Professor Henry Sokolski presented seven nonproliferation proposals in testimony before the House Committee on International Relations in a hearing on March 30, 2004. Executive Director of The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, Prof. Sokolski teaches IWP's course on Strategic Weapons Proliferation: History, Technology, and Policy. His testimony follows.

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today on the Bush Administration’s nonproliferation policies.  Let me say at the outset that the Bush Administration is unique and deserves credit in emphasizing nonproliferation enforcement, particularly in the cases of North Korea, Iraq and Libya.  The example the Administration has set in these cases has prompted the most significant debate about how to strengthen nonproliferation since India exploded its first bomb in 1974.  We need to exploit this window of interest to toughen nonproliferation enforcement, close as many loopholes as we can, and do so in as country-neutral a fashion as possible.
 
Towards this end, the Administration itself has proposed a new, tougher set of nonproliferation rules.  By far the most important of these have to do with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and here nearly all of these suggestions can be found among the seven specific proposals the President made February 11, 2004 in an address at the National Defense University (NDU). These proposals are significant. Properly understood, they recommend a sounder reading of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), one that is truer to the NPT’s original intent and that deflates the mistaken treaty interpretations that have enabled North Korea, Libya, Iran, and earlier, Iraq to acquire much of what is needed to make bombs. 

President Bush rightly characterized these misguided views as a “cynical manipulation” of the NPT.    In specific, those who want to acquire or share nuclear weapons  technology have twisted the NPT’s call for the sharing of peaceful nuclear technology into an unqualified right to “the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information.”  This it clearly is not.  As the NPT’s first article makes clear, no nuclear-weapons state party to the NPT (the U.S., Russia, China, France or the United Kingdom) is permitted to “in any way… assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon state to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.”  Similarly, the NPT’s second article prohibits all other members of the treaty from “manufactur[ing] or otherwise acquir[ing] nuclear weapons” and from “seek[ing] or receiv[ing] any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons.”   When the NPT speaks, as it clearly does in Article IV, about “the inalienable right” of NPT members to develop nuclear energy “without discrimination,”  it explicitly circumscribes this right by demanding that it be exercised “in conformity” with these two articles.

For years, too little effort has been made to spell out what “in conformity” means.  This is what President Bush tackled in his February 11th address.  He rightly emphasized that, nations seeking to develop peaceful nuclear energy have no need for either materials that can be used directly to fuel bombs – separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium – or the uranium enrichment and the plutonium reprocessing plants required to produce these materials.  As such, he proposed that the world’s le