Thank you Chairman Dorgan, Senator Domenici and distinguished members of the Committee for giving me the opportunity to comment on the National Nuclear Security Administration's Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation programs and its 2009 budget request. I have a written statement that I would like to submit for the record.

This morning I will summarize the three main points in my statement. My opinions have been shaped by 34 years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and nearly 20 years of practicing nonproliferation with my feet on the ground in places like Russia, China, India, North Korea and Kazakhstan.  Much of this I have done with the strong support and encouragement of Senator Domenici.

1) The proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons capability is growing. Today, we face a nuclear threat in North Korea, nuclear ambitions in Iran, a nuclear puzzle in Syria, recently nuclear-armed states in Pakistan and India, and an improved, but not satisfactory, nuclear security situation in Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union. The danger of nuclear terrorism is real. This is not a fight the United States can win alone. We cannot simply push the dangers beyond our borders. It is imperative to forge effective global partnerships to combat the threat of nuclear terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Meeting these challenges requires diplomatic initiative and technical cooperation. The United States must lead international diplomacy and DOE/NNSA must provide technical leadership and capabilities. The NNSA has done a commendable job in nuclear threat reduction and combating nuclear proliferation. However, funds to support these activities are not commensurate with the magnitude or the urgency of the threat.

2) CTR began with Nunn-Lugar followed by Nunn-Lugar-Domenici legislation directed at the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union. We must stay engaged with Russia and the other states of the Soviet Union. Much progress has been made, but more needs to be done. We have to change the nature of the partnership to one in which Russia carries more of the burden.

We should expand the cooperative reduction programs aggressively to other countries that require technical or financial assistance. The nuclear threat exists wherever nuclear materials exist. These materials cannot be eliminated, but they can be secured and safeguarded. We should more strongly support the International Atomic Energy Agency and provide more support to countries that try to implement UNSCR 1540 to prevent nuclear terrorism, for example.

We should enlist other nations such as China, India, and for that matter, Russia, to build a strong global partnership to prevent proliferation and combat nuclear terrorism. China and India have for the most part sat on the sidelines while the U.S. has led the fight. Russia has not engaged commensurate with its nuclear status. These efforts are particularly important if nuclear energy is to experience a real renaissance.

3) The hallmark of all of these efforts must be technology, partnership and in-country presence. The DOE/NNSA has in its laboratories the principal nuclear expertise in this country. It should be applauded for sending its technical experts around the world, often in very difficult situations (I met up with the DOE team in North Korea on a bitterly cold February day). However, both for structural reasons and budgetary shortfalls, that technical talent is slowing fading away. We do not have in place the necessary personnel recruitment or the working environment in the laboratories or the pipeline of students in our universities to replenish that talent. I strongly support the NNSA's Next Generation Safeguards Initiative, which is aimed at tackling this problem.

Mr. Chairman, when I first visited Russia's secret cities in 1992 shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, I feared that its collapse may trigger a nuclear catastrophe. The fact that nothing really terrible has happened in the intervening 16 years is in great part due to the DOE/NNSA programs that your are considering today. We must now be just as innovative and creative to deal with the changing nuclear threat today.

In my statement I also mention the implications of my recent trips to North Korea and to India. However, since I am out of time, I will need to leave those for your questions.

Thank you for your attention.

Stanford, Calif. - The visit this week of South Korea's new president, Lee Myung Bak, offers a rare opportunity to put the American-Korean relationship back on a more solid footing. President Lee, who won a decisive victory in last December's election, has expressed views on the security alliance, a bilateral free trade agreement, and policy toward North Korea that are thoroughly compatible with US interests. And Mr. Lee's authority was bolstered by his party's substantial victory in legislative elections April 9.

The question is whether Washington is poised to take advantage of this convergence of views.

For the past eight years, a major perception gap between Seoul and Washington has been painfully evident. Our governments often worked at cross-purposes in the six-party talks to denuclearize North Korea. Progressive governments in South Korea encouraged peaceful coexistence with the North through a pattern of unreciprocated engagement. For much of that time, the Bush administration sought to isolate and pressure Pyongyang into relinquishing its nuclear ambitions, and it made little effort to conceal its hopes for a regime change in Pyongyang.

