The Warsaw Workshop: Prospects for information sharing and confidence building on Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons in Europe

On 7-8 February 2013, the Polish Institute of International Affairs, Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace hosted the seminar: The Warsaw Workshop: Prospects for Information-sharing and Confidence-building on non-Strategic Weapons in Europe. The workshop was supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland, with the participation of the U.S. State Department.

The event brought together more than 80 participants, including nongovernmental experts from the academic and think-tank communities from NATO member states and Russia, government officials from Europe and the U.S., and representatives of NATO International Staff. The opening addresses were delivered by Undersecretary of State for Poland Bogusław Winid, Norway Secretary of State Torgeir Larsen, and Acting U.S. Under Secretary of State Rose E. Gottemoeller.

The workshop was aimed at advancing European security and stability through informal dialogue on the benefits of information-sharing, transparency, and confidence-building measures regarding non-strategic nuclear weapons in Europe, including categorisation-and-verification issues. It served as an opportunity to discuss and develop transparency ideas that may be a basis for future work on a variety of bilateral and multilateral forums, including the NATO–Russia Council.

The workshop employed a mix of plenary sessions and simultaneous working group sessions. The outcomes of each group’s work were presented and discussed during the closing session of the seminar. A set of working papers dealing with different aspects of the issue was commissioned for the workshop (see below).

A concise report from the workshop, prepared by the think tanks that co-organised the seminar using the working papers presented there and transcripts of seminar discussions, will be distributed to interested governments and the think-tank community in order to report on the events for use in further debate.