Defense Articles

[The following are excerpts from the speech delivered to the First Biennial Meeting of the States, concerning the United Nations Program of Action, New York, New York, July 7, 2003.]

Madam Chairperson, Excellencies, and distinguished colleagues, it is my honor and privilege to present the United States report to the First Biennial Meeting of States. All of the governments represented in this hall, and many of you personally, were here two years ago, in July of 2001, when the Program of Action was debated at length and ultimately agreed. In the intervening two years, many governments have exerted considerable efforts, and expended substantial resources, to fulfill the promise of the Program of Action. On behalf of my government, I salute your efforts and look forward to receiving your reports.

The United States strongly supports the United Nations Program of Action, and the meeting for which we are now gathered. We are committed to supporting the very focused and constructive agenda that our Chairperson, Ambassador Inoguchi, has so ably brought forward.

I well recall that our deliberations two years ago were accompanied by many passionate and well-informed advocates just beyond these walls, representing the non-governmental sector. Among them were private citizens representing a wide spectrum of positions relating to the lawful ownership of firearms. Regardless of one’s personal views on that issue, in the U.S. or any other country, the U.N. Conference had a very specific mandate from the General Assembly, and lawful gun ownership was not part of that mandate. The scope of the Conference and the Program of Action concern the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. That remains our focus today.

Madam Chairperson, as we review the many initiatives our governments have pursued under the Program of Action, I submit that we all have more than enough worthy work to do within the terms of that mandate. For it is difficult to exaggerate the impact of illicit flows of small arms and light weapons, in troubled places very distant from this hall.

We often talk about the biggest threats to international peace and security, such as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and appropriately so. Yet, it is readily apparent that the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons poses a serious threat to stability and security in this hemisphere as well as parts of Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. The ready availability of lethal weapons of war in the wrong hands is a serious impediment to conflict mediation, and a force protection concern for our militaries, including peacekeepers.

We must all work even more energetically to curb the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. I sincerely hope one key outcome of our endeavors this week will be a redoubled commitment to that task. And you will find the United States ready to engage in very practical ways to reduce the terrible costs being exacted by these illicit weapons of local destruction.

The United States maintains laws, policies, and programs that support the Program of Action. At the national level, the U.S. has a robust and transparent system of laws and regulations governing national holdings, manufacture, and the international movement of small arms and light weapons. All firearms, by law, are marked at the time of manufacture and import. Inventories of all national military holdings of small arms and light weapons are subject to strict security controls and registration by serial number to ensure that they are not lost or stolen.

At the regional and global levels, since July 2001, the United States has sponsored resolutions in the Organization of American States (OAS) to destroy excess small arms and light weapons and to develop model arms brokering regulations for the Western Hemisphere. We have sought to include small arms and light weapons in the Wassenaar Arrangement arms reporting categories. We have supported the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe efforts to develop “Best Practice” guides to assist states in establishing effective controls over small arms and light weapons, and made similar efforts elsewhere.

U.S. assistance programs called for in the Program of Action are extensive. Our law enforcement training programs include a focused curriculum on illicit arms trafficking for the countries of Southern Africa. Export control and border security programs in over thirty countries worldwide provide legal assistance, training, and equipment to prevent the illicit traffic in dangerous goods, including small arms and light weapons.

Perhaps our most significant contribution under the program has been in the area of destruction assistance programs. Since early 2001, U.S.-supported programs in ten countries have resulted in the destruction of over 400,000 excess or illegal small arms and light weapons and 44 million rounds of ammunition. The vast majority of these weapons in the global illicit trade are not newly-manufactured but rather are left over from the Cold War, when large weapons stockpiles were common in many countries within the Communist world. Destruction of these weapons, therefore, represents progress it takes them out of circulation for good, where they will never fall into the hands of terrorists, criminals, or warlords, or kill innocent civilians. For details I invite you to refer to our national report, which has been submitted to the United Nations Department for Disarmament Affairs and is available on its website.

Editor’s Note: PIREP is aviation shorthand for pilot report. It’s a means for one pilot to pass on current, potentially useful information to other pilots. In the same fashion, we intend to use this department to let readers know about aerospace-power items of interest.

THE AIRBORNE LASER (ABL), or YAL-1A is the second-largest aircraft program in terms of funding (the F-22 being the largest). [1] The modified 747-400F ABL (fig. 1) is designed to serve as a theater-ballistic-missile-defense platform by engaging missiles in their boost phase. After Operation Desert Storm, the Air Force stood up the ABL Program Office in 1992 at Phillips Laboratory, located at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico.

In order to carry out a successful intercept and shootdown, ABL will operate above the clouds at 40,000 feet, where its boost-phase attack profile offers several advantages. First, the target missile moves slowly in this phase of flight, and the missile frame is highly stressed, making it vulnerable to attack. Second, the missile’s infrared plume is easy to detect so that targeteers do not have to worry about distinguishing between decoys and warheads. Finally, destruction of the missile over enemy territory minimizes the threat to US and allied positions from falling debris.