When Washington decided to move its military headquarters out of Seoul in 2003, many Korean officials suspected that the Americans were just eager to get troops out of North Korean artillery range. President Roh Moo Hyun at times seemed interested in carving out a role as a balance wheel between the major powers in Northeast Asia. Meanwhile, the US was preoccupied by problems in the Middle East, and some American officials wondered if the US-Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance could long survive when one party dismissed the North Korean threat while the other viewed it as increasingly menacing.

Now comes Lee, a former mayor of Seoul and Hyundai construction executive with a reputation for tough-minded, pragmatic conservatism, eager to correct what he described as the misguided priorities of past ROK administrations. In a recent meeting with New Beginnings, a group of American policy experts on Korea, Lee appeared determined to accord priority to the alliance with the United States, exact a measure of reciprocity from the North, forestall major economic concessions to the North until it abandons its nuclear activities, and design a more ambitious global role for his country.

Surely Washington welcomes Lee's priorities. The tougher question is whether it can work effectively with him to translate shared aims into concrete results. This will pose three particular challenges.

First, on the nuclear issue, undeniably, bilateral talks with Pyongyang can facilitate diplomatic progress. There are dangers as well. Disconnects with the Japanese have deepened, and their officials occasionally complain about American "betrayals" in the discussions with Pyongyang. The North has consistently sought to use the negotiations to split the US and its allies. Success in the talks requires coordinated diplomacy between the US and the North's neighbors – especially with South Korea. In the past it often appeared that South Korean presidents worried less about Pyongyang's nuclear activities than Washington's possible reactions to them.

Today, there is the danger that South Korean conservatives may fear that Washington will ultimately acquiesce in North Korea's nascent nuclear status. No attempt to contain, let alone eliminate, the North Korean nuclear program can succeed unless the US and ROK governments work closely together. This will require a higher standard of candor and mutual trust in bilateral consultations than has been typical in recent years.

Second, the ratification of the Korea-US free-trade agreement (FTA) is a vital piece of unfinished business. Lee appears prepared to resume imports of US beef (halted due to mad cow disease concerns), essential to moving the FTA forward in Congress. Unfortunately, the Democratic presidential contenders are pandering to special interests on trade issues in a way they will probably later regret. Both sides have strategic and commercial interests at stake. The US stands to gain much more in increased exports from the FTA, while the Koreans hope that liberalizing foreign access to their economy will make them more competitive. So there is much to gain by nailing down this deal. A failure to complete it would be a significant strategic setback for our partnership.

Third, there is the question as to whether our political cycles will again diverge. For the past eight years, the US has been led by one of its most conservative administrations, while South Korea was headed by its most liberal president. Missteps were, perhaps, inevitable. And they have persisted, even though some effective work was done behind the scenes to forge cooperative arrangements on trade and force-deployment issues.

Lee's election signifies a conservative swing in South Korea's politics, while polls suggest the US may be moving in the opposite direction. Thus, a felicitous convergence of US and ROK official perspectives could prove fleeting. Yet the interests we share in expanded commerce, in modernizing our alliance, and in approaching the North with a joint strategy for "denuclearization" are compelling. They transcend partisan politics. They serve our respective national interests. The time to capitalize on them is now.

The International Studies Association has awarded CISAC Co-Director Scott Sagan the 2008 Deborah “Misty” Gerner Innovative Teaching in International Studies Award for his simulation exercise that he has taught to Stanford undergraduates for the last decade through PS 114S “%course1%.” The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and United Nations Security Council (UNSC) simulation, which Sagan developed, helps students understand the complexities of international negotiations as they relate to national interests. The Gerner award recognizes an instructor “who has developed new or significantly refined effective teaching in the discipline” with particular emphasis on “pedagogy that engages students with issues of war [and] peace.”

Under Sagan’s guidance, the simulation has been successfully exported to Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Reed College and the University of California-Berkeley. “Students tell me the simulation is the highlight of their academic experience,” said Ron Hassner, an assistant professor of political science at Berkeley who is a CISAC visiting professor.

As many as 150 students, acting as delegates to an international negotiation on a nuclear weapons issue, participate in the three-day simulation. Sagan tries to make the exercise as realistic as possible—students are required to dress formally and adopt the language and posture of diplomats during private negotiations and plenary meetings. In preparation, students research and write memoranda outlining the goals that should guide their assigned country’s behavior, and what strategies their delegation should adopt to achieve its goals. Delegates also receive briefings and guidance from heads of state who are played by faculty and visiting scholars with experience in the real world of diplomacy and arms control negotiation.

