest of the world in terms of their intentions and are they all hostile I'll get to whether they're hostile or not but first let me see what they could do to me if they wanted to and so I will look at the capabilities of Russia now and I will observe they could incinerate us many times over Oh might I look at their intentions? Yes but right now that of course doesn't make me very happy but I'd look at capabilities I'd look at the Chinese capabilities I would look at other places where the United States has interests, friends allies whether they be in Europe or whether they be in North East Asia or elsewhere and I'd say how can these countries be hurt who are potential enemies of these countries just in terms of capabilities now it's not purely capabilities because when I'm assessing capabilities I don't put France on the list of countries I'm worried about or at least most of us don't anyway and nor do we put the UK there or other countries where allies or close friends but I'm essentially answering your question with yes that's how a security analyst in the United States will think of these things now that person doesn't decide US foreign policy but they'll have a big impact on US security policy and there'll be moments when the foreign policy analyst will ask the security analyst what can they do to us and there'll be an answer and there'll be an answer in terms of our capability to defend and our capability to deter and everything I'm saying about the United States I believe is true of Russia and China right now and virtually every other state on the planet that tries to mount its own defense attend to its own security it will either attempt to unilaterally have this capability or to rely on an ally whose interest is served by defending that state I go back to the way analysts whether they be IR theorists in the realist tradition or whether they be security people who are IR theorists in the security tradition think about the international system and it is very much the way you described it there is, I've seen me run the other way when somebody mentions trust because I can imagine writing it in a speech we're hoping to build trust with a series of agreements actually not really we're hoping to build a better relationship greater transparency but when I use trust a relationship with another human being I mean trust that person has my back and certainly that person is not going to stab me in the back but we have a history international relations United States everybody at whatever age they are are aware of quote the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor we know what it is to be surprise attacked we believe we were surprise attacked on 9-11 we understand what that means our position is develop a defence develop a deterrent it doesn't mean other states don't look at us the same way and almost guarantees they do that's what it means to be in a state of nature that's what it means to have a security dilemma and all states in a state of nature have a security dilemma so it's an unhappy answer I give you but it's the only one I know how to give you thank you so we're getting a bit tight on time so what I'm going to do is invite all the people that put their hands up to take it in terms to give a comment and people can respond we can respond in one go so there was a chap in a checked shirt at the back do you still want to make a ask a question yes so if the microphone can be going that way and then lining up we have David Cullen here Burgundy I'm sorry I'm just referring to you there's a couple more coming up but I'm going to go in order that I've seen the hands the woman here and Paul Ingram and then if we have time we'll have these two at the end so would you like to make a start please and if you could keep it quick that would be great alright good afternoon my name is Hussain I'm a student at Middlesex University and I'm studying journalism and communications I was going to ask if any of you were familiar with two things which is the Stop the Arms Fair which is a coalition organisation that's based in London and the DSCI which is the largest arms deal trade in the world normally it's held in there's an event that goes on in September and I was thinking if you might be able to have any ideas about it ok thank you the next person on my list is David Cullen here please ok thank you strategy so I would be interested to hear what you were basing that on and whether they were wrong or you were and the other was more about the Putin's array of fantastical and exciting and horrifying weapons and you spoke quite persuasively about the history of Russia reacting to US aspirations for missile defence and I think there's a risk of reacting to Putin's aspirations to have these capabilities rather than treating them as they are as aspirations and trying to de-escalate the level of concern that's popping around thank you could you pass it to back please thank you firstly I've seen a journalist based in Srinigarh in Indian Ambassador Kashmir and my question is to Ambassador Gulochchi that I would like to you talked about defence and deterrence and I would like to know in that respect like how do you sell the idea of nuclear disarmament to a country like Pakistan whose airspace was recently violated on the pretext that they were harboring terrorists and there was a terrorist camp and then their bombs were carried by the Indian state there and when we came to know there was no such thing that there were reports there were no such reports that there were terrorist camps and all that how are you going to sell this idea of nuclear disarmament to a country like Pakistan which in all consequences whose nuclear capability saved a large scale war because of having nuclear capability they were able to deter and India and war was evaded so far countries like India are Pakistan thank you very much that's been really helpful could you pass the microphone back to this woman here I'm sorry to rush you hi I'm Sophie McCormack from basic so I would just like to ask a question to you ambassador so one thing that concerned me a little bit was when you spoke you spoke of deterrence being the fallback policy for dealing