Good afternoon, and thanks to the Pacific Forum and our Singaporean hosts for inviting me to Singapore for this dialogue.  I’d like to offer both some optimistic and some more pessimistic thoughts about the future of nuclear security and nonproliferation cooperation in this region.  Perhaps the other two speakers on this panel will be able to fill in more detail on valuable ways we can still move forward, but I’m afraid I’ll spend most of my time on the geopolitical chill that seems to have fallen over yesterday’s environment of multilateral cooperation. 

Opportunities for Cooperation

First, the good news.

Not long ago, when I was still in government after taking up office as U.S Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, I had the opportunity on a trip to China to visit the Nuclear Security Center of Excellence(COE) that the U.S. Government had helped to establish just outside of Beijing.  It had opened in 2016 as part of an international effort to set up multiple such centers around the world, each intended to serve as a nucleus for training and capacity-building efforts to bring regional states up to international “best practices.” 

That push to set up COEs was part of a broader international effort to secure vulnerable nuclear materials, an undertaking that also included convening four major “Nuclear Security Summits” at which countries came together at the head-of-government level to promise improvements in nuclear materials security worldwide. 

Today, nonproliferation, nuclear materials security, and the promotion of governance “best practices” in the civil-nuclear power sector remain important.  Indeed, with the advent of a new generation of nuclear power generation technology – in the form, for example, of the range of Small Modular Reactor (SMR) designs that will soon be coming online – power generation is likely to be even more widespread than ever before. 

As I understand it, Singapore decided back in 2012 not to pursue nuclear power generation, opting to wait until another generation of improvements in reactor technology and safety had occurred.  With the emergence of all those new SMRs, however, that day may soon be upon us. 

I hope Singapore will look carefully at these new systems, for they are likely to be safer and more proliferation resistant, less expensive, easier and quicker to deploy, and less likely to strain local power grids than “jumbo-scale” traditional power reactor units.  And with the Singapore Nuclear Research and Safety Institute (SNRSI), moreover, it sounds like you are doing a very impressive job here at local capacity-building, which can be the foundation for more international cooperation.  So the good news is that I think our two countries can indeed have a bright future ahead of us in these regards.

A Geopolitical Chill

On the less optimistic side, however, the years ahead are also likely to be a challenging time for the global nonproliferation regime as a whole, and for multilateral cooperation of the sort we’ve seen in prior years. 

The most obvious and direct challenges for the nonproliferation regime stem from the potential for additional nuclear weapons proliferation as a result of growing threats of revisionist great power aggression.  In Europe, of course, Vladimir Putin’s revisionist warfare has put unprecedented security pressures on nuclear-weapons non-possessors by raising the specter that invasion and conquest could erase states from the map for the first time since Adolf Hitler was alive. 

But this is hardly just a European problem.  Proliferation pressures are increasing in East Asia too, as growing Chinese military power and regional assertiveness – and Beijing’s huge nuclear build-up – confront local states with potentially existential threats to their autonomy and sovereignty in ways that traditional U.S. alliance relationships may find difficult to counter.  Making things worse, current U.S. policy is leading some allies increasingly to worry about whether Uncle Sam really would “be there” for them in a pinch to fulfil the U.S. security guarantees that for years have helped our closest friends conclude they did not need nuclear weapons themselves.

That much, unfortunately, isn’t news. 

Reprioritizing in the New Security Environment

But what I guess I’d also like to flag today, however, is that these challenges are likely also to have implications for nuclear security policy and the kind of multilateral, cooperative efforts that developed in the “Nuclear Security Summit” days.  Specifically, these trends are likely to make such mass cooperation more difficult, or perhaps even preclude it.

The energy devoted to nuclear security cooperation and securing nuclear materials against loss or theft in those years reflected the fact that those issues were considered a top tier priority for the international community.  But that kind of attention and prioritization is harder to imagine today, with leaders now so much more focused than they used to be upon the challenges presented by Russian and Chinese regional revisionism and by whimsically capricious volatility in U.S. policy. 

The difficulty now is not that nuclear security issues are no longer important, for I think we would all agree they remain quite important.  Rather, it is one of prioritization – and hence of the resources of money and political and diplomatic attention that are likely to be available for these matters if high-level decisions need to be made about policy tradeoffs, funding, and risk-tolerance.

Simply put, it is becoming harder today to argue that nuclear security cooperation is and must be a top-shelf priority for major states in the international arena.  The emergence of other hugely important issues that are of potentially existential consequence to some international players cannot but mean that nuclear security will move at least somewhat further down the totem pole of collective policy priorities.

I believe there is still scope for continued nonproliferation and nuclear security cooperation, especially as new-generation civil-nuclear technology is rolled out in the near future and becomes increasingly available to countries such as Singapore.  It is likely to be impossible, however, for the broader international community to keep its traditional focus on such work today. 

You can see this happening already.  When was the last time you heard a senior official emphasize these matters in a major speech?  Having taken over the directorate at the NSC that dealt with such matters in 2017, I’ve seen this drift pretty vividly in the U.S. Government, in recent years – and its notable that you didn’t really hear a peep about this even out of the Biden Administration either, despite the huge priority put on the Nuclear Security Summits when he was Vice President – and it continues. 

