Nuclear arms race continues, Blix warns Oireachtas

HANS BLIX, the former head of the UN’s WMD inspectorate, told an Oireachtas committee yesterday that efforts at nuclear disarmament had faced serious setbacks in the past decade.

In a presentation to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Dr Blix, who is now chairman of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, did not confine his criticism to states like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and India.

He also criticised the five major powers who hold nuclear arms — the US, Britain, China, Russia and France — for not honouring commitments to ban testing and to reduce or stop production of enriched uranium and plutonium.

Moreover, he said there was evidence that the nuclear powers were upgrading their weapons and also the relevance that was attached to them.

Dr Blix strongly indicated that the arms race did not conclude with the end of the Cold War.

“For 10 years we have seen stagnation and setbacks in the fields of arms control and disarmament,” Dr Blix said, adding that a revival of those efforts is now urgently required.

He said that the 1968 international nuclear non-proliferation treaty had been a success in that nearly all states in the world had adhered to it.

But he continued that the world is far from free from nuclear weapons. He said that three states — India, Israel and Pakistan — never signed the treaty and have developed and stockpiled weapons. He also said that three countries who joined the treaty as non-nuclear members — Iraq, Libya and North Korea — developed nuclear weapon programmes in violation of their commitments. North Korea later withdrew from the treaty.

He added there were suspicions that Iran is also trying to acquire a nuclear weapons capability.

However, he did point out that the number of nuclear warheads had fallen from 50,000 to some 27,000 since the Cold War but that thousands of those remained ‘on alert’.

“In the US a new generation of nuclear weapons is being designed.

“In Britain, a government decision is imminent on a new nuclear weapons programme that is far beyond the (existing one).”

He said the effect of that was countries like China and Russia developing measures to counter these new perceived threats.