UN nuclear nonproliferation talks end without agreement
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UN member states have failed to reach consensus after four weeks of negotiations on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament goals, the president of the conference said.
“Despite our best efforts… it is my understanding that the conference is not in a position to achieve agreement on its substantive work,” Vietnam’s Do Hung Viet told reporters in New York. He added: “I do not intend to put the document forward for adoption.”
The talks focused on reviewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), under which 191 countries agreed to restrict nuclear weapons to the five states that had them before January 1, 1967: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Four additional countries are widely believed to possess nuclear weapons: India, Pakistan, ‘Israel’, and North Korea. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, around 90 percent of the world’s 12,241 nuclear warheads remain in US and Russian arsenals.
A late draft of the conference text, seen by AFP, said Iran, which does not possess nuclear weapons, must “never” develop them, underscoring persistent divisions among negotiators over regional security concerns and nuclear policy enforcement.
