Disarmament

The World Inter-Parliamentary Union, a 103-nation group, will hold a symposium on conventional weapons disarmament May 28-31 in Mexico City.

Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams accused the British government of having a "fixation about IRA weapons, even though these weapons are silent," that could unravel much of Northern Ireland's 3-year-old peace accord. After negotiations Thursday, Britain indicated that it is willing to give ground on Sinn Fein's demands--particularly on further troop withdrawals and base closures--but only if the Irish Republican Army finally begins disarming.

As U.N. inspectors play hide-and-seek with the weapons stockpiles Iraq says it doesn't have, consider this: Russia has about 30,000 nuclear weapons, 40,000 metric tons of declared chemical weapons and 40 research institutes dedicated to biological weapons development. Over the last decade, the United States has been working with Russia under a program established in 1991 by Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and then-Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) to help dismantle this fearsome arsenal.

The definition of "overkill" is the ability of one nation's nuclear weapons to eradicate another country's population many times over. Russia and the United States meet that definition in spades. There is no reason for both of them to move so slowly to reduce their stockpiles of redundant nuclear weapons. This month the Pentagon announced it will reduce the number of operational nuclear warheads from the current 6,000 to 3,800 over the next five years.

Despite shortcomings in Russian cooperation on arms control, U.S. funding for the destruction of Soviet-era weaponry should proceed unimpeded, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said here Friday. "Our objective, and the Russian objective at the highest level, is to destroy weapons of mass destruction," Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) told a news conference. "It is not useful to set up conditions that there must be 100% compliance before we do anything."

Arthur Hobson Dean, a New York lawyer who served as the chief U.S. negotiator at the Geneva disarmament conference in the early 1960s, died of pneumonia Monday. He was 89. Dean, who lived in Oyster Bay, served President John F. Kennedy for nearly two years at the arduous Geneva sessions on a proposed pact to end atomic testing and at meetings on general disarmament proposals.

Ivory Coast's rebel and army chiefs agreed that fighters would start laying down their weapons June 27, a boost for efforts to end a civil war that started in 2002. A statement signed by both sides after talks in the capital, Yamoussoukro, said disarmament and demobilization operations would run from June 27 to Aug. 10. Army chief Philippe Mangou told reporters after the agreement that he was "satisfied" and "hopeful for the future."

Max L. Friedersdorf, U.S. consul general in Bermuda and a veteran of three Republican administrations, has been named U.S. representative to the Geneva conference on disarmament, the White House said Saturday. Friedersdorf, a 55-year old former newspaperman and former executive of Pepsico Inc., was named to replace Donald S. Lowitz. Friedersdorf served for two years as President Reagan's assistant for legislative affairs and legislative strategy coordinator.

The Irish Republican Army announced Wednesday that it had resumed direct contact with an independent disarmament commission after a break of more than a year. "Decommissioning" of weapons is a central issue of Northern Ireland's 1998 Good Friday peace accord, which envisioned that the IRA would gradually disarm in cooperation with the panel.

The senior Catholic in Northern Ireland's power-sharing Cabinet on Friday implored the Irish Republican Army to begin disarming or risk undoing the fledgling administration. Seamus Mallon, deputy first minister in the Protestant-Roman Catholic administration that took power last month under terms of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord, warned that an imminent report by a disarmament commission could shatter the trust that enabled the formation of a government.