|
|
|
 |
|
|
| HOME |
| NUCLEAR AND WMD |
| TRANS-ATLANTIC SECURITY |
| WEAPONS TRADE |
| BASIC PUBLICATIONS |
| ABOUT BASIC |
 |
Activities ReportOctober - December 2007An Update for BASIC Council, Advisors, Patrons, Donors and Partners
Organisation, Staffing and FundraisingThe Ploughshares Fund has awarded BASIC $165,000 to support BASIC's agenda of nuclear non-proliferation and transatlantic security. Also, we received an anonymous individual donation of £500 in October. BASIC has taken on a new Chair, a new Co-Executive Director in its London office, and a new Advisor to the Board. The November Board meeting confirmed Dr. Trevor McCrisken as the new Chair of BASIC. He is Associate Professor in American Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. His research interest is US foreign policy with particular emphasis on the threat and use of military force, the politics of intervention, and the relationship between American political culture and foreign policy. He is an Associate Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford where he was a Research Fellow from 2001-2003. Trevor takes over from Prof. James O'Connell, a founding member of the Board since 1987, and Chair of the Board for much of that time. James will remain on the Board and we thank him for his tireless service to BASIC over these last twenty years. Also, Trefor Williams has stepped down from the Board to devote more time to his work with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Paul Ingram is the new Co-Executive Director in BASIC's London office. He had been Senior Analyst with BASIC for five years, leading on initiatives around defence economics and export promotion, the replacement of the United Kingdom's Trident submarines, and Iran's nuclear programme. He has had a number of successes linked to this work, related to the British Government's decision to close the Defence Export Services Organisation, reduce support for the Export Credit Guarantees Department, and the debate in Parliament and elsewhere on delaying the Trident submarine replacement programme. Paul regularly appears on television as an analyst commenting on diverse security and defence issues, and has his own peak-time talk show on the principal domestic news channel in Iran covering issues relating to security in the Middle East. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger has joined the BASIC Advisory Board. Ambassador Eagleburger's career spanned more than 25 years at the US State Department. He held virtually every senior position in the Department dealing with national security issues - Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, Deputy Undersecretary for Management and Under Secretary for Political Affairs. In addition he was an Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and a member of the National Security Council staff. Also joining our BASIC Advisory Board is Camilla Bustani, a London-based lawyer specialising in international communications regulation at Ofcom, previously at Clifford Chance. Camilla is on the Board of the OpenDemocracy Foundation and has published on a variety of international issues. She is a Brazilian citizen, and lives with her husband and two children in north London. Ian Davis stepped down as Co-Executive Director of the London office in December after a period of over six successful years as our Director. During this time he has steered the organisation in new directions, raised its profile in a number of areas, and has achieved several breakthroughs. He is moving into consultancy work in the field. David Isenberg is also moving on after working with BASIC as a Senior Analyst for five years. David has been prolific in both broadcast and print media. In addition to his work on such issues as conventional arms sales, biological weapons, Iraq, Iran, intelligence, and general military issues, he carved out a niche while at BASIC as a world expert on private military companies. He is currently writing a book on the subject and working as a consultant in the field. We wish Ian and David the best of luck and thank them both for their long and productive service.
