24 September 2009
U.N. Security Council Commits to Global Nuclear Disarmament
Washington — The U.N. Security Council has unanimously committed to work for a world free of nuclear weapons.
Meeting in a special session September 24, the 15-member Security Council adopted UNSC Resolution 1887 without objection. The resolution sets a framework to guide nations in halting the spread of nuclear weapons and reducing global nuclear dangers. The resolution was offered by the United States, and President Obama, acting as president of the council, called for its adoption.
“In the six-plus decades that this Security Council has been in existence, only four other meetings of this nature have been convened. I called for this one so that we may address at the highest level a fundamental threat to the security of all peoples and all nations: the spread and use of nuclear weapons,” Obama said.
Obama became the first U.S. president to preside over the Security Council in its history. He named abolishing nuclear weapons as one of his priorities in a speech in Prague in April. He met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on September 23 and they pledged to keep to a self-imposed deadline for a new agreement between the United States and Russia, which possess 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, to further reduce their nuclear arsenals.
“This very institution was founded at the dawn of the atomic age, in part because man’s capacity to kill had to be contained. And although we averted a nuclear nightmare during the Cold War, we now face proliferation of a scope and complexity that demands new strategies and new approaches,” Obama said in brief remarks following the council meeting.
Obama added that the next 12 months will be critical in determining whether the resolution and efforts by the United Nations to stop the spread and use of nuclear weapons are successful.
“The world must stand together. And we must demonstrate that international law is not an empty promise, and that treaties will be enforced,” Obama said.
The Security Council resolution supports:
• A commitment to work for a world without nuclear weapons, and further progress in nuclear arms reductions.
• A strengthened Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a treaty review conference in 2010 that achieves realistic goals in nuclear disarmament, nonproliferation and peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
• Greater security for nuclear weapons materials to prevent terrorist groups from obtaining bomb-making materials.
• Authority for the Security Council to take appropriate action if nuclear materials are acquired by terrorist groups.
• Encouraging efforts for the peaceful use of nuclear energy that also reduces proliferation risk.
• Blocking nations that spread nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials from access to the international financial system.
• Key nuclear agreements including the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and a follow-on agreement, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Fissile Cut-Off Treaty, the Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism, and the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials.
The sponsored resolution also called on countries that have not signed the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to do so.
“Today, the Security Council endorsed a global effort to lock down all vulnerable nuclear materials within four years,” Obama said. “The United States will host a summit next April to advance this goal and help all nations achieve it.”
Obama added that the resolution “builds on a consensus that all nations have the right to peaceful nuclear energy; that nations with nuclear weapons have the responsibility to move toward disarmament; and those without them have the responsibility to forsake them.”
Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, who attended the Security Council session with a host of other dignitaries, issued a statement following the council action that endorsed the measures taken.
“The summit in the U.N. Security Council brings much-needed global focus to the risks posed by the spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear know-how and nuclear material,” their statement said. “The four of us have come together in a nonpartisan effort, deeply committed to building support for a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately to end them as a threat to the world.”
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