At UN, Pakistan slams nuclear doublespeak

new york — Pakistan has assailed the double standards adopted by some states, which preach nuclear disarmament but fail to take necessary steps themselves.

Speaking in a session of the United Nations Disarmament Commission, a subsidiary of the General Assembly, Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi said that a handful of nuclear weapon states advocate abstinence for others but are unwilling to give up their large inventories of nuclear weapons or their modernisation.

“This doublespeak has only aggravated the sense of insecurity among other states,” she told the 35-member commission.

“instead of fulfilling their legal disarmament obligations, these states have almost exclusively pursued non-proliferation with messi- anic zeal,” the Pakistani envoy said. “This gap between legality and reality has eroded the global faith in the mutually reinforcing nature of these processes”.

With obviously US-india nuclear pacts in mind, Ambassador Lodhi said that some nuclear weapon states have also concluded discriminatory nuclear cooperation agreements and helped grant waivers in an unfortunate departure from long held non-proliferation principles.

She said progress towards nuclear disarmament is being delayed and hindered by some who wish to divert the Conference on Disarmament’s focus to partial non-proliferation measures such as a Fissile Materials Cut Off Treaty (FMCT).

Reiterating Pakistan’s position on the FMCT, she said a treaty that is

Departure from non-proliferation principles

discriminatory in nature and does not address the existing stockpiles of fissile material would impinge on the security of some states while being cost free for those with the largest amounts of fissile stocks.

She pointed out that claims by some that an FMCT would put a quantitative cap on nuclear weap- in a departure from long held non-proliferation principles. > Claims by some that an FMCT would put a quantitative cap on nuclear weapons were false. > The doublespeak has only aggravated the sense of insecurity among other states. ons were false. The reasons, she said, were self-evident; because the vast stockpiles of fissile material, coupled with the continued unsafeguarded production for civilian and non-explosive military purposes, provide a ready reserve of fissile material that could be weaponised at will. —