 I would like to acknowledge the first Australians on whose lands we meet and whose culture we celebrate as among the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Professor Gareth Evans, Chancellor of the Australian National University, Distinguished Directors, Honourable Delegates, welcome to beautiful Gandal Hall. It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the General Plenary Session for the 17th Annual Asia-Pacific More United Nations Conference. The plenary is the most important event on the Amonk calendar, as it is the only time that all the committees get together. Today's session is designed to challenge you in ways that will build upon the experiences of committee debates and negotiations. You will have the opportunity to debate along with your nation's other representatives. More importantly, each country will be drawing upon the intelligence briefing materials, which may vary between countries. Today is sure to be a day of fiery and eloquent debate. Firstly, we will hear an address from our keynote speaker, the Honourable Professor Gareth Evans. Then after a short break, we will debate the draft resolution that you should have in front of you. I will now introduce our keynote speaker for today, Professor Gareth Evans. Among his many accomplishments, Professor Evans is Chancellor of the Australian National University and has co-chaired two major international commissions. The first in 2000 to 2001 was on intervention and state sovereignty, and the second in 2008 to 2010 was on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. The resulting report, Eliminating Nuclear Threats, was published in December, 2009. Professor Evans previously spent 21 years in Australian politics, 13 of them as a cabinet minister. Professor Evans was foreign minister between 1988 and 1996, and was best known internationally for his roles in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, concluding the Chemical Weapons Convention and initiating new Asia Pacific regional economic and security architecture. Please join me in welcoming to Amon 2011 Professor Gareth Evans. Well, Madam Secretary-General and delegates, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to be here talking to you. You guys might not be calling the policy shots at the moment on any of these issues, but it's not gonna be very long before you are in this country and many others around the region. And I frankly think my time is much better spent talking to you about some of these policy issues, not a little bit further up the hill, but there it is. Great to be here and looking forward to discussing backwards and forwards with you, the risks that are associated with the present stockpiles of nuclear weapons and the possibility of their proliferation and the appropriate policy responses to that. And doing that partly just because of the incredible relevance, salience of these policy issues out there in the world at large, but partly also, of course, to set the context for your debate later on this morning about a particular terrorist nuclear scenario. Let me begin by saying that of all the ways in which it's possible for us as human beings to do harm to each other, of all the risks to human security that are out there, there's really only two that are capable of really destroying life on this planet as we know it. There's only two really, really existential risks. One of them, of course, is associated with climate change, but the other is the risk of causing destruction to life on this planet as we know it from the explosion of nuclear weapons. Let me tell you that bombs can kill us a hell of a lot faster than CO2. It really is extraordinary under these circumstances that there's so much complacency among policymakers and publics around the world on this particular issue. Yes, the Cold War has been over for 20 years and with it, the real tension of Soviet Union versus United States face off. Yes, it's perfectly true that it's 65 years since a nuclear weapon has been exploded. Yes, it's true that you can't un-invent these things any more than you can un-invent any other destructive or other technology. Yes, it's true that there's a little bit of a feel of crying wolf about the number of times that Doomsday scenarios have been promoted about situation in North Korea or Iran or India, Pakistan. But I think we should remember that the boy who cried wolf did eventually end up getting equal. And I think we should take very, very, very seriously the nature of the risks that are involved in this particular policy area. And the risks in question are really come in four big categories. And let me just go through those categories with you. The first are the risks associated with existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons. At the moment, there is something like 23,000 nuclear weapons in existence all around the world with a combined destructive capability equal to 150,000 Hiroshima sized bombs. And we can all remember the destructive and we all know about the destruction that was associated with that one small bomb in Hiroshima and another one three days later in Nagasaki. Of those 23,000 nuclear weapons, 95% of them are held by the United States and Russia, 22,000 in fact of the 23. The other 1,000 weapons, the other nuclear arms states between them, China, United Kingdom, France, the three other players outside the non-proliferation treaty, the three big elephants, if you like, outside the room, India, Pakistan and Israel, and coming up in the rear, but importantly North Korea with a very small stockpile less than a dozen, probably only seven or eight nuclear explosive devices, but nonetheless seriously credible risk flowing from that. It's important to appreciate what the destructive capacity of these weapons are in real life situations. If a standard 300 kiloton size bomb were dropped in the course of a Pakistan-India war, for example on Mumbai, and we might be closer again to something like this happening as a result of the latest terrorist incident, which I'll come back to in a few minutes, two days ago, but if such a size bomb were to be dropped on Mumbai, for example, to take just one of innumerable scenarios one could contemplate around the world, the assessments are that the immediate deaths caused just through sheer blast force impact would be 1,100,000 people and the number of casualties people badly hurt by burns and radiation, would be double that, 2.2 million people. So just one bomb dropped in a nuclear exchange between those two countries would have incalculably gigantic consequences. And of course 300 kiloton bombs by no means the biggest that exist. During the Cold War you sometimes had bombs that were 10 or even 20 times that size and there's plenty in the nuclear arsenals of the major countries that at least double or triple that size. So the destructive capability is absolutely horrifying. But what I think we need to appreciate that with all those weapons lying around it really is a bit of a miracle that something hasn't gone wrong with the utilization of them so far. If not necessarily through deliberate use in a war situation, then by accidental use in a human era or system era kind of environment. We're learning now bit by bit as the years go on much more about just how many times we came close to catastrophe during the Cold War years as a result of human era or system era problems of this kind. I'll just give you two or three examples. One was the occasion when very well known US Senator Chuck Percy went to visit that US NORAD command and control center buried in the middle of a mountain in the Midwest. And they put on a demonstration for him of what it would look like on all those screens if there were in fact a Soviet missile invasion. Screens would light up, dots of light all over the place and alarm bells would be ringing, people would be scaring. Unfortunately, someone put the demonstration tape