Former U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton

I wanted to talk in my opening remarks about the key threats that the United States faces in the world today and then obviously I will be pleased to answer any questions on any subjects you are interested in the in the second half. We have next year, what I think is going to be a very consequential Presidential Election and obviously it's entirely appropriate and typical for domestic issues in a wide variety of policy matters to be debated. But, I think that we should be actually spending a lot more of our time worried about International Security questions that I am afraid the election is shaping up to discuss; because these are some of the issues that are going to affect America over a long period of time. And while it's true that our current debate on Foreign Policy is dominated by Iraq, and in fact there is some politicians and political forces that would like nothing better to than to talk about Iraq incessantly 24 hours a day. History will record that the threats that we do face from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; nuclear, chemical and biological and ballistic missile system that can deliver them are going to be much more important for the future security of the United States and it's friends and allies, then what happens in Iraq. We are at a perhaps unique moment in history where United States faces no serious military threat. There is no country or combination of countries in the world that we need to worry about today, unlike most of the 20th century. Now this may be a very brief moment with the rise of China and India and the resurgence of Russia. But in the interim, what we face is not a national threat so much as it is a threat from a class of weapons. And it's one of the reasons that the because of the terrible destructive power of this class of weapons, that the Bush Administration undertook a vision of the National Security Strategy in the early earlier days of the administration to focus on what is really the most effective and perhaps the only effective way of preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction, and how to stop from coming into the hands of Rogue States and Terrorists groups to begin with. We don't face that kind of threat that we did during Cold War days of the nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union that would affectively end civilization in both countries. We face the threat of a small handful of nuclear devices or other weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Rogue States and Terrorists; this is the classic description of an asymmetric threat. But it's not the kind of threat that is possible to deter, and the classic sense that we understood during the Cold War. Regimes run by people like Kim Jong Il or Religious Regimes like the one in Iran have fundamentally different value that are not subject to worrying about the threat of retaliation and therefore deterrence is not as likely to work. The people who carried out September the 11th, were not only prepared to die in the course of their attacks, they wanted to die. Those are not people you could deter by the threat of retaliation. And even though there is no doubt that if we if we were attacked with weapons of mass destruction and did retaliate, that the retaliation would be swift and decisive it's not sufficient I think for the people who died in the original attack. It's not enough to say, "Well, it was only San Francisco." So that, while the threat was not as cosmic as it was during the Cold War, death by weapon of mass destruction is not the threat that the United States should allow itself to have to live under. And that's why when we look at regimes like Iran and North Korea taking the steps to make sure that they don't acquire the capability and the first place; or that if they do, we find a way to roll it back as soon as possible, are so important. I want to talk particularly about Iran and North Korea. This is a clear example that when President Bush referred to "An axis of evil", he wasn't simply indulging in a metaphor. These two states have cooperated closely over the years in their Ballistic Missile Program; they both used the same Soviet Era Scud technology, even when North Korea from the late 1990's was engaged in a moratorium on launch testing from the Korean Peninsula. In Iran, they were launching succeedingly more sophisticated versions of Scud prototypes and sharing that information with North Korea. We don't know whether North Korea and Iran have cooperated extensively on their Nuclear Programs. But we do know that both of them were customers of the A. Q. Khan Proliferation Network, - the network established by the father of the Pakistani Nuclear Weapon who took his entrepreneurial skills into the proliferation market and sold critical nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya, that we know of for sure, and perhaps other countries as well. So given that North Korea and Iran both depended at least in part or I think only in part of A. Q. Khan, it wouldn't be surprising if there were cooperation in the nuclear field as well. North Korea, just to take a brief picture of the regime North Korea is a prison camp. It's 17 to 18 million citizens or is deprived and depressed as any people on this planet over the last century. During the past several decades, the average height and weight of the North Korean Citizen has declined, think about that. Their average height and weight is going down even as Kim Jong Il's Regime aggressively pursues all the forms of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. North Korea is not only a prison camp, it's a criminal regime; it will do anything to acquire hard currency. It's the world's largest proliferators of ballistic missile technology, largely into the sensitive region of the Middle East. North Korea counterfeits American, probably other money in a way so sophisticated that the people at the treasury department who deal with this issue