UNITED NATIONS: After seven long years of negotiations, the United Nations has finalized an international convention against nuclear terrorism. “It’s a major achievement,” Rohan Perera, chairman of the UN Adhoc Committee on Terrorism, told IPS on Thursday, just hours after the 191 member states approved the draft treaty by consensus. “I am sure that it is the shared sentiment of all delegations that this is indeed a significant and commendable step forward” in the global fight against terrorism, he added.
The treaty comes nearly eight years after Alexander Lebed, a decorated Soviet war hero and a former national security chief under President Boris Yeltsin, told a US television network that there were about 100 suitcase-sized Russian nuclear weapons missing and unaccounted for.
The Russian secret intelligence agency, the KGB, is said to have acquired an unspecified number of small nuclear weapons, each weighing less than 75 pounds, that were never included in any post-Cold War inventory on global disarmament.
There have been continued fears that some of these weapons, still deemed missing, may fall into the hands of terrorist groups.
The proposed treaty — titled the Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism — calls on all member states to help track down “loose nukes” and thwart potential nuclear terrorists.
“It is vital that we deny terrorists access to nuclear materials,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in his 62-page landmark report on the restructuring of the United Nations, released last week.
“Our strategy against terrorism must be comprehensive and should be based on five pillars: it must aim at dissuading people from resorting to terrorism or supporting it; it must deny terrorists access to funds and materials; it must deter states from sponsoring terrorism; it must develop state capacity to defeat terrorism; and it must defend human rights,” he added.
The international community has been warned of the possibility of either an armed attack on a nuclear installation or the abuse of nuclear materials.
The Russian Federation, which was the lead player in the new treaty, was primarily responsible for preparing the draft convention. The Russians believe the convention would pre-empt potential acts of nuclear terrorism.
In February, US President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin called for the early adoption of the nuclear terrorism convention. This was part of a joint statement on nuclear security cooperation.
The newest treaty — the 13th in a series of UN conventions against terrorism — will be ready for signature during the high-level summit meeting of world leaders at the General Assembly sessions in September this year. But it needs 22 ratifications before it becomes international law.
The last two treaties against terrorism were the 1997 International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombing and the 1999 International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism.
The 14th — and perhaps the last — of the treaties, titled a Comprehensive Convention on Terrorism, which will encompass elements of all 13 previous treaties, is expected to be finalized in mid-2006.
But that treaty remains deadlocked primarily over definitions relating to “terrorists,” “freedom fighters” and “state terrorism.”
Although the world’s five declared nuclear powers have pledged to curb the proliferation of the deadly weapons, they have not agreed to eliminate them completely from their military arsenals. All five countries are also veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council.
The continued existence of some 30,000 nuclear weapons long after the end of the Cold War still poses a grave danger to humanity. This is further worsened by the fact that 5,000 of these weapons are on alert status — meaning they are capable of being fired on 30 minutes’ notice.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service