Guest participants have included Ambassador Thomas Graham, President Bill Clinton’s special representative for arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament; Ambassador James Goodby, Clinton’s special representative for the security and dismantlement of nuclear weapons, chief negotiator for nuclear threat reduction agreements, and vice chair of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks; and Keith Hansen, a member of the U.S. negotiating team for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Traditionally, a law student has played the role of a UNSC undersecretary for legal affairs, to guide students through the process of drafting an international agreement. “Aside from enriching the learning experience, contact with these diplomats also contributes a solemnity and realism to the simulation,” said CISAC visiting Professor Ron Hassner, a Berkeley assistant professor of political science who teaches the class.

At Berkeley, almost 500 students have participated in Sagan’s simulations. Three years ago, Hassner said, Graham was so impressed by the students’ achievements during the exercise that he invited two student “ambassadors” to join him at the May 2005 NPT review conference in New York City. “These students had never been on an airplane, let alone visited the United Nations,” Hassner said. “Students tell me the simulation was the highlight of their academic experience.”

The award is named in honor of Deborah J. “Misty” Gerner, a University of Kansas political science professor and an internationally noted expert in Middle Eastern conflict who died of cancer in 2006. She was 50 years old.

For more information about the award: Deborah Gerner Teaching Award.

New Beginnings: Post-Election Prospects for U.S.-ROK Relations, a non-partisan study group of distinguished former American senior officials and experts formed by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the New York-based Korea Society, will release their report on how to revitalize the U.S.-Republic of Korea alliance on Monday, April 14, in Washington, DC., followed by a presentation in New York on April 15.

The report is being issued on the eve of the arrival in the United States of newly elected and inaugurated President of the Republic of Korea Lee Myung-bak. The report provides an analysis of the significance of the change in administration in South Korea and recommendations to American policymakers on steps to improve the partnership between the two countries. It reflects what the group learned during extensive meetings in Korea in early February, including discussions with then President-elect Lee and his senior advisors, as well as leading businessmen, security officials and experts, journalists, the leadership of the then ruling party, as well as senior American diplomats and military officials.

The full text of the report is available below. Press coverage of this project and the report can also be found in the links below.

New Beginnings was formed in anticipation of both the change in power in Korea and the upcoming U.S. national elections. The group plans to brief the presidential campaigns of all the major candidates on its recommendations, as well as key congressional leaders and senior administration officials.

Panel discussions by members of New Beginnings, looking ahead to President Lee’s visit to New York and Washington, will take place on:

Monday, April 14th, from 3:00-5:00 PM at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (Rome Building, Room Auditorium, 1619 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC) hosted by Don Oberdorfer, Chairman of the U.S.-Korea Institute at John Hopkins University.

Tuesday, April 15th, from 10:00-11:30 AM at Korea Society: New Beginnings: Post-Election Prospects for U.S.-ROK Relations (950 Third Ave, 8th Fl, New York, NY 10022) hosted by Evans Revere, president of The Korea Society.

Study group members are:

Michael H. Armacost, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan and former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs; currently the Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow at Stanford University

Stephen W. Bosworth, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, and a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea

Robert Carlin, a visiting scholar at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a former State Department Northeast Asia intelligence chief

Victor Cha, director of Asian Studies and D.S. Song Professor at Georgetown University, and former director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council and U.S. deputy head of delegation for the Six Party Talks in the George W. Bush administration

Thomas C. Hubbard, McLarty Associates; former U.S. ambassador to South Korea

Don Oberdorfer, chairman of the U.S.-Korea Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and former longtime Washington Post foreign correspondent

Charles L. Pritchard, president of the Korea Economic Institute in Washington, D.C., and former U.S. ambassador and special envoy for negotiations with North Korea

Evans J.R. Revere, president of the Korea Society and former principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

Gi-Wook Shin, director of Shorenstein APARC; the Tong Yang, Korea Foundation, and Korea Stanford Alumni Chair of Korean Studies; and professor of sociology at Stanford University

Daniel C. Sneider, associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University, and formerly a foreign affairs correspondent and columnist

