Four weeks of meetings at the United Nations to review the Non-Proliferation Treaty are expected to end today in failure. Arms control and disarmament groups are blaming the United States and other nuclear weapons states. The following policy analysts are available for interviews:

Amb. THOMAS GRAHAM, Jr.
Graham is a member of the Global Security Institute’s Bipartisan Security Group and was involved in negotiations for every major international arms control and non-proliferation agreement of the past 30 years. He said today: “Nuclear weapons probably would have spread all over the world were it not for the Non-Proliferation Treaty. If that had happened, it would have created a nightmare security situation, where virtually every conflict would have had the risk of going nuclear, and sub-national terrorist groups would likely have acquired nuclear weapons. The NPT is based on a central bargain: 183 non-nuclear countries would not acquire nuclear weapons and in exchange the nuclear powers were to adhere to a series of treaties and would disarm with the ultimate goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. The U.S. has not delivered on the commitments it made in 1995, which were the price for making the NPT permanent. There have been failures in the past, but this failure appears to be at this stage the most acute failure in the history of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference process.”
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ALICE SLATER
Slater is the director of the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment and a coordinator of the AbolitionNow! campaign, a coalition of 2,000 groups from 90 countries. She said today: “The U.S. is fighting over acknowledgement of a deal they made 10 years ago — when, in exchange for countries agreeing to extend the NPT indefinitely, the U.S. [said it] would, among other things, support a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But this administration refuses even to submit the CTBT to the Senate for an up-or-down vote on ratification. In the meantime, it is doing its own proliferating by maintaining a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert and researching new, smaller, and more usable nuclear weapons.”
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SUSI SNYDER
Secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Snyder said: “It is convenient to blame Iran and Egypt and others for the failure of the NPT Review Conference. But that begs the question. Egypt, for example, has been very vocal about the importance of acknowledging past agreements and bringing Israel into the Treaty. And Iran has consistently called for a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East. Both of these actions would strengthen the non-proliferation regime. When the U.S. refuses to even discuss these issues, then it is the one sabotaging the Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167