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RUEHUNV/USMISSION UNVIE VIENNA PRIORITY 0003

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 BANJUL 000441 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PARM KNNP PREL TRGY XA EG
SUBJECT: VCI BUREAU PDAS FORD COMPLIANCE DIPLOMACY 
CONSULTATION WITH EGYPT 
 
 
¶1. (SBU) SUMMARY: VCI Bureau PDAS Christopher Ford 
accompanied by Maher Tadros, Office of Nuclear Affairs, and 
Eric Wong, U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, met June 30, 2006 
with Egypt's Deputy Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs 
Ambassador Taher Farahat in Banjul on the margins of the 
Summit of the African Union.  The purpose of the meeting was 
to initiate consultative discussions on compliance policy and 
compliance enforcement approaches.  Both sides agreed upon 
the importance of upholding the credibility of 
nonproliferation regimes, and that there is a need to improve 
ways to cooperate in addressing compliance issues. 
Ambassador Farahat emphasized Egypt's commitment to arms 
control and nonproliferation and stressed the importance of a 
Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  PDAS 
Ford emphasized the importance both to international security 
and to international technology cooperation of ensuring 
compliance with Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and 
other nonproliferation regime rules, and discussed 
initiatives to enhance peaceful use of nuclear technology, 
CWC concerns, and lessons learned from past failures to 
confront noncompliance clearly and effectively.  Ford also 
addressed issues raised by the Egyptian official regarding 
disarmament progress.  Ambassador Farahat invited PDAS Ford 
for more detailed discussions in Egypt.  END SUMMARY. 
 
¶2. (SBU) PDAS Ford gave an overview of the Verification, 
Compliance, and Implementation Bureau and its missions, 
emphasizing that the purpose of this consultation was to 
improve dialogue about how the U.S. and foreign partners can 
work together to augment the international community's 
ability to respond to compliance challenges within 
nonproliferation regimes, and to raise the level of 
understanding of appreciation for nonproliferation 
obligations and compliance policy.  He noted that although 
the origins of U.S. verification and compliance policy 
development lay in bilateral context of U.S.-Soviet 
geopolitical rivalry, today's nonproliferation challenges are 
multinational ones that concern all countries and not just 
the major powers ) and that require all States Party to work 
together effectively in compliance enforcement.  This 
"democratization" of verification and compliance, he said, 
meant that all states have a responsibility, individually and 
collectively, to exercise rigor and diligence in watching for 
violations, and vigor and fortitude in combating 
noncompliance.  Ford outlined the "internal" and "external" 
aspects of compliance policy, explaining that the former term 
refers to the steps a country takes in order to ensure its 
own compliance (e.g., enacting implementing legislation or 
making declarations and meeting reporting requirements) while 
the latter refers to collective efforts to address other 
countries' inability or refusal to comply with theirs.  He 
pointed out that many countries have good intentions and wish 
to comply fully, but may need assistance with, for example, 
drafting legislation, declarations, or progress reports for 
resolution 1540 compliance.  Capacity-building and compliance 
assistance, Ford explained, can help solve such problems. 
External challenges due to unwillingness to comply, however, 
are more troublesome ) and should be a first-order concern 
of all States Party.  Ford emphasized that all countries have 
a stake in addressing such external compliance challenges in 
part because the sharing of benefits under nonproliferation 
regimes can only be assured if all countries comply with 
rules designed to mitigate the proliferation dangers of 
sharing technology.  Threatening one part of a regime, he 
told Farahat, threatens the whole regime, and all countries 
should thus understand their interests in ensuring effective 
compliance policy not only for security reasons (i.e., 
preventing neighbors from acquiring weapons of mass 
destruction) but for technology-sharing reasons (i.e., in 
support of the benefits of advanced technologies). 
 
¶3. (SBU) Ambassador Farahat emphasized that external 
challenges vary from region to region.  In the Middle East, 
he said, "one neighboring country" (he clearly meant Israel, 
but did not say so explicitly) is believed to possess 200 
nuclear weapons.  Farahat said that instability in the region 
due to the existence of nuclear, chemical, biological, or 
even small arms affect all countries there. For this reason, 
he continued, Egypt's policy for the last 20 years, has been 
to promote arms control.  He said the African Nuclear Weapons 
Free Zone Treaty, signed in Cairo 40 years ago, is an example 
of Egypt's approach to arms control, and that conclusion of a 
 
BANJUL 00000441  002 OF 003 
 
 
Middle East WMD-free zone is Egypt's policy and there was a 
need to bridge the gap between the interests of all states in 
the region.  PDAS Ford replied that the U.S. also believed 
the Middle East should have no weapons of mass destruction ) 
neither chemical and biological weapons, nor nuclear ones ) 
and that this should be achieved within an overall framework 
for peace.  With respect to Farahat's comments about nuclear 
weapons in a "neighboring country," Ford added that unless 
the international community is able to ensure by firm 
compliance enforcement policy that NPT rules are followed, 
there was little point in worrying about how to bring non-NPT 
states into the regime.  If compliance with Article II of the 
NPT were in effect made optional, in other words, it would 
become irrelevant whether or not today's non-parties accede 
to the Treaty.  For this reason, Ford emphasized, he hoped 
and expected that countries such as Egypt, which worry about 
alleged WMD programs in non-NPT states such as Israel, would 
support firm compliance enforcement against NPT violators 
such as Iran. 
 
