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The Bush administration is growing increasingly concerned about the failure of the international community to reach agreement on arms control and the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, reports Geostrategy-Direct. the global intelligence news service.
Officials said the U.N. has failed to achieve progress in negotiating international arms control and disarmament agreements — in both conventional and nonconventional weapons — over the past two years.
U.S. officials said the United Nations have not made progress toward arms control treaties. They said the exposure in late 2003 of a nuclear smuggling network that helped such countries as Iran, Libya and North Korea has not accelerated the pace of arms control efforts.
“The end of Libya’s nuclear program also led to the public revelation of the clandestine Khan network, and the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other governments have shut it down,” said Stephen Rademaker, assistant secretary of state for arms control. “These developments made clear that additional measures are needed to strengthen the NPT [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty] and the larger nuclear nonproliferation regime.”
The U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva was said to have represented the latest failure by the international community.
Officials said that for the eighth year in a row the conference was unable to negotiate arms control and disarmament agreements, the essential function of the U.N. group.
The Bush administration has been pressing the U.N. disarmament group to ban the sale and export of land mines as well as conclude negotiations on a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, or FMCT. The administration has urged these goals to be reached by 2005.
The State Department has sought FMCT approval without provisions for verification. The department has concluded that an effective international verification of the FMCT could not be achieved by May 2005, when the NPT Review Conference was scheduled to be held, officials said.
“If we are serious about ending the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, we should agree to a normative, legal ban as soon as possible, while such a ban could still have important, practical meaning in curbing the growth of nuclear weapon stockpiles,” Rademaker said. “The United States believes that we have identified an approach that can shorten this period considerably.”
Rademaker told the U.N. General Assembly’s First Committee on Oct. 8 that the failure of international arms control efforts appeared worse at the U.N. Disarmament Commission. He said the UNDC could not even reach a consensus on its agenda for 2004.
Last year, the commission failed to meet. The United States has called on the General Assembly to instruct the commission to dedicate its 2005 session solely to identifying ways to improve the panel’s effectiveness.
Rademaker said the United States wanted to impose stronger controls on land mines. He said the U.N.’s Conference on Disarmament could address the issue despite the activities of the Convention on Conventional Weapons, whose focus has also been on land mines.
“It will complement, not compete with, other agreements or proposals, and we urge our negotiating partners in Geneva to consider this proposal on its merits,” Rademaker said.
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