Battle Set at U.N. Over Weapons Treaties

The United States is expected to press for a fissile materials cutoff treaty this week at the United Nations, while China and Russia plan to push for a competing pact that would ban a space arms race, the Washington Times reported (see GSN, Jan. 31).

The diplomatic jousting would occur in the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, a forum that has been unable to agree on an agenda for a decade.

The fissile materials ban would prohibit the production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

“We believe it is in everybody’s interests to reduce the availability of fissile materials on the streets — (first) for producing bombs, which is a disarmament measure, and (second) preventing terrorists from getting hold of it, (which is) a nonproliferation measure,” said Christina Rocca, top U.S. envoy to the conference.

A Sino-Russian space arms race proposal, expected to be submitted today, is an effort to pre-empt the U.S. move on the fissile material treaty, according to State Department officials.

U.S. officials believe that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — which prohibits deployment of weapons of mass destruction in Earth’s orbit or on the Moon — provides the security sought through the Chinese-Russian plan.  However, the Bush administration is “prepared to look at new transparency and confidence-building measures,” one official said.

“We put our FMCT draft forward in May 2006 and have been pushing it all along, before there was any talk of a treaty on outer space,” according to another official.  “This is just another attempt to block the FMCT.”

Foreign diplomats and experts have offered an opposing take — that Washington might hope to curtail consideration of the space treaty by pushing the fissile material pact.

France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — four of the five official nuclear powers — say they have halted fissile material production.  The fifth nation, China, has made no such claim.

Opposition to such a treaty is expected from China, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Syria, all of which are known or suspected to operate nuclear programs, the Times reported (Kralev/Zarocostas, Washington Times, Feb. 11).

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