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DISARMAMENT: U.N. Goes After Nuclear Terrorists

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 31 2005 (IPS) - After seven long years of negotiations, the United Nations has finalised an international convention against nuclear terrorism.

“It’s a major achievement,” Rohan Perera, chairman of the U.N. Adhoc Committee on Terrorism, told IPS Thursday, just hours after the 191 member states approved the draft treaty by consensus.

“I am sure that it is the shared sentiment of all delegations that this is indeed a significant and commendable step forward” in the global fight against terrorism, he added.

The treaty comes nearly eight years after Alexander Lebed, a decorated Soviet war hero and a former national security chief under President Boris Yeltsin, told a U.S. television network that there were about 100 suitcase-sized Russian nuclear weapons missing and unaccounted for.

The Russian secret intelligence agency, the KGB, is said to have acquired an unspecified number of small nuclear weapons, each weighing less than 75 pounds, that were never included in any post-Cold War inventory on global disarmament.

There have been continued fears that some of these weapons, still deemed missing, may fall into the hands of terrorist groups.

The proposed treaty – titled the Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism – calls on all member states to help track down “loose nukes” and thwart potential nuclear terrorists.

“It is vital that we deny terrorists access to nuclear materials,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in his 62-page landmark report on the restructuring of the United Nations, released last week.

“Our strategy against terrorism must be comprehensive and should be based on five pillars: it must aim at dissuading people from resorting to terrorism or supporting it; it must deny terrorists access to funds and materials; it must deter states from sponsoring terrorism; it must develop state capacity to defeat terrorism; and it must defend human rights,” he added.

The international community has been warned of the possibility of either an armed attack on a nuclear installation or the abuse of nuclear materials.

The Russian Federation, which was the lead player in the new treaty, was primarily responsible for preparing the draft convention. The Russians believe the convention would pre-empt potential acts of nuclear terrorism.

In February, U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin called for the early adoption of the nuclear terrorism convention. This was part of a joint statement on nuclear security cooperation.

The newest treaty – the 13th in a series of U.N. conventions against terrorism – will be ready for signature during the high-level summit meeting of world leaders at the General Assembly sessions in September this year. But it needs 22 ratifications before it becomes international law.

The last two treaties against terrorism were the 1997 International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombing and the 1999 International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism.

The 14th – and perhaps the last – of the treaties, titled a Comprehensive Convention on Terrorism, which will encompass elements of all 13 previous treaties, is expected to be finalised in mid-2006.

But that treaty remains deadlocked primarily over definitions relating to “terrorists,” “freedom fighters” and “state terrorism.”

“I strongly urge world leaders to unite behind it and to conclude a comprehensive convention on terrorism before the end of the 60th session of the General Assembly next year,” Annan said last week.

He also said that transnational networks of terrorist groups have global reach and make common cause to pose a universal threat.

“Such groups profess a desire to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and to inflict mass casualties. Even one such attack and the chain of events it may set off could change our world forever,” he warned.

Although the world’s five declared nuclear powers – France, Britain, the United States, China and Russia – have pledged to curb the proliferation of the deadly weapons, they have not agreed to eliminate them completely from their military arsenals. All five countries are also veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

The undeclared nuclear powers include India, Pakistan, Israel, and possibly North Korea.

The continued existence of some 30,000 nuclear weapons long after the end of the Cold War still poses a grave danger to humanity.

This is further worsened by the fact that 5,000 of these weapons are on alert status – meaning they are capable of being fired on 30 minutes’ notice.

Since nuclear technologies were developed, the world community has also encountered cases of “leakage” of nuclear components.

A 1997 Hollywood movie titled “The Peacemaker” – partly shot outside the United Nations – dramatised the story of a disgruntled Bosnian diplomat who acquires a backpack-sized nuclear weapon and brings it to New York to blow it outside the U.N. headquarters.