Diplomats hail new U.S. readiness to negotiate ‘verifiable’ nuke treaty

GENEVA (AP) — A single word from Barack Obama has put new life into the stale disarmament talks in Geneva, where diplomats are hailing a “remarkable shift” by the Americans in favor of a treaty clamping down on production of the stuff of nuclear bombs.

Obama’s word — “verifiable” — has set the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament on a possible course toward negotiating a treaty after years of deadlock, most recently because the Bush administration argued that a pact couldn’t be verified by inspections and monitoring.

In his speech April 5 in the Czech Republic, U.S. President Obama detailed a packed agenda of goals in nuclear arms control, including slashing U.S. and Russian doomsday arsenals, adopting the treaty banning all nuclear tests, and negotiating a “new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons.”

That call in Prague’s Castle Square echoed here in the marble-clad halls of the Palais des Nations, where such a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) has been on the to-do list of the paralyzed disarmament conference since the 1990s, as one tool to stop the spread of atomic arms. Today’s fear of nuclear terrorism only heightens such concerns.

“The U.S. readiness to negotiate an internationally verifiable FMCT can be considered a turning point,” pronounced Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, whose Geneva diplomats coordinate the talks on a fissile-material treaty.

At the moment, only India and Pakistan — and possibly Israel and North Korea — are producing plutonium or highly enriched uranium for atomic weapons. Four “traditional” nuclear powers recognized under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — the United States, Russia, Britain and France — have declared moratoriums on production. The fifth, China, indicates unofficially it has stopped, too.

The world has a huge surplus of the exotic, man-made heavy metals known as fissile materials, whose chain-reacting atoms have been the core of nuclear bombs since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When mere pounds can make a bomb, as much as 2,500 metric tons of the stuff — up to 2,000 tons of highly enriched uranium and 500 tons of plutonium — sit in deployed or disused warheads and in more surprising places worldwide, says the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a nongovernmental network of nuclear experts.

Weapons-grade uranium powers Russian icebreakers and U.S. and other missile submarines. Some 14,000 plutonium weapon cores sit in storage outside Amarillo, Texas. Hundreds of tons of bomb-grade uranium are stashed elsewhere in the U.S. and Russia awaiting “blenddown” to less lethal grades. More stuff sits in university research reactors worldwide. Japan’s nuclear power establishment holds almost nine tons of plutonium separated from spent fuel.

Some material is under international oversight, but most is not.