David Straub, Pantech Research Fellow at Stanford's Shorenstein APARC, and a former State Department Korean affairs director

After the exhausting and dispiriting testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to Congress this week, it is now even more starkly apparent that we are stuck in Iraq with no exit strategy. The plan of the Bush administration, and of these military and diplomatic leaders, is still to "stay the course" and hope things will finally take hold in Iraq: hope that the competing Iraqi parties and factions will finally settle their biggest political differences; hope that the Iraqi Army will finally show the ability to face down threats to security and hold the country together; hope that "strategic patience" will eventually allow us to draw down our forces to a level that will not stretch the U.S. Army to the breaking point. But as a group of mid-level American military officers who served in Iraq observed in a devastating edited volume of this name, "Hope is Not a Plan."

To be fair, the U.S. military surge in Iraq (and its attendant shift in strategy on the ground), has achieved many positive things. Iraqi and American casualties have fallen sharply (by more than two-thirds on some measures) from their peak levels in 2006 and early 2007. The Iraqi army and police have grown by roughly 100,000, in addition to some 80,000 local community militia forces ("concerned local citizens") armed and paid by the U.S. As a result of increased force levels and a dramatic change in strategy toward engaging the Sunni Arab communities (including forces once active in the resistance), Al Qaeda has been driven out of most Sunni Arab communities, particularly in Anbar province, and its fearful grip on that section of the country has been broken. This has been the most important achievement of the surge. In many Iraqi urban neighborhoods, both in Baghdad and in other cities, particularly in the once lawless Anbar province, Iraqis have been able to return to the streets and to something approaching normal commercial and social life.

One of the biggest blunders has been the analytical failure to see that the Shiite Islamist political party's political triumph in Iraq would bring a strategic bonanza to Iran--effective control of at least the southern half of Iraq. These are not small achievements. Unfortunately, in the absence of a larger and more tough-minded strategy, they are also not sustainable ones.

John McCain may have been right for the moment when he declared to the Kansas Veterans of Foreign Wars on April 7, "We are no longer staring into the abyss of defeat." Unfortunately, in the context of continued political stalemate in Baghdad and the absence of a viable political strategy for stabilizing Iraq, the second part of his sentence simply does not follow: "... and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success." Rather, as Petraeus and Crocker unwittingly made clear, what we can look forward to is the indefinite commitment of 130,000 to 140,000 American troops, holding together a country that would otherwise shatter into much wider bloodshed. Hope is not a formula for success.

The truth is, we remain trapped in an awful quagmire. No less staunch a Republican than Senator Richard Lugar observed in the Senate hearings this week, "Simply appealing for more time to make progress is insufficient." Senator McCain lacks the candor or clarity of mind to recognize that absent a new political strategy, we are stuck in a holding pattern, propping up a badly divided and corrupt political class in Baghdad. At least he has had the candor, however, to acknowledge that, under these circumstances, American troops might have to be in Iraq for another 10, 20, or 100 years.

Senators Clinton and Obama, in turn, recognize that the United States cannot maintain large numbers of American troops in Iraq for anything like that long. Not only will Iraqi resistance forces rise up against it again, but these commitments are draining our fiscal and military vitality.

Even if we were to leave Iraq tomorrow, it would take years to rebuild, re-equip, and reset the American armed forces to their pre-war levels of capacity and readiness. In a survey of American military officers by the Center for a New American Security, 88 percent thought the war had stretched the US military dangerously thin. And then there is the question of what kind of Army we will be left with as we have to lower standards further and further to find the "recruits" to sustain this military quagmire. CNN reported on April 7 that one out of every eight new recruits requires a waiver because of past criminal behavior or other prior misconduct. The percentage of high school graduates among recruits has declined to 79%. Retired General Barry McCaffrey said recently that ten percent of Army recruits "should not be in uniform." And when the Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army testifies (as General Richard Cody did last week) that repeated deployments are placing "incredible stress on our soldiers and their families" and that "our readiness is being consumed as fast as we can build it," you know we have a serious problem.

Yet Clinton and Obama don't see the other side of this awful reality: that a swift, unconditional timetable for withdrawal of the kind they propose (on the order of one to two combat brigades per month) would likely see Iraq slip back into all-out civil war -- unless something dramatic changes in the political landscape there.