in the wrong slot. And instead of it just being confined to the briefing room it went out as an all systems alert to the entire American military system that there was in fact an occurring Soviet attack. And it took something like 15 minutes to unwind that and get the story out that no, this was a mistake. Leaving just about 10 minutes left before the decision window ran out for a nuclear response by the United States. That was just one such example of that kind and there's at least half a dozen other documented ones of mistakes of incoming flights of birds for incoming missiles and so on. There was another example, actually right at the very transition period of the end of the Cold War when a Norwegian weather satellite was launched in right very close to the edge of Russian Soviet territorial space and something had gone wrong in the communications through the normal civil process, the notification such a launch was happening. And the whole Russian system responded with a very, very high level alert because they thought this was a missile attack being launched upon them and all their weapons scenarios had it that it would be extremely likely if the United States were launching a attack that'd be something very close in in the region first up to knock out the communication systems of Moscow. And it was advice was actually given to Yeltsin who was then the Russian president that this was unequivocally a US attack out of a clear blue sky and that the US, the Russians ought to respond accordingly. Mercifully, Boris Yeltsin was not too plastered at the time and made his own judgment that it was just inconceivable that anything like this would happen in the political environment as it then stood and demanded that things be kept on hold until there could be some very rapid communication and the reality understood. But I think my favorite example of all of just how crazy this was during the Cold War years when we were in this period of so-called stability, mutually assured destruction, mutually assured standoff, nothing was really going to happen because the stakes were so high. My favorite example of just how close we did come to catastrophe was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, not the part of that crisis that you probably know from reading about but the part that's come to light really quite recently. The truth of the matter is that there were in fact a number of Soviet nuclear tipped missiles and other weapons on Cuban soil and on Russian submarines in the neighboring waters at the time that it was first discovered that there was a ship steaming towards Cuba armed with further missiles, which is what the Missile Crisis was all about. So there's stuff actually there and we now know. And one such nuclear weapon was in the form of a nuclear torpedo in a Russian submarine that was cruising the waters around Cuba and subject to scrutiny by American naval forces that had put a blockade around the island. And one point during this very tense standoff period, the US naval vessel in question dropped a depth charge nearby, thought nearby, Russian submarine in the vicinity not in order to do any damage but just to give it a little bit of a hurry up and to let them know that the US was there. In fact, it dropped closer to the submarine than anyone had anticipated and it did knock out all that submarine's communications back to Moscow. And under those circumstances, the protocol that existed as to what the commander of the submarine should do, the protocol was that it was left completely in his discretion as to whether he would find a target and fire his nuclear weapon or whether he'd hold back. The notion being that if your communications were knocked out, you were probably in a wartime scenario and that it was time to use every weapon in the Soviet armory. The captain of the Soviet submarine in question wasn't all that comfortable about taking on his own shoulders. The decision was to whether to fire that weapon or not. So he decided to call in these two deputy commanders to have a vote as to what they should do. So let me tell you that it was by a two to one vote on that particular Russian submarine on that morning that World War III was averted. It came as close as that. And the truth of the matter, of course, is that as more nuclear powers have come into the game, India, Pakistan, particularly in recent years, their command and control systems are frankly not nearly as sophisticated as those that we were led to believe during the Cold War years kept the situation sort of sane and stable. I was given a little bit of a sense of this and it's not entirely unrelated to your scenario later this morning. In the aftermath of the last big Mumbai attack, which we now know was attributable to Al Qaeda affiliates coming out of Pakistan, which many people were killed just two, three years ago, I was visiting both Delhi and then Islamabad wearing my hat as president of the International Crisis Group and pretty good access to senior policy makers. And I was trying to get a sense of just what the risk of a major conflict was and what the risk would be if there did turn out to be a conflict between these two countries of that turning into a nuclear exchange, given that both of them were now nuclear armed. I met with a room full of senior defense and foreign affairs officials and put among other things that question to them and was told, look, don't trouble your pretty little head, don't really worry about this kind of stuff because we all know that the stakes are extraordinarily high. We all know that if it were to lead to a nuclear exchange, there'd be catastrophic existential risk to both countries and it's just not going to happen. We can't be absolutely sure there won't be some kind of confrontation, but we in fact have in place mechanisms to ensure that things never get out of hand to that extent. In particular, I was told, we have a hotline or two hotlines, one between the top military commanders of India and Pakistan and a second hotline between the political leaders and you can rest assured that however tense things have been over the last six or seven weeks, it's not going to escalate in the way that people fear. Well, that was all very well. 10 minutes later, going out to my car with one of the more junior officials in the room had been sitting up the back, just sort of tugged my sleeve and said to me very quietly, I think to get a complete picture of what the current situation, you were perhaps to be aware that although those hotlines certainly exist, we are now nearly eight weeks into this crisis and neither of those hotlines has been used once between any of the officials involved. And that's the reality of the situation. You don't necessarily have people sitting down calmly, rationally deciding to deploy a nuclear weapon with all the catastrophic consequences of it. But you can have systems that are so weak, you can have the potential for human misjudgment and system error, so weak, so fragile, so vulnerable, the crazy things happen. And the truth of the matter, with this stockpile being the size as it is, even though there was a dramatic diminution down from about 70,000 weapons in the first years of the end of the Cold War, it's been stuck since at the present level of around 23,000, in fact there's some indications that it's increasing with India, Pakistan and China not holding back right now as we speak. The truth of the matter is when you look at that situation, it's not a matter of inherent system stability. It's not a matter of the inherently good statesmanship and sanity of the political leaderships of all the relevant countries that we have not had a nuclear catastrophe of this kind for the last 65 years. It's not a matter of any of those things, it's a matter of sheer dumb luck, sheer dumb luck that it hasn't happened. And frankly, none of us can be confident that that luck will continue in the