meet again soon this summer. we are not making headlines right now, but the states participating are very invested in the process, which is a good sign. gradually, we are making progress, but we are going to need to push and push intensively in this arena. the p-5 process, it is one that is quite current now. we're planning our upcoming meeting in washington, about which i'll say a few words. the p-5 have been meeting regularly to review our progress toward fulfilling our obligations and our commitments under the 2010 nuclear nonproliferation treaty review conference's action plan. this process is a venue to bolster the long-standing u.s./russian disarmament with an ongoing p-5 for nonproliferation. during p-5 conferences and ongoing p-5 meetings we've covered verification,

transparency, confidence building, nonproliferation and other important topics, all of which are important for establishing a firm foundation for further disarmament. in june of 2011, a year ago, the p-5 reaffirmed their unconditional support for the npt, reaffirmed the commitment set out in the 2010 action plan, stressed the need to strengthen the international atomic energy agency safeguards, and worked in pursuit of their shared goal of disarmament under article 6 of the mpt. following up on the 2009 london conference and the 2011 paris conference, the united states is hosting the next p-5 conference here in washington june 27th to june 29th. the united states looks forward to having further in-depth discussions, candid discussions. these have been very useful discussions, i must say, on a

variety of issues with our p-5 counterparts during the conference. we also look forward to hosting a public event. this will be on june 27th for those of you who are interested. it is titled three pillars for peace and security implementing the mpt. it will focus on the reinforcing nature of the three pillars and examine how all three are essential to create the conditions for the elimination of nuclear weapons. now, finally, let me turn to some of the work we've been doing inside my own bureau, the bureau of arms control verification and compliance. you may know i'm juggling two hats, i'm the acting undersecretary but maintaining my role as assistant secretary. i'm now joking that i have one of the longest titles in washington, but it does encompass a broad empire. but i wanted to talk a bit about the work we're doing on future verification technology. and appeal to you, because as we

move forward on all these fronts that i've laid out today, we are going to need the help of everyone in this room. it's not just on the advocacy level. we also need your creativity and your ideas. as i mentioned before, reducing to lower numbers of all kinds of weapons will require that we push past the current limits of our verification, and monitoring capabilities. whether we're trying to monitor missile launches, count nuclear warheads or detect and characterize an unexplained biological event, we need ever-improving tools and technologies. the state department's bureau of arms control verification and compliance, adc, which is my own home bureau, works very hard to be on the cutting edge of new technology, not merely for being on the cutting edge, but we know that is where we can best leverage for developing such new capabilities. it is because of this need for new technology that i'm particularly proud to announce

that we have for the first time ever made available to the public our so-called verification technology research and development needs document. this document then published on an annual basis, and it is a catalog of sorts, telling the r & d community what are the most pressing technology needs to answer the arms control questions in the future. now, with the publicly available document, we can expand our community of developers beyond the usual suspects of the defense and department of energy laboratories. to a certain extent, the needs document is a think piece. we hope it will stimulate some thinking about where we go from here on verification and monitoring of arms control treaties and agreements. it's easy to find, if you'll go to the vtt page and simply type in v fund. it will come up. and you'll have a chance to look

at it. i also encourage all of you in your organizations to pursue opportunities for track 1.5 and track 2 engagement policies. we should never undervalue the productivity of these efforts. many of the ideas that went into the new s.t.a.r.t. treaty, and i know i've said this time again, but many of the ideas that went into the new start is that right treaty were developed in the years running up to the negotiations through track 1 1/2 and track 2 activities. i have appreciated the role of the arms control association and many of the organizations represented here, as we prepare for negotiation of the arms trade treaty this july in new york. this is a very important effort that has gone on, and we really welcome your efforts overall. now, to wrap up, i want to leave you with one final thought. it's one of my favorites. and it's one i think about constantly. it's not every day you think of calvin coolidge as a source of inspiration.

but i always like to recall what he has to say about persistence. i think it's not a bad message for the add yens today. the president said, nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. talent will not, nothing is more common than unsuccessful men than talent. jen use will not. unrewarded jen use is almost a proverb. education will not. the world is full of educated derelicts. persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. the slogan "press on" has solved, and always will solve the problems of the human race. so colleagues and friends, we must press on. we have no easy task ahead of us. we must simply press on. we have far to go, and there are problems that we cannot anticipate, certainly in this job over the last three years there have been many problems that i did not anticipate. but we continued to press on. make no mistake, the arc of

nuclear history is bending downwards. i'm quite sure of that. i look forward to your comments and questions, and thank you very much for your attention today. [ applause ] >> thank you very much, rose, for your overview of all that's happening in this field. we have time for questions. and there are microphones on either side. so once again, if you want to ask a question, raise your hand. identify yourself and the microphone will come to you. as the microphones get to these two folks here in the front, let me just start with the first question, rose. you ended with the coolidge admonition to persist. which i think is always important in the field of nuclear arms control. one of the things we've been persisting with for a long time is the effort to get the material cutoff talks going. and you said it's a fight.

