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The world needs an agreement to ban radiological weapons

Cheap and Dirty Bombs VOICE, Could these creepy chest packs be North Korea’s way of threatening radiological war? BY WILLIAM C. POTTER , JEFFREY LEWIS FEBRUARY 17, 2014
  “…….. As part of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated a draft treaty on the prohibition of the development, production, stockpiling, and use of radiological weapons. In a rare act of superpower unity, the United States and the Soviet Union submitted the treaty to the Committee on Disarmament in 1979. Oddly enough, this draft treaty seems to have been all but forgotten by the arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation community. 
The Conference on Disarmament, as it is known today, maintained an ad hoc committee on radiological weapons until 1992. Despite the U.S.-Soviet agreement, the initiative foundered due to disagreements among other conference members over the scope of the draft treaty, definitional issues, and the relatively low priority attached to the subject by most delegations. In particular, the forum could not reach consensus on whether to include attacks on nuclear power plants or other facilities that would release radioactivity — a divisive issue that arose after Israel destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.
Now might be the time to revisit the history of U.S.-Soviet arms control efforts on radiological weapons. Although the Conference on Disarmament remains deadlocked over a number of issues, there may be a new forum in which to revisit this conversation: the P-5 process. First launched in 2009, this ongoing series of formal consultations among the five nuclear weapons states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — the United States, Russia, China, France, and Britain — has focused mainly on nuclear disarmament issues involving verification, transparency, and definitions of nuclear terms.
Some P5 states have expressed interest in adding new topics to the agenda ahead of the 2015 NPT Review Conference. Radiological warfare would be a useful addition. ….
Although a P5 renunciation of radiological weapons would be far from a multilateral treaty, an agreement would still constitute an important step to strengthen the norm against dirty bombs — and help discourage a renewed interest by states in radiological warfare……http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/02/17/cheap_and_dirty_bombs

February 19, 2014 - Posted by | Uncategorized

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