¶4. (SBU) Ambassador Farahat voiced concerns that the Chemical 
Weapons Convention (CWC) could have a potentially harmful 
effect upon a country,s industry.  (Note: Egypt has not 
signed the CWC.)  Tadros then pointed out that such concerns 
had fortunately not been borne out in practice, citing the 
fact that, with 178 states party to the Treaty, no such 
complaint has surfaced.  To the contrary, Tadros suggested, 
non-participation in the CWC had the potential to hurt trade 
in industrial chemicals, because CWC States Party may be less 
willing to trade with countries not subject to 
nonproliferation rules and transparency obligations, and 
because the export of certain chemicals to non States Party 
is prohibited outright while transfers of another group of 
chemicals to non-States Party must be reported to the 
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). 
Ford added that this illustrated a broader point about 
nonproliferation regimes, in that both non-participation and 
noncompliance inhibit trade and technology-sharing, thus 
giving the developing world an additional stake in effective 
regime-promotion and compliance policy.  Farahat stated that 
as a matter of principle Egypt supported the goals of the CWC 
but due to the situation in the Middle East, with a nuclear 
neighbor, Egypt should not be penalized twice. 
 
¶5. (SBU) Farahat then returned to the NPT, and argued that 
requiring the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 
Additional Protocol (AP) would hurt the integrity of the 
system as a whole by "raising the bar" for compliance. He 
stated that peaceful use of nuclear energy is an important 
pillar of the NPT, but complained that the behavior required 
in order fully to participate was being raised.   Farahat 
then stated that disarmament (by the nuclear weapons states) 
is also an important element under the NPT that did not meet 
Egypt,s expectations because thousands of nuclear warheads 
remain in existence. 
 
¶6. (SBU)  With regard to peaceful uses of nuclear energy, 
PDAS Ford outlined the nuclear suppliers, recent initiative 
) built upon President Bush,s February 2004 
nonproliferation initiatives ) to provide reliable fuel 
supplies for civilian power reactors in conjunction with 
moves away from enrichment and reprocessing technology.  He 
also said that the AP was an important tool made necessary by 
lessons learned in the early 1990s.  Regarding disarmament 
under the NPT,, Ford indicated that he was surprised that the 
Ambassador seemed not to be aware of the dramatic progress 
that had been made by the U.S. and Russia in moving away from 
the huge arsenals and confrontational strategic posture of 
the Cold War.  Ford pointed out the progress that had been 
made in recent years in eliminating many thousands of 
warheads and hundreds of delivery systems ) including entire 
classes of system ) and vast swathes of the infrastructure 
needed to build Cold War nuclear arsenals.  He noted that 
Article VI of the NPT (the disarmament provision) requires 
good faith negotiations toward disarmament, and said that the 
United States was proud of its Article VI accomplishments and 
wished they were more widely understood.  Additionally, Ford 
pointed out that only one P-5 country, China, was still 
building up its strategic nuclear forces, yet this had 
elicited not a word of public complaint from the Non-Aligned 
Movement (NAM).  Indeed, he observed, Article VI applied to 
all NPT States Party, not merely to the nuclear weapons 
 
BANJUL 00000441  003 OF 003 
 
 
powers ) and it spoke not only to disarmament but to the 
termination of nuclear arms races and the pursuit of general 
and complete disarmament.  Article VI's provision about 
nuclear arms races, said Ford, underlined the point that 
countries such as Egypt should join the United States in 
pursuing effective compliance enforcement policies against 
violators of NPT Article II, lest new nuclear arms races be 
created.  There was, therefore, a conceptual link between 
Article II compliance policy and the Article VI obligations 
of all States Party.  Finally, with respect to the danger of 
regional arms races, Ford reiterated to Farahat that 
countries such as Egypt which are concerned about possible 
Israeli nuclear weapons should ensure that others in the 
Middle East, such as Iran, do not acquire such capabilities. 
After all, said Ford, the surest way to convince Israel that 
it must acquire nuclear weapons ) or that it could never 
give them up once acquired ) would be to permit its hostile 
neighbors to inaugurate an escalating spiral of nuclear 
competition in the region.  Egypt should thus understand that 
it has a strong interest in supporting a firm compliance 
enforcement strategy. 
 
¶7. (SBU) Ambassador Farahat then said that the Iraqi 
situation had left "a dent" in the verification system 
leading Egypt to strongly believe in mechanisms such as the 
IAEA.  He went on to emphasize, however, that no country with 
aggressive intentions should be permitted to acquire WMD. 
Ford replied that perhaps Iran felt that it had learned a 
lesson about the ineffectiveness of international compliance 
enforcement policy when the international community did not 
react to Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran during 
the Iraq-Iran war.  It was thus doubly important, therefore, 
that the international community respond to today's 
nonproliferation challenges quickly and firmly.  Otherwise, 
Ford said, tomorrow,s proliferators will also conclude that 
nonproliferation regimes may indeed be violated at one,s 
discretion. 
 
¶8. (U) Farahat then described Egypt's approach to Africa's 
problem with small arms and light weapons (SA/LW).  He said 
Egypt preferred to deprive non-state actors of the need to 
acquire these arms by actively participating in solving 
regional issues.  This policy was based upon the principle 
that "where there is a demand there is a supply."   Ford 
replied that he had heard a great deal from African 
governments about verification and compliance issues related 
to SA/LW, and appreciated the importance of these issues in 
the region. 
 
¶9. (U) The discussion concluded with Ambassador Farahat 
inviting PDAS Ford to visit Egypt for more detailed 
discussions with experts, and indicating that he will relay 
the contents of this discussion to Egyptian officials. 
 
¶10. (U) This message has been cleared by VCI Bureau PDAS 
Christopher Ford. 
STAFFORD