there are only a certain number of different pathways that this can take. how do you see this debate developing in the next several months, given the opposition from one particular country in south asia, that shall go nameless, and are there alternative ways in which the p-5 can help make progress as the cd tries to find a way around the consensus rule difficulties that it always grapples with? >> many of you are aware of the efforts of the first committee, and the agenda. you've been involved in wrestling with these issues, either in or out of government. so you know that the pressures, what pressures emerged last october in the context of the first committee meeting in october. and those pressures had to do with a building frustration about the inability of the cd to

move off the dime. i use the word impasse. it's a very formidable impasse at this moment in the cd. and so pressures are developing within the first committee to basically go elsewhere. to move this negotiation to other settings. the u.n. general assembly, et cetera. so these pressures we were able essentially to let off the steam. i would say is a good way to put it. and let off the steam by emphasizing, again, the -- both the responsibility and the interest of key stakeholders in moving this issue forward. and that's why we have been so intent on getting the key stakeholders to the table, working on where we can go, how we can handle this issue, pressing forward. we're slowly, slowly making progress. so i for one hope that the key stakeholders will continue to be able to press forward. otherwise, i do fear that we may be heading in a direction that

will not be particularly productive in terms of getting through constraints. a bunch of countries can get together and negotiate the cutoff treaty, but if they don't have many materials, for weapons purposes it's not going to be all that helpful. so i think the important thing is now to keep our eye on the prize, to continue to have very, very serious discussions among the key stakeholders, and try in that way to, you know, to get a negotiation going. so that's where we're placing our emphasis at the present time. >> all right. thank you. and for those of you who want to dive into some of the details on this, we did an extensive interview with pakistan's ambassador to conference on disarmament and arms control today. i think we'll start out over here. barbara? >> barbara slaven from the atlanta council. pleasure to see you again. i wanted you to talk just a little bit about the

relationship that has developed with the russians in the arms control process, and the russians have putin now again as president. how do you see cooperation over iran developing? do you see that this arms control process might bleed into other issues with the russians, or are you a little concerned that putin may play the nationalism card a little harder than medvedev did? thanks. >> as far as russian policy is concerned, i see a great deal of consistency, quite frankly. if you're interested in the official russian articulation of their policy, it's very useful to look at, first of all, the remarks that putin published -- they were published under his name in some of the top newspapers, right before the election. also, he put out an election platform.

and since that time, he has -- his administration has published a foreign policy, their first foreign policy statement of policy, after he entered into the presidency. and there's an emphasis in each of those documents on continuing the arms control agenda, continuing arms control work. now, there aren't any details laid out there. but i do think it is important that that kind of emphasis has appeared. and also, a very positive perspective on implementation of the new s.t.a.r.t. treaty. there's been a very positive, and i would say practical approach to implementation of the new s.t.a.r.t. treaty. so as far as the arms control traditional nuclear arms environment, i see a continuity there with the way this issue has been approached since the late '60s, early 1970s, and the soviet union, when even though there were ups and downs in the

relationship, both washington and moscow saw nuclear arms control to be in their national security interests. so with fits and starts, and sometimes negotiations would halt for a while, certainly they did during the 1980s for a while, nevertheless, they would continue up again after perhaps a pause. so i don't really see at the moment a difficulty in that realm. i will say that the cooperation with iran, at this point, has actually been very, very solid. and russia's playing a leading role, as you all know, russia will be hosting the next meeting to talk with the iranians in the p-5-plus process, p-5-plus-1 process. so there will be, i think, many opportunities for russia to continue to play in moving that agenda forward. so all in all, i think one has to recognize that political transitions sometimes cause things to slow down a bit.

but nevertheless, in terms of the overarching agenda and willingness of the russian federation to engage on it, i have not seen a problem there. >> thank you. professor pickering, i think you had a question? if anyone in the back wants to ask a question, you need to raise your hand now so that we can get the microphones to the back. thank you. >> thank you very much for everything you do. and thank you very much for the speech. i would just remark on the last question that i think new s.t.a.r.t. had a great deal to do with reset. i think that's a piece that the community shouldn't ignore and plays back into arms control attitude. with respect to your speech, what are your top three priorities and why? an unfair question. >> top three priorities are -- well, they're hard to pick out, because i really have my top six priorities, which you kind of heard this morning.

