[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
U.S. NONPROLIFERATION POLICY AND THE FISCAL YEAR BUDGET
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ASIA, THE PACIFIC AND NONPROLIFERATION
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
September 26, 2019
__________
Serial No. 116-69
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/, http://
docs.house.gov,
or http://www.govinfo.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
37-849 PDF WASHINGTON : 2020
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York, Chairman
BRAD SHERMAN, California MICHAEL T. McCAUL, Texas, Ranking
GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York Member
ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey
GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida JOE WILSON, South Carolina
KAREN BASS, California SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania
WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts TED S. YOHO, Florida
DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois
AMI BERA, California LEE ZELDIN, New York
JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas JIM SENSENBRENNER, Wisconsin
DINA TITUS, Nevada ANN WAGNER, Missouri
ADRIANO ESPAILLAT, New York BRIAN MAST, Florida
TED LIEU, California FRANCIS ROONEY, Florida
SUSAN WILD, Pennsylvania BRIAN FITZPATRICK, Pennsylvania
DEAN PHILLIPS, Minnesota JOHN CURTIS, Utah
ILHAN OMAR, Minnesota KEN BUCK, Colorado
COLIN ALLRED, Texas RON WRIGHT, Texas
ANDY LEVIN, Michigan GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
ABIGAIL SPANBERGER, Virginia TIM BURCHETT, Tennessee
CHRISSY HOULAHAN, Pennsylvania GREG PENCE, Indiana
TOM MALINOWSKI, New Jersey STEVE WATKINS, Kansas
DAVID TRONE, Maryland MIKE GUEST, Mississippi
JIM COSTA, California
JUAN VARGAS, California
VICENTE GONZALEZ, Texas
Jason Steinbaum, Staff Director
Brendan Shields, Republican Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and Nonproliferation
BRAD SHERMAN, California, Chairman,
DINA TITUS, Nevada TED YOHO, Florida, Ranking Member
CHRISSY HOULAHAN, Pennsylvania SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania
GERALD CONNOLLY, Virginia ANN WAGNER, Missouri
AMI BERA, California BRIAN MAST, Florida
ANDY LEVIN. Michigan JOHN CURTIS, Utah
ABIGAIL SPANBERGER, Virginia
Don MacDonald, Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Page
WITNESSES
Ford, Christopher, Assistant Secretary of State for International
Security and Nonproliferation, U.S. Department of State........ 7
APPENDIX
Hearing Notice................................................... 32
Hearing Minutes.................................................. 33
Hearing Attendance............................................... 34
RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
Responses to questions submitted for the record from
Reepresentative Sherman........................................ 35
U.S. NONPROLIFERATION POLICY AND THE FISCAL YEAR BUDGET
Thursday, September 26, 2019
House of Representatives
Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and
Nonproliferation
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Washington, DC
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2 p.m., in
room 2172 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Brad Sherman
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Mr. Sherman. The subcommittee will come to order. Without
objection, all members will have 5 days to submit statements,
questions, and extraneous materials for the record subject to
the length, limitation, and the rules.
It is a pleasure to welcome Assistant Secretary Christopher
Ford to our subcommittee today with Under Secretary of State
for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Andrea
Thompson recently stepping down, Assistant Secretary Ford is
the most senior confirmed official in the nonproliferation
area.
As we look forward out across the nonproliferation
landscape, there is some reason for optimism or at least a
chance to reflect that things are not as bad as they might have
been. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty, the NPT, going into effect. In 1963, John
F. Kennedy admitted to being haunted by the feeling that there
would be 20 nuclear armed countries by 1975. One could only
comment that if there had been 20 nuclear armed countries by
1975, there would be double or triple that number today and we
as a species would have been through several nuclear wars. In a
way, the NPT can be viewed as the most important accomplishment
since World War II.
It is now, of course, 2019 and there are nine countries
with nuclear weapons. In the post cold war era most countries
have--more countries have gotten rid of nuclear weapons and
have acquired them that is chiefly due to the break up of the
Soviet Union, but also includes the decision by South Africa to
give up nuclear weapons. So things are much better than they
appeared to be or they appeared they would be in 1963. But past
successes do not guarantee future results and just because we
have not had nuclear weapons used in anger since 1945 does not
mean that that would not happen in the future.
There are number of pressing nonproliferation challenges
today. North Korea is the latest country to acquire nuclear
weapons, first testing a bomb in 2006. In recent years, North
Korea has accelerated its nuclear weapons and missile programs
including testing within the intercontinental range of
ballistic missiles, ICBMs, in 2017. Donald Trump and Kim Jong-
un have been through a variety of different emotional states in
their relationship, but whether it is a bromance or little
rocket man, the centrifuges in Yeonpyeong continue to turn and
North Korea continues to get each day more fissile material.
Perhaps another--well, we will ask our witness, six, eight
bombs worth a year.
Of course, we are aware of the Singapore Summit in June
2018 and the following one in Hanoi. There has not been
concrete results and although North Korea has vaguely promised
to work toward denuclearization, it is not clear what Kim Jong-
un's definition of that word is or what his timeframe is. Keep
in mind that the entire world is committed to the end of all
nuclear weapons and perhaps Kim Jong-un will give up his
nuclear weapons just as soon as the United States and Russia do
so.
Iran's nuclear program is a major concern for the United
States. The issue is not about the JCPOA, it is can we develop
a better deal since we have pulled out of this one. A better
deal has to be evaluated, not just in the sense of does it get
it through 4 years or 8 years with Iran having a nuclear
weapon, but can we achieve that as far as the eye can see,
hopefully, permanently. The chief advantage we got by pulling
out of the JCPOA is that it allowed us to impose sanctions on
Iran, but sitting just where Assistant Secretary Ford is
sitting, John Kerry assured this committee, the full committee,
that if we went into the JCPOA and to his way of thinking
stayed in it, we could still sanction Iran proportional to
their non-nuclear wrongdoing. Since their non-nuclear
wrongdoing is enormous, under John Kerry's view, we could have
kept them in the JCPOA and imposed as many sanctions as the
members of this committee could have come up with.
So we look forward to hearing what we can do to work toward
a permanently non-nuclear Iran. Nothing drives this point home
more than the recent decision to designate the Iran Central
Bank because it supports terrorism, not for nonproliferation
reasons, proof that we could have stayed in the JCPOA with all
its imperfections and still impose the same sanctions.
I have taken considerably longer to deliver this opening
statement than I anticipated, and so I look forward to
discussing, of course, Saudi Arabia's nuclear program which
gets far less attention than it should, but let me say a nation
that cannot be trusted with a bone saw should not be trusted
with nuclear weapons.
And we will look at the fact that Japan is seeking to move
down the reprocessing road in a way that poses significant
risks to the nonproliferation regime. With that, I will turn it
over to our ranking member for his opening remarks.
Mr. Yoho. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you Assistant
Secretary Ford for being here and I, too, remember John Kerry
sitting there and saying that no deal is better than a bad deal
and that was a bad deal. Thanks for holding this hearing.
In addition to focusing on affairs in the Asia-Pacific
theater, this subcommittee has the task of oversight for
nonproliferation. And I commend the chairman for bringing this
up because this is something we really need to discuss, to do
an assessment and see what is going on in the world that we
know about that we can about in a hearing like this. I would
like again welcome you for being here.
Since the cold war, the United States has stood as a leader
in deterring and responding to nuclear threats around the world
through cooperation with four other recognized nuclear powers,
Russia, the U.K., France, and China. Along with non-nuclear
weapon States, we have been able to work toward global nuclear
disarmament and prevent bad actors from getting their hands on
these deadly weapons.
When I see our four other recognized weapon States, Russia
and China, it worries me about the reporting and truthfulness.
The United States and our partners in nonproliferation have
come a long way since the uncertain days of the cold war.
However, the world still faces threats from several bad actors.
As we know, the clandestine operations of Iran, what is going
on in North Korea. Who knows what is going on in Syria. Who
knows what is going on in Cuba. And I think this is so
important that we kind of focus on what is going on.
