The US proposed a new treaty to curb proliferation of nuclear weapons by banning the production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium to improve the world's leverage against "hard cases" like Iran and North Korea.
Stephen Rademaker, acting US assistant secretary of state for arms control, told the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament that it should aim to conclude its work by September.
"The treaty text that we are putting forward contains the essential provisions that would comprise a successful, legally binding FMCT," or Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, said Rademaker in presenting a stripped-down proposed treaty on Thursday.
The US proposal -- only 3-pages long -- leaves out verification measures to avoid years of protracted negotiations, but it says governments could use "national means" -- or intelligence -- to detect violations by other countries and report them to all treaty members or to the UN Security Council.
Rademaker said a number of attempts were being made to prevent terrorists and governments from developing weapons of mass destruction, but the measures may be insufficient "in the case of governments that are absolutely determined to acquire such weapons."
He said Iran was "an obvious case in point," and said that country and North Korea were "the hard cases."
Rademaker noted that the UN Security Council had urged Iran in March to suspend its uranium-enrichment activities.
"Iran's response to this statement was to announce two weeks later that it had met with initial success in uranium enrichment and was planning to expand rapidly the scale of its enrichment work," he said.
But Hamid Eslamizad, a senior official at Iran's mission in Geneva, questioned what the link was between the proposed treaty and the case of Iran before the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Iran's nuclear program is peaceful, Eslamizad said.
"I would like to recall that so far the agency has made it clear that there has not been any diversion of nuclear materials in Iran towards prohibited use," he added.
Rademaker responded that Iran was merely repeating its usual defense that all nuclear material in the country has been accounted for by the IAEA.
"The question is, is there any undeclared nuclear material in Iran? And that's the whole issue," Rademaker told reporters.
The new treaty would ban "the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices," he said.
Rademaker said the proposal has widespread support and should be taken up by the conference, which has not written a treaty for 10 years.
The US proposal would go into force with only the approval of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the US.
Rademaker noted that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of the 1960s went into effect with the approval only of Britain, the Soviet Union and the US and that other nations -- including nuclear powers France and China -- joined later.
In contrast, he told reporters, the nuclear test ban treaty approved by the conference in 1996 required ratification by more than 30 countries, and it remains inactive because a number of nations, including the US, never ratified it.
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