Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, May 27 2005 (IPS) — Month-long U.N. talks on a major international treaty to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons ended here Friday with no consensus achieved on any of the core issues discussed, including disarmament.

Delegates from 188 countries had been charged with reviewing and finding ways to enhance the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Such talks have been held every five years since the pact was agreed in 1970.

”I regret that the conference has not been able to reach consensus,” Sergio Duarte, who presided over the talks, announced at the closing Friday. ”There are no recommendations.”

Frustrated and disappointed with the outcome of the meeting, civil society leaders and independent nuclear experts said the United States and other nuclear powers had failed to show the political will needed to strengthen the treaty.

”The United States has had four weeks to demonstrate international leadership on nuclear proliferation,” said Susi Snyder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, a U.S.-based advocacy group. ”But all they have shown is a democratic deficit.”

”It’s like the Wild West,” added Alice Slater of Abolition 2000, a global network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) campaigning for a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons. ”There’s a total disrespect for the rule of law,” she said, alluding to the U.S. role in negotiations.

Diplomats from the non-nuclear world had similar reactions.

”We have witnessed intransigence from more than one state on pressing issues of the day, coupled with the hubris that demands the priorities of the many be subordinated to the preferences of the few,” said Canadian envoy Paul Meyer. He did not name but was understood to refer to the United States and Iran, which dominated the talks.

Observers said throughout the negotiations, the United States remained inflexible on the question of fulfilling its obligations under Article Six of the 35-year-old treaty, which requires signatories to pursue negotiations on nuclear disarmament, a step many consider to be vital in preventing nuclear proliferation.

From the start, a large majority of non-nuclear nations had stated that they wanted to see the declared nuclear powers – the United States, Russia, France, Britain, and China – take their treaty obligations seriously by making drastic cuts in their nuclear arsenals.

The United States sought to keep the talks focussed on suspected nuclear weapons development by Iran and North Korea, and thus confined its part in the talks to emphasising the significance of the proliferation aspects of the treaty.

”Much has changed since we last gathered here in 2000,” Jackie Sanders, President George W. Bush’s special envoy, told delegates in a reference to terrorist threats, North Korea’s withdrawal from the treaty in 2002, and Iran’s alleged violations of its legal obligations under the NPT regime.

Defending her delegation’s position, she said the United States was pursuing a ”robust and comprehensive approach” to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction, a reference to the Proliferation Security Initiative, which is an attempt to stop the flow of nuclear material outside the NPT fold.

Former U.S. diplomats and policy makers, who closely watched the negotiations, said the issue of non-proliferation could not be addressed in isolation from disarmament initiatives.

”If the disarmament pillar of the treaty is not strong, the other pillars are not going to be strong either,” said Thomas Graham, president of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security. Graham led the U.S. delegation to the NPT review conference in 1995. ”This has to change.”

Graham linked the survival of the NPT to four core issues including negotiations on a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), fissile material cut-off treaty (FMCT), security assurances to non-nuclear weapon states, and drastic reduction of arsenals by nuclear powers. But the United States is not willing to endorse any of those moves.

On disarmament, former U.S. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara shared Graham’s concerns.

”Despite the end of the Cold War some 15 years ago, the United States’ nuclear weapons policies are essentially what they were when I was secretary of defense 40 years ago,” he told reporters this week.

He characterised U.S. policy as ”immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, very, very dangerous in terms of accidental or inadvertent use, and destructive of the non-proliferation regime.”

The United States has deployed about 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads, he said, noting that each one has a destructive power roughly 20 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb, which killed about 10,000 civilians in the Japanese city.

Of those 6,000 weapons, 2000 are on hair trigger alert, meaning they are ready to launch within 15 minutes based on the decision of one man: the U.S. president.

On May 1, the eve of this month’s NPT talks, survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings joined tens of thousands of protesters in front of U.N. headquarters to demand the abolition of nuclear weapons. On Friday, some said they were at a loss to understand why the diplomats had failed them.

”A mere handful of countries can thwart the will of the great majority of countries,” Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said in a letter to the conference president. ”Given what is at stake for humanity, this is intolerable.”