|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
 |
 |
    |
|
|
|||
 |
|
||
|
|||
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
Duarte Calls NPT Agenda Deal a ‘Tiny First Step’ By Jim Wurst UNITED NATIONS — Approval of an agenda at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference is “a very tiny first step” toward making the monthlong session a success, conference President Sergio Duarte said yesterday (see GSN, May 12). “Until the substantive issues can be addressed there won’t be any other development, any relief of tensions,” the Brazilian envoy said at a press conference. Delegates are gathering in closed meetings to decide on how to address those substantive issues, including nuclear disarmament, preventing defections from the treaty, and promotion of regional disarmament, especially in the Middle East. “For many parties, the issue is not to diminish [or] backtrack from what was achieved over the years in the NPT,” Duarte said. “For many, these are paramount concerns. For others, paramount concerns are things that have happened recently in the field of arms control, nonproliferation, disarmament and the gamut of issues that the treaty deals with.” One of the next problems is how to organize subsidiary bodies to focus on specific issues such as the Middle East and security guarantees. Such bodies by their nature highlight some issues over others. “So it’s a question of balance,” Duarte said. “How do you balance the way in which you tackle the issues so as not to give the impression that you are favoring one set of issues against another set of issues.” One proposal calls for three subsidiary bodies, including a panel dealing with “nuclear disarmament and security assurances.” The United States has said it does not favor a separate body for those issues, but the Nonaligned Movement nations want a focused discussion over security guarantees for non-nuclear states against nuclear attack. This could become the next roadblock in the deliberations. Looking ahead at the possibility of some sort of grand bargain that could result in a substantive outcome for this conference, Duarte said, “So far I don’t have the idea that indicates that there is no deal to be made, I don’t have that assessment yet.” This is the way negotiations work, he said. “It is painful, it is protracted, it is difficult to understand … but this is the way it is.” “The real issues are known and it is known that those issues have to be discussed, and if they are not, then the conference will be a failure.” Nongovernmental PerspectivesAs delegates were locked in the agenda debate this week, nongovernmental activists and experts and two U.S. lawmakers made their cases on how to advance the nonproliferation and disarmament agenda (see GSN, May 10). “Some say we should not admit that the NPT is in crisis for fear of undermining it. We disagree. In order to make the treaty work as it was intended, we must recognize that it has long been in crisis,” Xanthe Hall, of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, said Wednesday during a session of the conference plenary dedicated to statements by nongovernmental organizations. The organizations promoted an agenda exactly opposite of the direction they consider arms control is moving, calling for broader and firmer international controls, fewer uses for and reduced deployment of nuclear weapons, and a tighter ban on nuclear testing and weapons development. The ultimate goal is abolition of nuclear weapons. The collective recommendations presented to the conference also said the “inherent flaw” in the treaty’s endorsement of peaceful uses of nuclear technology needed to be addressed by placing “all enrichment and reprocessing facilities under multilateral control.” Richard Rhodes, the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, also advocated the abolition of nuclear weapons. “The road to the relative safety of abolition, which is not utopia but simply delayed deterrence, passes through” the treaty, the International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards agreements, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the proposed fissile material cutoff treaty and “further treaties, agreements, reductions and dismantlings,” Rhodes said yesterday at a seminar. He endorsed “a posture of delayed deterrence short of abolition,” expressed by former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn in which U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals would be shifted from hair-trigger alert to a launch posture of days and weeks. This “would not be abolition, but it would be well along the way, because much the same transparency needed for abolition would be required to confirm that an existing arsenal set for delayed launch was indeed secured against prompt launch,” Rhodes said. U.S. Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said the United States must meet its disarmament commitments. “The United States cannot preach temperance from a barstool. We cannot tell the rest of the world that they should disavow an interest in nuclear weapons even as this administration is proposing a new generation of more useful nuclear weapons,” Markey said Monday in a press conference also attended by former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix. Proposals for “bunker-busting” nuclear weapons and resumed nuclear testing “undermine our credibility,” he said (see related GSN story, today). Markey also supported the call for international control of civilian nuclear materials. Markey and other Democratic and Republican lawmakers introduced a House resolution last month listing actions the United States and other countries should take to support the treaty. The resolution, which Markey said he wants voted on before the end of the conference, “reaffirms [Congress’] support for the objectives” of the pact and “expresses its support for appropriate measures to strengthen the NPT.” Those measures include elements of the 13 disarmament initiatives approved at the 2000 NPT conference, along with proposals to make proliferation more difficult. Those measures include “universal adoption” of the IAEA Additional Protocol, ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, accelerating nuclear weapons elimination programs, negotiating reductions of nonstrategic nuclear stockpiles and establishing procedures for eliminating access to controlled nuclear materials by nations that withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
| ||||||||||
Back to top