with nuclear armed states such as Russia as well as the fallback policy for dealing with likely proliferating states like Iran and North Korea so I just wanted to ask you to kind of expand on the logic behind that as to why the same policies used the two very separate entities thank you and if you could pass the microphone now down to Paul Ingram here thank you thank you for bearing with this whistle stop that's the lot on this list once you ask your question then we'll see if there's time for the next lot okay so Paul Ingram the director of basic for another few days at least and I want to begin by thanking Dan for several things firstly setting up basic in the first place and his visionary leadership secondly for setting scrap up because I think this is an extraordinary contribution to the debate and and I want to apologise for any pain that he experiences by the direction that I take basic in which is not the same thing that he does I I'm surprised at this conversation about trust because you know the age old enemy of this country France is a country that we're not going to be going to war with any time soon and the European Union God bless its painful situation right now is still a continent of trust so I mean there is trust in international system it takes time to build up and it requires people and states to to have a degree of of strategic empathy and strategic empathy doesn't come about very quickly but it's something we can build towards and this comes I guess to my principle point and invitation to respond to which is we are dealing with complex adaptive system where nobody has the answers nobody none of us and the question the question is in a complex adaptive system when when there are people who are controlling many different parts of the system and actually failing even the nuclear weapon states how can we move into an engaged conversation or dialogue with people with states across the global community that we disagree with do we just simply present our answers or do we actually engage in an open dialogue where we recognise we don't have the answers they don't and we actually engage constructively thank you so we are running out of time so I'm sorry that will be the end of the questions and I'm sure if you were around for a bit you might be able to ask the speakers independently. I'm going to invite each speaker to give some closing remarks and respond to all the questions that they can. Can I start with you Dan? Thank you. Okay well many points here we reached very effective agreements with the Soviet Union when we didn't like them or trust them at all and our collaborative security was hugely enhanced and global security was hugely enhanced and we didn't much care for the communists and yet we managed to achieve that however unpleasant Putin is he doesn't have a competitive ideology such as communism and currently never mind Soviet power the great domestic product of Russia is about that of the Benelux countries so quite why we are so given the run around and are in so in all I don't quite know so yes I think we can debate and deal with countries that we profoundly disagree with I think we do have to look at this in the Bible at the moat in our own eye or the beam in our own eye I fear that there's a controversy about moving the Andrew Jackson off of American bill an African American woman on well Andrew Jackson is of course a hero of a certain strand of American society and for him he really didn't care but to know the difference between the Cherokee and the Seminole and the Sioux because he was moving west and I fear that the ideology explains why certain sections don't feel they need to know the difference between Shiar and Sunni they have a disposition of the world which is not a particularly positive one I'll close though by saying that there is a fundamental misunderstanding in a lot of the way in which international relations is taught but not in the way in which political leaders come to United Nations and it's this we live in an anarchical society in which there is no global government and no global discipline of states and therefore things go on the reality is that gradually since at least 1815 but certainly since World War I that the self-destructive potential of civilization has become the growing and now becomes the dominant feature in international society how do we deal with the self-destructive potential of industrial society we see it tackled in climate and environmental issues it also exists in the military sphere it came to the fore in the military sphere out of two world wars and the bomb and this acts as a disciplining factor on states because the whole point of the disciplining factor is that in the nature of a global policeman is that if you get it wrong you get punished and therefore you have to moderate your behaviour because you might be punished that's the whole point of the Hobbesian world and the reality with the bomb is if we get the bomb wrong if you get war wrong again we all get punished and that is why in rational systems as we saw during the later Cold War and beyond we see this competition between old style reality pre-atomic reality and post-atomic reality what I call Einstein Realism which is actually there is a real driver to cooperation which is if we get it wrong we will get disciplined and that you see in the behaviour of states you see it in what leaders say at the UN but it is a continuing tension and that is the challenge that we have to face thank you I have four questions I want to respond to quickly and briefly first David David challenged me at the end of your question you said either your colleague was right or you were right which I'm right he's wrong she well she's still wrong but let me say that you don't need to rely on my of course extremely objective response you can Google this yourself there's a good piece it was done in arms control today with lots of citations and actually with lots of citations and explanation of how the Russians came to escalate to de-escalate and citing open literature and I can tell you this much on a classified basis that our our view of that policy particularly in the early 2000s was the policy was