US wants world talks on weapons material ban

The US government has urged the world disarmament body to start negotiations for a ban on the production of material needed to make nuclear weapons.

But US ambassador Jackie Wolcott Sanders also told the 66-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland, that the administration of President George Bush had concluded that it would be difficult to verify whether such a treaty was being honoured.

Even so, Sanders said yesterday that “a ban on fissile material production for nuclear explosives would enhance global non-proliferation strictures against nuclear weapons”.

The US government has long advocated a ban on so-called ”fissile material” - plutonium and highly enriched uranium – but the Bush administration has taken a dim view of multilateral disarmament treaties and had put the issue up to review.

Without explanation, the administration suddenly decided to put forward its proposal to start negotiations on the treaty. Diplomats from other delegations said they understood that Sanders’ speech was written overnight and that the session of the conference was delayed about half an hour because of finishing touches to the text.

Unusually, the US mission to international organisations in Geneva refused to release a copy of the speech.

But officials in Washington noted that John Kerry, the Democratic challenger to Bush, made a speech on June 4 in which he called for preventing “the creation of new materials that are being produced for nuclear weapons”.

The treaty is seen by disarmament advocates as a way to curb nuclear weapons programmes in India, Pakistan and Israel, which are outside the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty due for a periodic review next year.

Sanders said the negotiations must be “clean” – without any links to other disarmament issues. That would break a logjam in the conference, where competing demands on what should be covered in a new accord have kept it from negotiating a treaty since the 1996 ban on nuclear weapons tests.

Perhaps in a gesture to win support, Sanders praised China for its efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programme. China has persistently demanded a ban on weapons in outer space – a position clearly aimed at the United States’ missile defence programme.

The treaty should be a legally binding ban on production of fissile material or other nuclear explosive devices, she said.

But, Sanders added, the US policy “raised serious concerns that realistic, effective verification” of such a treaty was unachievable.

In 2001 the United States ended more than six years of negotiations to set up a mechanism to enforce the Biological Weapons Convention by saying it would not be able to detect breaches and would give away defence and commercial secrets.