UNITED NATIONS, June 2: An independent commission headed by former United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix has recommended that all nuclear weapon states, including Pakistan, India, the United States and China, should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits all nuclear-weapon testing.
At a press conference on Thursday, Mr Blix urged Iran and Israel to end their nuclear activities and criticised the US for seeking militaristic remedies to disagreements.
The recommendations were among 60 put forward in a report prepared by the 14-member Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, an initiative of the Swedish government set up in 2003.
The panel wants Islamabad and New Delhi to join states which have declared a moratorium on the production of fissile material pending a treaty and increase transparency in nuclear and missile activities.
“The reality is that if the US were to ratify (the CTBT), then China would. If China did, India would. If India did, Pakistan would. If Pakistan did, then Iran would. It would set in motion a good domino effect,” Mr Blix said.
The panel suggested that both Iran and Israel commit themselves against enriching uranium under international safeguards as part of wider efforts to establish a mass destruction weapon-free zone in the ME.
“As confidence-building measures, all states in the region, including Iran and Israel, should for a prolonged period of time commit themselves to a verified arrangement not to have any enrichment, reprocessing or other sensitive fuel-cycle activities on their territories,” said the commission.
“Israel should commit itself not to make more plutonium; they are assumed to have 200 nuclear weapons,” Mr Blix said.
On Iran, Mr Blix said that “the issue was not whether it has produced or not produced nuclear weapons of mass destruction but whether it has the capacity. The governments change frequently and sometimes are even overthrown. A political decision could change everything if a country has the technology and the know-how,” he said.
The report is highly critical of the United States’ unwillingness to cooperate in international arms regimes, which, it asserts, undermines the effort to curb nuclear weapons.
“If it (US) takes the lead, the world is likely to follow. If it does not take the lead, there could be more nuclear tests and new nuclear arms races,” the report said.
The panel included the Director of the Delhi Policy Group, V.R. Raghavan, and former UN under-secretary-general for disarmament affairs Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka, who is a candidate for the top post at the UN this year. When asked whether Tehran could be trusted, Mr Blix said it was ‘not inconceivable’ that some Iranian groups saw 130,000 American troops in Iraq and American bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan as security threat to their country.
