National Defence committee  Just to follow up on my earlier comments, I would say quite categorically that the alliance BMD is not so much directed towards Russia as it is directed towards Iran and other emerging nuclear states. The NATO umbrella will never be capable of tackling the sorts of capabilities t

National Defence committee  I think it's more complex than just Russian interests. The Russians I've talked to about this issue believe that the west is not coming up with any solutions either. They too see a lot of human rights abuses and challenges, and they don't dispute that there are many innocents bei

National Defence committee  Okay, I'll go first. NATO's role in energy security clearly is about the relationship with Russia, by and large, and the Middle East. I think it does need to take energy security into account, but I think we're going to have to be cautious about using an alliance that is based u

National Defence committee  I perceive it to be a changing list of priorities for the United States. I think nevertheless that the United States still perceive its NATO allies as critical to what they used to call “pivot”, until they changed that name, because they still, as they did with a number of interv

National Defence committee  It's a much less informed reason. It's largely because it's not an area that I cover, but I would comment that North Korea is a significant potential threat. I wouldn't say it's a significant threat at the moment to North America, but of course if it continues along its current t

National Defence committee  Maybe I will answer first. The differences you refer to are at the heart of the challenge within the nuclear posture. As I said, we have a consensus document, but it's papering over the cracks. I don't perceive the Germans, the Dutch, and the Belgians to be hosting B61 bombs in

National Defence committee  I think Canada would need to look at its own national security interests. I have to say that I'm not sufficiently familiar with your own national security concerns to know whether you should join, but I would say that looking alliance-wide, it's very important that we take seriou

National Defence committee  My opinion is that whatever my opinion, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world. I wasn't referring to any contest to that statement when I was referring earlier to there being a lack of cohesion amongst the alliance. I don't percei

National Defence committee  Perhaps I could answer that first. I think that we in the west need to be very cautious about measuring moral and ethical interventions purely by the measuring stick of military intervention. Professor Welsh stated quite clearly that responsibility to protect is not simply about

National Defence committee  I think clearly there have been a series of actions that NATO has undertaken over the years, from Kosovo onward, that the Russians have taken great exception to. There are two angles here. The first is NATO taking action that the Russians are uncomfortable with because of the a

National Defence committee  Just to clarify, this is the cooperative threat reduction program, otherwise known, more popularly, as the Nunn–Lugar initiative. This is an initiative that, as you say, has been going on for 20 years, whereby the Americans have been providing capital to decommission many of the

National Defence committee  Thank you very much. I too am very grateful for this opportunity to outline what I perceive to be the main issues around NATO's nuclear posture arising from the strategic concept and, more recently in May, the adoption of the deterrence and defence posture review. There are thre