Proliferation Security Initiative Seen as Start to Curbing Trade in Weapons of Mass Destruction

By DAVID W. MUNNS
Assistant Editor

While much of the public controversy related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has swirled around Iraq and the presidential debates, the United States and its allies appear to be slowly making headway with a lesser-known effort to track down nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Sixty countries have become supporters of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), an effort to stop shipments of WMD, their delivery systems and related materials worldwide. Eleven are signatories and another 49 nations say they adhere to PSI principles.

Successes to date include two well-heralded incidents in which ships carrying Scud missiles or parts for nuclear weapons were boarded on the open seas. Evidence collected from one of these interdictions contributed to Libya’s decision in December 2003 to abandon its nuclear weapons program, according to Navy Secretary Gordon R. England.

However, WMD experts say that while high-profile interdictions are important, it is the broad international cooperation and PSI’s interventionist process that will reap long-term results. PSI signatories include France, Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as the United States.

The PSI is a departure from past efforts to curb WMD, because the emphasis is on taking action rather than building international bureaucracies and treaty protocols, said Baker Spring, a policy analyst for The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C. “As a means of hindering proliferation, multilateral arms control has become too dependent on a treaty regime managed by cumbersome international bureaucracies,” he said.

International weapons treaties inevitably beget international treaty organizations. One such entity, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, is supported by a staff of more than 500 people.

In contrast, PSI is “an activity rather than an organization,” according to Undersecretary of State John Bolton. PSI signatories agree to foster greater international support for the initiative, and use their existing military or police assets to board ships and interdict aircraft that are reasonably suspected of carrying WMD or related materials. PSI participants also agree to inspect all vehicles using their national ports, airfields or other transportation facilities. The interdictions and inspects are done in a manner consistent with national and international laws.

The creation of the PSI, which was unveiled in May 2003 by President George W. Bush during a meeting of the G-8 countries in Krakow, Poland, was preceded by a boarding incident. The North Korean freighter So San was tracked for weeks by U.S. intelligence agencies in December 2002 as it slowly made its way across the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea. Some involved in trailing the So San were part of multinational coalition of ships off the coast of Pakistan looking for terrorists fleeing Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion.

As the freighter approached Yemen, the United States asked Spain to stop and search the ship. Spanish Marines boarded the ship and discovered Scud missiles in route to Yemen hidden beneath bags of cement.

The ship and its cargo eventually were allowed to proceed to Yemen, after the Yemeni government said it had purchased the Scuds for defensive reasons.

There was a clear legal basis for boarding the ship, experts said, but the legality of seizing the missiles was less certain. However, “Spain could have made a very plausible legal case for seizing the cargo or turning it over to the United States because of numerous irregularities in paperwork and procedures,” Andrew C. Winner, associate professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote in his article “The PSI As Strategy,” for The Monitor, published by the Center for International Trade and Security.

One plausible reason for letting the So San go, Winner theorizes, is that “Washington decided that preserving Yemen’s cooperation on counterterrorism issues was more important than depriving it of a small number of antiquated missiles — missiles that probably would not be maintained properly in any case. Washington also extracted a promise from the Yemeni government not to transfer the missiles to a third party.”

“We learned a lot in that experience,” said Bolton. “Although we had been thinking of a variety of counterproliferation techniques that we could use, [the So San interdiction] was certainly one of the factors that led us to think that we do need to do this on a broader basis and have it be more systematic and be better trained and prepared, and get more other countries involved.”

England said in a recent speech that PSI was created “hand-in-hand with Maritime Domain Awareness,” the effort of the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and other agencies to acquire, fuse, integrate and distribute security information to mitigate risk to the United States.

“PSI has completed a lot of boardings at sea” and has “already proved its worth in combating WMD components and related arms trafficking,” England said.

The Navy Secretary, Winner and others feel PSI has been extraordinarily effective. However, the Office of the Secretary of Defense did not respond to Sea Power’s repeated requests for a detailed summary of PSI results to date.