but i think in terms of -- i'll tell you quite honestly, i think new s.t.a.r.t. implementation is going along very well. i say, all right, we don't not pay attention to that, but it's going well. and that's a good thing. but i do think a lot of where we go from here on reductions. i think about the conventional arms control regime. it's kind of interesting, but cfe was a spectacular success. it was such a spectacular success that we all forget about it. and we haven't been thinking about conventional arms control for some time. but the cfe is a great treaty. i'm glad it's still in force. but it was negotiated when we had the warsaw pact and nato ranged against each other in europe. we need a different type of arms control regime in europe today. that also preoccupies my thinking quite a bit. let me cheat a bit and say it's a combination of those p-5

related issues which include the fmct, which i would put in my third diplomatic priority, but i'm going to cheat further and say there is a fourth, which is the domestic priority of getting the cbct ratified. >> since you did just mention the ctb again, as many of us in this crowd know, the long awaited national academy of sciences study related to cbct was released in march. what's your sense of what those findings tell us about some of the issues that were at the center of the debate in 1999, and how much better does that put the treaty in position going forward for a serious reconsideration? >> there are two major issues in 1999 that affected decision-making about ratification of ctbt. one had to do with the verifiability of the treaty, and

nas study about the treaty, we welcomed their conclusions. we thought that they were in line with the evidence that we had seen, without having such a deep dive in technical terms as the academy took. but just on the face of it, i mentioned in my remarks that the ims system is now over 85% complete. when the ims system was looked at back in 1999, it was barely off the ground at that point. so just if you look at the, you know, what physically is available now to verify the treaty, there's just so much more there. the other major issue, of course, was the stockpile stewardship program and the efficacy of science-based stockpile stewardship in comparison with nuclear explosive testing. again, in 1999, the stockpile stewardship program was just barely off the ground. you may recall, i was working in d.o.e. at that point for the

nonproliferation programs. i was watching the process of getting stockpile stewardship off the ground. and it was a very, very good process. but it was still a baby. now we can say that the baby's matured into an early adulthood. and i think that it has proven its mettle in terms of showing the science-based stockpile stewardship can really preserve the security, effectiveness of the arsenal. those are the two big changes that have occurred. as i mentioned, i think it basically accords with what we could see just by looking at the physical evidence of what's accumulated since 1999 in the ims system. >> thanks. right here with a question? >> thank you. i'd like to ask you about the arms trade treaty. >> if you could identify yourself, please. >> i'm from the european parliament defense committee. i would like to ask you about

the arms trade treaty. at the european parliament, we're debating whether it should be a strong treaty which everybody signs, and whether it could be a weaker treaty which everybody signs. what is the u.s. position, under which conditions would you sign? >> well, if there's some code word in strong versus weak treaties, i should probably know what it is. but in general, the united states would sign up to treaties when they are strong. and i will emphasize that our view is, it is a treaty that covers arms trade per se. there is a legitimate trade in armments in conventional arms internationally. and so we see a real importance in ensuring that that trade is carefully regulated. and so that's the value that we see in an arms trade treaty. but we do believe there is a legitimate trade in conventional arms. and so would not support if it's

treated as more a nonproliferation treaty that we should not have any trade in these weapons. that is not our position. >> those negotiations on the att as it's called began in -- at the united nations on july 2nd. for about four weeks. and arms controls association was paying close attention to that. all right. we have another question here. and then we're going to go to the back row. then if you could bring the microphone up to trina, and then in the back. >> trina from the danish institute of national studies. i was going to ask you, because as i understand it, it's a russian precondition for even talking about these weapons, that they are first withdrawn from europe. so do you have any evidence that perhaps the europeans will be willing to withdraw the weapons from europe in anticipation of

arms control negotiations? it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg proposition. >> it's interesting about the russian condition. that has been a condition in place since the soviet union. it's not a new condition. it has -- it is a very, very long-standing condition that we used to call them tactical nuclear weapons, must be wrun to the continental united states before they'll even talk about reductions in this arena. so like any number of conditions that can be piled up in advance of negotiations, i think we have to be very careful about considering them as chicken-and-egg problems. we just have to work them -- the russians clearly aren't going to come to the negotiating table unless they see a negotiation to be in their national interest. we would not either. nor would we expect our nato allies to join us in an effort to negotiate such a treaty, unless they, too, joined in seeing it in their national interest. but i simply don't treat these

conditions, and the russians have piled up some other conditions on the table, i don't see them as a chicken-and-egg problem, i see them essentially as issues that must be worked in the run-up to negotiations, and we'll see where we get. they may see an interest over time in enhanced transparency, and understanding further what's going on in, for example, a former warsaw pact facilities that have now been closed out and no longer hold nuclear weapons. they may be interested in learning more about that. let's work the issue and see where we get. and then we'll see what we do about a negotiation. but i would just urge us all, it gets a bit -- sometimes you scratch your head, because you hear some russian commentators piling up what looked like conditions after conditions. i just -- i'd be very cautious about treating them as big blockage also. we just need to work them is all. >> we'll look to the lightning round of questions. i think we have time for two or three more. and i'll ask the folks to raise their hands.

