The top foreign officials from roughly 40 nations yesterday called on nine states to take the necessary action to allow the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to enter into force (see GSN, Sept. 3).
The pact that would create a global prohibition against nuclear test blasts cannot enter into force without being ratified by 44 nations that operated nuclear programs at the time they helped to establish the treaty in 1996. The remaining holdouts are China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and the United States.
The foreign ministers who met yesterday at the United Nations in New York issued a statement urging the nine nations to pursue ratification and, in the meantime, to maintain their voluntary suspension of nuclear testing.
They argued that the stay in testing -- last broken by North Korea in 2006 -- "does not have the same permanent and legally binding effect as the entry into force of the treaty" (Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization release I, Sept. 24).
Nations conducted more than 2,000 atomic test blasts between 1945 and 1996, when the United Nations approved the treaty, the Associated Press reported. An active treaty would strengthen nonproliferation and disarmament and act as a check on development of new nuclear weapons, according to the ministers' statement. A verification system is being developed to ensure the treaty would not be violated.
"The worst risk that we face is a nonstate actor with access to nuclear technology ... proliferating nuclear technology," said Costa Rican Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Stagno Ugarte.
Should Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) become the next U.S. president, the United States is likely to sign on to the treaty, said former Defense Secretary William Perry.
"If [Obama] is elected I hope and expect that he will provide strong support for the project," said Perry, an adviser to Obama (Slobodan Lekic, Associated Press/GMA News, Sept. 24).
Burundi yesterday became the 145th nation to ratify the treaty (Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization release II, Sept. 25).