Disarmament Diplomacy

Issue No. 58, June 2001

Editor's Introduction

With the CTBT the latest international treaty threatened by the Bush Administration, we call on governments, media and public voices to speak out in its defence. June's issue also carries two papers on the international legal status of nuclear weapons, in the wake of the July 1996 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice and growing grassroots protests. Prominent British anti-nuclear campaigner, Angie Zelter, sets out the case for 'people's disarmament' in the face of a state's refusal to renounce nuclear weapons. US lawyer and author Charles Moxley examines a recent ruling by the Scottish High Court, intended to overturn a lower court's acceptance of arguments by Zelter and others that Britain's deployment of the Trident nuclear system and the retention of potential first use in NATO's nuclear doctrine were unlawful.

There is universal revulsion at the idea of biological and toxin weapons ever being used, but international efforts to develop stronger verification and enforcement mechanisms to ensure the elimination of these weapons of potential mass destruction have run up against military, private and commercial interests in some key countries. Nicholas A. Sims, Senior Lecturer at the London School of Economics, considers thirty years of missed opportunities to enhance the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC), and sets out a number of options for strengthening the treaty's operation, even in the absence of a verification protocol.

Jenni Rissanen reports that in the few days before the Conference on Disarmament recessed in late June, three special coordinators were appointed to examine possible reform of its agenda, membership and working methods.

Documents and Sources features statements and comment on missile defence and nuclear arms control issues arising from President Bush's first trip to Europe, vivid testimony on US nuclear policy from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, key speeches from the international non-proliferation conference hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a detailed summary of the implementation of IAEA safeguards in 2000. News Review includes developments in missile defence, speculation and advice on the US nuclear review, Russian plans to import nuclear waste, an uneasy resumption of talks between the US and North Korea, debate over the future of US sanctions against India and Pakistan, and painful attempts to revitalise UN policy on Iraq.