John Duncan

ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT: TIME TO CLONE THE AMBASSADOR

This morning The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov addressed the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva where he said that "The right moment has come today, for the first time after the end of the Cold War, for making real progress in resuming the global disarmament process on a broad agenda,"

Unfortunately I am still stuck in New York having wrapped up the weeks discussion on the Arms Trade Treaty last night. This rather shows that while achieving agreement on new treaties in the UN has all too often been blocked, the last 3 years have nonetheless seen a real upsurge in diplomatic activity. The addition last year of the Oslo Treaty negotiations, took me around the world twice, but I still have not mastered being in two places at once.

Foreign Minister Lavrov’s voice urging greater effort is a welcome addition to that of other senior politicians who want to see progress and soon.

It is one of the strange things about multilateral arms control and disarmament that we never have ministerial meetings. NATO, the EU and other institutions regularly hold meetings where politicians “cut the final deal”. In our area of work governments are always represented by their officials despite the fact that the issues we deal with, eg Nuclear Weapons and the Arms Trade have potentially huge economic, military and social consequences.

I often wonder whether politicians would actually get bogged down in the details so beloved of  multilateral diplomats.

Posted at 15:48 07 March 2009 by John Duncan  |  Comments[0]