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United Nations Diplomats Lament Summit Failure on Nuclear Nonproliferation, Disarmament By Jim Wurst UNITED NATIONS — Diplomats at this week’s U.N. General Assembly meeting expressed their disappointment that the body’s preceding summit failed to address nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. However, they offered few ideas for breaking the deadlock (see GSN, Sept. 14). The assembly began the general debate of its 60th session on Saturday, immediately after the close of the summit. Secretary General Kofi Annan repeated his lament from last week about the failure of negotiators to include any language on disarmament and nonproliferation in the summit’s “outcome document.” “Months of negotiations yielded silence. States could not even agree to reaffirm their existing commitments, or find a way forward, even at the level of principles. They have been content to point fingers at each other, rather than work for solutions,” Annan said Saturday in opening the debate. Other leaders and diplomats echoed Annan’s recriminations. “None of us can justly claim that our failure as the United Nations to take specific decisions on these matters served to enhance global security from the threat of weapons of mass destruction,” South African President Thabo Mbeki said Saturday. “The summit was a lost opportunity on disarmament and nonproliferation. Multilateral nonproliferation regimes are being tested now by a small minority of governments that flout the norms and standards observed by the rest of the international community,” Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday before the General Assembly. Downer endorsed many of the initiatives that have broad support in the international community, but where consensus has not been possible. “We will continue to take a leading role in the universalizing the Additional Protocol on strengthened nuclear safeguards, making it a precondition for the supply of uranium to non-nuclear weapon states,” he said. “It is not acceptable in the current global climate that we have not started negotiations on a fissile materials cutoff treaty, a treaty which would reduce the risk of leakage of fissile material to proliferators or terrorists and buttress nuclear disarmament gains made to date.” Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds said that the nuclear threat is not being taken seriously enough. “It should have been made clear, at the summit, that disarmament commitments are to be implemented, and that nonproliferation undertakings are to be complied with,” she said Saturday. “The countries in possession of nuclear weapons have a special responsibility to disarm. At the summit, there should have been decisions to strengthen verification,” Freivalds said. “There should have been commitments to make the [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty] and other arms conventions universal. Negotiation processes should have been given a boost by the summit. Nothing of all this actually happened.” When the first draft of the summit outcome document was circulated in June, the section on disarmament and nonproliferation included specific language calling on states to fulfill their arms control commitments and endorsing numerous existing commitments, such as bringing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty into force and beginning negotiations on a fissile materials cutoff treaty. At the beginning of August, Norway led six other nations in submitting alternative language to this section that would have sharpened governments’ commitments to disarmament and nonproliferation. In mid-August, however, the United States submitted hundreds of proposed changes to the entire draft, giving other countries the opening to introduce their own amendments. This meant that countries opposing references to disarmament, notably the United States, were matched by Pakistan and other countries that wanted to delete references to nonproliferation, in particular the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The result of the stalemate was that the entire disarmament and nonproliferation section was deleted. Annan last week called this outcome “a real disgrace.” In his speech Saturday, Annan encouraged Norway and the other nations — Australia, Chile, Indonesia, Romania, South Africa and the United Kingdom — “to continue their efforts to find a way forward” on disarmament and nonproliferation. Speaking on Saturday shortly after Annan, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice addressed nonproliferation issues only in the context of Iran’s nuclear program. Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri yesterday called the summit’s “failure … dangerous for peace and stability.” “It is time for the international community, for the entire U.N. membership, not just some self-selected states, to promote a new consensus on disarmament and nonproliferation through the Conference on Disarmament or a special session of the U.N. Disarmament Commission,” Kasuri said.
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