At UN treaty conference, ambitious draft report sees timetable for abolishing nuke arms

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At UN, deadline aired for abolishing nuke weapons

UNITED NATIONS — The United States, Russia and other nuclear powers would agree to a global conference in 2014 to negotiate a timetable for abolishing nuclear arms, under a draft committee report submitted Friday, halfway through a monthlong conference reviewing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

The highly ambitious plan was only an opening bid for the upcoming two weeks of haggling over a final document to be issued by the conference. The eventual text, if there is one, will inevitably be less far-reaching.

For one thing, the five nuclear powers recognized under the treaty — also including Britain, France and China — have never endorsed a timetable for nuclear abolition.

For another, four nations that have or are suspected of having atomic arms — Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea — remain outside the treaty, unaffected by any plan the twice-a-decade treaty conference might adopt.

More achievable is the draft report’s proposal that the conference, without a timetable, “reaffirms the unequivocal undertaking of the nuclear-weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.”

At the 2005 treaty conference, the U.S. administration of President George W. Bush, unenthusiastic about arms-control diplomacy, rejected a reaffirmation of that principle, laid down at the 2000 NPT session. That stance contributed to the 2005 session’s failure to produce a consensus final document.

President Barack Obama, by contrast, has prominently endorsed the idea of nuclear abolition and moved forward on several arms-control fronts.

In fact, the draft committee report echoes the U.S. chief executive’s words in his pivotal April 2009 speech on nuclear arms in Prague, Czech Republic, saying the conference seeks “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

The draft was submitted after a week of committee debate by Austrian Ambassador Alexander Marschik, chairman of one of three main committees at the 189-nation NPT conference.

The three committees’ chairmen’s draft will be revised in committee debate next week, before being submitted to a single, all-conference drafting committee in late May.

Under the NPT, a 40-year-old pact designed to check the spread of nuclear weapons, nations without such ultimate arms pledged not to acquire them, while those with atomic arsenals pledged to move toward their elimination.

Treaty members gather every five years to review how it is working and agree on new approaches to problems — not by updating the treaty itself, a technically difficult task, but by trying to adopt a consensus final document calling for steps outside the treaty to advance its goals.