State Department Reorganization Raises Concerns

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week last week authorized a merger of the her department’s arms control and nonproliferation bureaus, prompting congressional interest and concerns from two former Clinton administration officials who said the move would diminish the department’s arms control focus (see GSN, Feb. 1).

The State Department has not released any specifics on the plan, other than to say it would fold the two bureaus into a single unit and that the effort is intended “to best address vital national security issues that the United States will face in the future and the priorities we have established to address them.”

“Many decisions on the planned merger remain to be made, including the makeup of the merged bureau’s offices and the new name,” a State Department official said.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Holum in letters last week to the chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressed concern that the plan would “abolish” the arms control bureau and “marginalize” its missions and expertise by merging them with a larger bureaucracy.

The consolidation would, they wrote further, “undercut nonproliferation” by softening focus on those issues and by undermining international perceptions of the U.S. commitment to its arms control obligations.

“At a crucial time, when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is up for its five year review, the further eclipse of arms control would be seen as a signal the United States is less than serious about its own NPT responsibilities, weakening the regime just when it is most urgently needed to deal with nuclear ambitions in North Korea and Iran,” they wrote.

When the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency was moved into the State Department in 1999 after congressional and interagency negotiations, Albright and Holum wrote, separate nonproliferation and arms control bureaus were maintained “to nurture the distinct methods and skills of both disciplines.”

The administration now is seeking to dismantle the department’s capability to negotiate future arms control agreements, they wrote.

“Over the past few years arms control has not been among the administration’s top priorities. But downplaying an activity is one thing; disabling ourselves from ever pursuing it is quite another,” the letter said.

Other nations have criticized the Bush administration for its opposition to some international arms control requirements. They have cited its unwillingness to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; to commit to irreversible, verifiable nuclear arms reductions; and to negotiate a verification protocol to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (see GSN, Dec. 10, 2001). In addition, in 2002, the United States withdrew from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (see GSN, June 13, 2002).

Following the U.S.-Russian signing in 2002 of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, a senior Bush administration official said that agreement signaled the end of formal U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations (see GSN, May 16, 2002).

Henry Sokolski, who runs the nonprofit Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, released a report last week that recommended reducing the number of arms control bureau directorates from around 20 to about five and shifting some arms control treaty verification activities into a separate, existing verification and compliance bureau.

Sokolski, who was the deputy for nonproliferation policy at the Defense Department during the George H.W. Bush administration, argued that the arms control bureaucracy should play a supporting role to the nonproliferation mission.

“If you’re going to have an office where you already have tensions between NP and AC, you’re going to have to say who’s got the supporting role and who has the lead,” he said. 

Giving arms control a supporting role makes sense, he wrote, because U.S. policy focus has shifted toward preventing countries from acquiring strategic weapons capabilities, or nonproliferation, rather than verifying “the existence and number of strategic weapons and control or reduce their numbers.”

In addition, unilateral and multilateral counterproliferation programs have arisen “to deal with weapons of mass destruction militarily after they have proliferated,” he wrote.  

He said further that some arms control bureau interests have been at odds with nonproliferation bureau objectives, such as whether to focus Chemical Weapons Convention implementation activities on U.S. and Russian stockpile elimination or on inspecting suspected treaty violators.

“There was a lot of … fighting with AC over what the priorities should be,” he said in an interview. For the arms control bureau, “the priority should be the disposal of stockpiles in Russia and the United States and for the nonproliferation bureau it was getting an inspection in Iran.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee also has taken an interest in the reorganization and plans to hold a reconfirmation hearing for the appointed head of the new bureau, according to a Senate source.

The State Department has not yet said who would run the combined bureau, but insiders expect that Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker, who is also managing the nonproliferation bureau, would receive the nod.

Questions regarding the reorganization would likely come up that hearing, but the committee also could insist upon separate hearings regarding the plan, the source said.

“The reorganization is a sufficiently big change that it will be treated like a reprogramming [of funding]. So there will be a reprogramming notification [from the department] that comes up, and is treated like any other reprogramming, which means that … you could have a hearing on it if you want. You could put a hold on it if you want,” the source said.

“How that issue and confirmation hearings intersect remains to be seen. It might depend upon how they intend to do the merger,” the source said.

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