The technologies used in the ABL were first developed in the Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL), an NKC-135 that successfully used an ABL to shoot down air-to-air missiles and drones in the 1980s. The ALL’s limited laser range, however, made the system militarily insignificant. [2] Yet, the ALL program prompted several new technology initiatives for the ABL.

For example, chemical mixtures were reformulated to produce a more powerful version of the chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL), invented at Phillips Laboratory in 1977. The laser fuel consists of hydrogen peroxide, potassium hydroxide, chlorine, iodine, and ammonia–all of which are combined with water to produce the beam. The laser operates at 1.315 microns, an infrared wavelength invisible to the naked eye. By using plastics and titanium and by recycling chemicals, laser contractor Thompson Ramo Wooldridge (TRW) was able to make the module lighter but at the same time increase the laser’s power output by 400 percent. The one-megawatt laser will have a range of four hundred kilometers, and an ABL will be able to fire the laser 30 times per sortie.

Another significant technological development is adaptive optics, developed to combat fluctuations in air temperature and consequent atmospheric turbulence that weakens and scatters the laser’s beam. Adaptive optics relies on a deformable mirror, sometimes called a rubber mirror, to compensate for tilt and phase distortions in the atmosphere. The mirror has 341 actuators that change one thousand times per second, enabling the mirror to modify the laser beam so that it can travel further through turbulent air. Finally, the development of non-water-cooled optics resulted in enormous weight savings.

In 1995 the ABL transitioned out of Phillips Laboratory, becoming a major defense-acquisition program. In order to mitigate risk, the chief of staff of the Air Force changed the prototype aircraft from a used 747-200 to a new-production 747-400 freighter. The added weight capacity of the new aircraft allowed for more flexibility, and several risk-reduction experiments conducted by Phillips Laboratory in 1996 showed promise. The TRW COIL laser, which demonstrated chemical efficiencies well beyond requirements, used adaptive optics to propagate a low-power beam between two aircraft to establish the feasibility of the ABL. In 1997 the Air Force awarded Boeing a $1.4 billion six-year contract to design, build, and test the ABL. The test aircraft will have six laser modules, and the production version will have 14. The schedule calls for the first ABL to shoot down a target representative of a theater ballistic missile in 2004. The Boeing team includes TRW, which builds the laser, and Lockheed Martin, which devel ops the optics.

The year 1997 also saw the formation of a team to gather atmospheric data in theaters of interest–specifically, Korea and the Middle East. The data, collected seasonally, confirmed the models used by the ABL. Due to the difficulty in measuring atmospheric turbulence directly, however, the Office of the Secretary of Defense requested further data collection through fiscal year 2000. The Air Force continues to build atmospheric databases for ABL, using a star scintillometer to gather light from certain stars that simulate ABL targets. The process uses a modified C-135E–code-named Argus–as the test platform, from which the scintillometer locks onto a star and then measures the amount of optical turbulence between the sensor and the star. By knowing the amount of distortion present, the ABL can predistort the laser-beam weapon so that it will be most intense when it hits the target.

In order to help with the tracking of the laser beam and target acquisition, the ABL is fitted with an active ranging system (ARS), composed of an F-15 LANTIRN pod with a [CO.sub.2] laser. The ARS, cued by the infrared search-and-track sensor, points the [CO.sub.2] laser for a highly accurate ranging and three-dimensional track of targets. Six infrared search-and-track sensors, located along the fuselage of the 747-400, provide 360-degree surveillance, initial detection, and tracking of missiles in boost phase.

European action on small arms and light weapons and explosive remnants of war; final report, June 2006.

United Nations Publications

2006

78 pages

$18.00

Paperback

UD380

Given all the media attention to weapons of mass destruction it may seem efforts to reduce the number of small arms and forgotten landmines may have been moved to the background. In reality, however, small arms and light weapons (SALW) and explosive remnants of war (ERW) have caused many deaths, escalate many conflicts, undermine many efforts to develop, and prevent the recovery of societies torn by local wars. Here the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research describes its work to implement the European Union Small Arms Strategy with the intention of expanding policy objectives, extend action against ERW and other types of landmines, and adopt policy guidelines to coordinate assistance on action against SALW, ERW and other types of landmines. They take as a test area the SALW and ERW situations in northern Africa.

Editor’s Note: PIREP is aviation shorthand for pilot report. It’s a means for one pilot to pass on current, potentially useful information to other pilots. In the same fashion, we intend to use this department to let readers know about aerospace-power items of interest.

