U.S. diplomats denied the country's atomic weapons arsenal risked undermining the international treaty prohibiting countries from making warheads, citing recent commitments to scrap bomb-grade plutonium as proof.
“I've heard repeatedly in Vienna that U.S. disarmament policy has stalled,'' Greg Schulte, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations nuclear agency, said late yesterday at a press briefing. “That is not true.''
The U.S. announced Sept. 17 that it was removing nine metric tons of plutonium earmarked for making new nuclear weapons, enough to make 1,000 bombs. The U.S. had kept 52.5 metric tons of excess plutonium for bombs, said Will Tobey, deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration. The 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty commits the U.S. and other countries possessing nuclear weapons to eliminate their arsenals in “good faith.''
“There is a risk, a very real and present risk, that the NPT regime will collapse'' unless the U.S. and others eliminate their bombs, said Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister and head of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
Evans joined other diplomats in Vienna criticizing countries with nuclear weapons for not doing enough to fulfill disarmament pledges.
The U.S. plans to cut its active nuclear warheads to around 5,400 in 2012 from an estimated 10,000 today, according to the the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published this month. Russia has around 16,000 warheads, of which around 5,800 are on standby, according to the publication.
Disarmament Undermined
Tobey declined to say how many warheads are in the U.S. arsenal, citing government policy.
“There is a clear link between non-proliferation and disarmament,'' Austria's Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik told diplomats from the 149 countries at the International Atomic Energy Agency's annual meeting in Vienna. The Alpine country is home to the UN agency.
Plassnik and other diplomats said failure by atomic weapons states to disarm undermines their case in ordering other countries to stop nuclear work that may yield arms.
“As long as some countries have nuclear weapons, there will be others who will also aspire to possess them,'' South Africa's IAEA ambassador Abdul Minty said. South Africa became the only nuclear weapons state to verifiably eliminate its arsenal after the apartheid regime fell in 1993.
U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to reduce their arsenals to limit themselves to 2,200 warheads each in May 2002. The two sides haven't agreed to specific counting rules, the Washington-based Arms Control Association says on its Web site.