we can take two or three at the same time. ari, you're going to have to -- he's got the mike. go ahead, sir. and then rose will take a couple at the same time. >> i'm peter perreni. i worked on and struggled with the issues of conventional arms control negotiations for about two years, ending in 2009. and particularly what to do about cfe, in gates' office. now that we find barriers, to do with the basic structure of the new treaty even, which is apparently unacceptable in many respects to russia, as well as regional issues that have gotten in the way of our ratification, like mal dovea, georgia, mutual concerns in other areas, this is

kind of an unfair question, but i'm wondering what sort of paths one might explore, whether it's a totally new treaty, or whether one begins with small political confidence-raising steps, perhaps by in regions of tension and then bultds up to something bigger? i know you said you were just exploring, you know, ideas. so i don't want to put you on the spot, but i'm curious as to what's in play, and what one hears, whether the most promising approach is a global solution, or a piecemeal, more political solution -- >> let's see what rose has to say about that. and natalie goldring, over here. microphone to the right. thank you. >> hi, rose. natalie goldring. appreciate your endorsement of

the arms trade treaty, even if it didn't make your top four. i would like to ask you a question about consensus. the u.s. has insisted on it in the arms trade treaty process. some of the same skeptics you've encountered in the fmtc process is also playing the same role. how do you think we can keep the u.s. assistance on consensus and keep the skeptics from using it to derail the treaty? >> actually, shall i take those two? let me come straight to natalie's question. the reason why it's not in my top four, is as far as my heavy lifting is concerned, at least at the moment, roberto did a fabulous job of paving the way. the reason why we're talking about a four-week negotiation is that we think there's a real shot at getting this thing done in four weeks. there are many difficulty issues to get through in july. and it's not a done deal. but i would say that the ground is very well prepared. and again, it's thanks to the

work of the nongovernmental community, but also the work of our negotiators in the prep comes that we're in such good shape. that's why it's not because i don't consider it important and significant from a policy perspective, it's just in terms of my own heavy lifting, we'll see. maybe july 31st will come and i'll be up in new york all night long. we'll see what happens. but i'm very positive about the preparatory work that has gone into it so far. your question about consensus is a very important one, for those of you who don't know, the arrangement for decision-making in the att goerkss is that as matter of substantive decision-making, such decisions must be made by consensus, procedural decisions can be made by a majority kind of approach. so it's a different approach. we've been quite hesitant about it, although we were willing to see how it works in this context, because it's difficult,

many times, to draw a bright line between substance and process. and we're concerned about that causing difficulties going forward. but we'll see how it goes. let's see how it goes this july, and see where we go from here. that's all i can say to you at the present time on that. as far as the conventional arms control, peter, those questions are very, very good ones. i will say that we're looking at a rather broad spectrum now. you made some mention of not being able to ratify a treaty. at the moment, we're taking a very broad ranging look at this arena of conventional arms control. we have a solid foundation, and the conventional forces in europe treaty is still in force, according to its terms. i look particularly, given my experience on new s.t.a.r.t., new s.t.a.r.t. and cfe, conventional arms control, are very differently. conventional arms control is union i lateral, s.t.a.r.t. is union i lateral. in both cases i think we have

accumulated some excellent experience in terms of the verification and inspection regimes, which we need to bear in mind. they've been great in raising confidence, and may play a role in the future. but at the same time i think we need to look very broadly at what the purpose of conventional arms control in europe is these days. we're not dealing with two alliances ranged against each other. what the regional security situations are, and furthermore, overall the way europe is, you know, handling the military forces these days is much different. there's a lot of budget cutting going on. there's a lot of effort at having, you know, shared capabilities across borderlines. and so we just need to think, i think, in a very broad ranging way, about where we want to go on conventional arms control. that's the effort we have under way in government now. no decisions have been made. but we are taking a very, very

serious look at it. and i expect this summer we'll be coming to some decisions about how to proceed. so if any of you out there have any ideas on this agenda, we would welcome the chance to talk to you about them. >> an invitation. all right. in speaking of persistence, let's go for our last question to mr. larry wiler in the back there. who has persisted on these issues longer than most of us here. for those of you who don't know, larry is one of the nonproliferation treaty negotiators. solar i, your question? >> yes, well, i was negotiating, as i mentioned to you on an earlier occasion, i think, with -- on nonproliferation treaty 57 years ago. time flies. >> yes. >> i'm getting older. >> when you're having fun. >> and i have another unfair question. what is your estimate of whether or not we're any closer to getting the necessary votes in