The US has drafted a UN Security Council resolution calling on all countries with atomic weapons to get rid of them, a text Washington hopes will be approved by a special council session presided over by US President Barack Obama.
The 15-nation council will debate the draft resolution on Sept. 24 on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the General Assembly, where Obama is making his debut appearance at the UN. Washington holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council during September.
The draft resolution was circulated to the full council on Friday, diplomats said.
The text, obtained by Reuters, calls for signatories of the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to begin talks on nuclear arms reduction and to negotiate “a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control, and calls on all other states to join in this endeavor.”
Diplomats said the US draft was yet another example of the sharp shift on disarmament policy taken by the Obama administration. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, had angered many NPT members by ignoring disarmament commitments made by previous US governments, analysts say.
The five permanent council members — the US, Britain, France, Russia and China — all have nuclear weapons. The “other states” — referred to but not named in the text — are Pakistan and India, which have not signed the NPT but are known to have atomic arsenals, and Israel, which neither confirms nor denies having nuclear arms but is presumed to have a sizable stockpile of warheads.
Council diplomats told reporters it also referred to North Korea, which withdrew from the treaty in 2003 and later tested two nuclear devices — one in 2006 and another earlier this year.
It also urges those countries outside the NPT to join it. Becoming a party to the NPT would require scrapping their nuclear arsenals, something the nuclear powers outside the pact have refused to do so far.
The draft resolution does not name specific countries, but it clearly has North Korea and Iran in mind when it says the council “deplores in particular the current major challenges to the nonproliferation regime that the Security Council has determined to be threats to international peace and security.”
The West suspects Iran is developing nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian atomic energy program and have pushed three rounds of UN sanctions against it, despite initial objections raised by Russia and China. Tehran says its atomic program is entirely peaceful and is aimed solely at the production of electricity.
Without referring to any specific regions, the draft resolution has the council “welcoming and supporting the steps taken to conclude nuclear-weapon-free zone treaties.” Egypt and other Arab states have long called for the establishment of such a zone in the Middle East — which would mean Israel would have to get rid of any atomic bombs it possesses.
The US resolution would also urge “all states to refrain from conducting a nuclear test explosion and to join the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, thereby bringing the treaty into force.”
The US signed the treaty, which would ban all nuclear tests, in 1996 during the administration of then-president Bill Clinton, a Democrat. In 1999, the then-Republican-majority US Senate made clear that it opposed the treaty as an unnecessary limitation on its military research options.
When Bush took office in 2001, his administration said it did not want its options limited by such a treaty and never asked the Senate to vote on the test ban treaty.
Washington is joined by China, North Korea, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel and Pakistan as hold-out countries whose ratification is necessary for the treaty to enter into force. There will be a major conference on the test ban treaty on Sept. 24 and Sept. 25 at UN headquarters in New York.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the