future. That's all about the risk associated with the present stockpiles and those with their fingers on those triggers and those launch systems. There's a second category of risk, of course, which is associated with proliferation, new players coming into the game to add to the five original nuclear weapons states, the three elephants outside the room India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. There is a possibility, we can talk about this in question time if you'd like, as I've got nuanced views about this, there is a possibility that Iran will not just play games with nuclear capability but actually break out and acquire nuclear weapons. And if it does, we can unquestionably foresee a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. And we can see the dominoes falling, the tide turning in favor of that nightmare scenario that was contemplated back in the 1960s when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was first being talked about. That unless there were some disciplines of this kind introduced, the world would have within 20 or 30 years, 20, 30, 40 nuclear weapons states. We're not there at the moment, we've held the line of relatively small numbers of nuclear weapons states, but the risk is very real of a breakout unless we do some of the policy things that I'll come to in a moment. The third area of risk is associated with the widely anticipated, at least until very recently, expansion of civil nuclear energy, partly of course in response to the climate change issue and the recognition or the argument in many parts of the world, the only way you're going to be able to create a base load energy generating capability which doesn't have those carbon consequences is through a dramatic expansion of nuclear and it has been widely anticipated that by 2030 there'd be something like double the world's present stock of 400-odd nuclear power stations. Events in Fukushima of course have put a question mark about that, although we saw in the Chinese press commentary just a couple of days ago that China for one is not being spooked by that and is determined to go ahead with its own civil nuclear program and I'm pretty sure that other countries will as well. So we can certainly anticipate some kind of significant expansion. That's not in itself of inherently very serious concerns as far as nuclear weapons proliferation is concerned. Of course there are safety environmental issues of a separate kind, which I'm not for the moment talking about. But one of the concerns is a central concern if there is a renaissance in civil nuclear energy, if there is a dramatic expansion. One of the very real concerns is that a number of new players in the nuclear energy game will be tempted to acquire their own fuel-making capability to build fissile material-making facilities in the form of uranium enrichment facilities or plutonium reprocessing facilities. And if that happens, you have sprinkled then around the world a number of what have been described as bomb starter kits because the crucial element, if any country is getting into the nuclear weapons business, the crucial element is that supply of fissile material. And it's really quite troubling to think that there might be additional sources of such material coming into the game rather than just reliance on the existing manufacturing capability that countries need to have the uranium refined produced up to the standard that's needed to go into nuclear power facilities, which is only about 3% enrichment for the technical people among you, whereas weapons-grade uranium is about 90% enrichment. But the same facilities that can get your stuff to the industrial-level standard of material are exactly the same facilities that can enrich this stuff up to weapons-grade, which is, of course, why there's been so much anxiety about what Iran has been doing with enrichment facilities that arguably it didn't need because there's plenty of available supply of industrial-grade uranium on the world market. So there's a problem of this kind associated with civil nuclear energy. And the last risk area, the four that I'm talking about is the one that's most directly and immediately related to the scenario that I understand you've just been given for now or so ago and we'll be debating later this morning. And that's, of course, the risk associated with nuclear terrorism. It's possible to overstate the risk associated with people getting hold of such weapons and there's been a lot of fairly lurid commentary over the years suggesting that this was a very, very high level of risk indeed. I'd put it as smaller, but certainly, certainly, certainly not negligible. Why not negligible? Because we know very well, of course, that there are many groups out there, Al Qaeda affiliates, franchisees, if you like, who, despite all the huge amount of intelligence and other effort that's gone into eradicating this phenomenon the last year, do last years since 9-11, do represent a serious threat in the sense that there's all sorts of people out there with the intent to do the maximum possible damage to just about anyone at all in the West, certainly and indeed among their co-religionists as well. And the only question is, does that intent can it be translated into capability and actual delivery of weapons? We know all about the capacity to deliver ordinary, ordinary explosive devices all over the place all the time. It's continuing to happen. It happened two days ago in Mumbai, as you've been reading in the press or watching the news in the last 24 hours with 18 people being killed by three bombs being planted in incredibly volatile part of the world at the moment. But what if those, that particular terrorist group or groups that were associated with that attack two days ago, what if instead of planting three or four ordinary common and garden TNT-type bombs around the place, what if they had got hold of somewhere or had been able to manufacture somehow just an ancient Hiroshima sized nuclear bomb. Not 300 kilotons, 15 kilotons, 15 to 20 kilotons. A simple implosion device for which the engineering recipe is out there on the web and you would only need a team of 15 or 20 or so qualified engineers to do all the necessary finely calibrated grinding and putting together will be needed to make such a device work provided you had the necessary number of kilograms of fissile material either highly enriched uranium or pertaining to play with. What if they'd been able to engineer and put together such a device or had been able to find one off the shelf somewhere in one of those perhaps missing suitcase bombs that you're a little bit bigger than a suitcase bomb we're talking about but one of those bombs that perhaps have been insufficiently stored or accounted for in the form of Soviet Union. That's part of the story that you're dealing with in your scenario this morning. What would be the implications of taking a van with such a device, 15 kT yield into the middle of Mumbai? How many deaths would we have seen two days ago if that had gone off? Well these calculations have been done and a device of that kind being exploded at ground level not up in the air would result immediately in that city given the population concentration of something like 480,000 deaths and injuries, casualties, burns, radiation, sickness and so on of over another 700,000. So instead of 18 people being killed you would have had nearly 500,000 with another 700,000 injured and of course apply that same logic to New York and compare and contrast putting a device of that kind in Times Square as compared with running a plane into the World Trade Center to 3,000 deaths in the Trade Center but hundreds of thousands deaths and casualties if it were done with a nuclear device. And it's not impossible to do this. I doubt that there are full sized weapons around these days there's been so much attention being devoted to those old stockpiles