quite robust and reflected in a lot of different places in the literature but also unclassified so there's no question that there's a claritory part of their policy what you might say is what's the policy now because this was embraced as a method of dealing with an asymmetric conventional disadvantage that the Russians perceived from the 90s and they needed some way to secure their borders against the loss of the buffer of states which some of which had joined NATO and the robust character of the United States capability project force anyway what I would say is no question that's there the question is what are they doing now do they still talk about this they do not and when I accuse the Russian ambassador over a very nice luncheon in Washington this was an annoying policy escalate to de-escalate he said it's not our policy he didn't say any more but that's what he should have said so right now I don't think it's a policy but it sure as hell was and the worst part is what I talked about and that is the development of lots of systems to operate at lower yields in order to get to use nuclear weapons without getting into high kiloton yields okay how do we deal with Pakistan and disarmament well I have sympathy for Pakistani security dilemma not because Pakistan is right and India is wrong not because Pakistan is home to terrorist operations against India a lot right India is not innocent either and at least New Delhi and probably not Islamabad are not interested in having the United States or anything else come in and help them solve this security dilemma all I would say is the US perspective on this is that as one of our perspectives is that yes Pakistan has an asymmetric conventional force disadvantage vis-a-vis India and always will but its method of dealing with this repeats the mistakes of the Soviet Union and the United States over decades of building up a robust nuclear weapons capability with a diversified group of delivery systems so that they can operate at lower levels and engage right away be credible and therefore as being credible have a more effective deterrent for our perspective they are much more likely to get into a nuclear war by building and deploying the systems they are we would argue for them and their security that they would be better served by arms control to talk to the Indians about deployment transparency and other things of which there is a lot of literature with the US and other countries have gone through it some with success and some not so much but my answer is that the Pakistani answer and the Indian response is essentially an arms race and doesn't serve their interest that's how an American strategist might look at that with respect to the question on why would the United States or why would I I guess more precisely look at Iran and North Korea the same way we would look at Russia and presume to deal with them through deterrence well we only would to the extent we can't deal with them through defense and while we have some capability to deal with ballistic missiles that are of intermediate range and certainly short range we do have systems that will engage those kinds of targets we do not have systems that with any confidence can engage ICBM warhead at coming in at those reentry speeds so therefore we talk about in the Iranian case not so much deterrence now because Iran does not have any nuclear weapons to the best of our knowledge its ballistic missiles are coming along and we're talking about deploying to deal with them but we can mount a defense against Iran and for most scenarios and so we don't talk so much about deterrence unless they were to become a nuclear weapons state North Korea has moved into a gray area announcing the chairman did January of 2017 that he would North Korea the DPRK would develop an ICBM capability that would directly threaten continental in the United States all right maybe on the first day of that capability we could mount a defense so if we knew when they were attacking if we were there were no decoys mixed in if we knew pretty much the trajectories were going to be attacked we might be able to shoot down incoming RVs but on day 2 and day 50 not so much so we don't really have a defense against even a developed North Korean capability to deliver ICBMs against continental in the United States so I for one am an advocate of deterrence for dealing with North Korea because the alternative is defense or preemption and we don't have a defense and we ain't going to get one anytime soon that leaves preemption and I do not like American preemptive acts so deterrence fits with containment and meets my needs for the security of my family and my country and it doesn't involve us killing any North Koreans so I like it better than any other of the options that are available finally we're technically out of time this is a short answer great thank you on the question of trust I should say that the question of trust the way I have treated goes to self-interest when it is in our self-interest to trust as in an ally we do when it's not in our self-interest we do not states act in their own self-interest okay well what a fascinating conversation thank you very much everybody for coming thank you to both our speakers thank you for organising this very quickly winding up there's been all sorts of comments relating to whether we can be optimistic or pessimistic at the current time when we're thinking about nuclear war and peace in the age of Trump but more tangibly I think there's all sorts of reasons to stay positive about the possibilities of arms control and disarmament whilst recognising their very real challenges at the moment things that have been mentioned are we simply don't have any other option there's evidence from scrap of achievements that have been made in the past at moments of significant antagonism Bob was saying that it's technically possible but also it's politically not implausible might not be easy and they still have value and utility even if parts of them are broken it's still worth trying to get better agreements so thank you again everybody for coming and if you could just give a clap to everybody for being here, thank you very much