THE AIRBORNE LASER (ABL), or YAL-1A is the second-largest aircraft program in terms of funding (the F-22 being the largest). [1] The modified 747-400F ABL (fig. 1) is designed to serve as a theater-ballistic-missile-defense platform by engaging missiles in their boost phase. After Operation Desert Storm, the Air Force stood up the ABL Program Office in 1992 at Phillips Laboratory, located at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico.

In order to carry out a successful intercept and shootdown, ABL will operate above the clouds at 40,000 feet, where its boost-phase attack profile offers several advantages. First, the target missile moves slowly in this phase of flight, and the missile frame is highly stressed, making it vulnerable to attack. Second, the missile’s infrared plume is easy to detect so that targeteers do not have to worry about distinguishing between decoys and warheads. Finally, destruction of the missile over enemy territory minimizes the threat to US and allied positions from falling debris.

The technologies used in the ABL were first developed in the Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL), an NKC-135 that successfully used an ABL to shoot down air-to-air missiles and drones in the 1980s. The ALL’s limited laser range, however, made the system militarily insignificant. [2] Yet, the ALL program prompted several new technology initiatives for the ABL.

For example, chemical mixtures were reformulated to produce a more powerful version of the chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL), invented at Phillips Laboratory in 1977. The laser fuel consists of hydrogen peroxide, potassium hydroxide, chlorine, iodine, and ammonia–all of which are combined with water to produce the beam. The laser operates at 1.315 microns, an infrared wavelength invisible to the naked eye. By using plastics and titanium and by recycling chemicals, laser contractor Thompson Ramo Wooldridge (TRW) was able to make the module lighter but at the same time increase the laser’s power output by 400 percent. The one-megawatt laser will have a range of four hundred kilometers, and an ABL will be able to fire the laser 30 times per sortie.

Another significant technological development is adaptive optics, developed to combat fluctuations in air temperature and consequent atmospheric turbulence that weakens and scatters the laser’s beam. Adaptive optics relies on a deformable mirror, sometimes called a rubber mirror, to compensate for tilt and phase distortions in the atmosphere. The mirror has 341 actuators that change one thousand times per second, enabling the mirror to modify the laser beam so that it can travel further through turbulent air. Finally, the development of non-water-cooled optics resulted in enormous weight savings.

In 1995 the ABL transitioned out of Phillips Laboratory, becoming a major defense-acquisition program. In order to mitigate risk, the chief of staff of the Air Force changed the prototype aircraft from a used 747-200 to a new-production 747-400 freighter. The added weight capacity of the new aircraft allowed for more flexibility, and several risk-reduction experiments conducted by Phillips Laboratory in 1996 showed promise. The TRW COIL laser, which demonstrated chemical efficiencies well beyond requirements, used adaptive optics to propagate a low-power beam between two aircraft to establish the feasibility of the ABL. In 1997 the Air Force awarded Boeing a $1.4 billion six-year contract to design, build, and test the ABL. The test aircraft will have six laser modules, and the production version will have 14. The schedule calls for the first ABL to shoot down a target representative of a theater ballistic missile in 2004. The Boeing team includes TRW, which builds the laser, and Lockheed Martin, which devel ops the optics.

The year 1997 also saw the formation of a team to gather atmospheric data in theaters of interest–specifically, Korea and the Middle East. The data, collected seasonally, confirmed the models used by the ABL. Due to the difficulty in measuring atmospheric turbulence directly, however, the Office of the Secretary of Defense requested further data collection through fiscal year 2000. The Air Force continues to build atmospheric databases for ABL, using a star scintillometer to gather light from certain stars that simulate ABL targets. The process uses a modified C-135E–code-named Argus–as the test platform, from which the scintillometer locks onto a star and then measures the amount of optical turbulence between the sensor and the star. By knowing the amount of distortion present, the ABL can predistort the laser-beam weapon so that it will be most intense when it hits the target.

In order to help with the tracking of the laser beam and target acquisition, the ABL is fitted with an active ranging system (ARS), composed of an F-15 LANTIRN pod with a [CO.sub.2] laser. The ARS, cued by the infrared search-and-track sensor, points the [CO.sub.2] laser for a highly accurate ranging and three-dimensional track of targets. Six infrared search-and-track sensors, located along the fuselage of the 747-400, provide 360-degree surveillance, initial detection, and tracking of missiles in boost phase.

Madam Chairperson, Excellencies, and distinguished colleagues, it is my honor and privilege to present the United States report to the First Biennial Meeting of States. All of the governments represented in this hall, and many of you personally, were here two years ago, in July of 2001, when the Program of Action was debated at length and ultimately agreed. In the intervening two years, many governments have exerted considerable efforts, and expended substantial resources, to fulfill the promise of the Program of Action. On behalf of my government, I salute your efforts and look forward to receiving your reports.

The United States strongly supports the United Nations Program of Action, and the meeting for which we are now gathered. We are committed to supporting the very focused and constructive agenda that our Chairperson, Ambassador Inoguchi, has so ably brought forward.

