GENEVA—A coalition of seven countries hopes to breathe new life into efforts to save the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, blocked for years by feuding between nuclear "haves" and "have nots", their leader said on Friday.
Mexico, Norway, Ireland, Brazil, Sweden, South Africa and New Zealand are among more than 180 nations meeting in Geneva until May 9 for talks on how to save the ailing atom control pact. They hope to move the process forward by trying to defuse mistrust and resentment between rich and poor states.
"There is a certain lifelessness (plaguing) the NPT review process," said Don MacKay, New Zealand's Geneva ambassador, who heads the so-called New Agenda Coalition.
"NAC is trying to build bridges between the sides ... but we need to get dialogue going beyond predictable prepared statements and finger-pointing," he told Reuters in an interview.
Referring to North Korea, Iran and Syria, big nuclear arms powers say alleged covert attempts to obtain and spread the means to make atom bombs mean the review's foremost task is to toughen curbs on transfers of sensitive nuclear technology.
But developing nations say this would erode their right under the NPT to the peaceful fruits of nuclear energy, and gloss over nuclear weapons powers' alleged failure to heed treaty commitments to do away with their doomsday arsenals.
None of the seven NAC countries has nuclear arms, although Brazil, Sweden and South Africa use civilian nuclear energy.
All champion disarmament, Brazil and South Africa having voluntarily scrapped efforts to enrich uranium, a process that can yield electricity or bombs.
Tensions
This week's NPT Preparatory Committee (Prepcom) meeting aims to flesh out ideas for repairing the treaty so they can be finalised at a follow-up meeting next year and submitted to a decision-making Review Conference in 2010.
But point-scoring over NPT woes that pits the United States and some Western allies against Iran and Syria—who deny secret pursuits of atom bombs—and other developing nations persists. North Korea is absent from the meeting, having left the NPT in 2003.
Unlike the 2007 Prepcom, which was crippled by wrangling over the agenda, this year's session has begun looking at substantive remedies for the treaty after prodding from the NAC.
At the U.N. General Assembly last fall, NAC proposed nuclear arms states set up a verification system to raise trust in their recent announcements of steep cuts in arsenals.
"The non-nuclear world gets drip-fed bits of information from the weapons powers. If this were institutionalised (by binding multilateral accord) rather than voluntary, they would get credit they say they don't get now," said MacKay.
The NAC has also suggested ending the heightened state of alert of thousands of nuclear weapons dating from the Cold War era of East-West stalemate that ended almost a generation ago.
He said proliferation temptations were driven in part by a broad perception that nuclear powers aim to keep at least some of their firepower forever as a symbol of might and authority.
NAC is calling for nuclear powers to remove from security doctrines any possibility of using their firepower against perceived non-nuclear threats, to discourage others from seeking atom bombs. It also wants talks on a treaty to end production of fissile materials, and the implementation of a nuclear test ban treaty held up because major powers like the United States and China have failed to ratify it.
MacKay welcomed a new British idea on verifying disarmament steps and a French proposal to shut down test sites worldwide.
"Delegations are ready to deal yet (on solutions)," he said. "But I think they will go away from this meeting thinking there are actually substantive proposals that can actually help and where we can make progress in 2010."
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