DISARMAMENT: More Troubles for Nuclear Test-uban Treaty

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 4 1996 (IPS) - The comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty (CTBT), due to be signed at the United Nations in September, is in trouble because of a new split between nuclear and non-nuclear states.

Pakistan and Iran, who have raised new objections to a draft text, are seeking amendments that the United States is refusing to concede. Washington has warned that any fresh attempts to re-open negotiations on the draft, currently under discussion in Geneva, may turn back a 40-year effort to ban nuclear explosions from the face of the earth.

“The most probable result of a further negotiation on the text is to doom the treaty,” John Holum, director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and leader of the U.S. delegation.

But several non-nuclear states charge that Washington is trying to ram down their throats a treaty full of holes.

“My government is not satisfied with the manner in which the test-ban treaty negotiations have proceeded at this session,” said Ambassador Munir Akram of Pakistan. “The text (of the draft treaty) that has emerged is not entirely the product of negotiations, with parts of it having descended from heaven, or elsewhere,” Akram told a meeting of the 61-member U.N. Disarmament Conference in Geneva this week.

The text is based on a draft prepared by the chairman of the conference, Jaap Ramaker of the Netherlands. The proposed CTBT fell into trouble last month when India announced it would not sign the accord because it did not contain a timetable for total nuclear disarmament.

The original deadline to finalise the treaty was Jun. 28. The agreement would only enter into force when signed by 44 of the 185 member-states, including all the “nuclear-capable states.”

These include the five declared nuclear states – France, Britain, China, Russia, and the United States – and the three “threshold” states, namely India, Pakistan and Israel.

Pakistan says the text does not live up to the expectations of the international community. The CTBT, Pakistan points out, is a misnomer because it is not “comprehensive”: It would only ban nuclear explosions, not all nuclear testing.

Akram says the text does not address several issues of serious concern to his country. Pakistan has repeatedly said that verification of the test-ban treaty must be accomplished primarily by the international monitoring system and that on-site inspections should be rare and exceptional.

“As for the use of national technical means of verification, there must be binding assurances that espionage and human intelligence would be expressly excluded from the purview of those means,” he added.

Ambassador Sirous Nasseri of Iran argues that negotiations have been carried out with great concern for the wishes of nuclear- weapons states.

“Talks on some key issues became confined exclusively to a very few states,” he said.

The non-nuclear states have argued the treaty leaves a loophole for the ‘big five’ countries to conduct nuclear testing by computer simulation because of their access to advance technology. According to Ambassador Gilberto Vergne Saboia of Brazil, the draft treaty has many deficiencies.

Among these, he said, was the lack of any real commitment for nuclear disarmament and the absence of clear criteria on the use of data not gathered through treaty organs for verification purposes. In spite of these shortcomings, he said, Brazil is convinced that the text “offers the best prospect for the attainment this year of a long-sought goal of an agreement outlawing nuclear-weapon test explosions, bringing all closer to a nuclear-weapon-free world.”

Responding to criticism about the deficiencies in the draft treaty, U.S. delegate Holum said no one could guarantee that the world would be free of nuclear weapons by a certain date if the Conference forwarded the treaty to the United Nations.

“But all can fully understand that such a day will be long postponed, perhaps indefinitely, if after four decades of effort we now falter in taking the next concrete step down the road,” he said.