I well recall that our deliberations two years ago were accompanied by many passionate and well-informed advocates just beyond these walls, representing the non-governmental sector. Among them were private citizens representing a wide spectrum of positions relating to the lawful ownership of firearms. Regardless of one’s personal views on that issue, in the U.S. or any other country, the U.N. Conference had a very specific mandate from the General Assembly, and lawful gun ownership was not part of that mandate. The scope of the Conference and the Program of Action concern the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. That remains our focus today.

Madam Chairperson, as we review the many initiatives our governments have pursued under the Program of Action, I submit that we all have more than enough worthy work to do within the terms of that mandate. For it is difficult to exaggerate the impact of illicit flows of small arms and light weapons, in troubled places very distant from this hall.

We often talk about the biggest threats to international peace and security, such as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and appropriately so. Yet, it is readily apparent that the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons poses a serious threat to stability and security in this hemisphere as well as parts of Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. The ready availability of lethal weapons of war in the wrong hands is a serious impediment to conflict mediation, and a force protection concern for our militaries, including peacekeepers.

We must all work even more energetically to curb the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. I sincerely hope one key outcome of our endeavors this week will be a redoubled commitment to that task. And you will find the United States ready to engage in very practical ways to reduce the terrible costs being exacted by these illicit weapons of local destruction.

The United States maintains laws, policies, and programs that support the Program of Action. At the national level, the U.S. has a robust and transparent system of laws and regulations governing national holdings, manufacture, and the international movement of small arms and light weapons. All firearms, by law, are marked at the time of manufacture and import. Inventories of all national military holdings of small arms and light weapons are subject to strict security controls and registration by serial number to ensure that they are not lost or stolen.

At the regional and global levels, since July 2001, the United States has sponsored resolutions in the Organization of American States (OAS) to destroy excess small arms and light weapons and to develop model arms brokering regulations for the Western Hemisphere. We have sought to include small arms and light weapons in the Wassenaar Arrangement arms reporting categories. We have supported the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe efforts to develop “Best Practice” guides to assist states in establishing effective controls over small arms and light weapons, and made similar efforts elsewhere.

U.S. assistance programs called for in the Program of Action are extensive. Our law enforcement training programs include a focused curriculum on illicit arms trafficking for the countries of Southern Africa. Export control and border security programs in over thirty countries worldwide provide legal assistance, training, and equipment to prevent the illicit traffic in dangerous goods, including small arms and light weapons.

Perhaps our most significant contribution under the program has been in the area of destruction assistance programs. Since early 2001, U.S.-supported programs in ten countries have resulted in the destruction of over 400,000 excess or illegal small arms and light weapons and 44 million rounds of ammunition. The vast majority of these weapons in the global illicit trade are not newly-manufactured but rather are left over from the Cold War, when large weapons stockpiles were common in many countries within the Communist world. Destruction of these weapons, therefore, represents progress it takes them out of circulation for good, where they will never fall into the hands of terrorists, criminals, or warlords, or kill innocent civilians. For details I invite you to refer to our national report, which has been submitted to the United Nations Department for Disarmament Affairs and is available on its website.

The attention given in recent years to the problem of the illicit manufacture, transfer and circulation of small arms and light weapons, and their excessive accumulation, has certainly grown, permitting substantial progress to be made, particularly at the regional level. Nevertheless, much remains to be done in order to develop and implement concrete programmes, policies and laws to effectively combat, prevent and eradicate the spread of those weapons.

Acceptance of the magnitude of the problem, as well as its global and multidimensional character, was indeed an achievement during the 2001 United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, which was also a fundamental step towards a collective undertaking based on the principle of shared responsibility. The full understanding of the problem, not only from its disarmament perspective but also as a tool to fight crime and terrorism and protect human rights and humanitarian law, invited us to work simultaneously in different fields and fora.

Now it is time to adopt measures to control and, in some cases, prohibit the manufacture and trade of small arms and light weapons, as well as their acquisition and possession by Governments or individuals, including through the development of legally binding instruments, common policies and other actions, and by strengthening international cooperation in this field.
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In this context, it is important to identify crucial issues that remain to be solved, such as those referring to a global system for marking and tracing small arms and light weapons, the need for universal rules to control the activities of brokers and other intermediaries, the establishment of strict limitation or prohibition for the acquisition and possession of these weapons by civilians, or the prohibition of transfers and other transactions from or between States and non-State actors. Adequate marking is at the core of any effort to control small arms and light weapons. It is indispensable for identification, as well as for tracing, as recognized by all States, even though some of them still oppose a standard marking. Progress in this field is therefore urgent.

At the regional level, the Inter-American Convention against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and other Related Materials, adopted in 1997, made a significant contribution by requiring appropriate markings of the name of manufacturer, place of manufacture, and serial number at the time of manufacture, as well as the importer’s name and address on imported firearms, and also appropriate markings on any firearms confiscated or forfeited.