We urgently need an exit strategy from Iraq, but it cannot simply be to declare we are leaving by some fixed, early date -- and goodbye and good luck. Without the prospect of a substantial American military drawdown on the near horizon, Iraq's political factions will lack the incentive to make the hard choices for a sustainable compromise that might hold the country together. But in the absence of an intense diplomatic effort to broker this compromise, the prospect of imminent American withdrawal will not induce compromise, but rather rigidity and the psychology of preparing for an imminent civil war.

So what needs to be done?

To begin with, we need a more hard-headed analysis of our real interests. For years now, the Bush administration has leaned toward the Shiite Islamist political party, ISCI (the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI). ISCI and its militia, the Badr Organization, which has heavily penetrated the Iraqi army and police, were formed in exile in Iran in the 1980s and grew up under the heavy influence there of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They subscribe to the hard-core Khomeini of system "velayat al faqih" -- rule by the Islamic jurist. And they have welcomed numerous Iranian agents into Iraq to help them establish that system.

Of the many grand blunders of the Bush administration in Iraq, one of the biggest has been the analytical failure to see that ISCI"s political triumph in Iraq would bring a strategic bonanza to Iran -- effective control of at least the southern half of Iraq. To pave the way for this, ISCI and its leader, the ailing Islamist cleric, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, have long sought to gather all nine provinces in the Shiite southern half of the country into a single super-region, which would enable ISCI to establish political hegemony over the entire Shiite region, control most of the country's oil resources (based mainly in the Basra area of the far south), and dominate the politics of the center.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's recent ill-fated crackdown on the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr was not just about establishing order in the south. A more important subterranean motive (for which the United States allowed itself to be used) was to remove the chief obstacle to ISCI's bid for hegemony in the south. Sadr and his disparate political and militia forces oppose the creation of a Shiite super-region, and constitute the most significant political rival to ISCI (and its junior partner in Shiite politics, Nuri al-Maliki's Dawa party). ISCI's calculation has been that if Sadr could be neutralized, its path to victory in the coming provincial elections in October could be cleared, and then it could press forward with its aim of gathering all nine southern provinces into one.

We should have no illusions: Sadr is a nasty, deeply illiberal character. His militia forces, or those who swagger around, draped in weapons, seizing territory and imposing Islamic order in his name, often approximate the Taliban in their level of commitment to human rights, women's rights, religious freedom, and the rule of law. But Sadr's political movement is a broad tent that also includes more nationalist Shiite elements who share with one another (and with many Sunni Arab factions with whom they have been in contact) a determined resistance to ISCI's and Iran's bid to control southern Iraq, and through that region, the country as a whole. In other words, the participation of the Sadrist movement in electoral politics at least preserves political fluidity and pluralism. Its elimination, while leaving ISCI and its tightly knit militia network in control of much of the security apparatus and of existing provincial governments in the south, paves the way for Iranian domination.

One of the greatest and most bitter ironies of the Bush administration's posture in Iraq has been its persistent failure to see how it was handing the greatest threat to security in the region -- the Islamic Republic of Iran -- a grand strategic prize. So far, the Iranian regime has largely succeeded in its goals of bogging the U.S. down in a bleeding insurgency, draining its military and its treasure and sapping its will, until the point that Iraq (so they think) will fall into their hands like a ripe apple. No wonder the Iranian ruling elite so often seems to be smiling like a mafia gang on its way to eliminating its rivals. As one Iraqi recently observed to me, "The Iranians are more intellectual, more strategic, and more patient than the U.S. The Bush administration's approach in Iraq has been purely tactical. When the U.S. spends a billion dollars in Iraq, Iran spends $50 million and gets more."

It is not clear that this strategic victory for Iran in Iraq can be prevented at this point. Certainly it will not come from the Kurds, who have long since struck a cynical bargain with ISCI: they can have their Shiite super-region, and in return the Kurds want to absorb into their Kurdistan region the city and province of Kirkuk, whose vast oil resources would make eventual Kurdish independence a much more viable proposition.

