Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
4/24/2015
The 2015 Review Conference (RevCon) for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty starts on Monday at UN Headquarters in New York, and treaty advocates expect disarmament and a WMD-free zone in the Middle East to dominate discussions this year. “On nuclear disarmament, I think there’s a lot of expectation that there’ll be more forward-looking action requested by the Review Conference, and there we have the biggest disagreements, because we already have an Action Plan from 2010, but there are divergent views among state bodies about what’s the appropriate pace of implementation, especially the disarmament part of it,” Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova, Director of the International Organizations & Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told NS&D Monitor during a phone interview this week. “So the nuclear weapons states, they believe that they’re going at an OK pace—maybe they could go faster, they say, but by and large, they see the Action Plan as sort of a long-term roadmap, whereas a lot of the non-nuclear-weapon states think that the pace is unacceptably slow, so what they might want the conference to do and what I would like to see them do is request, maybe, specific deadlines attached to specific action items or introduce more specific benchmarks, so that it is less the matter of subjective interpretation every time.” RevCon attendees also could address bringing North Korea back into compliance with the NPT, Mukhatzhanova said. The Joint Statement of Sept. 19, 2005 at the end of the fourth round of the Six-Party Talks called for North Korea to return to the NPT, after the country withdrew in 2003.
Mukhatzhanova said ongoing nuclear modernization programs call into question countries’ commitment to long-term disarmament, outlined in Article 6 of the NPT. The U.S. and Russia are both undertaking full-scale modernization programs of their nuclear forces. She said: “There’s been a disappointment, I think, over the past five years, that [disarmament] progress hasn’t been as fast as expected, so going into this Review Conference, I think spirits and expectations are different than 2010.”