In contrast, the Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, negotiated in Vienna after a long dispute with China, allowed two methods of marking at the time of manufacture instead of setting a standard. This instrument accepted any alternative unique user-friendly marking with simple geometric symbols, in combination with a numeric and/or alphanumeric code, permitting ready identification by all States of the country of manufacture.

The Programme of Action adopted at the 2001 Conference did not solve the problem, since it only calls to ensure that henceforth licensed manufacturers apply an appropriate and reliable marking on each small arm and light weapon as an integral part of the production process, noting that this marking should be unique and should identify the country of manufacture and also provide information that enables the national authorities to identify the manufacturer and serial number so that each weapon can be identified and traced. It is therefore important to highlight the current work of the Group of Governmental Experts on Tracing Illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons, established by the General Assembly, and the need to negotiate a binding instrument of universal application.

The Programme of Action includes a commitment to eve op common understandings of the basic issues and the scope of the problems related to illicit brokering in small arms and light weapons, with a view to preventing, combating and eradicating the activities of those engaged in such brokering”. The commitment has been the subject of several informal discussions in recent years, but still needs to materialize through a concrete proposal to adopt common policies and legislation to control brokers’ activities, which are often difficult to locate, so as to identify the country of jurisdiction. Legitimate brokers and other intermediaries recognize the need for controls, since they realize the importance of their activities to reduce illicit trade in small and light weapons. Their cooperation, as well as from the manufacturers, is very important in identifying the individuals involved in criminal activities.

The issue of acquisition and possession of small arms and light weapons by civilians was considered during the 2001 Conference, but some countries, particularly the United States, made it clear that they would not accept any form of control or limitation, not even an encouragement to look into these issues at the national level. The original proposal only encouraged States to seriously consider the prohibition of unrestricted trade in, and private ownership of, small arms and light weapons specifically designed for military purposes. A revised version even recognized explicitly that this would be done without discouraging or diminishing lawful leisure or recreational activities, such as travel or tourism for sport shooting, hunting and other forms of lawful ownership and use recognized by States.

Editor’s Note: PIREP is aviation shorthand for pilot report. It’s a means for one pilot to pass on current, potentially useful information to other pilots. In the same fashion, we intend to use this department to let readers know about aerospace-power items of interest.

THE AIRBORNE LASER (ABL), or YAL-1A is the second-largest aircraft program in terms of funding (the F-22 being the largest). [1] The modified 747-400F ABL (fig. 1) is designed to serve as a theater-ballistic-missile-defense platform by engaging missiles in their boost phase. After Operation Desert Storm, the Air Force stood up the ABL Program Office in 1992 at Phillips Laboratory, located at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico.

In order to carry out a successful intercept and shootdown, ABL will operate above the clouds at 40,000 feet, where its boost-phase attack profile offers several advantages. First, the target missile moves slowly in this phase of flight, and the missile frame is highly stressed, making it vulnerable to attack. Second, the missile’s infrared plume is easy to detect so that targeteers do not have to worry about distinguishing between decoys and warheads. Finally, destruction of the missile over enemy territory minimizes the threat to US and allied positions from falling debris.

The technologies used in the ABL were first developed in the Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL), an NKC-135 that successfully used an ABL to shoot down air-to-air missiles and drones in the 1980s. The ALL’s limited laser range, however, made the system militarily insignificant. [2] Yet, the ALL program prompted several new technology initiatives for the ABL.
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For example, chemical mixtures were reformulated to produce a more powerful version of the chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL), invented at Phillips Laboratory in 1977. The laser fuel consists of hydrogen peroxide, potassium hydroxide, chlorine, iodine, and ammonia–all of which are combined with water to produce the beam. The laser operates at 1.315 microns, an infrared wavelength invisible to the naked eye. By using plastics and titanium and by recycling chemicals, laser contractor Thompson Ramo Wooldridge (TRW) was able to make the module lighter but at the same time increase the laser’s power output by 400 percent. The one-megawatt laser will have a range of four hundred kilometers, and an ABL will be able to fire the laser 30 times per sortie.

Another significant technological development is adaptive optics, developed to combat fluctuations in air temperature and consequent atmospheric turbulence that weakens and scatters the laser’s beam. Adaptive optics relies on a deformable mirror, sometimes called a rubber mirror, to compensate for tilt and phase distortions in the atmosphere. The mirror has 341 actuators that change one thousand times per second, enabling the mirror to modify the laser beam so that it can travel further through turbulent air. Finally, the development of non-water-cooled optics resulted in enormous weight savings.