An example of recent progress in nonproliferation is North
Korea. The Trump Administration has made significant progress
with leader Kim Jong-un in efforts to denuclearize the Korean
Peninsula. And this is something that has been criticized for
him stepping up, having relationships with a person like Kim
Jong-un. But what we know is you cannot move forward if you do
not have relationships, especially in that region of the world.
And we have done the diplomatic trial for 25 years and it did
not work under President Bush, President--or Clinton, Bush, and
President Obama. And so I welcome a new strategy.
While there has not been a formal commitment from North
Korea, the U.S. has been able to engage with the historically
closed-off regime through unprecedented high-level talks. This
effort will take time, but it is essential for continued
security and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific.
I would also like the commend President Trump for his
decision to no longer participate in the JCPOA. Time and again,
Iran proved they had no intention to fully upholding their end
of the deal. And we saw for 30 years it was a cat and mouse
game and every time they got caught, they denied it until we
showed otherwise. If we do not continually hold our adversaries
like North Korea and Iran accountable for their blatant
disregard for the international rules and norms, these bad
actors will continue to advance their nuclear capabilities
which could eventually bring us to a point of no return. And I
think that is something we are all trying to prevent.
With that, I am just going to end my statement and look
forward to hearing from you and I yield back.
Mr. Sherman. Thank you. Does any other member seek time to
make an opening statement? Seeing none, we will hear from our
witness.
STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER FORD, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AND NONPROLIFERATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
STATE
Mr. Ford. Good afternoon and thank you, Chairman Sherman,
Ranking Minority Member Yoho, and Representatives. Thank you
for the chance to appear before you today to talk a little bit
about our vision and our priorities at the Bureau of
International Security and Nonproliferation.
In the interest of being as helpful as I can in answering
your questions, I will truncate rather dramatically my long
opening statement, but I would respectfully request that the
full text of the prepared remarks be entered.
Mr. Sherman. Without objection, so ordered.
Mr. Ford. Thank you, sir. For long time observers of U.S.
nonproliferation policy, Mr. Chairman, much of what we are
doing today should not be too surprising. We are very fortunate
that nonproliferation has tended to enjoy strong bipartisan
support in Washington and here in Congress as many of our key
priorities and our key objectives have remained fundamentally
unchanged for many years.
But there is also much in what we are doing in today's ISN
that is, I would submit, new and innovative, so I would like to
talk a little bit about both.
In the past, ISN has generally conceived its mission as
being principally about preventing the flow of sensitive
technology and materials to rogue States or to terrorists and
about supporting nonproliferation-related multilateral regimes.
All of this, Mr. Chairman, we still do and I daresay we do it
pretty well. I have many capable predecessors, as well as a
longstanding tradition of strong support here on Capitol Hill
to thank for having such a capable team at ISN, with such a
strong record of accomplishment for us to build upon. So thank
you for all that, Mr. Chairman.
And let me offer here, if I might, while we are on whatever
we are on, the opportunity to offer our public thanks to my
fantastic folks back at ISN who may happen to be listening to
this. So thanks for that.
We do all this work very hard to build, maintain, preserve,
and to strengthen various treaties, multilateral regimes, and
international institutions, upon which the global
nonproliferation regimes depends. Among the things that we do,
we negotiate civil-nuclear cooperation agreements, as well as
consequence management agreements and plans with foreign
governments and U.S. embassies around the world to forestall
against and improve preparedness for CBRN incidents.
We lead the U.S. Government's work on nuclear safeguards,
safety, security, and peaceful uses of nuclear technology vis-
a-vis the IAEA. And we manage capacity-building programming
around the world that helps other countries come up to
nonproliferation, safety, security, and export control best
practices.
We screen both export licenses and visa applications for
proliferation dangers. We conduct proliferation impact
assessments of proposed agreements or transactions, and we use
State Department sanctions authorities to penalize those who
engage in proliferation and to help deter future mischief.
All this work, Mr. Chairman, is devoted to making sure that
it is as difficult, as costly, as expensive, and as painful as
possible for rogue regimes and terrorists to acquire weapons of
mass destruction, delivery systems, or advanced conventional
weapons. This is our ``traditional nonproliferation'' mission,
and it is exceedingly important work. But I would like to
emphasize, sir, that this is not all that we now do.
For one thing, we are also working very hard in new ways to
ensure that all of this is done as efficiently and effectively
as possible. As one example, we are undertaking a broad reform
of our programming work to ensure that ISN is as responsible
and effective as possible as a steward of the funds that
Congress and the U.S. taxpayer have entrusted us to manage.
We are, for instance, building new evaluative mechanisms
into our programming to ensure that we target spending as
directly as possible against concrete security threats and the
highest priority challenges facing us. We are building better
ways to reevaluate programming decisions on an ongoing basis so
as to maximize their responsiveness to changing circumstances.
And we are working to ensure that we ``graduate'' recipients of
our assistance as their capacities improve so at the end of the
day we can always be devoting our resources to the most
pressing security needs. To this end, we have also been
migrating our programming funds from more rigid and country-
specific accounts into more flexible regional or global ones
that will permit us to more easily maintain appropriately
threat-prioritized allocations on an ongoing basis as the
security environment changes.
We are very grateful for the support that we have received
from the State Department and from Congress in these reforms of
our programming work. We are also grateful, of course, for
continued funding for our nonproliferation programming which
helps us address various threats on our mission to prevent the
spread of WMD delivery systems and advanced conventional
weapons capabilities, as well as, where possible, to roll back
such threat programs where they have already taken root.
Internally, we are also working to improve coordination
between our ``policy'' office and our ``programming'' offices
in order to maximize the effectiveness of the ISN team as a
collaborative team all together. In line with these reforms in
the past two Presidents' budgets, the Department has requested
that Congress grant full or what is called full notwithstanding
authority for three ISN programs to help us identify and help
prevent the proliferation activities anywhere and any time that
they may occur and I hope that you all will look favorably upon
this request.
But, and here is my second point, sir, these days we do
even more than, Mr. Chairman. ISN now also uses our
nonproliferation-derived tools and expertise to support U.S.
national security and geopolitical strategy more broadly,
particularly in support of our Nation's competitive strategy,
vis-a-vis State's challenges. We now work with new focus and
vigor, for instance, to impede technology and resource flows to
China and to Russia as part of a broad U.S. competitive
strategy.
We implement sanctions against those who engage in
significant transactions with the Russian defense or
intelligence sectors, as well as leveraging the threat of such
sanctions to prevent such transactions, cutting off revenue
flows to the Kremlin and countering the malign and manipulative
strategic relationships that Moscow seeks to build with its
foreign armed clients.
We also work to counter the momentum of China's predatory,
State-funded nuclear, civil nuclear industry. And we negotiate
Nuclear Cooperation Memoranda of Understanding which is a new
mechanism that we have built at ISN to help U.S. stakeholders
develop and strengthen their own relationships with actual or
potential nuclear technology partners overseas.
And not least, we also help implement pressure campaigns
against both Iran and the DPRK to change their own strategic
calculus when it comes to proliferation even while we are
planning and preparing to be able to implement negotiated
elimination of threat programs through the very talks and
negotiations that this pressure is designed to incentivize. All
of our ISN offices are exploring how they can contribute better
to these goals and missions as well and we are reorienting
parts of the Bureau to facilitate this.
We have not, Mr. Chairman, I would emphasize, abandoned our
traditional priorities and indeed they in many ways can provide
a foundation for our new and emerging roles as well. We work at
these long-standing missions faithfully, diligently, and we
work at them effectively, but we are also mindful that State-
on-State challenges never went away during the last quarter
century as much as one might have wished that they had. And it
is now for that reason part of mission today also to help
respond to those challenges.
We are very grateful, Mr. Chairman, the support that we
have received from Congress over the years and today and we
look forward to continuing to work with you and your colleagues
on these great collective challenges in the months and the
years ahead. And I very much look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Ford follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Sherman. Thank you. I let you go a little over because
you are doing the most important thing in the world which is
preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.
