February 06, 2008	Wednesday	Muharram 27, 1429

GENEVA, Feb 5: Britain proposed on Tuesday that the five major nuclear powers develop clearer ways to prove they are dismantling their warheads, not secretly hanging on to them.

Defence Secretary Des Browne offered to host talks on verification techniques in a speech to the Conference on Disarmament, saying it would boost international confidence.

The chances of eliminating nuclear arms would be enhanced if states without them could see those that possessed the weapons were taking irrevocable steps towards disarmament, he told the UN-backed forum in Geneva.

“If we are serious about doing our bit to create the conditions for complete nuclear disarmament, we must now also begin to build deeper technical relationships on disarmament between nuclear-weapon states,” Browne said.

“It is therefore of paramount importance that verification techniques are developed which enable us all — nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapons states — to have confidence that when a state says it has fully and irrevocably dismantled a nuclear warhead, we all can be assured it is telling the truth.”

The United States and Russia have made huge cuts in their nuclear arsenals since the end of the Cold War. Britain and France have made smaller reductions. But thousands of atomic warheads remained worldwide, according to Browne.

Britain is willing to host a technical conference linking nuclear officials in the five official nuclear-weapon states — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — he said.

The aim would be to refine techniques for verifying nuclear disarmament before the next review conference on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, due in 2010, he said. The 1970 pact aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

“The more reductions states make, the more confidence they will require that no one is cheating and secretly retaining a ‘marginal nuclear weapon’,” Browne said.

Senior US officials will brief the Geneva conference on Thursday on Washington’s “accelerating efforts” to advance nuclear non-proliferation, the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said in a statement.

“This includes a 50 per cent reduction in the US nuclear arsenal since 2001, dismantling greater numbers of nuclear weapons..., and our cooperation with over 100 nations in non-proliferation and threat-reduction work,” said agency administrator Thomas D’Agostino, who will be in Geneva.

There was no immediate comment from other official nuclear weapons states or from India, Israel and Pakistan which have remained outside the NPT and are regarded as nuclear capable.

Iran, which denies western suspicions of a covert programme to produce atomic bombs, is among the forum’s 65 member states.

Tehran is under UN Security Council sanctions for refusing to suspend uranium enrichment and show complete transparency about a nuclear it says is meant only to generate electricity. —Reuters