In 1995 the ABL transitioned out of Phillips Laboratory, becoming a major defense-acquisition program. In order to mitigate risk, the chief of staff of the Air Force changed the prototype aircraft from a used 747-200 to a new-production 747-400 freighter. The added weight capacity of the new aircraft allowed for more flexibility, and several risk-reduction experiments conducted by Phillips Laboratory in 1996 showed promise. The TRW COIL laser, which demonstrated chemical efficiencies well beyond requirements, used adaptive optics to propagate a low-power beam between two aircraft to establish the feasibility of the ABL. In 1997 the Air Force awarded Boeing a $1.4 billion six-year contract to design, build, and test the ABL. The test aircraft will have six laser modules, and the production version will have 14. The schedule calls for the first ABL to shoot down a target representative of a theater ballistic missile in 2004. The Boeing team includes TRW, which builds the laser, and Lockheed Martin, which devel ops the optics.

The year 1997 also saw the formation of a team to gather atmospheric data in theaters of interest–specifically, Korea and the Middle East. The data, collected seasonally, confirmed the models used by the ABL. Due to the difficulty in measuring atmospheric turbulence directly, however, the Office of the Secretary of Defense requested further data collection through fiscal year 2000. The Air Force continues to build atmospheric databases for ABL, using a star scintillometer to gather light from certain stars that simulate ABL targets. The process uses a modified C-135E–code-named Argus–as the test platform, from which the scintillometer locks onto a star and then measures the amount of optical turbulence between the sensor and the star. By knowing the amount of distortion present, the ABL can predistort the laser-beam weapon so that it will be most intense when it hits the target.

In order to help with the tracking of the laser beam and target acquisition, the ABL is fitted with an active ranging system (ARS), composed of an F-15 LANTIRN pod with a [CO.sub.2] laser. The ARS, cued by the infrared search-and-track sensor, points the [CO.sub.2] laser for a highly accurate ranging and three-dimensional track of targets. Six infrared search-and-track sensors, located along the fuselage of the 747-400, provide 360-degree surveillance, initial detection, and tracking of missiles in boost phase.

[The following are excerpts from the speech delivered to the First Biennial Meeting of the States, concerning the United Nations Program of Action, New York, New York, July 7, 2003.]

Madam Chairperson, Excellencies, and distinguished colleagues, it is my honor and privilege to present the United States report to the First Biennial Meeting of States. All of the governments represented in this hall, and many of you personally, were here two years ago, in July of 2001, when the Program of Action was debated at length and ultimately agreed. In the intervening two years, many governments have exerted considerable efforts, and expended substantial resources, to fulfill the promise of the Program of Action. On behalf of my government, I salute your efforts and look forward to receiving your reports.

The United States strongly supports the United Nations Program of Action, and the meeting for which we are now gathered. We are committed to supporting the very focused and constructive agenda that our Chairperson, Ambassador Inoguchi, has so ably brought forward.
Advertisement

I well recall that our deliberations two years ago were accompanied by many passionate and well-informed advocates just beyond these walls, representing the non-governmental sector. Among them were private citizens representing a wide spectrum of positions relating to the lawful ownership of firearms. Regardless of one’s personal views on that issue, in the U.S. or any other country, the U.N. Conference had a very specific mandate from the General Assembly, and lawful gun ownership was not part of that mandate. The scope of the Conference and the Program of Action concern the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. That remains our focus today.

Madam Chairperson, as we review the many initiatives our governments have pursued under the Program of Action, I submit that we all have more than enough worthy work to do within the terms of that mandate. For it is difficult to exaggerate the impact of illicit flows of small arms and light weapons, in troubled places very distant from this hall.

We often talk about the biggest threats to international peace and security, such as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and appropriately so. Yet, it is readily apparent that the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons poses a serious threat to stability and security in this hemisphere as well as parts of Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. The ready availability of lethal weapons of war in the wrong hands is a serious impediment to conflict mediation, and a force protection concern for our militaries, including peacekeepers.

We must all work even more energetically to curb the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. I sincerely hope one key outcome of our endeavors this week will be a redoubled commitment to that task. And you will find the United States ready to engage in very practical ways to reduce the terrible costs being exacted by these illicit weapons of local destruction.

The United States maintains laws, policies, and programs that support the Program of Action. At the national level, the U.S. has a robust and transparent system of laws and regulations governing national holdings, manufacture, and the international movement of small arms and light weapons. All firearms, by law, are marked at the time of manufacture and import. Inventories of all national military holdings of small arms and light weapons are subject to strict security controls and registration by serial number to ensure that they are not lost or stolen.

At the regional and global levels, since July 2001, the United States has sponsored resolutions in the Organization of American States (OAS) to destroy excess small arms and light weapons and to develop model arms brokering regulations for the Western Hemisphere. We have sought to include small arms and light weapons in the Wassenaar Arrangement arms reporting categories. We have supported the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe efforts to develop “Best Practice” guides to assist states in establishing effective controls over small arms and light weapons, and made similar efforts elsewhere.