in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere but there's certainly a hell of a lot of unaccounted for highly fissile uranium and plutonium and certainly the engineering capability around to do this. You've also got of course the possibility of diversion if not finding one of these weapons from the Cold War years but what about the possibility of diversion in Pakistan? Let's say from the existing stockpile of weapons there and one has to say this is not a fanciful scenario because even though again all sorts of assurances are being given by both Pakistani military and civilian officials to the United States and the world at large about the incredibly rigorous safeguarding, security lock up measures they have for their weapons. We now know that there's an increasing proportion of really quite militant jihadists assuming roles in the Pakistan military not just as was the case for many years at the very low sub officer level but now even up to Brigadier level we know now it's been subject of many recent reports and analyses. We know that there is this kind of sentiment there so the possibility of an inside job finding a way of unlocking the doors and getting some of this stuff out into terrorist hands is not a fanciful scenario. Not a readily imaginable scenario but it's not fanciful. So the risks are there and it's very, very, very important that the world respond to them. So what about the appropriate policy response to all of this? I should say one other thing I suppose because it's in your scenario about radiological weapons or so-called dirty bombs which is another classic potential weapon in the hands of potential terrorists. Really this is a much more plausible scenario much more readily credible to imagine than the really quite complex scenario of an actual full scale nuclear weapon. A radiological bomb, a dirty bomb simply involves getting hold of a handful of radio nuclides measured in grams rather than kilograms of a kind that are quite readily available right across the industrialized world in both medical use and in industrial use. Season whatever it is, 137, my chemistry is always lousy in this case but there's plenty of this stuff around and what you do in constructing a so-called dirty bomb is basically just get a handful of this material and strap it on top of a conventional explosive set off the conventional explosive and scatter the radio nuclides into the air as a result. The damage you can cause with this kind of device is much, much smaller of course than the damage that's associated with a full scale nuclear explosion but and the casualties would probably be measured in at most sort of World Trade Center type dimensions rather than the scores of hundreds of thousands that are associated with a fusion device going off but the psychological impact of that amount of radiation being put into the air in the middle of a major city can readily be imagined and it is a very, very available weapon of terror and to me it's something of a miracle that that particular weapon of terror has not so far been used by any of these groups that are out there with the motivations that they undoubtedly have. Anyway, so what's the policy response to this whole spread of nuclear stockpile and proliferation, terrorism, civil renaissance problems? I think the three basic points to make the world has to get serious about a policy response in three different areas about the building blocks for both non-proliferation disarmament about non-proliferation itself and about disarmament itself and I'll rattle quickly through a menu of policy responses that are appropriate right now in each one of those areas but first let me just say that we're partly seeing the world getting serious about this issue as a result of three or four sort of watershed things that have happened in recent years. One was in fact the Canberra Commission Report of 1996 which did make an Australian initiated report about the risks associated with the continuing presence of nuclear weapons and the need for disarmament. You might have thought that there'd be many such reports out there but there weren't in fact before this with anything like the credibility of this one because it had in its membership, I remember this because I put it all together in the last months of the then Labor government. We had people like Robert McNamara, the former US Defense Secretary, we had people like General Lee Butler who'd been former head of the US Strategic Air Command and responsible for the whole delivery of the US nuclear armory. We had a whole bunch of other really, really major well-known international figures, not all of whom actually necessarily believed that nuclear disarmament would be a good thing who had some kind of residual nostalgia, some of them for the Cold War years and the stability that that had supposedly generated but that commission report which was unanimous came out and said that whatever the credibility might have been of that nuclear deterrent environment in the Cold War, there were huge risks associated with the continuing possession of these things and we had to get serious about disarmament. That was followed, nothing much happened in response to that even though intellectually it did make quite a major impact. Until much more recently in 2007, we had the first of a series of extremely influential opinion articles in the Wall Street Journal, not a left-wing newspaper by the so-called four horsemen, the four statesmen, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, former Secretary of State, Reagan administration, William Perry, Secretary of Defense and the Democrat administrations, Sam Senator Sam Nunn, Kissinger, Schultz, Perry and Nunn, these very famous series of op-eds which have continued through to just a few months ago the most recent of them. What you had was a group of very, very hard-nosed United States Cold War realists who had no track record of sentimentality about anything Henry Kissinger first said. Saying exactly as the Canberra Commission had done is that whatever contribution these things might arguably have made to stability during the Cold War years in the world as we now see it out there, it's in nobody's interest to continue the possession of nuclear weapons. It's critically important that a series of steps be rapidly taken to move towards and to ultimately achieve a world without nuclear weapons. That was extraordinarily influential politically as well as intellectually all around the world but it only began to be translated into effective action with the election of Barack Obama at the end of 2009, taking office in 2010 with the result that we have seen in the Prague speech of Barack Obama, the articulation for the first time of a specific operational agenda designed to ultimately achieve a world, as he said, not in my lifetime but to ultimately achieve a world without nuclear weapons and very serious efforts being put into negotiations with Russia and with respect to a whole range of other issues that I'll come to in a second. The other thing that's happened in quite recent times which I think has also made a contribution to the world beginning to get serious again about this issue after a long lapse of complacency and difference and inaction was the report of the commission that you've heard about, possibly know about, eliminating nuclear threats which was sponsored by the Australian government with the Japanese government, which I co-chaired and former Japanese Foreign Minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi which again had an all-star international cast and what this report did was not just give a familiar description of the kind of risks, the kind that I've been talking about and a sort of scattergun statement of what needed to be done. I think the real utility of this report and those of you who are interested in this subject might well want to get a hold of it. It's available freely