I am going to focus on the Saudi program. I also sit on the
Science Committee and in that committee Rick Perry assured me
that the Administration will not sign a 123 agreement with
Saudi Arabia unless Saudi Arabia signs the additional protocol.
He repeated that in a letter to the Saudi Energy Minister. It
was sent on September 4th.
Since I like getting these assurances, I would like to get
one also from you. Will we sign a 123 agreement with Saudi
Arabia if Saudi Arabia has not agreed to or signed the
additional protocol?
Mr. Ford. Mr. Chairman, my guidance at the State Department
is to try to avoid where I can comments on on-going
negotiations. However, the----
Mr. Sherman. What is the Congress for if we are not going
to ask you questions about what you are working on?
Mr. Ford. I was actually about to say, sir, that the
Secretary of Energy has been very clear and I hope that will be
in some way reassuring about our seriousness, ensuring that we
are always asking for the strongest possible nonproliferation
assurance.
Mr. Sherman. Asking or insisting upon--let me put it this
way. I quoted Secretary Perry. Do you know anyone at the State
Department that disagrees with him on this issue?
Mr. Ford. There has been no daylight between the Secretary
of Energy and the Department of State on these issues, sir.
Mr. Sherman. Now moving on, when was the last Iran, North
Korea, Syria Nonproliferation Act report provided to Congress
and what period of time did that report cover?
Mr. Ford. I believe, sir, that the last report was
submitted in May and it was the Calendar 16 report. It
contained, I believe it resulted in additional sanctions,
designations against 22 persons or entities.
Mr. Sherman. But it covered the period through the end of
2016?
Mr. Ford. Yes, sir. It has been a bit of travail for us to
dig out from the hole that we inherited. When I arrived at the
beginning of this administration, we were, I believe, three
reports behind. We are now on the edge of being only one report
behind. We are finishing up the one the Calendar 17 report and
it ought to be submitted by the end of the year. That I fully
admit is not out of the hole yet, but it does represent
progress at a time in which staffing and resource challenges
amidst a swirling world of day to day proliferation related
concerns have made it challenging to do this, but we have been
pretty successful in making progress and I can assure you, sir,
that we will continue to do so.
Mr. Sherman. Can you describe what the Administration is
doing to make it more difficult for Iran to use illicit
procurement of materials that would help them develop a nuclear
weapon?
Mr. Ford. A range of things. It is quite a full-spectrum
approach. We work very closely with our intelligence and law
enforcement colleagues to make sure that we understand as much
as possible about the proliferation network through which items
and materials move. We work with intermediary points and
transshippers to do what we can to ensure that they are as well
informed as they can be and that they are able to get in the
way of such shipments wherever possible. We work with countries
that represent points of origin and demarche them frequently
about problem shipments and transfers. Some, of course, are
more cooperative than others, but it is an effort that we
undertake daily through multiple offices in the Bureau and
partnership capacity building efforts around the world, sir.
Mr. Sherman. The Administration says South Korea and the
firm KEPCO is bidding on a Saudi nuclear contract and that it
uses U.S. technology and therefore cannot sell to Saudi Arabia
nuclear equipment without a 123 agreement between the United
States and Saudi Arabia in place. Others have said that KEPCO
is not using U.S. technology. What is the position of your
Department?
Mr. Ford. It is our understanding, sir, that there is
indeed U.S. technology in the reactor design that the South
Koreans are offering through KEPCO to the Saudis. And as a
result of that, it is our understanding and belief and I think
we share this with the Department of Energy that a so-called
Part 810 authorization would be necessary in order for South
Korea lawfully to export that technology to the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Sherman. Let us see. So if KEPCO went ahead and bid
without a Part 810 license, would that be a violation of U.S.
law?
Mr. Ford. I must confess not to be enough of a lawyer on
these topics to know precisely what would happen, but I have to
think that that would entail significant legal complications
for the South Korean bid, sir.
Mr. Sherman. And do you know whether the South Korean
Government has agreed with us that it uses U.S. technology?
Mr. Ford. I know that this point has been very clear to
them, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Sherman. I would hope that you would also deal with the
East Asia Bureau. We have bled lives and treasure to protect
the people of South Korea by the tens of thousands of deaths,
by the hundreds of thousands of injuries. And I hope that we
could drive home the importance of South Korea not undermining
American security in some other part of the world just so that
one company can make a few dollars. So this should affect
everything in our relationship with South Korea. And with that,
I yield to the ranking member.
Mr. Yoho. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As we were talking
earlier about the assessment of the state of the world with who
has nuclear weapons, what are the counts, what are the best
estimates we have, who are the good players, who are the ones
that we cannot trust, and we have seen over and over again
Iran, you know, the cat and mouse game we have had or North
Korea, the clandestine, that we just do not understand really
and have a good assessment. I know we have limited knowledge.
And then you bring in other players that may be out there. And
of course, China is out there which, you know, they do not have
a strong commitment of holding up treaties and international
norms.
And so in your assessment where you said on
nonproliferation, what do you see where we need to focus more
on where we may have dropped the ball that we should do a
better job? And I know you guys are doing a great job, but from
Congress' authority to direct maybe a program or put emphasis
somewhere else, I would like to hear from you on that.
Mr. Ford. Well, sir, I would not describe these two points
as being dramatic, unmet needs, but they are challenges on
which we are working hard and on which progress has been
modest, but there is progress. And the first being the general
challenge of China which continues to be, in effect, the
proliferator's preferred point of origin for multiple systems
around the world. I am thinking in particular of supplies to
the Iranian missile program which had been the subject of the
enormous efforts on our part and sanctions and demarches
against entities involved for 15 years or more. We are working
to do what we can with that. It is not moving as fast as anyone
would like and of course, the Iranians have been working very
hard not to continue their supply network.
Another challenge related to that, sir, is the degree to
which the Iranians partly, I hope, as a result of our efforts
and successes in getting countries to be better partners and
build their export control capacity, controlling items in
international transit. The Iranians are getting better at
shifting items at lower and lower levels or perhaps not even on
control lists and doing later assembly of various uncontrolled
components back home. That makes it, in some respects, harder
to do the kind of export control work that we do and it forces
us to rely increasingly upon working with partners to use the
so called catch-all controls in their export control licensing
or in their transshipment management. That is not impossible,
but it is a more difficult and it is more of a nontraditional
challenge compared to simply comparing what you see on a bill
of lading to a control list from say the Wassenaar Arrangement.
Mr. Yoho. And that is what we worry about because with the
transshipment and it goes through different channels through
Hong Kong to a boat out in the South China Sea and goes from
one boat to the other and it shows up. The components coming in
that we know that maybe Iran was bringing in, do we have a
sense of any of that coming in and was there looking at the
Iranian situation, was there a sense that they might have been
building centrifuges that they claim not to? Is that something
you can talk about here?
Mr. Ford. In terms of assessments of what the Iranians may
or may not be doing right now beyond what one sees in, for
example, the IAEA reporting, I would refer you to our
intelligence colleagues who may be able to offer more insight
into that.
Mr. Yoho. Yes, and that is one of the problems I had with
that, the JCPOA was supposed to be initially any time,
anywhere, any place, and then we found out that was not really
true.
Moving forward to North Korea, have we gotten anywhere of
what denuclearization means to both sides that we can agree on
and then what level of inspections that we could all agree upon
with the IAEA?
Mr. Ford. Our interagency has been working very hard for
quite some time to be ready in the event that North Korea, in
fact, do what it has promised to do and what we expect and
needed to do in these negotiations that we hope to have
restarted soon. It is very difficult to speak in great detail
about that here because, of course, precisely what it is that
is agreed to is not yet known. Our planning efforts have been
devoted to trying to ensure that we are as ready as possible
for a variety of different source of answers.