Accordingly, while I hope that cooperation will continue, I suspect that it will increasingly need to be done only on a bilateral basis – or perhaps on a “minilateral” one between small groups of likeminded serious and responsible states – rather than on the sprawling scale we saw 15 years ago. 

I still believe there are many responsible governments in this region of the world who will continue to feel a strong shared interest in upholding the nonproliferation regime through nuclear security cooperation, the enforcement of U.N. sanctions against North Korea, cracking down on the transshipment of Chinese-origin missile proliferation supplies for Iran, and – now also, with the European invocation of sanctions “snap-back” on Iran under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 – re-imposing full global sanctions pressures on the Iranian regime.  That’s vital work, and there may also still be continued opportunities for nuclear security and governance “best practices” cooperation.  I think we can still do good work together to these ends.

The Problem of China

Regional efforts on nuclear governance and nonproliferation, however, will have their limits, and they won’t involve anything like the scale or intensity of the “Nuclear Security Summit” years.   We will presumably, for instance, to have to avoid working with China for the most part or depending upon its good faith, for it has now become painfully clear that  when it comes to international security affairs, Beijing is now much more part of the problem than part of the solution – and clear, too, what the side effects have been of such cooperative engagement with Beijing in the past. 

Back in the heyday of “Nuclear Security Summit” enthusiasm, there was still optimism that engaging China on these issues would be constructive.  That COE I visited near Beijing, in fact, was financed in part by U.S. taxpayer dollars. 

For years, moreover, China was a major recipient of assistance from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Technical Cooperation program, receiving aid for nuclear technology development financed by countries such as the United States as if it were just another needy developing country.  The Obama Administration was even willing to sign a new civil-nuclear technology-sharing agreement with China as late as 2015. 

In such engagements, however, the international community treated China as if it were a poor developing country full of good intentions and in need of foreign help.  But China was none of these things.  It was, in fact, turning into a huge, predatory top-tier competitor in the global nuclear marketplace that is today already building half of the new nuclear power plants under construction in the world, and which now enjoys a share of the global export market behind only that of Russia. 

Those engagements also ignored China’s role as a notorious (and continuing) proliferator of unsafeguarded civil nuclear technology to Pakistan – and even, through the 1980s, at least, of nuclear weapons technology as well.  (I myself have seen the Chinese nuclear weapons designs that the Pakistani proliferator A.Q. Khan gave to Muammar Qaddafi’s terrorism-sponsoring regime in Libya, by the way. We removed them from Libya in 2004.  My nuclear affairs office director flew them out sitting next to me in a chartered plane, in briefcase chained to his wrist!)

It also turned out that China was stealing nuclear reactor technology from the United States to help its own civil-nuclear program, and actually then diverting U.S. technology – including nuclear-related software codes – to help the People’s Liberation Army with naval nuclear propulsion in applications such as aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines.  I’m proud that my team at the State Department led the way in 2018 in scaling back that foolish cooperation, but one side effect of the painful lessons we have learned about working with China in the nuclear arena is that as we and our regional friends explore further possibilities for cooperation, we’ll have to find ways to do this that carefully keep China out of such arrangements from here on out.

Yesterday afternoon I visited Fort Canning Park here in Singapore, and took the opportunity to tour the so-called “Battlebox” – that is, the bunker from which the British ran their ill-fated defense of Singapore against the Japanese in 1942.  It helped bring home to me how people in this area of the world have good reason to remember what it is like when an aggressive rising power offers its neighbors realities of conquest and domination wrapped in a narrative of supposed liberation from the injustices of a Western-centric global system. 

Singapore’s conqueror at that time, General Tomoyuki Yamashita – later to be executed as a war criminal in 1946 – declared that Japan’s aim was to “promote … social development by establishing the East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere on which the New Order of justice ha[s] to be attained under ‘the Great Spirit of Cosmocracy’ ….”  As the historians Mark Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow have pointed out, that idea of a “Great Cosmocracy”

“stemmed from the Japanese notion of Hakkaoichiu (sometimes rendered in English as ‘Eight Corners of the World under One Roof’), a vague idea of universal brotherhood and mutual respect for diverse religions, customs[,] and languages.”

We all know what Yamashita really meant, of course.  And I imagine that the people of Singapore and elsewhere in this region continue to bear this grim history very much in mind when they hear Chinese Communist Party officials proclaim their dreams of a “community with a shared future for mankind” – “a world where people live in perfect harmony and are as dear to one another as family” – and when they hear China’s leaders join the Russians (of all people!) in calling for an international order of “more democratic international relations.”  Everyone should know what that really means, too, and it is precisely this which is stressing the nonproliferation regime in East Asia today.

There is thus little reason to expect constructive nonproliferation cooperation of the broad, multilateral sort our leaders still hoped for a decade ago.

Yet the unfortunate necessity of countering China’s proliferation pressures and working around Beijing’s nonproliferation obstruction should in no way dim the bright prospects for U.S.-Singaporean bilateral cooperation on nuclear issues: on nuclear security and governance, on nonproliferation more broadly, and hopefully before long on nuclear power generation as well.  Our two governments share strong interests in deepening our relationship in all these respects, and I very much hope that we will.

Thank you. 

—Christopher Ford