on the web. The utility of it was to articulate a very clear set of concrete action plans, short-term to 2012, medium-term to 2025, longer-term beyond, which were designed to sort of get this thing out of the realm of vague generalities and wish lists into very specific and concrete policy form. And it's the content of this report that I guess I'll be reflecting as I quickly now track through with you the appropriate policy responses on these different risk areas. As I said, the first policy response is to get serious about the building blocks for both non-properation and disarmament. One such building block is the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was negotiated a few years ago, but is still not in force, even though it's the subject of a voluntary moratorium by every country in the world, broken only in recent times by the North Koreans. But so long as that treaty remains unratified by the necessary number of countries and not in force as a result, there is a risk. But this really quite fundamental building block for a nuclear-free future and a non-properation, a proliferation of free future will be undermined. It's sort of hanging on the politics of the US Senate at the moment, and those politics don't look very good in the context of the next year. And we've got China and India sort of refusing to take any steps until the US goes first, and it's very, very important, I think, that we break the impasse and at least bed down this part of the equation. A second crucial building block is a treaty that's being negotiated or sought to be negotiated in Geneva at the moment, the Conference on Disarmament, called the Fisar Material Cut-off Treaty, which is a complicated way of saying a treaty to stop the future production anywhere in the world of weapons-grade Fisar material. At the moment, that negotiating forum operates on a consensus basis so that any single country can stop the negotiation, even getting started. And Pakistan has been, I'm afraid to say, shamelessly playing that consensus-blocking role over the last couple of years, with arguably India and China comfortably hiding behind it, because none of those countries at the moment want to put themselves in a position of denying themselves the capability of building more weapons. That's the long and the short of it. But if we are going to stop further proliferation, we are going to move towards a nuclear weapons-free world, this is a crucial building block ingredient. The third building block is an area that again comes very close to your scenario discussion later this morning, and that's nuclear security, the physical security of weapons and Fisar material in the many, many parts of the world where this is a real question mark. In fact, in this particular, because obviously without confidence in your capacity to lock this stuff up away, you can hardly be confident that you're going to either be able to stop the terrorist risk of access to this material, or the proliferation risk of potential new states wanting to get access to it, or indeed the risk of misuse of other ways and the implications of that for disarmament. You've got to address this issue of security. This is the one area in which I think that the world has pretty much got its act together over the last decade, with particularly post-911, with a lot of formal agreements being reached, including UN Security Council Resolution 1540 on cooperation to stop the terrorist access to this kind of material. The implementation, which has been going on for a rather longer period of what's called cooperative threat reduction, enterprise initiated by the US, mainly to address the problem of what you did with this poorly secured weapons and nuclear material in the former Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and that's still continuing very strongly to this day with a lot of financial support in the US and others. And you've got a whole variety of other conventions, agreements, and informal arrangements, including intelligence cooperation and so on, that are being put in place or being reasonably effectively implemented. All this security area was the subject of the Barack Obama initiated nuclear security summit, which took place in the first half of last year in Washington and attracted a very high level attendance of heads of states and government. I was there hovering around the margins of this very impressive gathering indeed, and in the context of that particular gathering, there was again agreement, not so much on new specific measures, but agreement on more effective implementation of the measures that were out there. So I think we're seeing a seriousness of approach on the security issues, which I wish were replicated elsewhere. So much for the building blocks, the second big area of policy attention that is absolutely crucial is just addressing the problem of proliferation itself. And in that context, there's again, three or four things that we need to focus on. One is holding the line against the most likely or imminent or possible cases of proliferation. And that means right now, the situation in Iran. And we can perhaps talk again, as I said, later on, I don't want to take up all the time talking at you about how that's poised at the moment, but clearly if there is a breakout in Iran, that's going to be very, very serious for the proliferation regime as a whole. Second thing that needs to be done is strengthening the Non-Proliferation Treaty itself. Every five years, there's a Non-Proliferation Treaty NPT review conference. We had one last year, which was a success in the sense that it was not a failure, but hardly a success in the sense of getting agreement about any new measures to strengthen the effectiveness of that treaty. One such measure, and I'll mention only one, as Australia has been promoting this very strongly, is for there to be universal embrace of what's called the additional protocol. It's worth saying a quick word about this because you probably hear all the time talk about safeguards, nuclear safeguards, nuclear safeguards. The traditional system of safeguards under the NPT Treaty and as enforced by the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, traditional safeguards are just a form of accountancy whereby you put all sorts of mechanical widgets on people's nuclear power stations and internationally inspect those widgets, those monitoring devices from time to time and have other physical inspections, all with the object of ensuring that there's no diversion of nuclear material from inside the nuclear power plant to some external military use. It's an accounting exercise. But if you're going to be, and that's what safeguards traditionally have been all about and when we talk about Australia and uranium being sold only subject to safeguards and safeguards, there's safeguards, that, that's what it's about, that accountancy exercise. It's important, but obviously not the whole story because if you're going to be serious about stop-impliferation, you've got to have an international monitoring and inspection system which moves beyond accountancy to actual detection. You've got to have ways and means of inspecting premises that you think are being used to create enriched uranium, maybe buried in a mountain somewhere, far, far away from an ordinary nuclear power station. You need, if you get intelligence about a possible weapons making engineering program to be able to go to the country and question and actually penetrate the system, get access to the papers, the potential sites and make your own international judgments about what's actually happening. At the moment, a number of countries have signed up to the additional protocol which commits themselves to that kind of inspection regime. But of course, most of the countries that you would most want to be subject to such an extended regime, like for example, Iran, have not done so. So there's a critical