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Press Conference on the Proliferation Security Initiative (excerpted)
John R. Bolton, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security
U.S. Consulate General in Krakow
Krakow, Poland
May 31, 2004

UNDER SECRETARY BOLTON: Thank you all very much for coming. Of course we are here because this is the first anniversary of President Bush’s speech in Krakow that announced the Proliferation Security Initiative. The initiative has made great progress in the year since the President announced this idea to interdict shipments of weapons of mass destruction [WMD] and WMD-related materials in international commerce.

In another speech in February at our National Defense University the President proposed expanding the initiative to do an addition to interdiction going after manufacturing and research facilities for weapons of mass destruction, international financial flows and other aspects of the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. And tomorrow we will celebrate the first anniversary. The government of Poland hosts approximately sixty nations – six zero nations – worldwide that have announced their support for PSI. But today we had a critical elaboration of PSI, as the fourteen members of the core group confirmed that the Russian Federation would join the core group. This is a development that the United States has been working on almost since the beginning of PSI’s one-year existence. It’s a development we welcome and we look forward to active participation by Russia and PSI interdiction activities globally. The Russian Foreign Ministry has just within the past half hour, I believe, issued a statement in Moscow. I saw it on the Internet before coming over here, so some of you from the wire services, I think your colleagues in Moscow have already put it on your respective wires. The Russian delegation, in fact, participated in the core group meeting this morning at the salt mine. I won’t try and pronounce it but I’ll ask that somebody do justice to the name, but in this wonderful place where we had the meeting their delegation was headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak and by Colonel General Yuriy Baluyevskiy who is the Deputy Chairman of their Joint Chiefs of Staff. As the Polish host said this was the first underground PSI meeting. It was a wonderful idea. I’m glad I went there. But let me just return to Russia for a minute. This is a major development, a very welcome development from the perspective of the United States and all the PSI members. We expect that our intelligence-sharing and law enforcement and military assets working with the Russian Federation will make a major contribution to our effort to interdict WMD trafficking worldwide.

And I’ll just make one more point and then I’ll be happy to take questions. As I said, tomorrow the Polish government will host this first anniversary celebration with approximately sixty nations participating. You can see that we started from our original meeting of eleven countries in Madrid in June of last year and now we’re at sixty countries, which have declared their political support for PSI. Now there’s certainly considerable additional work to be done, but I think that the turnout here demonstrates the widespread acceptance of PSI and demonstrates the importance of taking robust action to cut off trade in weapons of mass destruction. And it’s a demonstration of how in just one short year PSI has become a major weapon in the struggle against WMD proliferation. So I’ll stop there and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.

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QUESTION: My question is what kind of activity do you expect from Russia to take on? Do you also expect that the access of Russia to the initiative may cause the other countries to follow suit like China. For instance, in other countries do you expect to reach that effect? And what concrete activities do you expect of Russians to take?

UNDER SECRETARY BOLTON: Well I think as a political signal Russia joining the core group of PSI is very profound. And I think its implications will reach far and wide. Since September 11 Russia and the United States have already had extensive intelligence interchanges on questions of international terrorism and I expect that we will now enhance our intelligence sharing in the area of trafficking and weapons of mass destruction. Russia is a great naval power and it has extensive land and air space that can be used for commercial activities, which we hope and expect will now be closed to proliferators.

In the immediate future we’re hoping that Russia will participate in the next meeting of what we call Operational Experts, which is basically intelligence, law enforcement and military people. It will be hosted by Norway in early August.

You know, when President Bush came into office he talked about creating a new strategic framework with Russia involving strategic offence, strategic defense and non-proliferation. In strategic offence we now have the Treaty of Moscow that will substantially reduce both country’s strategic nuclear warheads. In strategic defensive terms we have moved beyond the ABM Treaty of 1972 and in fact we’re now engaged in discussions with Poland about the possibility of basing interceptors and radars here. And on the third aspect of the new strategic framework of non-proliferation we’ve done many things, but Russia joining the PSI core group is another example of strengthening of that leg of the strategic framework between Russia and the United States. So I can go on at length.

Pursuant to the decision that President Bush and President Jiang Zemin made at the Crawford Summit we have been engaging in a strategic dialogue with China over the last two years. And we have certainly been discussing PSI activities. In fact we have had some operational cooperation with China in interdiction activities. And I expect as part of the strategic dialogue between China and the United States we will continue to discuss PSI and whether there will come a time when China’s prepared for closer cooperation is really up to them. But let me go back to the point I made before – PSI is an activity, not an organization. If China cooperates fully with us on operational matters that would suit us just fine.

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