It does not take much facility in political arithmetic to figure out who are the big losers in all of this: first of all the Sunni Arabs (about twenty percent of Iraq's population), who have no major oil producing assets in the provinces where they predominate, and who believe the creation of a Shiite super-region would be a formula for their own permanent marginalization and impoverishment. The other big loser would be all those Iraqis (surprisingly, a majority) who continue to believe in the idea of a united Iraq, and who are adamantly opposed to Iranian domination.

For this reason, the bargain between ISCI and the Kurds (codified in the 2005 constitution) cannot be the basis of a stable and democratic Iraq. It leaves out two crucial sections of the population: first, the Sunni Arabs, and second, a majority of Iraq's Shia as well, who fought Iran in a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s and do not want their territory to become a satellite of Iran's Islamic Republic. If the United States were to withdraw from an Iraq configured along these lines, civil war would almost certainly follow. It would pit an ISCI-dominated government in the south and in Baghdad, backed by Iran, against a loose coalition of Sunni Arab and Shiite nationalist resistance, backed by Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other Sunni Arab states in the region alarmed by Iran's expanding power (which also includes a determined drive to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity). And in the chaos, there would also be a welter of more local-level fights for dominance.

The only way out of this nightmare scenario is a coherent, well-prepared, vigorous effort to broker a constitutional compromise before it is too late. The parameters of the necessary bargain have been clear for many years. ISCI would need to give up its ambition of a single, nine-province super-region, but could be granted a federal system with the eventual ability to lobby for creation of smaller regions (of up to three provinces each, as the interim Iraqi constitution had allowed for). The Kurds would get to keep their own region as part of a federal system, but the development of new oil fields would remain a prerogative mainly of the central government, not, as the Kurds and ISCI wish, regional governments. The Sunnis would have to reconcile themselves to being a minority political force in Iraq, but their provinces would be assured a fair and automatic distribution of the oil revenue, more or less in proportion to each province's share of the population.

There are a number of other issues to be worked out as well (including the reintegration of former Baathists below the top level into government, and the pruning of ISCI loyalists from the commanding ranks of the security forces, especially the police). But the pivotal elements of a deal involve the structure of the federal system and the control of oil production and distribution of its revenue.

The constitutional deal that is needed cannot be brokered by the United States alone. A "diplomatic surge" is urgently needed, in which the U.S. would partner with the UN and the European Union. For an administration that has been loathe to surrender control in Iraq, this is a difficult step, but without it, there will be no political breakthrough, and thus no exit from the quagmire.

In the context of such a grand bargain, the United States could draw down somewhat more gradually than Clinton and Obama now envision, perhaps getting down over the course of about three years to a small residual security force to protect American civilian operations in Iraq. If the provincial elections scheduled for this October can come off without massive intimidation and bloodshed, that will help, as it will likely deliver setbacks tin the south to ISCI and Dawa (who have governed poorly) and generate a more pluralistic political terrain, in which power in the Shiite south is shared by a more diverse set of actors.

It is far from clear that Iran, so close to winning its prize, would not sabotage such an outcome. Direct and intensive engagement with the Iranian regime would also be needed. This could offer the Iranians other incentives as part of a larger deal that would include verifiable suspension of their nuclear program. It could also play on the prospect of what they could themselves could face in an Iraq without the United States: a divided Shiite community, part of which is rising up in resistance to their dominance, allied with a united Sunni community with the broad backing of other Arab states in the region. And all of this before they had acquired the nuclear weapon they think will give a huge boost to their regional power.

A certain amount of brinksmanship would be needed to demonstrate to Iran that the alternative to compromise in Iraq is that they could wind up trading places with us, being bled and drained in an insurgent war while their enemies score opportunistic gains. In that case, the strategic prize could become an albatross around the neck of a regime that faces huge economic and political problems within Iran itself.

The above offers no sure path out of Iraq. Should diplomacy fail, we would be left with little choice but to prepare to withdraw, perhaps rapidly and in extremis, letting the regional actors and the Iraqis themselves pick up the pieces. It would be an ugly and costly scenario. But the credible threat of it might be the one thing that tips Iraq's polarized parties toward accommodation. And bad as it would be for a time, it could hardly be worse than having the United States bogged down in Iraq, desperately holding our military fingers in the dike for the decades that Senator McCain seems prepared to envision, while both our military capacity and our soft power drain away.

How did you get involved in diplomacy and inspection work?