called their notes "Superbills" because they are so sophisticated meaning we don't really have a clear idea how much of our money they have counterfeited. North Korea sells illegal narcotics through their diplomatic pouches and until Japan cracked down in the past few years, North Korea controlled most illicit gambling activities in Japan. So this is a regime devoted to it's own survival and devoted to acquiring the weapons that can help keep it in power. It is happy and has been happy to negotiate about giving up it's Nuclear Weapons Capability. In fact it's even happy to commit to give up it's Nuclear Weapons Capability in exchange for tangible, economic and political benefits. It's done at several times, it's done it again most recently in February. It's very pleased to make these commitments to receive the benefits and then to violate the agreement. In 1994, it negotiated what was called "The Agreed Framework" with the Clinton Administration where it agreed to freeze the Yongbyon reactor does it sound familiar? To freeze the Yongbyon reactor and to give up it's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Within a very short time after signing that agreement that would have frozen it's Plutonium Root to Nuclear Weapons, it began a procurement program for industrial sized Uranium Enrichment Capability, the second the alternative root to nuclear weapons. So signing agreements to give up the Nuclear Weapons Capability is second nature to the North Koreans and they have done it again. And they have achieved as they did in 1994 commitments by South Korea and the United States to provide them with tangible economic and political benefits. Now, here is the real question. Do you believe that North Korea will ever voluntarily give up it's Nuclear Weapons capability? If you believe the answer to that question is "Yes", then of course, it makes perfectly good sense to negotiate with North Korea and an effort to find a way to induce them to do it. On the other hand, if you think they believe that giving up their nuclear weapons is the equivalent of committing regime suicide, as I do; then their conclusion has to be they will not voluntarily give up nuclear weapons. And I think that's exactly the circumstance we are in now. They have once again made the promise; they have taken some preliminary steps, and just true to the playbook that's in Kim Jong Il's desk in Pyongyang, South Korea and the United States and China have increased their levels of assistance. Thus helping to get Kim Jong Il out of the corner that he put himself in last year in October by testing a nuclear device. I think that the current strategy in North Korea is to play for time, hoping that that in 18 months after our elections, they will have a President in Washington who is even more willing to negotiate with them, more willing to compromise, more willing prop up the regime running this prison camp in North Korea. In fact, the past four to five years of diplomacy, unfortunately, have given North Korea what proliferators need more than anything else the one asset they can't purchase and that's time. Time is on the side of the proliferators. Time is not on the side of the United States and those who stand against proliferation. Time gives the proliferators what he needs to overcome scientific and technological difficulties in his program, time to reinforce his position in leadership, time to increase the threat level to nearby countries and to the world as a whole. Now one would think that China would have a vested interest in making sure that North Korea doesn't acquire nuclear weapons. And I do take China at it's word when it says, "It doesn't want North Korea with nuclear weapons because that could induce at some point Japan and perhaps other countries to acquire their own Nuclear Weapons Capability." And from a Chinese point of view, proliferation, and the consequent instability in North East Asia, would have to be detrimental to it's long range economic development goals because of the political instability that the proliferation would create. But China and so in that sense, the goals of China and the United States are congruent. Where there is a difference is that China fears that if it applies too much pressure to the North Korean regime to accomplish that objective that the regime is sufficiently fragile that it could collapse. Now, China supplies 80 percent to 90 percent of North Korea's energy. China supplies a huge amount of food assistance to North Korea, not out of humanitarian motivations, but basically they would rather feed the North Koreans on their side of the Yalu River than on the Chinese side of the Yalu River. And they see that if they were able to cut off these supplies in an effort to pressure Kim Jong Il to give up his quest for nuclear weapons, the result might be the collapse of the regime itself. And if there were collapse in North Korea, there is no doubt that it would be filled by United States and South Korea in an effort to stabilize the situation and that would lead to the reunification of the Korean Peninsula, which the Chinese don't want. They like having a buffer state in North Korea. They fear in a reunited Korea, that there would be American troops on the Yalu River; they have seen that movie before. They didn't like it the first time they saw it, they don't like it any better now. So the result is that the Chinese don't do much to pressure North Korea, much of what they need to do to actually bring a change. And I think therefore that we face an increasingly unpleasant set of options on how to deal with North Korea for truly serious about bringing their nuclear capability to an end. I think that the objective of the United States should be what it has been since 1945, - The Reunification of the Korean Peninsula, the elimination of Kim Jong Il's regime, the cleaning up of that prison camp and giving the opportunity for the Korean people to lead a decent and peaceful life. That is the only thing that's going to solve the nuclear