U.S. Proposes New Nuke Treaty

The United States on Thursday proposed a new treaty to curb proliferation of nuclear weapons by banning the production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium to improve the world's leverage against "hard cases" like Iran and North Korea.

Stephen G. Rademaker, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for arms control, told the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament that it should aim to conclude its work by September.

"The treaty text that we are putting forward contains the essential provisions that would comprise a successful, legally binding FMCT," or Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, said Rademaker in presenting a stripped-down proposed treaty.

The U.S. proposal, only 3 ½ pages long, leaves out verification measures to avoid years of protracted negotiations, but it says governments could use "national means," or intelligence, to detect violations by other countries and report them to all treaty members or to the U.N. Security Council.

Rademaker said a number of attempts were being made to prevent terrorists and governments from developing weapons of mass destruction, but the measures may be insufficient "in the case of governments that are absolutely determined to acquire such weapons."

He said Iran was "an obvious case in point," and said that country and North Korea were "the hard cases."

Rademaker noted that the U.N. Security Council had urged Iran in March to suspend its uranium-enrichment activities.

"Iran's response to this statement was to announce two weeks later that it had met with initial success in uranium enrichment and was planning to expand rapidly the scale of its enrichment work," he said.

"At a time when the greatest threat to non-proliferation has been created by the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea, the proposal to start a treaty that brings all nations to a new round of negotiations may be what is needed," said CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk from the United Nations, "because the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is perceived by many nations as being a treaty of "haves" and "have-nots" with several nuclear-armed nations outside the treaty's bounds.

"The world is a more dangerous place than it was in 1968 when the non-proliferation treaty defined the nuclear rules," adds Falk.

But Hamid Eslamizad, a senior official at Iran's mission in Geneva, questioned what the link was between the proposed treaty and the case of Iran before the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran's nuclear program is peaceful, Eslamizad said. "I would like to recall that so far the agency has made it clear that there has not been any diversion of nuclear materials in Iran towards prohibited use."

Rademaker responded that Iran was merely repeating its usual defense that all nuclear material in the country has been accounted for by the IAEA.

"The question is, is there any undeclared nuclear material in Iran? And that's the whole issue," Rademaker told reporters.

The new treaty would ban "the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices," he said.

Rademaker said the proposal has widespread support and should be taken up by the conference, which has not written a treaty for 10 years.

The U.S. proposal would go into force with only the approval of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.

Rademaker noted that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of the 1960s went into effect with the approval only of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States and that other nations, including nuclear powers France and China, joined later.

In contrast, he told reporters, the nuclear test ban treaty approved by the conference in 1996 required ratification by more than 30 countries, and it remains inactive because a number of nations, including the United States, never ratified it.

In Washington Wade Boese, research director at the private Arms Control Association, said the United States, Russia, France and Britain already have officially declared they have stopped production for nuclear weapons and China is understood to have done so as well.

"The value of the agreement would be getting India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and potentially Iran to sign on to this agreement, but the likelihood is very small," Boese said in an interview.

One reason, he said, is that the U.S. proposal does not contain any verification measures, and most countries at the conference want such provisions in any treaty.

"It is essentially a nonstarter," Boese said. "The conference works by consensus, and other countries such as Russia and China want to hold talks on outer space and nuclear disarmament, and the United States is refusing to do so."

"Therefore the prospect of negotiations starting on this is about nil," he said.

Other nations welcomed the U.S. initiative, but indicated differences with the approach.

Both China and Russia said progress on fissile materials should not come at the expense of other treaty proposals.

Britain and France said they were ready to start negotiating a new fissile material treaty, while India and nuclear rival Pakistan said they saw the proposal as a positive step in the overall work of the conference.