The International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament has called n a draft report for curtailing the number of nuclear weapons around the world to less than 1,000 by 2025, Kyodo News reported Friday (see GSN, Oct. 16).
(Oct. 19) -
Former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and former Japanese Foreign Minister Yuriko Kawaguchi, co-leaders of the International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament, shown in May. A draft report by the commission urges nations to possess no more than 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2025 (Stan Honda/Getty Images).
The draft was put together prior to the commission's final meeting this week in Hiroshima. There is doubt among some panel members that the final document would promote the cut from today's global arsenal of more than 20,000 weapons to "a world with no more than 1,000 nuclear warheads."
An earlier draft of the report that was debated at the commission's June meeting in Moscow has seen some of its key items watered down. Under the new draft, the target year for U.S. President Barack Obama to put together a new nuclear doctrine has been pushed back from spring 2010 to 2012. The old deadline would have had Obama put together a new doctrine in time for consideration at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference in May.
The draft calls on nuclear nations to "achieve early movement on nuclear doctrine, with all nuclear-armed states declaring that the sole purpose of retaining the nuclear weapons they have is to deter others from using such weapons against them or their allies."
It also extends until 2025 the adoption of a policy in which all nuclear-armed states agree to "no first use" of nuclear weapons.
The draft's short-term action benchmarks also contains goals for bringing into force the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and slashing the number of warheads in United States and Russian stockpiles. It calls for "all nuclear armed states [to] give strong negative security assurances to non-nuclear states."
Agenda goals through 2025 include a suggestion to "develop and build support for a comprehensive nuclear weapons convention to legally underpin the ultimate transition to a nuclear weapons-free world."
Goals past 2025 include the creation of "military conditions in which conventional arms imbalances, missile defense systems or any other national or intergovernmental organization capability is not seen as so inherently destabilizing as to justify the retention of a nuclear deterrent capability, (Kyodo News I/Breitbart.com, Oct. 16).
The commission intends to release the final report in January, Kyodo reported (Kyodo News II/iStockAnalyst, Oct. 18).