need to strengthen that and for there to be consensus generated about that. There's also a critical need if you're getting serious about non-proliferation to strengthen the institution of the IAEA itself and just generally to have in place the kind of resources of inspection laboratories and personnel that would make realistically achievable the objectives that are so often just loosely stated in the abstract. There's one other important thing that needs to be done in the non-proliferation area if we're going to get serious about stopping the risks for the future. And that is to try and put some mechanisms in place to ensure that even if there is a number of new, even if there are a number of new countries getting into the nuclear energy game or expanding their existing energy capability, there won't be new fissile material manufacturing or plutonium reprocessing plants established with just purely a national badge on them. The whole issue here is of either what's called multi-lateralizing the fuel cycle, finding ways of creating international machinery that will ensure that any such plants in the future are under international control, rather national control with all the assurances that would give. Or ensuring that in some other ways there are guaranteed fuel supply sources available from external sources so that countries don't have to do their own thing. The final area we need to get serious about is disarmament itself. Not least because unless the existing weapons powers are serious about disarming, albeit not tomorrow, at least in the long run, it's very, very difficult for them to preach to the non-nuclear weapons states the virtues of not acquiring arms. All the world hates a hypocrite. All the world hates double standards. And this has been an area of rampant double standards for decade after decade after decade. So quite apart from the inherent problems with the existing stock powers reducing them eventually to zero, the disarmament agenda is a critical one if we are going to get the political momentum generated for a serious containment of future proliferation. Getting to serious disarmament is not easy. You will be aware of some NGO efforts like the Global Zero campaign and so on who are talking confidently about a timeline of getting to zero by 2030. It's just a matter of a step progression all the way down and if we're serious about it, we can get there. It's a bit more complicated, I'm afraid, than that. The trouble is, as we said in our report and spelt this out very carefully, it's one thing to get to a minimization scenario, a dramatic, dramatic reduction in the number of nuclear weapons. It's another thing again to get from very low numbers to actual zero. Let me spell that out. What we said was the first objective ought to be a very, very serious minimization objective so that we target, by 2025, a dramatic reduction from 23,000 nuclear weapons in the world, stockpiles to no more than 2,000 with the United States coming down from 9,000 weapons to 500, with Russia coming down from 14,000 nuclear weapons again to 500, and with all the other weapon states having no more between them than their present 1,000. We said, we thought that this was a realistic objective that was achievable and the capacity to destroy the weapons physically at reasonable cost could be managed on that sort of scale. We said that should not be the only objective for 2025. It's not just a matter if you want the world to be safer than it is now and to reduce some of those risks we're talking about. There's two other things that've got to happen by 2025 or hopefully much, much sooner than that. One of the other things that's got to happen is a fundamental change in nuclear doctrine so that all the nuclear weapon states are signed up to and actually believe it and mean it, signed up to a no first use commitment that they will never be the first to use nuclear weapons and you can appreciate the significance of that. It doesn't take nuclear weapons out of the equation completely but if that's seriously intended, it reduces the risk very significantly of some kind of nuclear holocaust. And the third thing that has to happen to reach a serious minimization target is for a no first use declaration and a reduction in numbers to also be accompanied by a dramatic reduction in the number of weapons that are actually deployed and available for immediate operational use. At the moment, there are thousands of such weapons actively deployed by most of the nuclear weapon states and the idea would be by 2025 to reduce that to a very, very, very tiny minimum, maybe a few dozen weapons on submarines that are survivable in the event of some sneak attack on the countries that it feels it has some defensive retaliatory capability but very, very low numbers and with all those, the rest of them put away in storage, dismantled, taking quite a long lead time to put together in usable form. And associated with that, hopefully achieved much, much sooner than 2025, a dramatic change in the alert status of these weapons. At the moment, you've got something like 2000 Russian and U.S. weapons that are still, and this is a really lunatic truth, still even 20 years after the Cold War on high trigger alert, launch on warning alert with just a decision window of a few minutes available for the President of the United States or Russia to respond to information or misinformation, perceived information about an attack from the other side. You still have UNIS presidents carrying around with them this football so-called as mechanical device with all the codes that would need to be put together and triggered for there to be such a response because there are so many of these weapons on high alert and because we're still living to that extent in the Cold War scenario. There was an extraordinary revelation a few months ago that for nearly six months of Bill Clinton's presidency, he had in fact been entrusted with a little card with the code numbers on them to use this football machinery, but had lost it. Presumably left it in a pair of trousers somewhere I don't know, but that's another story. Which just demonstrates the lunacy of all of this, but at the same time it's surreal Dr. Strangelove quality of it. So one of the things that has to happen is obviously that alert status has got to be changed. So minimization by 2025 in all those ways and then you set your sights on the final elimination and getting as fast as possible, fast as possible to zero. I don't think it's possible, as I've said, to treat this as a kind of step progression. So having got to the minimum, you just keep on going and five years later you get to zero. The problem is getting from minimum numbers to zero numbers runs into a series of major qualitatively different obstacles. Obstacle number one is psychological. A number of countries just can't bear the idea of losing that nuclear weapon status. The so-called testosterone fact, and I think you might describe it, France being conspicuous among them. Second consideration is geophysical, geopolitical realities. Unless we can resolve some of the neighborhood tensions in the Middle East and in particular South Asia over the issue of Kashmir, for example, which has been continuing such a volatile trigger for discontent between India and Pakistan. Unless we can resolve some of these issues, we're just not going to have people's mindset as willing to pass up the comfort blanket for whatever the utility in practice may be. And I want to hang on to that comfort blanket. And then we've got technical issues, technical issues of verification, technical issues of enforcement. How can countries be absolutely confident that nobody is going to cheat if they do give up all their weapons? Given that you can outlaw things like this, but you can't uninvent them. Of course you can't. The intellectual knowledge is still there. The capable of recreation. How can you have