I had originally intended to become a professor. I took a PhD at Cambridge and I also studied at Columbia University for two years. Then as I got back to Stockholm and did some teaching, I was asked to come in as a consultant to the Foreign Ministry, and gradually I got gobbled up by the ministry.

Can you describe the experience of doing inspections in Iraq?

My job was mainly to make sure that our inspectors had all their rights to do what they needed to do, that they were not stopped. Remember that in the '90s, Iraq frequently stopped inspectors and we suspected that they had something to hide. But in 2002-2003, we were never stopped for any inspection, not even the so-called palaces of Saddam Hussein. I thought that in the '90s sometimes the inspectors from New York had been a bit too Rambo-like, and of course inspectors from the teams often had people from the intelligence side, both from the U.S. and the U.K. We were determined to be completely independent. And I think we were. We were in nobody's pocket.

There were moments which were thrilling. At one point our inspectors found some munitions which had been for chemical weapons. There was no chemical in them, but they had not been declared. For a moment we thought maybe this is the tip of an iceberg, but gradually came to the conclusion that it was floes from an iceberg that had been there.

Preemption is where you see an attack coming, where an attack is imminent... You can take action when the airplanes or the missiles are approaching your territory. Another matter, however, is to attack a foreign country saying that we suspect that they will attack us.

From the beginning, like most people, our gut feelings were that there were weapons of mass destruction, although when we were asked about it we said, we are not here to tell you gut feelings, but to inspect. But as we inspected more and more cases, and did not find any weapons of mass destruction, the gut feeling changed, naturally.

There's a sad feeling about the whole thing that we were not able to have a greater impact. I was sometimes told, or it was assumed, that my phone had been bugged. And my reflection on that is simply that I wish that they had listened better to what I had to say.

There were also things that were amusing.

Do you have any amusing anecdotes you want to share?

Well, I remember that before we were admitted, Kofi Annan tried to bring me into discussions with Iraqis in the spring of 2002, and the Iraqis would have nothing to do with me, because they were negative to inspections, and they called me a spy. Before that they said I was a nonentity. Eventually when they accepted inspection, I was addressed as Your Excellency. So I thought when I became a spy I'd at least been promoted from a nonentity, and then when I was addressed as Your Excellency I'd really arrived.

What do you think is the key to being an effective diplomat?

You have to know your mandate first. In our case that was set by the resolutions, 1284 and 1441. As a lawyer I knew them very well. Our role was to inspect and report to the Security Council. We were not there to tell the Council what it should do. We were, as it were, the police investigation and they were the judges.

The second is that you must know your dossier. The facts. We spent lots of time going through what had happened in the '90s.

The third point I think is to exercise critical thinking, as police investigations do. They have a hypothesis, but you must collect and examine all the evidence. If you do not have the right diagnosis, how can [the] Security Council find the right therapy? This was the error, the big error, in the U.S. and the U.K. They did not have critical minds. They came, and they relied far too much on defectors. And the defectors were not interested in inspection, they were interested in invasion.

It also has to do something with--this is the fourth point--how inspectors behave. As I said I thought sometimes in the '90s the animosity and difficulty that they had in Iraq was due to the conduct of the inspectors--Rambo-style. I said when I took over that we intended to use all the rights that we had under the Security Council resolutions, but we were not there in order to provoke or harass or humiliate the Iraqis. When you ask what is important in diplomacy, I think that one of the most important things is always to avoid humiliation.

You say in your book that the climate for arms control has deteriorated, even as international cooperation has increased in some other areas like health and the environment. Why do you think that is?

The interdependence that results from more communication and transport and increased trade forces the world into a great deal of agreements, because it wouldn't function otherwise. SARS or avian flu or what have you--all this requires cooperation. The body of international law has increased tremendously, and most of it functions without any courts or any threats of sanctions.

We also have basic rules about how states conduct against each other, like diplomatic relations and the interpretation of treaties and consular relations, but also, nowadays, on the use of force. And that's an area, as I say in my book, where law is much less reliable. It's relatively new. Such rules did not exist before the U.N. Charter. The League of Nations did not prohibit states to go to war. It obliged them to try first with peaceful means. It's only in 1945 that people in San Francisco laid down the rule that states must not use armed force against each other unless they do it in self-defense against an armed attack or unless they do it under authorization of the Security Council. So that was a leap forward in 1945. Now, during the Cold War there were many violations of this. But what was new in 2002 was that the U.S. National Security Strategy declared that the rules of the Charter were too narrow for them, and they declared that they would take armed action regardless of these limitations in the Charter.