U.S. assistance programs called for in the Program of Action are extensive. Our law enforcement training programs include a focused curriculum on illicit arms trafficking for the countries of Southern Africa. Export control and border security programs in over thirty countries worldwide provide legal assistance, training, and equipment to prevent the illicit traffic in dangerous goods, including small arms and light weapons.

Perhaps our most significant contribution under the program has been in the area of destruction assistance programs. Since early 2001, U.S.-supported programs in ten countries have resulted in the destruction of over 400,000 excess or illegal small arms and light weapons and 44 million rounds of ammunition. The vast majority of these weapons in the global illicit trade are not newly-manufactured but rather are left over from the Cold War, when large weapons stockpiles were common in many countries within the Communist world. Destruction of these weapons, therefore, represents progress it takes them out of circulation for good, where they will never fall into the hands of terrorists, criminals, or warlords, or kill innocent civilians. For details I invite you to refer to our national report, which has been submitted to the United Nations Department for Disarmament Affairs and is available on its website.

The Cambodian government, with European Union assistance, on Wednesday destroyed 3,519 surplus military weapons in a large bonfire in Anlong Veng, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in northern Cambodia, a senior Defense Ministry official said.

The ”Flame of Peace” destruction ceremony was participated in by about 3,000 people including foreign diplomats, government officials and villagers, said Maj. Gen. Son Kimsorn, director of the Defense Ministry’s military equipment department.

Anlong Veng was the last stronghold of Khmer Rouge supreme leader Pol Pot, who died there 1998. It is located in Udor Meanchey Province near the Thai border, about 100 kilometers north of the famed Angkor temple complex.

After 30 years of war, Cambodia’s peace and stability has been undermined by the continued availability and circulation of large quantities of weapons — legal and illegal.

Since May 1999, the government has been regularly holding public ceremonies to crush or burn surplus weapons or weapons confiscated from civilians.

With the latest one, the total number of weapons destroyed in such ceremonies would be over 154,000, mostly AK-47 and CKC rifles.

The weapons were destroyed in Anlong Veng under EU ASAT, a project name that stands for the European Union’s Assistance on Curbing Small Arms and Light Weapons in the Kingdom of Cambodia.

David de Beer, EU ASAC project manager noted in a message delivered at the ceremony that Anlong Veng, as Pol Pot’s former stronghold, ”reminds many people in the country of the darkest period of Cambodian history.”

”It is a powerful message when we can say that the Royal Cambodian Government is destroying over 3,500 weapons in Anlong Veng,” he said. ”Anlong Veng used to be the symbol of war, but now through the Flame of Peace ceremony, Anlong Veng becomes part of the progress to peace.”

Since 2001, EU ASAC has supported the Cambodian government in destroying over 70,000 weapons in 25 Flame of Peace ceremonies. Between 65 percent and 80 percent of the weapons are said to be operational.

Another major activity of the EU ASAC program is helping the Defense Ministry implement a weapons registration and safe storage project for all small arms and light weapons under its control.

Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, Second Edition 2002), 120 pp., $16.70.

THE DISTINGUISHED international relations theorist Kenneth Waltz (still) thinks that the emergence of new nuclear powers is not necessarily to be regretted. In a world of many nuclear powers, in Waltz’s view, a major war would be practically impossible. He therefore believes that “more may be better”–that what has come to be called “nuclear proliferation” might actually be a good thing. Scott Sagan, a professor of political science at Stanford University and a leading authority in the field of strategic studies, disagrees; in Sagan’s view, “more will be worse.” In 1995, Waltz and Sagan published The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate, in which each laid out his argument and then responded to the other’s argument. The discussion was spirited and often quite interesting, and the book deservedly received a good deal of attention. A revised edition, with new passages on terrorism and missile defense and a new chapter on India and Pakistan, has just been published. Its appearance provides us with a timely opport unity to confront the proliferation question yet again–a chance to get to the bottom of what is perhaps the most important international issue the world will face in the years to come.

Why does Waltz think that the spread of nuclear weapons is not necessarily to be avoided? His fundamental claim is that nuclear forces have a very powerful deterrent effect, and that nuclear states would therefore be extremely reluctant to tangle with each other. If one such state does take aggressive action–if a nuclear Iraq invaded Kuwait, for example–other powers would find it too dangerous to use military force against the aggressor state, and would only be able to take non-military measures. If the United States at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 “had thought that Iraq might have had a few bombs, it would have had to manage the Iraq-Kuwait crisis differently, say by employing only an embargo.” If, however, by some chance a limited war between two nuclear states did break out, that conflict would be very unlikely to escalate. Escalation that threatened an adversary’s core interests, especially an invasion of the adversary’s homeland with conventional forces, would be “too risky to conte mplate.” But if a country’s core interests actually were threatened, then even that situation would scarcely lead to disaster. There would be no massive escalation. Instead nuclear weapons would be used in a very limited way. A “few judiciously delivered warheads” would in such circumstances be a very effective wake-up call, and would probably “bring rapid deescalation.”

