By IRNA,
London : The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) Tuesday called for support to press the UK government to start talks to get rid of the country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons as required by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
CND vice-president Bruce Kent welcomed the new initiative led by former statesmen for the world nuclear powers to reduce their arsenals and overhaul the NPT but warned it was not enough.
The belief by four former British foreign and defence ministers that a world free of nuclear weapons is “achievable” is more than welcome, Kent said.
“However, to express this as an ‘ultimate aspiration’ is to consign it to an unacceptably distant future,” he said in a letter to the Times newspaper.
In a joint article on Monday, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Lord Owen, Lord Hurd and Lord Robertson warned that the world is entering a dangerous new phase and said the only way to deal with the danger is to work multilaterally towards complete nuclear disarmament.
But Kent said that the International Court of Justice had already ruled in 1996 that “there is an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.”
“Moreover in 2007 a 170-page draft convention, covering all the contentious issues that would face negotiators, was published by international groupings of lawyers, engineers, scientists and physicians and is now lodged with the UN,” he said.
The vice president of Europe’s biggest single-issue peace organization pointed out that despite this, Britain still opposes the call for the start of such negotiations and called on the statesmen to join a broadly based appeal to reverse the position.
The joint article was seen as a transatlantic equivalent of the ground-breaking Wall Street Journal initiative by American statesmen George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn last year to start serious debate in the US on nuclear disarmament.
According to the British-American Security Information Council further announcements and initiatives are expected from the UK government and parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee in the next weeks and months that will build on the momentum behind disarmament.