verification mechanisms in place so that everyone else has got at least 12 months notice if someone is up to no good in terms of reestablishing their nuclear armory? And then if you do get that notice, what's the enforcement mechanism that you can put in place? Given the problems of the exercise of the veto power in the security council under the present arrangements, how could we be sure that there would be an effective universal enforcement strategy in place? These are all very serious problems that have to be resolved in the context of creating a world ultimately without nuclear weapons. But we sure as hell ought to be making a start right now on addressing those problems. I'm in favor not of trying to negotiate right now a nuclear weapons convention of the kind that's been widely promulgated by NGOs and a number of other countries around the world. I think that would be premature to think that we could have anything like the success rate that we've had with the land mines convention or the cluster munitions convention, for example, which some people use as a model for this. The truth of the matter is this is an infinitely more complex issue than any other such issue on the international stage. But we can be wrestling right now with the intellectual issues of verification enforcement and so on that are going to be so critical if we are going to have an ultimately negotiated world without nuclear weapons. And it's not too soon to begin that process. And it's certainly of course not too soon to begin the process of serious negotiation between the United States and Russia without which frankly nothing else is going to happen with the other nuclear powers. The other nuclear powers say why the hell should we move to further diminish our stockpiles when we've only got X hundred ourselves and the United States and Russia each got thousands and thousands of these weapons. Tell that to China, for example, they're just not going to do it. The trick with the other states is to ensure they don't increase their armories meanwhile. But getting the United States and Russia to the next stage of a negotiation, they just had one successfully concluded negotiation, the New START Treaty that I've read about which have reduced the number of deployed strategic weapons by some margin. But it hasn't resulted in the destruction nor will it result in the destruction of any one of those weapons. They all just go into storage and they're capable of being wheeled out and used again. We're going to get those numbers down. It's going to require a completely different kind of negotiation. Obama is trying to initiate that, get it started with the Russian side at the moment but it's running into all sorts of stumbling blocks, ballistic missile defense, perceived conventional weapons imbalances and so on and similar stumbling blocks stand in the way of Chinese negotiations with the US in due course of this kind. So don't let anyone kid themselves that it's going to be any kind of an easy path even if a much greater degree of policy consensus could be developed than what we now see. But it is absolutely critical that we get serious about non-proliferation and disarmament in all these ways. And I think the best simple way of describing why it's so important is to go back to the mantra that was articulated in just three or four sentences by the Canberra Commission in 1996 which was re-articulated in the Blitz Commission a few years later, re-articulated in our commission report and I think it just captures what's involved here in a nutshell and the mantra is as follows. So long as any country retains nuclear weapons others will want them. So long as any country has nuclear weapons they are bound one day to be used by accident or miscalculation, if not by deliberate design. And any such use would be catastrophic for life on this planet as we know it. If only we could get that message into the heads of our decision makers and get them acting seriously accordingly we've got a chance of addressing this very, very serious risk to the planet. I just hope to God that your generation does a hell of a lot better in advancing this objective than mine has. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Mary Akring, a first year at AAP. You talked about building up nuclear abilities in Iraq, leading to a Middle Eastern arms race and also about security. Do you think that the building of nuclear ability particularly in Iraq will be able to balance the Middle Eastern powers? And if so, could that lead to a sort of peaceful tension in the region? I'm not in the business of expressing any kind of confidence in nuclear balances as a way of ensuring stability. We had that nuclear balance between the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War years. Okay, there wasn't a war. People were very cautious on both sides but I hope I've demonstrated to you how hellishly close we came to that. And I think in any sort of current environment of new players and fragile command and control systems and just other dynamics at work we'd be dramatically accelerating the risk component if we thought that one sensible way forward would be to just have a balance of this kind, a balance of terror, a balance of fear of mutual instruction and so on. Certainly we know that Israel would not tolerate any other player in the region with nuclear weapons. For better or worse, Israel regards the possession of even one or two weapons by a state like Iran as constituting an existential threat to it. And while I think Israel has been dissuaded by the United States among others and by its own judgment of the way all hell would break, loosened and the terrorist activity if it were to act preemptively against Iran right now. My view and I think most people's view is that if Iran were to actually weaponize and cross the big red line, acquire weapons, that the political pressures and psychological pressures in Israel would be to make that impossible to tolerate and we would see military action being taken. Hopefully these issues are going to be thrashed out and the situation in this region diffused in the Middle East weapons of mass destruction free zone conference that was agreed to be held to initiate such a process at the last NPT review conference. But unfortunately as time has gone on since early part of last, in the middle of last year, there's been zero movement towards actually implementing that and recent events have not made life any easier in terms of the situation in Syria and elsewhere of getting any movement on that front. That said, I mean I did say something about Iran a couple of times and sort of left that dangling. I've been very closely involved in recent years with the Iran issue when I was president of the National Christ Group. I've been to Tehran several times. I've talked to senior Iranian negotiators as well as US and European Union negotiators. So I've been not so close to it the last year or so but I've a pretty clear idea of the dynamics of this. And my view is that while Iran has certainly been quite shameless in acquiring a virtual nuclear capability in building its capacity to produce FISA material and probably doing a bit of back room research as well. It's certainly done that in the past. And while it's duct and weaved and dissimulated in the IEA and the Security Council response as well and while it thoroughly deserves as a result the sanctions that have been put upon it. My own judgment is that I don't think Iran will in fact cross the big red line in any reasonably foreseeable future. I think they wanna get to the stage where they can demonstrate, they can do it, construct their stuff, thumb their nose at the rest of the world, spook the region a bit but not actually go that extra step. Why do I say that? One, for the reason I just spelled out about Israel I think they know that were they to cross that line they'd be zapped pretty quickly and with the