A nuclear world, according to Waltz, is thus a world of safety nets beneath safety nets. In the unlikely event that serious problems between nuclear states developed at one level of conflict, the dangers would very probably be contained before matters escalated to the next level. The mere possession of a nuclear capability, Waltz says, induces “caution in any state” and “especially in weak ones.” A nuclear Iraq, he now writes (Libya was the state mentioned in the corresponding passage in the 1995 text), would actually be more cautious than a non-nuclear Iraq. The possession of nuclear weapons by an adversary, moreover, would have an extremely powerful deterrent effect. In Waltz’s view, “not much is required to deter.” “A low probability of carrying a highly destructive attack home”, he believes, “is sufficient for deterrence.” A large force is not necessary for this purpose; a relatively small number of bombs would do the trick. That small force, of course, would have to be able to survive an enemy attack, bu t since bombs can be small and light, they are “easy to hide and to move” and delivering them, even after a surprise attack, would not be hard to do. “Bombs can be driven in by trucks from neighboring countries”, he writes. “Ports can be torpedoed by small boats lying offshore.” Even “weak and poor states”, he writes, can “easily” build small, survivable nuclear forces, and when they do, they will deter even the strongest nuclear powers. With nuclear weapons, he says, “any state will be deterred by another state ’s second-strike forces.” Relative strength then no longer matters: “if no state can launch a disarming attack with high confidence, force comparisons are irrelevant.” “A minimal deterrent”, he writes, “deters as well as a maximal one.”

The atomic bomb, Waltz believes, is thus the great equalizer in international politics. It is not just that a small nuclear force is as good as a big one. He now argues (in two passages that did not appear in the 1995 text) that the presence of nuclear forces also makes disparities in conventional military power meaningless. “Nuclear weapons”, he says,

negate the advantages of conventional superiority because escalation in the use of conventional force risks receiving a nuclear strike. With nuclear weapons, not only is a small second-strike force equivalent to a large second-strike force but also small conventional forces are equivalent to large conventional forces because large forces cannot be used against a nuclear power.

In such a world, where neither the nuclear nor the conventional balance matters, the weak are as strong as the strong. Everyone is deterred–and deterred equally. No one will dare start a war, because the risks are so immense. There is thus practically no risk of war, or at any rate of a war in which nuclear weapons are used in a major way. In a nuclear world, a general war is a virtual “impossibility”; in such a world, “only limited wars can be fought” and “the probability of major war among states having nuclear weapons approaches zero. Nuclear weapons are thus the great bulwark of international peace; and it is because they have such a powerfully stabilizing effect that in Waltz’s view the “gradual spread of nuclear weapons is more to be welcomed than feared.”

SAGAN DOES NOT think a nuclear world would be nearly as stable as Waltz makes out. Indeed, looking at South Asia, he thinks that deterrence will eventually break down–that nuclear weapons will someday be used in a conflict between India and Pakistan. For him, the root problem with Waltz’s argument is the assumption that states are under very strong pressure to behave rationally, and that one can therefore assume that states in fact will act rationally. To Sagan, nuclear weapons are controlled by “imperfect humans inside imperfect organizations”, and, given the way large organizations actually work, such a high degree of rationality simply cannot be expected. Nuclear weapons are in the hands of professional military organizations, and those organizations behave in only “boundedly rational” ways that “are likely to lead to deterrence failures and deliberate or accidental nuclear war.”

In the 1995 version of his essay, Sagan focused on three dangers resulting from the “wide-spread biases and imperfections in military organizations.” First was the problem of preventive war: when a country begins to build a nuclear force, one or more of its rivals might decide to launch an attack on that country’s nuclear facilities before it is too late. Military officers, Sagan argues, are particularly attracted to this kind of thinking, and this, he says, can be a real source of danger, especially in countries where the armed forces are not under firm civilian control. The second problem has to do with the survivability of a nuclear force. In a crisis, vulnerable forces might invite enemy attack, and for various organizational reasons, professional militaries, if left to themselves, might not actually build invulnerable forces. The third problem has to do with the possibility of a nuclear accident; this includes the problem of unauthorized use, since such use is “accidental” from the standpoint of the cent ral authorities. And there are limits, Sagan insists, to how accident-proof large organizations are likely to be. (Sagan is the author of an important 1993 book called The Limits of Safety, which lays out this argument in some detail.) The empirical record, he point outs here, shows that accidents are possible. An Iraqi bomb, the UN inspectors discovered in the early 1990s, would have been “highly unstable” and might have gone off “if it fell off the edge” of a desk. Such an accident, especially if it were to take place near the front lines in a war, might well in his view lead to a major nuclear exchange.