With respect to the IAEA, however, what we have made very
clear both publicly and to the North Koreans themselves, is
that we--it is very difficult to imagine any scenario in which
the IAEA is not involved in some way. Now the particular
modalities of that remain to be negotiated and frankly,
Pyongyang does not have the happiest of relationships with the
Agency over the years, but certainly especially with respect to
long-term monitoring and frankly, providing the kind of
international imprimatur on the fact that certain
dismantlements have occurred and that certain safeguards are,
in fact, being effectively applied, it is very difficult to
imagine a substitute for the IAEA in that respect, especially
at the time.
Mr. Yoho. Right. All right, thank you. I am out of time and
I yield back.
Mr. Sherman. The gentleman from California.
Mr. Bera. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also want to attach
myself. I happen to be on the Committee on Science, Space, and
Technology with the chairman, and again, just reiterating that
committee with Secretary Perry, we were given strong
reassurances that unless an acceptable 123 agreement with
additional protocols was signed by the Saudis that we would not
be proceeding and the recent events of the missile attack on
the Saudi refinery gives us just one additional reason that we
need to proceed pretty carefully.
My background is as a physician. I spend a lot of time
thinking about pandemic preparedness, et cetera. And again, I
know ISN plays a role in global biosecurity efforts. You know,
when I think about the Biological Weapons Convention and just
look at the advances that are taking place in genetics, et
cetera, how are we going to keep up with this? If I could get
your perspective on continually modernizing the BWC.
Mr. Ford. You are quite correct. That is a very great
challenge. We have been working very hard to try to use the
mechanisms that the BWC does provide to encourage countries to
do more in terms of confidence-building measures with each
other, for instance, in terms of mutual transparency and
awareness. We think that there is more that can and should be
done under the auspices of the Convention to build out
approaches and preparedness for the kind of mutual assistance
that the Convention envisions in the event that there happens
to be a biological attack, for instance. These are things that
we do work with our colleagues within the Convention on quite
regularly.
The intercessional process between review conferences has
been a bit challenging because of foot dragging by countries
such as Cuba and Iran, for example, and we have had trouble
enticing some participants to, in fact, pay their dues which
funds that intercessional process. So this is an on-going
challenge in managing this. But at the same time as we are
doing this, we are also working very hard through our
programming spending, for example, and doing things like
securing biological facilities and labs and improving awareness
of security practices of bioscience that will hopefully through
these bilateral engagements conduce to a better state of play
irrespective of what is or is not agreed or worked out through
the Convention itself.
Mr. Bera. We often spend a lot of our time talking about
nuclear nonproliferation, but from your perspective, Assistant
Secretary, what are the things that we should be focused on in
Congress that can certainly assist your diplomatic efforts.
There is still a large number of countries that are members of
the BWC, but certainly do not have the same protocols that we
are urging. And what would you like to see us focused on in
that particular area?
Mr. Ford. Well, actually if I might put in something of a
shameless plug for reforms that we are doing in our programming
precisely in order to make them more threat responsive, I would
point out that we are working quite hard, especially on the
countering weapons of mass destruction terrorism front to make
sure that we are as responsive as we can be as our collective
understanding of the evolving threats out there change.
At the moment, the unfortunately hot topic is more on the
chemical and biological side and we are reprioritizing some of
the work that we are doing to make sure that while we, of
course, do not want to let drop the very important radiological
and nuclear side of it, there is an unmet need in the CBW
aspect of our programming that we are reprioritizing some
funding toward. That is an important priority and it is part of
the threat responsive recalibration effort that we are doing
with our programming and we would certainly be delighted were
Congress to assist and support these kinds of efforts. They are
underway and we think they are very promising and I can also
promise that we are, as I alluded to in my written remarks, we
are building in efforts to ensure that at any given point we
are reprioritizing and reprioritizing and reprioritizing,
depending upon what we see in the shifting threat environment.
At the moment in CBW, I cannot speak to what it might be in
say 10 years' time, but we very much hope to continue to work
with those who provide funding for these efforts to make sure
that we can tell you at any given moment that the marginal
dollar is always going toward the most important unmet need.
Mr. Bera. In my capacity as chair of Oversight of Foreign
Affairs, I would love to have my staff reach out to you or your
staff or find some time for us to meet and get into some of the
specifics where we think there might be some holes and where we
could be of assistance.
Mr. Ford. That would be a pleasure, sir.
Mr. Bera. Great. Thank you. I will yield back.
Mr. Sherman. I recognize the gentleman from Pennsylvania.
Mr. Perry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Ford, it is a
pleasure to have you here and we appreciate your presence.
We announced that we would no longer participate in the
JCPOA in May of last year and in September of this year, which
is last month, no, it is this month. It is almost last month.
It is this month, the IAEA reported that Iran started
installing advanced centrifuges at its pilot uranium enrichment
facility. And in July of this year, the reports found that both
the quality of Iran's low enriched uranium stockpile, as well
as the LEU's uranium 235 concentration exceeded the JCPOA's
mandated limit.
A couple questions here in regard to those two factoids.
The July 2019 report, is that as of July or when did they
figure out that Iran had exceeded both the quantity and the
concentration and then reported? Was that the time that they
found out or did they find out some time prior to that and then
that is when we got the report?
Mr. Ford. Well, Congressman, I do not have the report in
front of me so I do not know specific date of information. Our
work with them on things like JCPOA monitoring has been over
time quite timely. So if there was any delay, my suspicion is
it results simply from things like flying back to report and
draft in Vienna. We are not in any way unhappy with the
timeliness of the report.
Mr. Perry. And I am not suggesting--what I am trying to
figure out the time line of when they determined things as
opposed to the time when it is actually reported. Is that in
your experience days, months, weeks, or hours?
Mr. Ford. Without having the data in front of me, take this
with something of a big error bar, but my impression is much
more like days.
Mr. Perry. OK. So we left in May, right, we announced our
withdrawal in May, but Iran still has the bilateral agreement
with the other countries, even as we have exited, right? Is
that not true?
Mr. Ford. We are no longer a participant.
Mr. Perry. Right.
Mr. Ford. There are several other--all the other parties.
Mr. Perry. All the other parties, right?
Mr. Ford. Yes, sir.
Mr. Perry. Now even though as far as I know, was the
agreement ever signed by Iran, you know, like a signature is as
good as the intention that backs it up. And I do not think that
Iran ever had any intention, but that is my personal opinion,
but did they ever sign it?
Mr. Ford. I am not aware of any document with signatures on
it if that is what you are describing.
Mr. Perry. But there was a public agreement that they would
comply and I do not know how long it takes to exceed both the
quantity at whatever level they are at or the concentration. I
do not know if it matters, that we pulled out in May and by
July of the next year--and I do not know if we can determine
whether they had already been enriching to that level prior to
us departing because one of my frustrations here, quite
honestly, is that even in this committee, there have been a lot
of calls that why are we leaving the JCPOA? Why would we
consider leaving it? Iran has been compliant and you cannot
name one time where they have not been compliant. And I am
wondering if we can figure that out.
Even while these things are a violation, these things are a
violation of the JCPOA as it stands and there are still, I do
not want to call them signatories, even though I do not know
that anybody signed, but countries that have agreed including
Iran, yet these violations are never seen as violations and so
that is another question. Why are they not seen as violations?
And what does it take to actually violate the treaty and be
called for it?
Mr. Ford. I think as we have seen reporting from the IAEA,
Iran is clearly doing things now that are not consistent with
the JCPOA commitments. There would have been a point under the
JCPOA when all of these things would have been perfectly fine
by the terms of the agreement and that was actually one of the
reasons why we did not like it. It was, in a sense, not even--
--
Mr. Perry. My point is is when they violate it, no one ever
says they had violated it, which is one of the frustrations,
quite honestly, in Congress and I think to the American people,
is that they know. Americans, if we have not figured it out in
Washington, DC, Americans inherently know that Iran has no--
they have no plans or intentions whatsoever of complying with
this stuff, and they know that they are going to violate it. We
are going to complain a little bit, and they are just going to
keep going.