Programme Activities (October - December 2007)'Getting to Zero'Launch and groundwork The event was followed up by a day of meetings on Capitol Hill to raise awareness about GTZ-related issues. Meetings were held with Congressmen Ed Royce, Gene Greene, and John Boozman, and staff members from the offices of Senators Robert Casey and Jim DeMint. Congressman Boozman asked for further briefings on GTZ and offered to host meetings in the Capitol on the subject. We are now actively seeking to recruit a British All-Party Parliamentary delegation, as well as a number of key advisers to the project. In December BASIC organised a joint roundtable with the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall on moves needed to achieve global nuclear disarmament ('Revitalising the Non-Proliferation Regime'). The event was chaired by Michael Clarke, Director of RUSI and involved Professor Frank von Hippel, Major-General Pan Zhenqiang, Ambassador Dr. Miguel Marin-Bosch, Professor Jack Mendelsohn, participants from the Foreign Office, the Royal Society and RUSI. BASIC Board Member and iconic musician Brian Eno was invited to open a debate on BBC Radio's flagship programme, Today, focusing on Britain's role in promoting global disarmament by not renewing the Trident system. His three-minutes was responded to by James Arbuthnot MP, Chair of the Commons Defence Select Committee. The programme was broadcast on 31 December 2007, and the piece is available online. BASIC Board Member Ambassador Robert Barry published a piece on the Guardian newspaper's website in response to the latest Wall Street Journal article calling for renewed commitment to the vision of a nuclear weapon free world and the steps towards it, available online. BASIC now regularly sends out an e-news Getting to Zero Update, covering developments relevant to nuclear nonproliferation and the reduction of existing nuclear stockpiles. For more information on GTZ, please visit: http://www.basicint.org/nuclear/index.htm Trident BASIC published the report by Professor Paul Dunne, Dr. Samuel Perlo-Freeman and Paul Ingram on 7 October, outlining the annual opportunity cost to the British government of replacing Trident with new submarines and warheads, and the construction of two new planned carriers. The report, The real cost behind Trident Replacement and the Carriers, estimated this to be £5bn, or 40% of the defence equipment budget, every year for the lifetime of the vessels, a cost unjustifiable at a time of tightening public budgets. Both projects have been the subject of considerable controversy, and BASIC planning to follow up with further work in 2008 as funding pressures build upon the UK defence procurement budget.
Anthropology 101 wins prestigious Artivist award in Hollywood Iran's Nuclear Programme BASIC continues to promote informed debate on Iran's nuclear programme and its wider geo-political context. We are also the only Western NGO to be regularly addressing an Iranian audience on international security issues through Iranian TV. BASIC Co-Executive Director in London, Paul Ingram, hosts a weekly 45-minute discussion on issues of global and regional security on Iran's domestic terrestrial TV news station, IRINN. The programme is broadcast live and uncensored with simultaneous translation. BASIC also produces a widely-read bi-weekly email news update covering issues related to Iran's nuclear programme. Shortly after the release of the unclassified US National Intelligence
Estimate on Iran's nuclear program, Shervin Boloorian analyzed policy
considerations that may have influenced Iran's decision to apparently
forego the pursuit of a nuclear weapons program in 2003. His analysis
may be found in the BASIC Note: Updated
NIE Implies Constructive Pragmatism in Iran. He concludes that
the "NIE implies that the current adversarial approach to Iran has
not made enough of an impact on Iran's decision-making calculus
for the Iranians to change their behavior." Transatlantic Security IssuesCounter-Terrorism In Washington on 18 October, Board Member Ambassador James Leonard hosted a meeting with Prof. Barry Kellman of DePaul University Law School to discuss the threats from biological weapons. Prof. Kellman also discussed his new comprehensive book on the subject (Bioviolence). The roundtable was attended by researchers working in the United States. BASIC then hosted a similar breakfast in London a week later on 24 October for UK-based researchers. NATO - Afghanistan BASIC sent a 20-page submission to the UK Defence Committee for an inquiry into 'The Future of NATO and European Defence' on 3 December. The report covered NATO's challenges in Afghanistan, the Comprehensive Political Guidance, missile defence, and nuclear weapons. The submission also proposed goals that NATO leaders should consider, including reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in Alliance strategic doctrine. BASIC continued to produce the Afghanistan Update and emailed it to a growing list of subscribers. UK-US Relations BASIC and Saferworld jointly submitted to the Defence Committee
Inquiry on 'The UK-US Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty', on 15 November.
The Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty is an initiative to reduce
the barriers to trade between the two countries, allowing exceptions
to licensing and monitoring procedures. The submission was the only
one to come from non-aerospace, non-governmental organisations,
and the Committee
Report, which was published on 4 December, cited the BASIC-
Saferworld submission several times. However, the Committee was
generally strongly in favour of the Treaty, in spite of the reservations
expressed in the submission. The Committee Report did agree with
some concerns raised in the submission, stipulating that, "In order
to ensure that the Treaty is in accordance with UK export control
policy, the UK Government should restrict any open or general licences
it issues, to meet the requirements of the Treaty, to exclude the
re-export or transfer from the US of UK goods and technology to
third countries other than to US or UK forces". All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Security and Non-ProliferationThe All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Security and Non-Proliferation held three meetings in Westminster between October and December 2007.
|
||
The
short-film 'Anthropology 101' picked up the |
BASIC
UK: The Grayston Centre, 2nd Floor, 28 Charles Square London
N1 6HT, +44-(0)20-7324 4680 |