Nuclear Treaties

The United States and Russia have agreed to a new nuclear arms treaty that will be signed April 8 in Prague, Czech Republic, President Obama announced Friday after speaking with his Russian counterpart. The treaty substantially cuts the nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia will deploy and will significantly reduce missiles and launchers, Obama said. It follows a 1991 treaty that expired in December and about which the United States and Russia have been negotiating. "In many ways, nuclear weapons represent both the darkest days of the Cold War, and the most troubling threats of our time," Obama said.

The Obama administration and the Kremlin agreed today to continue the provisions of their keystone nuclear arms control treaty while they try to negotiate a follow-on agreement. The two governments issued a joint statement saying that, because of their desire for stability, "we express our commitment, as a matter of principle, to continue to work together in the spirit of the START Treaty following its expiration." The governments also cited a "firm intention to ensure that a new treaty on strategic arms enters into force at the earliest possible date."

The 65-nation Conference on Disarmament broke a dozen years of deadlock and opened the way to negotiate a new nuclear arms control treaty. Diplomats welcomed the adoption of a "program of work" as a breakthrough for the conference, which has been stalemated since it wrote the nuclear test ban treaty in 1996. The program refers to nuclear disarmament in general, but it indicates a top candidate for a new treaty is one to ban production of fissile materials such as highly enriched uranium and plutonium.

An Iranian envoy said his government will not submit to extensive nuclear inspections while Israel stays outside the global treaty to curb the spread of atomic weapons. "The existing double standard shall not be tolerated anymore by non-nuclear-weapon states," Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh told a Geneva meeting of the 190 countries that have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Israel, which does not discuss whether it has atomic weapons, is one of the nations that did not sign.

IN THEIR THIRD PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE, in October 1960, John F. Kennedy went after Vice President Richard Nixon, blasting him as weak on national security for not stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. France had just tested its first nuclear device, joining the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain as the world's first nuclear powers. Kennedy warned "that 10, 15 or 20 nations will have a nuclear capacity -- including Red China -- by the end of the presidential office in 1964."

At a key U.N. disarmament conference Monday, the U.S. lashed out at Iran and North Korea for their purported pursuit of atomic weapons and demanded that Iran dismantle its uranium enrichment facilities. But Iran said that it had an "inalienable right" to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and that it might restart its once-secret nuclear energy program. The entrenched conflicts may set the conference up for failure, diplomats said.

Thousands of activists marched past the United Nations on Sunday, urging diplomats reviewing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to remember the horrors of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki six decades ago and not allow them to be repeated. Chanting "No War, No Nukes" and carrying signs saying "No More Hiroshima, No More Nagasaki," the marchers headed to Central Park, where they formed a human peace symbol. Organizers put the number of protesters at 40,000.

Democrats on Tuesday accused the Bush administration of risking a new arms race as the Senate endorsed a Pentagon plan to end a 10-year ban on research and development of a new generation of tactical nuclear bombs. The charge drew a sharp denial from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who asserted that the Pentagon only wants to study new weapons that could help the United States destroy caches of chemical and biological weapons or other targets deep underground.

Why are we dancing to North Korea's tune ("There's a Method to Pyongyang's Madness," Jan. 11)? We should adapt a modification of the mutually assured destruction policy of the Cold War (with its proven effectiveness) into an "assured destruction" policy toward North Korea (and Iraq), meaning that any use of weapons of mass destruction will immediately result in our offshore submarines launching total destruction on their capitals. No need for huge, expensive military buildups and no need to maintain bases in hostile or potentially hostile countries.