Diplomats over two weeks hammered out an agenda and chose procedures and a chairman for next year's Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference, the Associated Press reported Friday (see GSN, May 8).
(May. 18) -
Zimbabwean Ambassador to the United Nations Boniface Chidyausiku, shown in 2008, praised the accomplishments of a meeting he chaired to help prepare for next year's Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference (Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images).
Delegates to the previous NPT review conference in 2005 agreed on an agenda only three weeks after the meeting had already started, paving the way for its failure, according to AP (see GSN, May 31, 2005).
The latest preparatory meeting, which ended Friday, "was truly successful," said Eric Danon, French ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. "We feel it was the best possible outcome to prepare for 2010" (Edith Lederer, Associated Press/NJ.com, May 15).
Still, envoys from the 189 NPT member states failed to agree on specific proposals for nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation, along with ideas on civilian nuclear power. Zimbabwean Ambassador to the United Nations Boniface Chidyausiku, the preparatory session's chairman, declared one set of proposed recommendations "dead," the Washington Post reported Saturday (Colum Lynch, Washington Post, May 16).
"We're almost there, but we didn't want to spoil the atmosphere by going into acrimonious little differences between state parties," he said. Recommendations "could have been a bonus," but delegates lacked sufficient time to resolve their differences at the meeting, Chidyausiku said.
"The differences -- they were not major," he said. "With time, we could have done it."
Review conferences are held every five years in order to assess the operation of the treaty and strengthen its execution. The next session is scheduled for May 3-28, 2010.
The United States has until the meeting "to really focus on some of the issues that [U.S. President Barack Obama] has put forward," said one high-level U.S. official. Washington hopes to make it harder for countries to withdraw from the treaty, augment International Atomic Energy Agency inspections and bolster nonproliferation safeguards in the civilian energy sector (Lederer, AP).
Iran, Cuba and other developing countries pressed the five recognized nuclear-weapon states Friday to vow not to launch nuclear strikes on non-nuclear weapon nations and to pursue their treaty mandate to move toward elimination of their nuclear arsenals, the Post reported.
France has provided the most resistance on nuclear disarmament, said Rebecca Johnson, head of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy.
"The French are feeling anxious because Obama and (British Prime Minister) Gordon Brown have both said they want to see a world free of nuclear weapons. France wants to keep nuclear weapons," Johnson said (Lynch, Washington Post).