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Plan mooted for nuke-free world as US, Russia talk
By Cai Hong (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-01 09:19 Washington DC -- The first practical proposals to reduce the number of nuclear weapons are expected to be central to a second summit between the leaders of the world's two most powerful nations. US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev will hold meetings in Moscow from Sunday until Tuesday following what the Obama administration described as a desire to "push the re-set button" on relations with Russia.
Observers say the two leaders will now pursue an arms deal cutting nuclear warheads below levels agreed in the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty in 2002. The treaty committed both sides to cutting arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads by 2012. "The consensus that the US and Russia have reached on this issue is good for the world," Wu Jianmin, president of China Foreign Affairs University, told China Daily. "It signifies that the bilateral relations are improving." "The two countries have made good progress in their negotiations on cutting nuclear warheads," said Richard Burt, former US Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany from 1985 to 1989 and former US Chief Negotiator for the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, at the commission meeting of the Washington-based think tank Global Zero on June 28 and 29. A growing group of national leaders worldwide is calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Today, the overwhelming majority of nations - 183 - do not have nuclear weapons, but only nine possess more than 23,000 nuclear warheads. Burt said the US and Russia should reduce their warheads first - and seriously - and then other countries with nuclear weapons would follow suit. Global Zero is an international initiative dedicated to achieving a binding, verifiable agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons. Many of the members have worked at senior levels with issues of national security in nuclear weapons states and key non-nuclear countries. The group includes nine former heads of state; eight former foreign ministers from the US, Russia, Britain and India; three former defense ministers from the US and Britain; six former national security advisers from the US, India and Pakistan; and 19 former top military commanders from the US, Russia, China, Britain, India and Pakistan. It has outlined a four-phased process for the preparation, negotiation, and ratification of a global zero accord over 14 years, from 2010 to 2023, and the completion of the dismantlement of all nuclear warheads over the following sever years (2024 to 2030). Burt, who chairs the Global Zero commission, said it is a "practical, comprehensive end-to-end strategy" - including near, medium and long-term steps - for the phased, verified reduction of all nuclear weapons to zero. Wu Jianmin said he endorsed the plan for a nuclear-free world, adding China put forward such a proposal as early as 1964. While embracing the zero nuclear weapons idea, Peng Guangqian, a strategist at the Chinese Academy of Military Science, is not so optimistic about fulfilling the goal in 20 years as the Global Zero commission envisions. "The prerequisite for a nuclear-free world is to improve the political and security environment, which can free small countries from the fear of nuclear attack," Peng said. "In such circusmtances there would be no reason to develop nuclear weapons." He said there was still "a long way to go… Tough as it is, we have to go this way as the world is on the verge of a nuclear weapons-built volcano." Burt agreed that "too quick and dramatic a reduction was not politically realistic for the two countries." Eliminating all nuclear weapons cannot happen quickly, he added. It will take years of technical, diplomatic and political preparations before negotiations on a global zero accord can even begin – and many more years to negotiate and implement it. "We believe that Presidents Medvedev and Obama could set the world's course to zero nuclear weapons if they initiated serious talks on a comprehensive strategy to achieve it," Igor Yurgens, a senior advisor to President Medvedev, said in Moscow via telephone on Monday. Political and military leaders warned that the world was nearing a "proliferation tipping point" when nuclear weapons spread beyond the capacity of any effort to rein them in and the chances increase that they will be used by a country in conflict or by accident, or by a terrorist group. They claimed that nothing would strengthen the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) more in the near-term than the initiation of global zero talks. The NPT enshrined the basic objective of the elimination of all nuclear weapons and mandated that signatory countries negotiate "effective measures" to achieve it. Former US Ambassador to Russia James Collins noted that President Obama was a "truly post Cold War president". He said this was important because Obama didn't start his political career with a vocabulary or a way of thinking about the world that divided it into East and West. Collins said Obama's Russian counterpart was from a similar generation. "Let's hope he has a similar frame of mind," he said. Some other US politicians and national security practitioners have put forward their proposals calling for opposite action on non-proliferation. They cite national security as one of the reasons to keep a US nuclear deterrent. The Perry-Schlesinger Commission (named after co-chairmen William Perry, secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, and James Schlesinger, secretary of defense under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford) released a consensus report in May. It made numerous recommendations to increase the funding for, and improve the effectiveness of, the nuclear weapons laboratory complex - the Los Alamo facility in New Mexico, the Pantex plant in Texas, and the Y-12 plant in Tennessee. |