problem in North Korea. That was even more on attractive of the use of force, because the dynamic is such. That is, as long as North Korea has this nuclear capability, it remains a threat not just in North East Asia. But because it is a government that will do anything for hard currency; it's entirely conceivable, it could sell a nuclear device to Al Qaeda or anybody else with the right price and therefore, would constitute a threat on a global basis no matter what the state of development of its missile program is. And it really is the risk of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction as much as the Rogue States themselves that should fill us with concern. And that's why Iran's steady progress toward to nuclear weapon's capability is as much or perhaps even more troubling than North Korea. Iran has been pursuing nuclear weapons in a clandestine fashion for close to 20 years. It has, although it's a signatory to the Non-proliferation Treaty, that where it's committed to be a non nuclear weapon state for most of this 20 year period and it has lied to the International Atomic Energy Agency, it's concealed information from the IAEA, it's withheld data distorted data, it's even gone so far as the bulldoze buildings and excavate hundreds and hundreds of cubic yards of dirt in order to hide traces of radioactivity from IAEA inspectors. Iran says that it's nuclear program is entirely peaceful. That it's just for civil nuclear power purposes because they say, "After all, we are running out of oil and natural gas in Iran." Several years ago, when I was in Government, I asked the Energy Department to look into this Iranian claim, that they were about to run out. And the Department of Energy experts studied the evidence they had and came back with the conclusion that, indeed Iran was running out of oil and natural gas. At the current rate of domestic consumption and export Iran will run out of natural gas in about 350 or 400 years. So of course it makes perfectly good sense to plan against that contingency. The fact is we know that the scope of Iran's activities across the entire nuclear fuel cycle is only explainable by the pursuit of nuclear weapons. We know this, not simply because of intelligence we know this now from the data which is publicly available, much of it is been published by the International Atomic Energy Agency. And I will just give two quick examples the IAEA came into the possession of documents that the Iranians had that show how you form Uranium metal into hollow hemispheres you know, like the hollow metal globes, we all as children. That is the way the joining of the two hollow hemispheres of highly enriched uranium that you put together what our scientists euphemistically call the physics package of a nuclear weapon. Put two hollow hemispheres of enriched Uranium together surrounded with high explosives detonate the high explosives. The uranium compresses, it forms a critical mass and you get a nuclear explosion. There is no peaceful use for fabricating uranium metal into hollow hemispheres and unless you think the Iranians just have a high level of interest in abstract nuclear physics, that's a pretty compelling piece of evidence what they are up to. Secretary Powell right before he left Office of Secretary of State, described the other information that we have about the way in which the Iranians are attempting to achieve a a critical stage in the development of their nuclear weapons program to form the nuclear war head in such a way that it can fit into a nose cone of the Ballistic Missile Program that they are developing. So that you have a reentry vehicle that can carry the nuclear warhead, carry the payload to it's target. Again, this has nothing what ever to do with civil nuclear power. Now over the past several years, we have allowed our friends in Europe, Britain, France and Germany; whom we call the EU3 to negotiate with Iran to attempt to see if there is a package of incentives or carrots as we call them at the State Department to that would induce Iran to give up nuclear weapons. And I can tell you after nearly four years of activity there is almost no carrot I can conceive of that the Europeans haven't tried to offer Iran; to give Iran to give this government entire Iran, the prospect of a new relationship with the United States. With the exception of a couple of brief periods, the Iranians have consistently rebuffed the European efforts saying that they had a right to this nuclear technology and then they tended to pursue it. The Iranians have continued to ignore these efforts at negotiations, they have failed to comply with multiple resolutions of the IAEA Board of Governors including one by an overwhelming majority about a year and a half ago, they are calling on them to suspend their uranium enrichment activity. That program was then referred to the Security Council. But we are by a nearly unanimous vote, the Security Council ordered Iran to suspend the uranium enrichment activity. An order which the Iranians ignored resulting in two sanctions resolutions much weaker than they should have been, I am sorry to say but with additional 60 day deadlines for Iran to suspend the uranium enrichment, two more resolutions that Iran ignored. So with respect to Iran, we can ask the same question we asked of North Korea. Do you believe that Iran will voluntarily give up it's pursuit of nuclear weapons? Europeans have believed that and for nearly five years they have tried to negotiate with Iran. And the practical answer that Iran has given, is take a hike. And that's because in Iran's view of it's place in the world, nuclear weapons are a trump card for it as well. Iran is a under the current government is aggressively pursuing a substantial increase in it's authority and it's region and beyond. It supplies, weapons and financial assistance to radical groups inside Iraq, it's going so far now is to begin supplying the Taliban and Afghanistan, once it's sworn enemy with weapons to attack the United