Let me ask you this because I am running out of time. The
centrifuges, the heavy water, and the 235 concentrations, is
any of that necessary for the production of commercial-grade
power?
Mr. Ford. If they had an enrichment architecture that was
big enough to produce it in an efficient way enough for a power
program, you could at least imagine trying to make the
argument. But with the scale of activities they are doing right
now, I see no commercial relevance to this at all. But what
there is is a potential danger for this activity to shorten the
so-called breakout time.
Mr. Perry. But since there is no commercial relevance, what
is the relevance?
Mr. Ford. I hesitate with putting thoughts into their head
and words into their mouth. My guess is it is partly
negotiating leverage. They wish to be, in effect, paid off in
order to stop these provocative activities. It is a bit of an
extortion racket.
Mr. Perry. My point is is that these things are not
necessary for nuclear power production, what they are necessary
is for a nuclear weapons program. And I yield the balance which
I do not have any, but I will yield.
Mr. Sherman. Thank you. Recognize the gentlelady for
Pennsylvania.
Ms. Houlahan. Thank you, sir, and thank you for coming
today. I actually wanted to dig in a little bit on some of your
testimony. You mentioned that you were coming back up to speed
on three reports that were overdue and that you were just one
report behind and that you were remarking that that was despite
of being under staffed and under resourced. And I would like to
know to what degree do you find yourself under staffed and
under resourced and what is it that we can do to be helpful in
that area?
Mr. Ford. Well, in our budget request, for example, for
example, we have a request for at least a little bit of
additional help in terms of FTEs that is being driven not just
by on-going workload, but by anticipated increase in certain
types of caseload for the matters that we handle.
In particular, the new legislation that is the FIRRMA
legislation has been put in place to help reform the process by
which foreign investments in the United States are screened for
national security implications in order to, frankly, to close
loopholes that it is a very good thing to close. That is all
fantastic from our national security perspective and we are
building out our, in the interagency, our ability to implement
that, but it does take--t will result in a greater case load
from our perspective at ISN, something in the order of 400
percent or so.
We are asking for an additional FTE this year and it is
very clear that in future years we will need more FTEs and that
is simply for this particular piece of the puzzle alone. At the
moment, we have something like 174 people on board. Our
authorized ceiling is more like 186. We are currently trying to
hire against 20 FTE billets to try to bring our staffing up,
but in the nature of bureaucracies that are occasionally
afflicted by government shutdown, sometimes it is hard to make
those processes work as quickly and efficiently as one would
like. We are making progress.
Ms. Houlahan. So what do you attribute to the fact that you
have 12 to 20 billets that go unfilled with a government
shutdown 9 months ago and the economy's low unemployment rate,
what do you attribute the fact that you cannot attract the
talent that you would like?
Mr. Ford. Actually, I do not know that we cannot attract
the talent. My suspicion is it is much more of a process, a
question of bureaucratic procedures churning slowly. That does
affect the competitiveness of a government job. If one is able
to get a response from one's private sector potential employer
in the space of 2 months, there is a bird in the hand versus a
bird in the bush question for a bright, young person trying to
come in to an important area like this if they have to wait
many, many more months for government employment. But that is
not an ISN-specific problem. That is something that we are
trying to work on across the Department and probably the
government as a whole.
Ms. Houlahan. That does have to do with security clearance
backlog at all? The rate of response being months instead of
more urgently?
Mr. Ford. I am not sure, ma'am, frankly. It probably is in
some cases, but everyone's security background investigation is
different and those are probably very different challenges one
person from the next.
Ms. Houlahan. Thank you. And with the last couple of
minutes of my time, I wanted to get into biology a little bit
more. Mr. Bera, Representative Bera, talked a little bit about
biological weapons and that is a concern and interest of mine,
too.
I was wondering if you could talk about what we are doing
to assess the information transparency of places like China,
Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and their transparency on all
issues biological.
Mr. Ford. I wish that were easier to answer. Their
transparency is certainly not what one would like it to be. The
classic example, of course, is Russia, which for many years, we
understand, of course, had a very forward leaning biological
weapons program. There was a brief window after the end of the
cold war when the Russian Government was willing to admit that
such a thing had been in existence, but then they went back to
denying it and they have not ever thereafter come clean about
what it consisted of or about what has become of it, leading to
all the obvious----
Ms. Houlahan. And can we, the United States, do to bolster
the transparency of a place like Russia?
Mr. Ford. It is hard when they do not wish to be
transparent and when their system is as authoritarian as it is.
And the same thing could be said of probably other countries
around the world. There is no easy recipe for this. I think
there is probably more that we could do in terms of the classic
kind of open-source analysis one does of what publications are
coming out and what one can understand from different lines of
efforts and research laboratories around the world.
It is occasionally possible to learn interesting things
from people who are working on potentially provocative dual use
topics to suddenly in the middle of a promising career go
silent. But that is the day-to-day work of intelligence
analysis and open source analysis of various sorts. We
certainly do that.
In terms of getting more transparency, I think part of this
is a diplomatic challenge that frankly those who are not
transparent about such things in today's world when so many
really horrifically scary things are possible with bioscience
technology these days, far beyond what used to be so hectoring
them and making this an important priority and always making
sure that the rest of the world is asking them why are you not
being as transparent as say the Europeans or the Americans.
Ms. Houlahan. I have run out of time as well, but I look
forward to following up with you, having a further maybe off-
the-record conversation. Thank you.
Mr. Sherman. The gentlelady from Virginia is recognized.
Ms. Spanberger. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Assistant Secretary
Ford, thank you for being with us today. In January, DNI Coats
and DIA Director Lieutenant General Ashley testified that Kim
Jong-un is unlikely to eliminate North Korea's nuclear weapons
program, assessing both Kim Jong-un's intent, as well as the
country's current increasing military capabilities. This
assessment is seemingly incompatible with the administration's
intent to have the and I quote ``final and fully verified
denuclearization of North Korea.''
As a former intelligence officer, I am concerned about what
appears to be a dramatic disconnect between our political and
our intelligence leaders, in particular, the rejection of
objective nonpartisan intelligence assessments. As the head of
the International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau whose
primary mission, as you described in your testimony, is to
prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and to help
roll back proliferation where it has already taken root.
What is your assessment on the likelihood of the complete
and verifiable denuclearization of North Korea?
Mr. Ford. I would say that, well, there is no questioning
of the IC's assessment. It is our hope, frankly, to persuade
the North Korean regime to change its strategic catalyst. Does
it wish to? I would be surprised if it did. But has it promised
to? Actually, it fact it has and trying to get it to follow
through in the commitments it has made in person to our
President is the order of the day. No one I think would pretend
that that is an easy, quick, or linear process, nor would
anyone guarantee that it, in fact, will work.
We do think it would be unconscionable not to try, given
the stakes involved and we are working very hard to make sure
that our diplomats are prepared in a way that allows them to be
technically proficient and able to reach deals with the North
Koreans, to come as close as humanly as can become to the goal
of final and fully verified denuclearization. That is not a
guarantee it will work, but it is an absolute commitment to
give it a very, very serious try because of the stakes
involved.
Ms. Spanberger. And do you have an estimate of
approximately how many nuclear weapons North Korea has
destroyed since negotiations began?
Mr. Ford. Has destroyed? I do not have an estimate of that,
but I would encourage you to talk to the intel folks about
that.
Ms. Spanberger. OK, and to your knowledge has North Korea
slowed the production of fissile material during these
negotiations?
Mr. Ford. North Korea has committed to a--in effect, a
moratorium on nuclear testing specifically and on long range
missile testing. There is no commitment that I am aware of that
goes beyond that, but in terms of what they are thought to
actually be doing or not be doing, that might be a better topic
for a different room and perhaps an intelligence community with
it.
Ms. Spanberger. Wonderful. And in your perspective, from
your perspective, what is the best outcome that we could
potentially expect from these negotiations? And what do we need
to get there?
