LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Disarmament: Nuclear Disarmament
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Disarmament efforts focus on two basic types of weapons -- weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and small arms. Much attention has naturally been spent on working to halt the nuclear arms race because of the devastating amount of damage that these weapons can do. Progress has been made, but there are still more than 30,000-50,000 nuclear warheads - enough to destroy the entire planet many times over. In addition, after the end of the Cold War in which people feared the superpowers could destroy each other, new fears about the use of these weapons by terrorists or rogue nations has, in some minds, given us even more reason to fear these weapons.
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Over the past two years the Conference on Disarmament has been unable to make progress, having failed to establish an ad hoc committee on nuclear disarmament. The Review process of the NPT offers an alternative complementary path to stimulate progress and to lay some of the groundwork for negotiations.
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The basis for a global-disarmament compact is provided by current agreements. Nuclear disarmament has been made respectable for conservatives since even Henry Kissinger has decided there is a need to ban the bomb (indeed, most of Ronald Reagan’s former top advisors now believe that nuclear proliferation and then nuclear war is inevitable unless the US gets rid of its own nuclear weapons). The way ahead is to adapt procedures that have worked in the past rather than engage in developing a new set. The “best practice” here lies in the UN’s work in Iraq (by Hans Blix and the other inspectors) and in the the work of Mohamed ElBaradei [10] and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA [11]). UN inspectors should have access to the permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) as well as to the “smaller” nuclear powers (India, Pakistan and Israel). These procedures will ... be effective in restricting terrorist access to nuclear technology; and they can be adapted to work with biological and chemical weapons.
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The face of disarmament education has changed a few times over the last several decades. While the initial focus during the Cold War was on nuclear weapons, the geo-political changes that took place in the 1990s, opened the doors of multilateral disarmament to include the conventional arms trade, in particular small arms, light weapons and landmines. After the catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States in 2001, DNP education is expanded to include the threat of terrorism. In particular, nuclear smuggling has become a source of great concern. With security lax at nuclear sites where stockpiles of uranium and plutonium are being stored in often unsafe conditions, the potential for nuclear materials to fall into the wrong hands has increased considerably. Since 1993 there have been a number of confirmed cases of nuclear smuggling involving radioactive material that could be used to make a crude nuclear weapon.
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The prohibition of the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons will provide an indispensable basis for further concrete measures towards nuclear disarmament. In the pursuit of nuclear disarmament, it would be unrealistic to look for absolute parity, or total agreement on the existence of parity in the destructive capabilities of the two major nuclear arsenals. Various declaratory statements and proposals for cuts, freezes and control measures have been put forward. These have been met by counter-proposals, at least partly meant to neutralize one another, and retain the propaganda advantage. This has by now become a continuing dialogue and is changing so rapidly in substance that it is impossible to make any value judgments. Thus, while the dialogue may continue, it is evident that the first step should be to freeze the present nuclear arsenals and not to add to them.
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The traditional omnibus resolution promoting the long-time call of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) for a time-bound framework for nuclear disarmament (60/70), sponsored (as in past years) by Myanmar/Burma, managed 113 votes in favour, including China. In accordance with past practice, NATO voted against and a mixture of states, including Russia abstained. Similarly, Malaysia's resolution (60/76), which follows up on the 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons and calls for negotiations on a Nuclear Weapons Convention... split largely along group lines, achieving 126 votes in favour. Most significantly, however, 165 states voted in favour of the paragraph that underlines the unanimous ICJ conclusion that there exists an obligation to pursue and bring to conclusion negotiations on nuclear disarmament. Only Israel, Russia and the United States voted against this conclusion, while five states, including Britain and France abstained.
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Nuclear Disarmament