John Duncan

Nuclear Matters: What are the Think-Tanks thinking of?

It’s been a busy week for events on Nuclear Disarmament and Non Proliferation starting with Brian Eno and Rory Bremner’s “Visions for a New Century” on Monday, to the “Global Vision” summit in Paris on Tuesday through to the Munich Security Conference running into this weekend.

In all of these civil society has come together with politicians and officials to set out their ambition for the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in New York in 3 months time.
 
As I have commented in earlier blog entries, the NPT is a peculiar beast. While there is a cross party consensus in the United Kingdom that nuclear weapon proliferation represents one of the major security threats to our global society, we will not see politicians (unlike the recent Copenhagen summit) gathering in New York in May at the Review Conference to hammer out a deal. Success or failure will lie in the hands of the diplomats – a daunting prospect.

So the support of civil society and the pressure that has come from the meetings this week to “Do more, Go further” is very important in building the constituency we diplomats need to argue that the time has come to breakout from the “Decade of Deadlock” in taking forward this agenda.

In just under a month the United States will reveal the results of their own Nuclear Posture Review. In the meantime global civil society has been setting out the areas where they are looking for progress, most notably former ministers Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi of Australia and Japan’s report on “Eliminating Nuclear Threats”.

For those who would like further information the following links May be useful:

Towards A World Free of Nuclear Weapons

Gordon Corera (BBC) on Global Zero

Leading NGO BASIC website on Getting to Zero and the Brian Eno event

The FCO's own dedicated website on the Road to 2010

Posted at 19:38 07 February 2010 by John Duncan  |  Comments[2]