And this is no small point. This is a question of preventive war. Preemption is where you see an attack coming, where an attack is imminent. It is generally recognized that you can take action before the bombs fall. You can take action when the airplanes or the missiles are approaching your territory. Another matter, however, is to attack a foreign country saying that we suspect that they will attack us. In the case of Iran, that's taking armed action already at the sight of a few grams of uranium enriched to 4 percent. Now that's not an armed attack.

What do you think about the current prospects for disarmament?

I'm delighted to see that there's a strong body of American opinion, non-partisan, and led by former Secretary of State Shultz, and Kissinger, and Sam Nunn and Bill Perry. Many, including Colin Powell, side with them. They say, yes, the arsenal of nuclear weapons was needed during the Cold War, but no longer, and it can only damage and give ideas to other people; if the great powers need nuclear weapons maybe we also need them. So they urge the United States to take the initiative vis-a-vis Russia to move toward nuclear disarmament. They're not starry-eyed idealists. They know this is going to take time, but there are plenty of things that can be undertaken now.

And what are the most important steps to be taken now?

I have no hesitation that the most important signal would be a ratification and entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. This was rejected by the U.S. Senate during the Clinton administration. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have said that they would want to have that treaty ratified. And I think the chances are that if the US ratifies it then China will, if China will, India will, if India does I think Pakistan will, then we will get the whole bunch. So this is at the top of the agenda. But taking nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert--which really is a relic from the cold war--I think is also very high up on the agenda.

What do you think is the most worrisome development in terms of nuclear weapons today?

I think the most acute questions are the negotiations with North Korea and with Iran. I'm favorable to the approach that's been taken lately by the U.S. in relation to North Korea. I don't think that threatening the North Koreans with any military action is a defensible policy. Military pressure is more likely to be counterproductive and lead them to a hardening of their positions; that's what we have seen in the past. However, the six-power talks in Beijing have been looking much more for carrots, and including, notably, a guarantee against attack, and also a guarantee of diplomatic relations with the U.S. and with Japan, if the North Koreans go along with a nuclear settlement. I think this is much more likely to yield results.

In the case of Iran, I think that while the Europeans have a number of carrots on the table, they say that these carrots are only available to Iran if, first, Iran does its part. There's a precondition that Iran should suspend enrichment. I don't know any negotiations in which one party says, yes, I will do my part and then we'll discuss what you'll give me for it. But the two elements I mentioned in the case of North Korea are not, to my knowledge, on the table in the case of Iran. Namely, a guarantee against attack, and talk about diplomatic relations. So I think that playing these two cards would be enormously valuable.

What about the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands?

One can hardly exclude any risk, but most experts deem it highly unlikely that non-state actors would be able to master this. They have to put together the weapons; they also have to find some means of delivery. And we also know from the case of terrorists in Tokyo a number of years ago that they chose rather the chemical weapons in their attack in the subway. There's some talk about what they call dirty bombs, a way of using radioactive material and exploding it and contaminating an area. That would be a terror weapon, but can by no means be compared to a nuclear weapon.

What's your advice to U.S. voters who are concerned about nuclear weapons?

I certainly think that McCain is a respectable, upright person with integrity. But from the point of view of disarmament, and the need for a new wind in international relations, I think that both Hillary and Obama are far better placed.

What are you up to these days?

I give a lot of lectures around the world. I travel much too much.

Actually, what I would want to do and what I'm starting to do is write a book about the development of international law and disarmament. How can we move the world slowly towards more peaceful relations? Well, you'll find beginnings of my thinking in Why Disarmament Matters. This is something I should do, but all these engagements to speak at various conferences take a lot of my time.

Aside from the former U.S. statesmen who support disarmament, are there any other causes for optimism you can see?

We need, as I said, a new wind. And I think a change of leaders, perhaps, could give a chance to that. In Russia you have a change of leaders even though Putin hovers over the scene. In Washington you will have a new leader. In France it's new, in Germany relatively new, and in the U.K., the new government is much more pro-disarmament. So there are some glimmers of hope.