Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- The United States and two other nuclear-weapon states on Tuesday reaffirmed their opposition to a special global meeting for pursuing nuclear disarmament initiatives outside a multilateral arms control forum that has remained in deadlock for 16 years.

Pakistan last month blocked adoption of a work plan at the international Conference on Disarmament, again preventing the 65-nation body from moving forward with negotiations on arms control measures such as a treaty to ban the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons.

Existing multilateral arms control mechanisms have failed to generate "concrete outcomes ... for more than a decade," the U.N. General Assembly stated in ordering creation of a new "open-ended working group" on the elimination of nuclear weapons. U.N. member states called in a Jan. 4 resolution for the group to meet over 15 days this year and "to develop proposals to take forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations."

The measure came after U.N. member nations called last year for the General Assembly to pursue a nuclear disarmament agenda; that effort was opposed by three recognized nuclear powers -- the United States, France and the United Kingdom -- and by nuclear-armed nations India, Pakistan and Israel.

"We understand that the CD’s failures have led states to look elsewhere," said Laura Kennedy, U.S. permanent representative to the forum in Geneva, Switzerland. "However, we do not support nonconsensus based efforts to develop nuclear disarmament proposals through the open-ended working group and do not see how this mechanism fits into the existing consensus framework of the [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty] action plan.

France and Russia also voiced opposition to the group on Tuesday, according to a U.N. press release. Moscow indicated it would not participate in the effort.

Switzerland and Egypt, though, issued statements in support of the General Assembly initiative.

In a Jan. 11 interview with Global Security Newswire, Kennedy played down the possibility for action by the full U.N. body to yield progress on nuclear arms control.

“Frankly, we don’t see that as a magic bullet,” she said by telephone from Geneva. Only the first of three such sessions convened from 1978 to 1988 generated a consensus document,  Kennedy noted.