The UN has approved a working group to negotiate a treaty banning production of fissionable material for nuclear weapons, writes Walter Pincus
IT WAS a small step. But after almost a decade of deadlock, the United Nations Conference on Disarmament has approved a working group to negotiate a treaty banning production of fissionable material for nuclear weapons, and another to discuss preventing an arms race in space.
The UN group, meeting in Geneva last week, had been unable to agree on a work agenda for the past 10 years. That was due in part to the US refusal to give in to demands by the Chinese and Russians for the conference to study prevention of arms in space. In turn, those countries and others blocked negotiations sought by the US to ban production of new fissile material for weapons without verification provisions.
Ambassador Idriss Jazairy of Algeria, the outgoing conference president, thanked his own country’s president for helping break the stalemate.
Don’t expect quick action on the issue, however. The last international pact this 65-nation group successfully negotiated was the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which has yet to come into force, partly because the US Senate has not voted to ratify it.
In 1993 the UN General Assembly first passed a resolution calling for negotiations on a fissile material treaty. Two years elapsed before the underlying mandate for an “effectively verifiable” one was approved by the conference.
President Barack Obama has made a fissile material treaty part of his arms-control agenda. But there are already warning signs that a fissile pact faces problems, in part because the conference approves only by consensus – meaning everyone must agree.
Pakistan’s UN ambassador, Zamir Akran, made clear that verification of nuclear material manufacturing and stocks is “vital” to a fissile material treaty, “because of the nuclear co-operation arrangement in our neighbourhood”. That was a not-so-subtle reference to the US-India nuclear agreement that made US nuclear technology available to the Indians while allowing New Delhi’s military reactors to keep operating without international safeguards.
Indian ambassador Nirupama Rao said her country would participate in the fissile negotiations, but would “not accept obligations” hindering India’s “strategic programme”, or research and development, nor obligations placing “an undue burden on our military non-proscribed activities”. She said India considered nuclear weapons to be “an integral part of our national security and will remain so pending the global elimination of all nuclear weapons on a universal, nondiscriminatory basis”.
In 1984 the UN General Assembly first resolved the conference should take up prevention of an arms race in space. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the US opposed taking up a treaty to ban weapons in space, its officials insisted the US ballistic missile defence systems contemplated did not involve putting interceptors in space.
Two years ago, after China shot down one of its own dying satellites, the US position at the conference was that the weapon used was ground-based.
While the US insisted it had the right to protect its satellites by whatever means it could, “the United States continued to believe that there was no arms race in space, and therefore no problem for arms control to solve”, its representative, ambassador Christina Rocca, said. Negotiating any new treaty against weaponising space was “unnecessary and counterproductive”, she said.
By then, however, the Russians had joined the Chinese in seeking a space treaty. Moscow’s representative, ambassador Valery Loshchinin, noted that then-president Vladimir Putin had said the militarisation of outer space could have “unpredictable consequences for the international community and provoke nothing less than the beginning of a nuclear era”.
Last week’s agreement called for setting up a working group that would “discuss substantively, without limitation, all issues related to the prevention of an arms race in space” and report to the conference on its progress. – (LATimes/Washington Post service)