States. Iran finances Hezbolla, the Shiite Militia group in Lebanon to the turn of around a $100 million a year perhaps more. Iran finances Hamas which is now on control on the Gaza Strip, even though Hamas is essentially a Sunni Islamic Party and the Iranians who are Shiites. Secretary Rice has called Iran; the World's the Central Bank for Terrorism. So if you look at this pattern of behavior; support for terrorism, pursuit of nuclear weapons, this is the mark of a government that knows the direction it's moving. And indeed its current President, Ahmadinejad has said very clearly what some of his objectives are. He has called for Israel to be wiped off the map. You know it's, you look back in history and wonder sometimes when somebody gives you a signal what they are about to do and you ignore it, - what why does it take to look at people and say, you know sometimes people actually say what they mean. When Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf", people said, "Well its this is lunacy, this isn't going to happen." When he marched into the Rhineland in 1936, Britain and France weren't willing to do anything about it. They weren't willing to use force to push the German military back, just as said today. Britain and France and Germany are not willing to contemplate the use of force in Iran. In fact, this nearly 5 years of diplomacy, - unsuccessful diplomacy failed diplomacy, has put us in a very difficult position. As in the case of North Korea, our options are now limited. I think the only secure route to preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons is to change the regime in Tehran. And this has been our historical experience as well at a period when regimes undergo fundamental change, they have been we have been able to induce some of them to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons only apartheid regime fell in South Africa, and a truly democratic government took over. That new government decided it would give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Now when the Soviet Union collapsed, new governments in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus returns Soviet Nuclear Weapons to the Russian Federation. And it's possible that a new Government in Tehran would also conclude that they were better off, they are not pursuing nuclear weapons rather than continuing to do so. I think regime change in Iran is feasible. There is enormous dissatisfaction in the country. Since 1979, the Islamic Revolution has grossly mismanaged the economy and there is evidence of enormous economic dissatisfaction. The young people of Iran are educated and knowledgeable and they can see that there is a different kind of life that they could lead free of the harsh way of rule of the current Government and there is a substantial ethnic dissatisfaction in Iran as well. So that the possibility of regime change, I think is real. But regime change is difficult, its complex, it could take a long time and as Iran drives toward the day when it does have its own Nuclear Weapons capability, time is becoming very short. And that's why as a last resort and a very unattractive fashion; the use of military force has to be an option for us as well would not involve that kind of ground forces that are engaged in Iraq today. It could be done I think by breaking the nuclear fuel cycle at several critical points, be a air strikes. I don't recommend this alternative I don't look forward to it. It is at best the last resort. But if the question is, do you prefer to have an Iran with nuclear weapons or to use military force to stop it? Then I think it becomes an option that we have to consider. Because the Iran that we see today is increasing its influence, increasing its power and so far there is no indication that it's prepared to slow down. Now both Iran and North Korea have one other option, they can come to their senses and they can conclude that they be better off giving up the pursuit of nuclear weapons than continuing to go after them. Unlikely as it may seem, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya did reach this conclusion after the over throw of Saddam Hussein, he looked at the situation and erroneously as it turned out, but decide perhaps he might be next. And in connection with the number of other things we did that basically showed we knew that he was engaged with the A. Q. Khan Proliferation Network, Gaddafi came to the United Kingdom and the United States and after some difficult negotiations, agreed to give up his nuclear weapons program and he did it the right way. He didn't drag out negotiations the way North Korea and Iran have done, where we don't even have the beginnings of an agreement on what our verification mechanism for North Korea and Iran will be. Gaddafi opened up this facilities to the CIA and SIS, who were able to go where ever they wanted to Libya and verify that what we thought we knew or didn't know about his nuclear program. And then, so great was his determination to prove to us that he was giving up the pursuit of nuclear weapons that Gaddafi allowed, an American ship to come to Libya where his nuclear program was boxed up and brought to the United States. The Iranian the Libyan nuclear weapons program today lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and there is plenty of room next to it for the North Korean Nuclear Weapons Program and the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program, if they make that decision. Let me say in the effort to stop these countries from getting nuclear weapons and the effort to stop other countries that are watching the Iran and North Korea experiences, I think we should try and have as many political allies as we can from Europe else where on the world certainly hope we can use the United Nations, but make no mistake about it. This proliferation will not be stopped by Brussels, will not be stopped by UN, if there is anybody that's going to stop it, it's the United States of America. Thank you very much.