Nato s continuing non-proliferation role

Wolfgang Rudischhauser, director of the WMD non-proliferation centre at Nato HQ, tells Gwyn Winfield about the continuing role of Nato Nato s continuing non-proliferation role GW: Your previous role was as chair of the working party on non-proliferation at the Directorate for Security Policy and Conflict Prevention, WMD, Conventional Weapons and Space Division, European External Action Service. So the non-proliferation mission is not new to you, albeit from a civilian side. How have you found the change? What is it like to work for an organisation that does both nonproliferation and counter-proliferation? Has the fact that you are now working for an impelling organisation been a big change? What have the challenges been? WR: While I was working in a civilian body for the last seven years there was also the possibility of EU military missions abroad, with the EU battle group, even though it has never been actively tasked. Just as the EU has a military experience, Nato as a military organisation also does a lot of capacity building, training and exercising. It is not only about military but capacity building, creating the necessary capabilities and expertise. That is what we concentrate on in the WMD Non-Proliferation Centre. We leave the military aspect mainly to Shape and the people involved in military planning, while we try and assist them in creating the expertise, capability and training opportunities. You might say there is a big difference between the EU as a civilian organisation and Nato as a military one, but both are mixed bodies and you have a lot of overlapping activities: particularly with the Centres of Excellence (See CBRNe World Spring 2011) within the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the EU, who do a lot of capacity building. Things overlap and we have to see where Nato s competitive advantage is. GW: Even when we just look at Nato policy it is having to shift far more now than it has done in the last 10 years. If we consider the challenges facing Nato partners in eastern Europe there are changes there in the last 12 months that need to be planned for. At Russian's antics in the Ukraine has forced a re-examination of Nato policy Vitaly Kuzmin 10 CBRNe WORLD December 2014 www.cbrneworld.com

Nato s continuing non-proliferation role the same time the WMD Non- Proliferation Centre is getting smaller. So you have a rising and varied threat and a smaller capability to deal with it in terms of both the capability and the policy piece. How do you manage to deliver dynamic policy suggestions to meet this threat when there may not be a WMD defence capability left? You can write all the policy you want, but if there is no capability for delivering it? WR: Defence spending is under strain throughout the alliance. Strong wishes were expressed at the Wales summit along with a commitment to change this trend; but we will have to face strained budgets for a number of years. I would say that if we can maintain the current spending on CBRN defence prevention, protection, resilience, including in the civil field where the recovery piece often takes place, as opposed to further reductions, then we will have already done a good job. For example, the Bundeswehr has reduced its CBRN defence capability in terms of manpower by one third in the last two to three years, and that is the probable case for most other allies. We need to stop this trend and maintain the current level; the threat will not go away as we have new threats coming from the Middle East, various failed states and other regions. GW: It is not a question of the threat not going away; the threat is increasing. Not only is it increasing but it is also changing, it is far more dynamic than it has been before WR: It has changed, though it is difficult to say that the threat has increased. It is a changing threat. It is a moving threat, moving from state to non-state actors, and this is a different challenge. GW: If you just focus on the policy level then you have a lot to consider with a dynamic situation in Iran, Syria, the Ukraine and Russia. Even the policy challenge is becoming a lot bigger to interpret! Are you going to get bigger or maintain what you ve got? WR: For now we will maintain what we have. We need to focus where we can make a difference. We will concentrate Nato has a strong relationship with the Ukraine through the SPS CBRNe World on policy setting and creating the right environment for training capacity building, and then intelligence and threat assessment. We will also ensure that we maintain the same level of intelligence sharing and assessment amongst allies and Nato bodies. GW: What about potential Nato mission sets over the next two years, and the experience that has been gained from the Balkans and Kosovo, especially the lessons learned from the destruction of industrial facilities and the attendant spills of toxic industrial chemicals (TICs)? Have you re-visited those in terms of a potential Ukrainian scenario, since so many facilities are being destroyed there, and whether they would be useful? WR: The experience in Kosovo was very useful, but this situation is different. Then we had a small country, a lot of Nato troops present for a long time with access to nearly the whole country, and we were able to collect data. Ukraine is different, it is a civil war, we have no access to the area and the big chemical installations are in the contested eastern part. Since we have no primary information yet from the Ukrainians, without boots on the ground we can t establish the facts as we did in Kosovo. As you know there is neither opportunity nor willingness for Nato to put people on the ground and if they were there, they would probably not be able to enter the area where they would need to be. GW: There are agencies in place though, and some of them are likely to have had CBRN training. Are bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) able to feed back any data? 12 CBRNe WORLD December 2014 www.cbrneworld.com

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Nato s continuing non-proliferation role WR: They encounter their own difficulties, especially the threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), so their capacity is limited and they have a different and focused mandate. We are monitoring the situation, we don t have too much information on destroyed critical infrastructure, but as soon as we get some information from the Ukrainians we will use it in our analysis and interpret it as best we can. GW: What is the current situation between the Ukrainian government and the WMD centre? Previously, through Lt Col Bernd Allert it was quite vibrant. As well as joint exercises there was the CBRN forensics conference in Kiev in 2011, for example. WR: It ended in 2011 when there was a change in regime and Ukraine announced it had no interest in cooperating further. It is unfortunate that our cooperation is not as close as it was in the past. From 2007 until 2011 we had a close cooperation with the previous government and these exercises helped people protect the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) soccer games in Ukraine and Poland. We also had a lot of training and exercises with a full mapping of activities. Now, for reasons that are unclear, the change in government, and the gradual movement of the previous Ukrainian government towards Russia rather than Europe, there has been a decline in our activities and we struggle to get these issues back on the priority list. With a civil war and problems in the east their priorities are different, and undertaking CBRN defence activities will always be an uphill battle in a situation where tanks, troops, defending your country and re-establishing territorial integrity are the top political priority. GW: One of the first units to be stood up in the new Crimean state was a CBRN company. Do you see anything ominous in this? Russia has also been improving their CBRN defence capability, specifically moderniding their recce vehicles Vitaly Kuzmin 14 CBRNe WORLD December 2014 www.cbrneworld.com

