By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Aug 8 1996 (IPS)

Diplomats and lawyers have been working in vain for weeks to find some way to make India ratify a Treaty for the Complete Prohibition of Nuclear Testing, without explicitly mentioning the country.

The failure of the Treaty editors became clear once more this Thursday, when India’s ambassador, Arundhati Ghose, told the Disarmament Commission for the nth time that her nation would not be signing the agreement.

Worse still, New Delhi threatened to block consensus on the project in the Commission, meaning the initiative will not be presented to the UN General Assembly next month.

India has taken it as read that all the discussion on how the treaty will come into power have only one objective in mind: ratification by New Delhi.

John Holum, director of the Disarmament and Arms Control Agency of the United States, explained Wednesday in Washington that a “significant” number of nations were calling for the treaty to only become legal when the five nuclear powers and three nations “on the threshold” of being so have all signed.

So far all the powers – China, the United States, France, Britain and Russia – have all signed, but all the “threshold” nations – India, Israel and Pakistan – have not.

President of the special treaty negotiations committee, the Dutch ambassador Jaap Ramaker, came up with one last formula to get all the owners of nuclear power installations or arsenals to sign up.

Article 14 said the treaty would come into action when all the member nations of the Disarmament Commission with nuclear energy plants used for research have ratified it.

This would apply to 44 of the 61 Commission member countries, including, of course, the three threshold nations.

Another of the project dispositions deals with the possibility that, three years after its approval, the treaty will may still not achieve legal status for lack of ratification.

In this case, the Conference of the Parties – made up of the signatories – will meet to adopt measures to assure the protocol comes into practice.

But the Indian government has refused to accept the proposed text as they believe it has been especially geared to seek their ratification.

Ghose told the Defence Commission this formula was seeking to “force us into signing through methods which have no precedent in the treaty negotiations.”

India also said it feared the Conference of Parties would declare sanctions against the nations which do not sign the treaty.

In the case of this text remaining unchanged, India will be forced to oppose the Disarmament Conference efforts to sanction the veto on nuclear tests, said Ghose.

The special treaty negotiations committee will meet Friday to monitor the development of the negotiations.

The Group of 21, made up of the Non Aligned nations, presented a Plan of Action for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons this Thursday, which will be gradually applied until 2020.

The Non Aligned nations’ programme more than made up for the gaps India found in the text of the project, which does not mention aims for nuclear disarmament, nor put an end to the arms race.

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