Mr. Ford. Well, I mean I suppose the best outcome is what
we are asking for on its face. We have offered the North
Koreans a very dramatic swap, if you will. They face a very
deliberately created international campaign of extremely
punishing sanctions and pressure. It is our understanding that
Chairman Kim is committed to having some kind of a prosperous
and bright future for his country. He values the kind of
engagement with the world that could bring in the sorts of
profits and engagement with the rest of the world there. And
our hope is that we can offer him the opportunity to be
relieved of those pressures if he, in fact, does nothing more
complicated than live up to the promises that he has already
made with respect to denuclearization and that he has made
repeatedly, his predecessors made repeatedly in the past going
back to the early 1990's. Clearly, that negotiating record
suggests that this is not going to be a simple or easy
trajectory, but it is also true that we have never had the kind
of direct engagement with them that we now have and are hoping
to restart at the working and negotiating level very shortly.
Ms. Spanberger. And in that challenging trajectory noting
the history between our two countries or at times lack thereof,
what can we do to address the challenges that may exist when
there have been times when the administration has not been
prioritizing verified intelligence reports related to North
Korea or frankly other areas of the world when it comes to
nuclear proliferation issues?
Mr. Ford. I am actually not quite sure to what you are
referring, ma'am, but at least in my experience intelligence
reporting related to the North Korean proliferation challenge
has always been greeted with enormous attention and focus, in
part, because it has such an obvious and direct bearing upon
our ability to accomplish the mission that we have been
assigned by our commander in chief to negotiate a way out of
this morass.
So as far as I can tell, they have always been paid
enormous attention to.
Ms. Spanberger. All right, well, I thank you for your time,
sir. And I yield back.
Mr. Sherman. The gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Levin.
Mr. Levin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Ford, the New START
Treaty restricts the number of American and Russian nuclear
warheads----
Mr. Sherman. If the gentleman will yield, I need to warn
the witness, we are probably going to do a second round. Just
do not expect this day to be over in 5 minutes.
Mr. Levin. I thank you for your forbearance then. You know,
the New START Treaty is set to expire in February 2021 unless
we and Russia agree to extend it. Does the Administration have
a position at this point as to whether the New START Treaty
should be extended?
Mr. Ford. To my knowledge, that decision has not been taken
yet, but I have to give the caveat that that is not my lane in
the road. It is Department of State. So I may not be the best
person to answer that question.
Mr. Levin. All right, thank you. We will followup with
them. I think it is important that we try to continue.
I think that President Trump's withdrawal from the
Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty represented a huge
mistake, both for America's security and global peace and I
strongly urge the Administration to support extending the New
START Treaty and get Russia moving in the right direction on
arms control.
I want to move on to Saudi Arabia. This month, Reuters
reported that talks on a civilian nuclear deal between the U.S.
and Saudi Arabia had hit a road block because Saudi Arabia does
not want to rule out the option of enriching uranium, that is,
as I see it, they do not want to close the door to a possible
nuclear bomb.
Is that a fair assessment in your view of the Saudis'
position on this issue?
Mr. Ford. I am not in a very good position to be able to
talk about the contents of ongoing diplomatic negotiations.
However, in certain press reports the Saudis have talked about
their--here and then--about their hope to develop an enrichment
capacity for purposes of producing fuel for nuclear reactors.
That is all that I have heard them say publicly or, frankly,
privately.
Mr. Levin. Earlier this year, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo testified during a Senate hearing that the United States
wants to deal with the Saudis ``which would not permit them to
enrich.''
Will the Administration insist that any civilian nuclear
deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia blocks the Saudis'
pathway to a bomb and prohibits enriching uranium or
reprocessing plutonium?
Mr. Ford. My boss, Under Secretary Thompson has made clear
that we go into 123 Agreement negotiations always asking for
the strongest possible nonproliferation assurances. It is our
policy for many years to oppose the spread of enrichment and
reprocessing technology. And we always try to achieve that in
123 Agreements.
Historically, the record makes clear that it is not always
possible to get that out of agreement, but we always insist and
frankly, even the bare minimum required by law is a far better
set of proliferation assurances than any other supplier of
nuclear technology. We always work hard to get the best
possible deal that we can and usually we do pretty well. Their
record is not 100 percent on the so-called gold standard, but
that is----
Mr. Levin. Thank you. Well, in my opinion, anything less
than the gold standard will not do. The Saudis do not have a
God given right to have nuclear power with U.S. cooperation and
we better make sure that Saudi Arabia does not obtain nuclear
weapons. That is far more important.
Earlier this year, I introduced a resolution that would
hold any civilian nuclear deal between the U.S. and Saudi
Arabia to the highest nonproliferation standard you were
mentioning and ensure that the deal does not set the stage for
a Saudi nuclear weapon. It calls for any nuclear agreement to
prohibit Saudi Arabia from enriching uranium or reprocessing
plutonium and block the Saudis' route to a nuclear bomb, the
gold standard, as you mentioned.
I did this because peace and nonproliferation should always
be the top priority for the United States, but also because
recent events, like the horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi,
have made it all the more clear why we must insist on the
highest nonproliferation standard for this deal. We cannot
allow a civilian nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia to create a
pathway to a nuclear bomb, period.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back the balance of my
time.
Mr. Sherman. Thank you. The gentleman from Michigan would
be happy to know that we have a provision that I wrote in the
NDAA that goes quite far in the direction you are suggesting
and I look forward to----
Mr. Levin. Yes. I hope it survives.
Mr. Sherman. I look forward to your help in getting--it to
survive.
Mr. Levin. You got it.
Mr. Sherman. I will now recognize the gentleman from
Virginia.
Mr. Connolly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to
followup on the point you made in a minute, but first I want--
unfortunately, I was at another meeting when our colleague from
Pennsylvania asserted that there were violations that had been
ignored pursuant to the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear agreement.
And let the record show that even the United States did not
have to certify until it stopped doing so in general, but the
IAE certified and I was there the day they issued their last
certification this late spring this year that in all metric,
all measurements of expectations set out in the agreement, Iran
was not compliant with respect to the level of enrichment, the
storage of enriched of uranium, centrifuges, inspections at a
lot of facilities, that the deconstructing of the plutonium
production reactor core and others.
We are all entitled to our own opinion. We are not entitled
to our own facts. And frankly, by distorting facts or ignoring
facts, in my view, to justify walking away from an agreement
many did not like to begin with, we have now almost certainly
set in motion the very thing we wanted to avoid, a nuclear
Iran. And we looked success in the face and decided to despise
it and I just think that is a destructive policy and I think
the time has come for even those who were critics to admit it
was working and that there is every urgency to either
reconstitute it or try to reengage. But I do not know how
serious human beings can reengage with the very power that
convenes people in the first place and wrote the treaty and
then renounced its own treaty.
The damage done in our credibility is not just on paper. It
is real. It is palpable and it is going to damage the ability
of the United States on many fronts to play interlocutor, to
play arbitrator, to play chairman in bringing together parties
with disparate views on important issues such as this one.
And how we re-engage Iran having shown we are an unreliable
partner on a plan that was agreed to not only by our allies in
Europe, but by Iran with whom we had not talked essentially
since the revolution and China and Russia. We brought them all
together a single, single development. And we blew it all
apart. And from my point of view we blew it all apart because
the current President of the United States did not like the
previous President of the United States having anything by way
of concrete achievement to his name. That is a petulant,
peevish reason to damage the national security interest of the
United States and to frankly, reinject the nuclear issue in a
very volatile region of the world. Just a point of view. I am
sorry that Mr. Perry is not here to hear it.
Following up on Mr. Levin's point about gold standard in
Saudi Arabia, Mr. Assistant Secretary, are we not a little bit
concerned that if we, in fact, accept something less than that
that it then could unintentionally lead to proliferation
because lots of other countries would be able to look at that
and say we want to a lesser standard, too?
Mr. Ford. Actually, historically, sir, very few countries,
in fact, only two have ever agreed to the gold standard and
they had their very peculiar circumstances. In one case, there
was already domestic legislation prohibiting enrichment and
reprocessing in the United Arab Emirates, so it was essentially
not much of an ask at all for them to be, to sign off in a 123
to those rules.
