Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty

The Clinton Administration, trying to bolster its campaign to prevent the spread of nuclear arms, hopes to persuade the four other nuclear powers to end production of a key weapons component. A senior Administration official said that Russia, Britain and France have agreed to join the United States in announcing that they will no longer produce weapons-grade plutonium and uranium.

The State Department rejected Iran's latest proposal for international talks Thursday in the latest sign of trouble for the Obama administration's top-priority effort to engage Tehran in nuclear negotiations. A five-page Iranian proposal distributed to foreign diplomats Wednesday "was not really responsive to our greatest concern , which is obviously Iran's nuclear program," said P.J. Crowley, the senior State Department spokesman. At the same time, Crowley said, "We remain willing to engage Iran."

Eight Arab states took a united stand Monday against international tolerance of Israel's refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Egypt, Syria and six conservative Gulf states, meeting in Cairo at foreign ministers' level, said exempting Israel from nuclear inspections is incompatible with Middle East peace. It is the first time so many Arab states, at such a level, have taken a common position in the negotiations leading up to a big non-proliferation conference in Geneva in April.

With all five of the world's acknowledged nuclear powers offering fresh security assurances to the rest of the world, a senior U.S. official said Thursday that the outlook "is increasingly favorable" for permanent renewal of the 25-year-old treaty credited with curbing the spread of nuclear arms.

Haunted by the specter of nuclear-armed suicide bombers capable of reducing whole cities to rubble, representatives of more than 170 nations will meet at the United Nations starting today to renew a 25-year-old treaty that so far has kept atomic bombs out of the hands of rogue governments and terrorists.

Vice President Al Gore warned bluntly Wednesday that failure to make permanent a 25-year-old treaty banning the spread of nuclear weapons could trigger regional arms races that could be even more dangerous than the atomic standoff of the Cold War.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, after months of threatening to block U.S. efforts to permanently extend the international pact regulating nuclear weapons, has pledged not to withdraw from the treaty even if Israel refuses to sign. Coming before talks with President Clinton today, Mubarak's comments in an interview with The Times defused the most troublesome dispute between the United States and Egypt since before the Camp David accords of 1978.

Almost five years ago, Iran unilaterally stopped its uranium enrichment program. The West described it as a diplomatic breakthrough; Tehran called it a temporary suspension. Regardless, the world breathed a sigh of relief. The respite didn't last. A resentful Iran restarted its sensitive processing and enrichment program in 2005, shortly after the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, arguing that the West had insulted the country. In an interview in his finely decorated quarters in Vienna this month, Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, described a "confidence deficit" on both sides.

Iran's hard-line parliament Sunday threatened to pass legislation that would force the government to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The move, which would put Iran in company with North Korea, came as Washington and its allies pressed for a U.N. Security Council vote to outlaw Tehran's uranium enrichment program.

When North Korea announced its nuclear test last week, it was just the latest sign that the effort to contain the spread of atomic weapons was breaking down: Several countries are on the verge of beginning uranium enrichment programs, and others have already started such efforts, policymakers and experts say. Brazil recently inaugurated an industrial-scale uranium enrichment plant, and Argentina and South Africa are interested in similar projects.