DISARMAMENT: Nuclear Test Ban Will Come Before United Nations

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 23 1996 (IPS) - A nuclear test ban treaty blocked by India will be presented to the U.N. General Assembly for approval on Sep. 9, Australia’s U.N. ambassador says.

India succeeded last week in blocking consensus approval for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) at nuclear talks in Geneva, and thus prevented the Conference on Disarmament from referring the treaty to the United Nations.

But Ambassador Richard Butler of Australia says his nation will submit the treaty to the General Assembly, so that the treaty can be adopted and opened for signature next month.

“We regret that it had to be done this way,” Butler says. “But we are not prepared to accept that this unique moment in history…will be withheld” through India’s objections.

On Friday, Australia forwarded the text of the treaty, which bans all nuclear test explosions, to General Assembly President Diogo Freitas do Amaral of Portugal. Canberra also submitted a resolution which asks the 185-nation Assembly to adopt the treaty and open it up for signatures from member states.

Butler describes the resolution, which he hopes to put up for a vote on Sep 9, as “merely procedural,” and predicts widespread support will emerge at the proposed special session of the General Assembly.

He said he expects “a very, very long list” of co-sponsors for the resolution, possibly exceeding the more than 90 countries which co-sponsored a General Assembly resolution last December that called for a ban on nuclear testing.

Australia, which waged a tough fight against French and Chinese nuclear testing conducted last year, certainly has credibility to ask for the treaty’s opening. But the controversy that has dogged the CTBT peaked with India’s refusal to allow the Disarmament Conference to adopt it for approval by the United Nations.

India decided to block the treaty because the CTBT text insisted that India, along with fellow nuclear “threshold” states Pakistan and Israel, must ratify it for the treaty to take effect. Forty-four nations in all must ratify the CTBT before it is in force, including the three “threshold” countries and the five declared nuclear powers.

If the treaty is still not in force after three years, the text requires that an international conference be held to decide how to secure its implementation. Indian Foreign Minister I. K. Gujral last week said such provision “denied India its sovereign right of exercise of consent and contains an element of implied coercion.”

Following India’s blocking of consensus approval of the CTBT text at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, the five declared nuclear powers — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — have scrambled to preserve at least some of the gains made during the two-year CTBT negotiations.

Now, without the Conference’s consensus behind it, the treaty is a tougher sell. Some developing nations have expressed uneasiness with the fact that, despite two years of negotiations, the Disarmament Conference’s approval is now deemed unnecessary because one nation opposed it.

What is needed, experts acknowledge, is for the five nuclearpowers to muster enough support from the non-nuclear states, especially those in the developing world, to make up for the loss of Disarmament Conference consensus.

“(The nuclear powers) would be best advised to come up with some sort of proposals to bring around non-aligned states,” says Nicola Butler, an analyst at the British-American Security Information Council.

Most analysts expect that the treaty could command a majority in the General Assembly; out of the Disarmament Conference’s 61 member states, only India and Iran objected to the text.

Ambassador Butler says the General Assembly only needs to adopt the text by a simple majority to open the document up for signatures. But Nicola Butler warns, “They shouldn’t look for a simple majority (at the United Nations) but wholehearted support.”

To obtain such support, says Daryl Kimball, spokesman for Physicians for Social Responsibility, the treaty will have to be presented to the General Assembly “in a manner that conforms with the Conference on Disarmament’s credibility.” In essence, nations must gently overturn the results at Geneva without appearing to bypass the Conference entirely.

Support from developing nations has already boosted the CTBT’s credibility anew in recent days. Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Mexico, Pakistan and Peru have all declared support for sponsoring the treaty’s introduction at the United Nations.

But, as Gujral argued last week, “the negotiations have ended without consensus because the text does not reflect the aspirations of the vast majority of countries for a nuclear- weapon-free world.”

“It is a sad fact that the nuclear weapon states show no interest in giving up their nuclear hegemony,” Gujral said.

Only a commitment to full disarmament by the five nuclear powers can secure India’s support, New Delhi says.

Ambassador Butler counters that, although the nuclear states could go further to disarm, that is no excuse for holding up a test ban. “Let’s not make the one the hostage of the other,” he argues.

Under the CTBT, he says, the nuclear powers have agreed never again to conduct test explosions, putting to an end an era in which 530 test explosions have taken place. “This is a major step toward nuclear disarmament,” the envoy contends.