WR: What I know about Crimea is that there were a number of sensitive installations, such as biolabs, that were rapidly taken over by the Russians. That was a positive development as had they been grabbed by uncontrolled rebels it would have been much more dangerous. We don t have the picture for Crimea that we do for the rest of Ukraine; there might be installations or chemical factories where no-one controls what is going on, but our hands are tied and we have limited independent information. GW: The other state that has had problems with Russia and has worked closely with Nato is Georgia, which has done a lot of work with the Science for Peace and Security (SPS) research project. Have the current difficult relations impacted this scientific outreach? Are you still motoring ahead or reining back in case you antagonise the situation? WR: On the contrary we have a real engagement regarding SPS projects with Ukraine since the April ministerial [a press release received after this interview confirmed that Ukraine has become the programme s top financial beneficiary Ed.]. We have 11 multi-year projects and two events under the SPS programme for Ukraine alone and we work with other eastern partners, including Georgia, on collecting ideas for projects. The work is ongoing and if you look at the statement by the foreign ministers in April, and also the joint statement of the Nato-Ukraine commission,

Nato s continuing non-proliferation role there is a real commitment to working on these issues. GW: Are you seeing more requests for policy from partner member states on the Baltic? Nato faces a vast array of potential threats, do they want more guidance on their specific threats? Or, again, is it business as usual as they have bigger things to worry about than chem bio? WR: Some of the things I said about Ukraine also apply to the Baltic states, but we haven t detected a real increase in requests. There has been a lot of work done with the Latvian co-chair of the Committee on Proliferation in Defence Format and Estonia has been very engaged in cyber defence via its Centre s of Excellence (COE). and looked at how cyber attacks can be used as a means of unintentionally or intentionally releasing CBRN material. There is a significant difference, however, between Ukraine and the Baltic states. They are members of Nato, so there is a difference in cooperation. The threats that they are expecting are not the ones that we are dealing with, their request is for a permanent presence of planes and boots on the ground); so I haven t detected any real increase in interest from the Baltics, but I have only just started in this job and do not yet have the full picture. GW: Some summits, such as Prague, have had a major focus on CBRN, there was no such emphasis in the Cardiff summit. Was this disappointing? WR: I wouldn t say disappointing, as the Wales summit was originally planned to be focused on Afghanistan, and the good work that Nato has done there, but it changed topics with Russia-Ukraine and the readiness action plan at the forefront and Syria/Iraq also on the table. I wouldn t say I am disappointed as we managed to get in a reference to CBRN, which was not fundamentally different to what happened in Chicago. We have our hook to get on with our work, but the work of the centre continues anyway whether it is mentioned at the summit or not. It is always better to have clear tasking, but as long as the things are clearly mentioned this is fine. We would have wished for more details, but during the negotiating process things that are not defended by many nations fall through the roster. There is another reference in the Wales summit, declaration number 67 [Find what little there is here, Ed. http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/offici al_texts_112964.htm?mode=pressreleas e], that talks about the framework nation concept. This brings us back to the Joint CBRN Defence Task Force, based on the framework nations concept, with key nations leading the others and developing capacities within a group of nations. So there are references we can build upon. We would The Bundeswehr is leading the Ten Nation Letter framework CBRNe World have wished more but we can work well with what we have in the communique. GW: Turning to the future, what are you looking forward to working on in the next two to five years? Can you look further out into what you hope might be the Rudischhauser legacy? WR: I have no crystal ball for looking into the future. What is obvious is that we need to deal with many more fragile territories and regions and more nonstate actors and threats. It is difficult to say what the Nato role can be, as Nato is built on the assumption that you deal with threats from states. Look at Syria, Nato is not involved, there is a broad anti-isil coalition, but supported by individual nations. The Iranian negotiations were done by P5+1. The WMD threat in North Korea has been dealt with by the six party talks, not Nato, and probably that is the future of the activities including in our field. We are looking at flexible and varying concepts where Nato can be engaged. It has been involved in the Syrian chemical weapons destruction. The original plans were changed due to the Russian invasion of Crimea, but the idea is that Nato can deal with some of these issues in various allied combinations and that is how we must look at the future. We also have the Smart Defence concept and CBRN is an aspect to be considered. It is about how you better use the available money, we have to face the fact that we will not get increases in the overall allies defence budget. Nations need to work together and through smart defence wherever possible to do a better job but not with more money. Before I started here in Nato I had talks with the European Defence Agency (EDA) and one of the points I was pushing was that we intensify the dialogue between Nato s WMD Non- Proliferation Centre and the EDA. Unfortunately I haven t been able to follow up yet, having only just started, but in the next two to three years it will be on my plate. Nato doesn t need to do everything if it is done elsewhere; if that s not the case then we need to look at it again. 16 CBRNe WORLD December 2014 www.cbrneworld.com