The other case being Taiwan, and as a result----
Mr. Connolly. I am sorry, I am running out of time. My
fault, but I am not understanding your point. Mr. Levin said we
should not settle for anything less than the gold standard with
respect to Saudi Arabia. Are you giving a rationale for why we
will accept something less than a gold standard in Saudi
Arabia?
Mr. Ford. No, sir. I am trying to explain why it is hard.
And another reason why it is challenging is that I wish that
all the other nuclear suppliers around the world----
Mr. Connolly. Let us stipulate that--Mr. Ford, I am running
out of time. Let us stipulate it is hard. But what is the goal?
What is the policy? Do we want the gold standard for Saudi
Arabia especially in light of their recent behavior?
Mr. Khashoggi was my constituent and I still mourn what
happened and I think we ought to be tougher, not weaker with
respect to Saudi Arabia across the board, but irrespective of
that, we do not want a nuclear proliferation any more than we
have to have it in the region. Why would we not insist on the
gold standard in Saudi Arabia other than it is hard?
Mr. Ford. Forgive me, sir. I did not know that he was your
constituent and let me say it was a horrific and a horrocious
and tragic situation and one can only mourn for his loss. We
have pressed the Saudi Government strongly for full
accountability for all those involved and I dearly hope that
that happens.
With respect to the gold standard, the point I was trying
to make, sir, is that unfortunately, this is no longer an era
in which the United States' market share in the nuclear
business allows us the opportunity to simply dictate terms. The
challenge in this is finding the spot that allows us to get the
strongest possible nonproliferation assurances without asking
for the unachievable perfect in such a way that it drives
would-be counterparties to deal with other suppliers who
frankly do not care, in some cases much at all about these
kinds of assurances. And where one can go running to another
supplier who does not ask those complicated and
nonproliferation strings, we have a very difficult negotiating
challenge.
We absolutely try to get the best that we can possibly can
in every single circumstance. It is hard in advance to say what
that will be in any given case, but I can assure you that we
are trying as hard as we possibly can. And Secretary Perry has
also made very clear our seriousness in trying to push this as
far as it is possible to push it.
Mr. Connolly. We look forward to pursuing it with you.
Thank you. And thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Sherman. Thank you. We will now do the second round. I
will recognize myself for 5 minutes and I have got a lot of
comments.
The first is that MbS, the Crown Prince says we want the
same deal as Iran. And I think that in a way they should get it
and that is this. If you start a nuclear program and you do not
have a 123 Agreement with the United States, you should get the
kinds of sanctions that we impose on countries we expect to
proliferate. If Saudi Arabia wants to be an enemy of the United
States on a par with Tehran, they can go down the Tehran road.
And the only way--you are right. We are not the--we do not have
the market power in the nuclear field to cause countries not to
proliferate which is why you have to deal with the other parts
of the U.S. Government and use the economic power of the United
States and the fact that other countries are dependent upon us
for their national security because otherwise, you have got
nothing, I mean, to negotiate with. The countries always want
to keep their options open.
As to the Iran deal, I think Iran is now asking that
whatever new deal is put together be ratified by Congress.
There has been an opinion on our side that anything signed by
the President, who is a Democrat, is morally binding and
legally binding on the American people whether Congress
ratifies it or passes legislation or not. Suffice it to say no
one in my party believes that if this President signs a deal
say a deal with Botswana that both countries will endeavor to
burn as much coal as possible, that that would be morally or
legally binding upon the United States without congressional
action. So it was not a treaty. That being said, it is a little
extreme to tell Iran that they should have remained in
compliance with it after we backed out. They negotiated it to
get certain benefits from the United States. We have taken
those benefits away.
Saudi Arabia is on a peninsula with a huge amount of
natural gas. It is very expensive to liquefy and move natural
gas when you do not have a pipeline. They do not have a
pipeline. So the economic way to generate electricity is to
burn natural gas. They have chosen not to. Why do they have a
nuclear program? To give themselves a position to build a
nuclear weapon. I hope that we will keep that in mind as they
say first they need a nuclear program and second, they need to
avoid the additional protocol.
Let us see. South Korea has long expressed an interest in
pyroprocessing which they claim is less of a proliferation risk
than reprocessing. Last time the State Department ruled on the
issue in 2011, your Department at that point said
pyroprocessing is reprocessing period. Do you stand by that?
Mr. Ford. Actually, I am a little bit out of date on those
negotiations and the on-going engagement with them. I believe
that there has been a sort of compromise modus operandi worked
out in this long-standing point of difference between the two
governments, but I am afraid I am not as familiar with that as
I should be.
If I might, sir, on the Iran----
Mr. Sherman. So are we trying to discourage South Korea
from pyroprocessing or have we changed our position?
Mr. Ford. Our policy continues to be to discourage the
spread of enrichment and reprocessing technology in general,
including in South Korea.
Mr. Sherman. Let me move on. What is the Trump
Administration doing to prevent France from selling a very
large processing plant to China that would allow Beijing to
produce enough material for tens of thousands of nuclear
weapons?
Mr. Ford. We work very closely with all other nuclear
suppliers to encourage what we call standards of responsible
nuclear supply. That includes a whole bunch of things that not
everyone does. It includes promoting the additional protocol as
a standard of supply. It encourages--it includes demarching
people for what we believe to be unproductive and potentially
strategically destabilizing moves. I cannot speak about
particular demarches, of course, but our policy----
Mr. Sherman. I will just mention a few issues with the
questions for the record.
We have got Japan's massive reprocessing plant that has
been delayed for years. We hope that the administration is
trying to persuade Japan not to operate that plant.
We have got the Turkish President talking about moving
toward a nuclear weapon and we hope that your Department is
seeking to ensure that Turkey lives up to its NPT commitments.
And I will want an answer for the record, explicitly, on
why the Administration has taken action to prevent Iran from
shipping enriched uranium out of the country. I also oppose the
JCPOA, but I think that getting enriched uranium out of Iran is
a good thing and with that, I will recognize the ranking
member.
Mr. Ford. If I might----
Mr. Sherman. If you want to indulge me for the time, I will
get an answer, sure.
Mr. Ford. Forgive me, I cut you off. I was going to say
with the issue of shipping uranium out of Iran, the fuel swap
that was set up under the JCPOA, for which we dropped our
previous waiver permission, was designed to give the Iranians
an opportunity to continue to enrich. It allowed them to
enrich, to keep enriching, and not exceed the cap.
Mr. Sherman. Yes. But now they have broken through that
cap. The cap was imposed by an agreement that we renounced.
Mr. Ford. But they did not need that fuel swap to start
with. They are perfectly capable of down blending. None of this
was actually necessary for them. It was a political excuse to
give them an opportunity to justify and legitimize the
continued operation of enrichment and centrifuge activity that
we did not think it was appropriate to encourage.
Mr. Sherman. Well, the only thing worse than Iran enriching
is enriching and holding on to the enriched uranium. If they
enrich and ship out, that is not as good as not enriching at
all, but it is better than enriching and retaining.
Mr. Ford. But all of these problems, sir, are ones we would
have faced either way under the JCPOA itself. We might have
faced them a few more years down the line, but one of the
fundamental problems with the deal and one of the principal
reasons that we felt it necessary to pull out of it is that
even under the JCPOA, we would have faced all these very same
problems at some point or another anyway. In fact, it would
have been worse then because at that time Iran would have been
given, in effect, permission by the international community to
buildup a stockpile of any amount of enriched uranium and----
Mr. Sherman. We know the long-term flaws of the JCPOA. We
pulled out of the JCPOA so the world is not going to think that
Iran pulled out when they violated because we already pulled
out. The less enriched uranium the Iranians have and the lower
enrichment level of that uranium at any one time the better.
And the idea that well, we will prevent them enriching by not
letting them ship out which means they will stop enriching
because they do not want to violate the cap does not work if
the world does not enforce the cap and we are not in a position
to enforce--to tell the world to enforce the cap when we pulled
out of the deal.
