In a message that was fundamentally preordained, the Trump administration on Thursday officially made clear that it opposes a treaty for a global ban on nuclear weapons, which will be debated next week at the United Nations.
“We recently met with Ambassadors about the upcoming conference to establish a treaty banning nuclear weapons,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said in a statement posted on her Twitter feed. “We would all love to see the day when nuclear weapons are no longer needed; however, to ban all nuclear weapons now would make us and our allies more vulnerable, and would strengthen bad actors like Iran and North Korea who would not abide by it.”
The statement was accompanied by four photographs of Haley meeting with a number of diplomats, but a clear list of the participants was not immediately available. The U.S. Mission to the United Nations had not responded to questions by deadline Friday for NS&D Monitor.
Appearing Tuesday at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, National Security Council WMD and counterproliferation chief Christopher Ford said such a prohibition would make the world more dangerous by undermining U.S. extended deterrence protections for Europe and the Asia-Pacific.
Last October, 123 member nations of the U.N. First Committee voted for an Austrian-led draft resolution calling for the United Nations to convene a conference for negotiation of a legally binding accord prohibiting nuclear weapons. Four of the five recognized nuclear powers under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty – the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, and France – joined 34 other nations in opposing the resolution. Fifth nuclear power China abstained but just days ago said it would not participate in the negotiations.
The conference is scheduled for March 27 to 31 and June 15 to July 7, under the presidency of Elayne Whyte Gómez, Costa Rica’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Advocates say the treaty is necessary to ensure nuclear weapons are never used and to put a cap on stockpile buildups that reduce opportunities for disarmament over the long run. Critics say it would just leave the world vulnerable to rogue outliers such as North Korea, which has been regularly testing its ballistic missile capabilities and shows signs of being ready to conduct its sixth nuclear test detonation in a matter of days.
The administration of President Barack Obama, who spoke of one day achieving a world without nuclear weapons, nonetheless opposed the possibility of such a ban. Before the vote in October, U.S. Special Representative to the Conference on Disarmament Robert Wood said the treaty would be impractical, “polarizing,” and challenging to verify. The administration instead promoted a multistep disarmament process that could include a fissile material cutoff treaty or further U.S.-Russian nuclear arsenal reductions.
“[T]his is one area of bipartisan agreement: there is little U.S. interest in seeing the ban treaty negotiations advance,” Miles Pomper, senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said by email Friday.
It’s an open question of whether President Donald Trump would support even the moderate steps suggested by his predecessor. Trump has made repeated statements during his campaign and presidency emphasizing the importance of U.S. nuclear might and has appeared skeptical of arms control.
In a January telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump reportedly called the New START accord a bad deal for the United States. The treaty requires Russia and the United States by next February to deploy no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads on 700 long-range delivery systems.
In February, Trump said the U.S. nuclear arsenal must be “top of the pack.”
The administration is preparing a new Nuclear Posture Review that will set U.S. nuclear policy for up to a decade. Ford said one question to be addressed in the review is the value of ever going to zero nuclear weapons.
The United States is also advancing a decades-long modernization of all three legs of its nuclear triad, which has been projected to cost $1 trillion over three decades.
