Atom treaty in crisis as members meet: UN chief

Vienna, Apr 30: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was suffering a crisis of confidence as member states met to mull how to prevent the pact from falling apart.

Two years after the last NPT Review Conference ended in deadlock after wrangling over the agenda, 188 nations began an NPT Preparatory Committee, running until May 11, to help pave the way to the next full conference in 2010.

The NPT binds members without nuclear bombs not to acquire them via diversions of peaceful nuclear energy know-how.

It also commits the original five nuclear weapons powers from the post-World War Two era to phase out their arsenals and guarantees the right of all members to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

But North Korea's nuclear test in 2006 after bolting the NPT and Iran's bid to enrich uranium in defiance of U.N. resolutions demanding that it stop due to fears of a covert quest for bombs have put the treaty under unprecedented strain.

The NPT is also faltering from a perception among nuclear ''have nots'' that nuclear ''haves'' have restricted access to atomic energy for development and stalled on disarmament obligations.

Ban, in a message to the Vienna meeting read out by an aide, said there was a ''crisis of confidence'' in the 37-year-old NPT.

LITANY OF TREATY PROBLEMS

''Evidence of such a crisis is widespread,'' he said, citing slow disarmament, non-compliance with NPT safeguards by some states and the failure of key nuclear powers to ratify a 10-year-old nuclear test ban treaty.

''Ongoing tests of nuclear-capable missiles, possible discrimination in peaceful nuclear cooperation and the failure to implement the proposal to establish a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East have also raised serious concerns,'' said Ban.

He urged national delegations at the NPT meeting to adopt ''a non-confrontational approach'' and make constructive proposals.

The NPT ''PrepCom'', the first of three annual sessions before the next review conference, will make no decisions on substance but will relaunch debate about how to shore up the treaty.

One idea, backed by UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei, is to create a multilateral nuclear fuel bank to assure supply to developing nations so they would not need to master production technology applicable for bomb-making.

But politically-charged differences over priorities remain as wide as at the 2005 conference, which failed to yield a consensus statement about how to tackle challenges to the NPT.

Industrialised, nuclear powers were expected to stress the need for tougher controls on the spread of enrichment know-how.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of developing nations will again push developed counterparts to honour disarmament goals, eclipsed by a US-led ''war on terror'' and seek a nuclear arms-free zone in the Middle East.

NAM sees discrimination in Western-engineered UN sanctions on Iran meant to make it halt nuclear work Tehran insists is for peaceful energy, while Israel, which never joined the NPT, faces no pressure to dismantle an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

REUTERS

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