Mr. Ford. You and I would both agree that the right answer
is for Iran to have no ability to produce enriched uranium at
all.
Mr. Sherman. Obviously, in a perfect world----
Mr. Ford. But the JCPOA, in effect, deprived us of a
pathway toward that right solution by legitimizing a massive
nuclear buildup of a capacity in a few years' time. That is
what we were determining from that, sir.
Mr. Ford. We could go on for a long time. The fact is that
trying to enforce part of the deal--the deal against Iran while
pulling out of it and then finding a crafty way to put--anyway,
we have gone on long enough.
The gentleman is recognized. I may sneak out because I have
got a former foreign minister of Indonesia, but I will sneak
back.
Mr. Yoho [presiding]. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, I
sit here on Foreign Affairs for the last 7 years and I hear
this over and over again, you know, the JCPOA, John Kerry is
sitting there and no deal is better than a bad deal. And there
is a deal, but it is not signed. I mean you have bought a car,
I bought a car. I bought a house, you bought a house. Nothing
is binding until it is signed.
And so you see the confusion all this causes and the angst
and one side against the other side. It was a bad vehicle that
we should do better as Americans, as the U.S. Government.
In my opening statement I talked about since the cold war,
the United States has stood as a leader in deterring and
responding to nuclear threats around the world through
cooperation with the four other recognized nuclear powers,
Russia, the U.K., France, and China. Now we have the other
ones, but I think we all need to sit at the table and have an
adult conversation. Where do we want to go with these things
that we wish we could un-invent, but we cannot? And what about
the others, the CWCs and the biological weapons, and come to an
agreement and bring all parties together and just say let us
not go down this road. You know, let us work on diplomacy.
Is anybody talking about that? I know and then you have the
U.N. out there which to me is a very useless vehicle because
there is no enforcement mechanism and I look at the Security
Council, you know, the 12 members that voted unanimously to put
sanctioned on North Korea and two of them are Russia and China
who never really enforced the sanctions. So it is inept at what
it can do because it is limited by authoritative power or you
know, enforcement I guess is what it is.
So there has got to be a better vehicle. And I think of the
INF Treaty that we backed out of and it was because Russia was
in there and our intelligence said they were creating new
missiles, that they were incompliant, and then you have China
who is not a signatory of that and they are building up an
arsenal and it is just to me it is lunacy looking from here out
there. And I am sure as they look at us, they are saying, well,
I cannot believe they are this ignorant.
What would you recommend we do as world leaders with other
nations to come together and have these discussions? And I
would like to hear your thoughts on a better way to do this.
Mr. Ford. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this,
sir. This is actually something about which we feel very
strongly and that we have been trying, in connection with which
we have been trying to build new approaches. It does appear to
us that the luxury that we got used to after the cold war of
being able to see global arsenals decline precipitously has
resulted in the relaxing of tensions that was associated with
the ending of the cold war. That period, unfortunately, is not
the period in which we now live.
Mr. Yoho. Right.
Mr. Ford. The security environment now is more challenging
than it was at that time and the traditional approaches that we
became accustomed to during that post cold war interlude are
ones that are, frankly, running out of steam to some degree and
are not able to produce the kind of results that we have come
to expect of them.
In response to that, we are trying to explore efforts
diplomatically to bring countries together to have a more
creative and thoughtful dialog on how to unstick this process.
I think there is a lot of wisdom that is encoded in the NPT
itself and the preamble of that treaty actually refers to the
importance of easing tensions and strengthening trust between
States in order to facilitate disarmament. And I think in that
one sentence you have an important kernel of wisdom here. The
way you get to a world that ultimately does not have nuclear
weapons is not to go after the tools in a world that is
challenged in the security way that it is, but to go about
trying to alleviate the underlying tensions that give countries
incentives or perceived incentives to acquire weapons, to
retain them, to not relinquish them. If we can figure out ways
to alleviate tensions in the broader community, perhaps in
islands of relaxation that can spread outward or whatever else
it may be, that is the way that you are going to at least
potentially find a way forward. That is why the Ban Treaty is
absolutely the wrong way to do this. It goes about it backward
by pretending that you are going to address this by the tools
first as if the security circumstances will follow.
But what we are trying to do with what is called the
Creating an Environment for Nuclear Disarmament initiative or
CEND, is to bring countries together to have the kind of free
flowing engaged, not for attribution, almost brainstorming if
you will, to try to think through how it is that we can
approach these challenges differently. What does the world need
and how would you go about the challenge of trying to alleviate
tension as opposed to simply imagining that you can wave a wand
and have people feel relaxed enough about a challenging
security environment that they would be willing to go to the
next step and relinquish a certain additional number of
warheads.
If there is a way forward, it has to run somehow through
what the NPT tells us it needs to and that is to say that same
relaxation of tensions and strengthening of trust. There is no
guarantee this will work, but it is a kind of engagement and a
focus of engagement that has not been tried before and we were
very pleased to host the first plenary of a--I think we had as
many as 30 or 40 countries come together in Washington in early
July.
Mr. Yoho. Of this year?
Mr. Ford. Yes, sir.
Mr. Yoho. OK.
Mr. Ford. And we are planning another series of follow on
line of effort discussion working groups to follow from that
beginning in the very near future. There is no guarantee this
produces results, but I think it is one of the few sort of
novel approaches that has been tried for some time and we are
very proud of at least giving it a try.
Mr. Yoho. How many times have you met like that? Is this
the first one?
Mr. Ford. Once so far and perhaps in another couple of
months I can tell you it is two.
Mr. Yoho. OK, hang on just a second. All right, and China
is a signatory to the NPT?
Mr. Ford. They are. Yes, sir.
Mr. Yoho. All right, they agreed on the sanctions with
China--or with North Korea and they did not follow through as
did Russia. I think of China with the Philippines in the South
China Sea and the EC losing their argument in The Hague about
the claims to the Nine-Dash Line and all that and they lost
that argument, yet they ignored it. I remember Xi Jinping, in
our Rose Garden with President Obama, saying we are not going
to militarize those islands while they are doing it.
So when you have people that are members of the NPT and
they have signed on it and you start negotiating this and then
here again China is not in the INF, so they are free to do
whatever they want to, we need a collective, bringing these
countries together and say all right, to deescalate where we
are heading now and to prevent future conflicts, hopefully,
maybe artificial intelligence will be the panacea of preventing
future wars, but to be able to move forward you have got to
have that trust and you have got to have a way of checking that
and without trust you cannot move forward.
I am not looking for a response from you. I wish you the
best of luck. I am looking forward to seeing what happens after
your next meeting and if you would reach out to us and let us
know, because there should be a world standard that says from
this point forward this is what we are going to do and all
these countries that have, you know, chemical weapons,
biological weapons, nuclear weapons agree this is where we are
going to draw a line, no more. And I appreciate your time.
Mr. Sherman [presiding]. I will make one final comment
because I have a feeling you talked about the JCPOA.
Mr. Yoho. No, I did not.
Mr. Sherman. OK. I look forward to sufficient pressure
being put on so that your Administration is able to negotiate a
deal with Iran on proliferation issues that requires
congressional approval and it is so good that he votes for it.
Mr. Yoho. And you do, too.
Mr. Sherman. And that I vote for it.
Mr. Ford. And if I might, sir, we actually have said
publicly and because it is true, that we are, in fact, open to
a legally binding agreement. In many respects that is,
arguably, one of the many flaws.
Mr. Sherman. And to make it legally binding you need
Congress and to get Congress, you are going to have to have a
regime that does a credible job of keeping Iran from having
nuclear weapons, not only during this Administration, but
during future Administrations.
With that and I do not want anybody to think that I do not
have a hundred other things to say, but with that, we stand
adjourned.
Mr. Ford. Thank you, sir.
[Whereupon, at 3:25 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
APPENDIX
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RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS SUBMITTE FOR THE RECORD
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