Probably the greatest — and best known — achievement of PSI was the collaborative work of U.S. and British intelligence agencies that identified WMD equipment shipped from a factory in Malaysia to the United Arab Emirates. There, the cargo was transferred to the German-owned freighter BBC China. After the freighter passed into the Suez Canal, German and Italian authorities stopped and boarded the ship in adherence with PSI principles, and revealed its cargo of centrifugal parts destined for Libya.

“Armed with this evidence, diplomatic officials confronted Libya and secured an agreement to abandon nuclear and WMD ambitions,” according to England. “So these programs do work and our Navy will support the expansion of PSI.”

A U.S. Navy official stated that, “the U.S. Navy has and will continue to coordinate with allied navies in support of counter-proliferation of WMD.”

Much of the coordination is participation in interdiction training exercises. The U.S. Navy has participated in five maritime exercises in an ongoing series in support of PSI. The U.S. Navy led Exercise Sea Saber 2004 in the Arabian Sea in January.

The U.S. Naval War College also hosted a DoD-sponsored PSI war game in September, in Newport, R.I., with 17 nations in attendance.

A notable exception to the PSI regime is China. David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, notes that the Chinese have reacted to PSI, but are not a participating nation because of its maritime interdiction principles.

Shambaugh said the Chinese have agreed to pre-inspect cargo leaving Shanghai, but will use all appropriate venues to contest sea interdiction in light of the Yinhe affair in July 1993.

The Yinhe was alleged to be carrying substances to Iran that are used in the production of chemical weapons, such as thiodiglycol and thionyl chloride. The ship was followed and interdicted by U.S. forces, but no such chemicals were discovered.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately protested the ship’s interdiction stating that the U.S. “took such extraordinary actions as having the Chinese ship on the high seas followed by [U.S.] warships and taken aerial photos of by its military aircraft, which interrupted the ship’s normal navigation. Moreover, the U.S. side also spread … misleading information to countries whose ports that Yinhe was scheduled to call, and demanded that they refuse to let the ship dock and unload its cargo.”

Andrew Prosser, a Herbert Scoville Peace Fellow, contends that PSI primarily “targets WMD materials flowing into or out of North Korea.” Its benefits are mostly information sharing between countries and legal protection for the U.S. to conduct interdictions.

However, he said, “with such a loose and hazy organization it will be hard to know whether the U.S. will actually be able to interdict WMD as a result of the initiative.”

Prosser points out that there is no budget allocated specifically toward PSI, but rather the United States expects governmental agencies involved with PSI to fund related activities out of their regular budgets. Another shortcoming of the initiative, he said, is future policy differences between the United States and signing countries. This divergence could arise in differing perspectives on how to best deal with the WMD threat.

But U.S. agencies continue to make headway under the auspices of PSI. On Feb. 11, the United States signed a boarding agreement relating directly to WMD with Liberia. Liberia had previously been dubbed the second-largest “flag-of-convenience state” in the world because of its willingness to register large numbers of merchant vessels to fly the Liberian flag. This allowed ships suspected of carrying illicit cargoes to be stopped only if the Liberian government in Monrovia granted permission.

The agreement means the Liberian government now will look favorably upon boarding requests on behalf of PSI countries, according to Winner. This, and similar agreements under negotiation with other flag-of-convenience nations, closes several legal loopholes in PSI because boarding operations can be executed in international waters. Without boarding agreements, the ability to board would be doubtful, he said.

The long-term effect of the PSI remains to be seen. “For now, however, the PSI is new, innovative and, judging from the Libyan experience, effective in stopping at least some critical elements of the trade in WMD parts, precursors and missile delivery systems,” Winner said. And PSI, “has managed to bring together the United States and its European (and other) allies, both on a common goal and on a set of means to reach that goal — no small feat after the acrimony that accompanied the invasion of Iraq.”