Israelis having up to 200 nuclear weapons and the Iranians by definition one or two it's not a very good equation to get into. Secondly, I think they believe they run out of any kind of residual support not that there's very much left for them these days from Russia and China. That's the screws have been tightening from Russia and China in the last year or two previously they're being dusted with a feather by those countries in the Security Council. Iranians know they've been incredibly isolated. The third thing that follows from that is that there'd be a sanctions regime of absolutely merciless quality put upon them. That's already been quite tough in recent times but it would get tougher still and that would have real consequences. Fourth reason is that I think they do understand and appreciate that were they to cross that line other countries in the region are not going to tolerate Iranian hegemony for very long and you will get, not the Egyptians certainly the Saudi Arabians maybe the Turks wanting to get into the game too with consequences we can all imagine. The final reason which I always mention on these occasions and people think I've gone a little bit nuts but to me it's not irrelevant and that's the religious reason. The Iranians are actually quite credible when they say they have a very strong religious objection to weapons of mass destruction. They talk the talk. I mean in a jar says disgusting and so on but they've also walked the walk in a sense because at the time of the 1980s around Iraq war when they were being assaulted with chemical weapons by the Iraqis the Iranians did not actually respond in kind and I know from many conversations I've had with Iranians there's a real intensity of passion about this which I think has to be taken seriously. Of course some people say Fatwa is a situation ethics today's Fatwa is tomorrow's different story and don't take any account of this but I think sometimes we can be a little bit too cynical about these things and there is another explanation of what's going on in Iran which is not about totally impeccable commitment solely to peaceful purpose. It's a bit more subtle than that. A bit more worrying than that but that's very different from saying the Iranians are going across the line. I think the Europeans now after a long period of doubt the Americans even sense that this is the reality about current Iranian policy and that's one of the reasons why it's gone off the boil a bit in terms of what you're reading about in the press in terms of the reaction to Iran. There's still an impatience and a distaste for the way Iran's playing the present game and still a belief which I shared with the sanctions regime would have been kept very, very tough indeed but that's not quite the same thing as saying that their hell bent on a path of weaponization with all the horrible flow from that and sometimes I do think it is important to in all of these discussions, keep a fairly nuanced approach to it if we are going to get a solution and certainly as with North Korea the door must be held open for further negotiations on this. You can't slam it shut that way lies madness. Hello, I'm the President of the United States of America. I just have a question. We talked about medicine elements when nuclear weapons were issued as a result of systematic error in this communication. How important do you see extremely multilateral communication between what they have as the incredible to have their nuclear weapons? Yeah, I think it is important that some kind of serious multilateral dialogue get started sooner rather than later. We all know that the basic dynamic is the bilateral dialogue between the U.S. and Russia and unless and until we get some dramatic forward movement there it's going to be very, very difficult to get others to sign up to any substantial cuts of their own but we badly, badly need a kind of complex strategic dialogue not only the bilateral bits but the multilateral bits so that we get some shared understandings of the present nuclear states not just the five weapon states under the NPT but all at least the basic eight the five plus the three India, Pakistan and Israel about how to move forward in the future and what kind of timetable they're prepared to work to. There's a little bit of that discussion occurring in the context of the follow on to the NPT review conference the United States have been trying to convene meetings of the P5 to talk about there's not with much success, substantively so far. There is a proposal in our report that the much maligned Geneva negotiating process show a bit of initiative and create a genuine forum a multilateral forum in Geneva for the weapon states too because they're all members of the CDT you don't have the problem in that context of India, Pakistan or Israel being outside the treaty framework of the NPT they should get together and negotiate this and at least start talking seriously about issues like transparency I mean one of the basic problems how the hell are you ever going to get a serious elimination disarmament discussion going when certain countries just won't be in the slightest bit transparent about what the size of their stockpiles or their deployment or even their basic doctrine is I mean Israel is the worst example because it refuses to acknowledge it has any nuclear weapons at all whereas the whole world of course knows that does and Israel doesn't mind the whole world knowing in particular it's Arab neighbors knowing but it wants to pretend that it doesn't have them so that's the problem China is not in the slightest bit transparent it says we're transparent about doctrine but not about numbers because to tell you what our real numbers are you'd be incredibly surprised at how small they are and that would create pressures upon us to increase our stockpile well, yes guys but they have adopted a minimalist approach but that's no reason why they can't be a hell of a lot more transparent and that will be a critical precondition India and Pakistan are equally not transparent at all and that we have a pretty fair idea of how many nukes each of these countries have but it's a critical precondition for any serious disarmament negotiation it's also the case that that kind of dialogue multi-electrical dialogue could be important in getting started some serious discussions about what a verification and enforcement regime would actually look like in the longer term future if we do get to a world of very low numbers and a world of zero how can we ensure we stay that way? It's not too soon to commence any of that process at the moment but I wouldn't be putting too much money on some rapid movement towards serious negotiations on that front I think it is going to have to await the next round at least of major achievement by the United States and Russia and that's what we should be primarily focusing on at this day Our hypothetical crisis today relates to nuclear weapons and terrorism and I thank Gareth Evans for speaking so fearlessly and frankly about the issue of nuclear weapons in regards to terrorism during law school I worked on Australia's longest-running terrorism trial 18 months long, eight accused, 13 semi-trailer loads worth of evidence and there were these guys that planned to bomb Sydney and I think that it's important to realise that terrorism is not something that is happening in other countries, only overseas it's something that faces our own hometowns and so I say this point to point out that even though this crisis today is hypothetical the issues are very real the issues talked about regarding nuclear weapons is very real the issues regarding terrorism are very real and even though the terrorism trial I worked on didn't involve a nuclear weapon the next one might So once again, I thank Gareth Evans for highlighting the seriousness of these issues and I look forward to the rest of the day Enjoy a 20-minute break