11 Nations to Discuss Blocking Shipments of Weapons Materials

Officials from the United States and 10 other countries will meet in Madrid today to discuss how they can use or change international law to prevent shipments of weapons of mass destruction or their delivery systems.

The meeting is the Bush administration’s attempt to create a multilateral setting -- outside the United Nations -- to explore ways to stop such countries as Iran and North Korea from importing or exporting nuclear materiel, ballistic missiles or other such weapons technologies.

President Bush has repeatedly asserted the U.S. right to act, with other nations if possible but alone if necessary, to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of “rogue” states and terrorists. But he has had trouble persuading other nations to sign up for enforcement duty.

The Madrid meeting is a first, informal gathering of “a small group of like-minded countries” interested in expanding international efforts to stop the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, as part of the “Proliferation Security Initiative” proposed by Bush in a May 31 speech in Krakow, Poland, a senior State Department official said Wednesday.

Mid-level officials from the U.S., Britain, Italy, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, the Netherlands and host Spain will attend the seven-hour meeting, according to Ramon Santos, political counselor at the Spanish Embassy in Washington.

The U.S. hopes that the meeting will improve intelligence-sharing to intercept weapons and nuclear materiel, the State Department official said.

Among the questions to be discussed is whether new international legal authority is required to prevent transfers of weapons that are not banned under international law, diplomats said.

“We’re still working on whether there needs to be some change to international law to facilitate these types of interdictions, to stop illicit trade,” Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told Australian radio Wednesday.

Downer said there was no talk “at this stage of imposing a blockade on North Korea,” but Australia, he said, is discussing with the United States and Japan possible changes in international law that would make it easier to stop vessels suspected of carrying illicit goods.

But another source familiar with the Bush administration’s thinking on North Korea said, “They are tightening the noose without calling it sanctions.”

The effort was spurred by the case of the Sosan, a North Korean ship that was discovered carrying a cargo of Scud missiles to Yemen in December.

At the request of the United States, Spanish authorities boarded the ship and determined that its cargo was indeed weapons, not cement, as the captain claimed. But the North Korean short-range missiles are not banned under international law. When the Yemeni government said it had ordered the weapons, the Spanish had no choice but to let the ship continue on its way.

North Korea has withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, declared that it has nuclear weapons and threatened to export them if the Bush administration does not address its security concerns. Washington also accuses Iran of pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program, and is attempting to rally other nations, including Russia and China, to pressure Tehran to stop.

The United States would like to pressure both North Korea and Iran -- and try to keep the world’s most dangerous weapons from spreading even faster around the globe -- by intercepting objectionable cargo. Such a move is seen as an alternative to imposing economic sanctions.

But without careful legal basis, seizing ships or airplanes could be deemed an act of war.

At the first discussion, the official said, “we want to talk about our mutual understanding of the rules of the road, what the permissible bases for interdiction are.”

For example, international maritime law allows nations to board suspect ships with the permission of the country under whose flag the ship is sailing, or to board stateless ships flying without a flag, he said.

“One thing we’re going to explore is whether those authorities need to be supplemented,” the official said.

A major problem for those who wish to bottle up the nuclear genie is that there is nothing illegal about nations who are not signatories of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty shipping nuclear material to each other, said Jon B. Wolfsthal, a nonproliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

One approach to making such transfers illegal is to pass a U.N. Security Council resolution “authorizing states to board and inspect any vessel or vehicle if there is reason to believe they are carrying weapons of mass destruction,” nuclear nonproliferation expert Henry Sokolski argued in the latest issue of Arms Control Today.

After its bruising in the Security Council over the Iraq invasion, however, the Bush administration seems to be taking a more gradual approach to expanding the interpretation of international law to ban transfers of weapons of mass destruction and building up a common understanding that such interceptions are permitted, Wolfsthal said.

“The fact that the U.S. is willing to explore the legal basis for this is better than simply saying: ‘We have the right to do this under self-defense, and we don’t need to cooperate or get anyone’s opinion,’ ” Wolfsthal said.

Sanctions or a blockade on North Korea have been ruled out for now because they are opposed by its immediate neighbors China, South Korea and Russia. Proponents of the policy that some are calling “selective interdiction” believe that it will be far more palatable to the international community if it involves enforcement of existing laws.

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Efron reported from Washington and Demick from Seoul. Times staff writer Mark Magnier in Tokyo contributed to this report.