Reaching Critical Will

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Conference on Disarmament

General Assembly First Committee

UN Disarmament Commission

Special Session on Disarmament

Unofficial Transcript
New Zealand
21 June 2006

Thank you very much Madame Chair. And can I reiterate the words of appreciation as expressed by other colleagues for the excellent work that you have done and also for the excellent work that the others in the P6 have done. You have clearly brought us very close, and the fact that no one has rejected the proposal—just said that they cannot accept the consensus at this time, have indicated that they need more time, and we certainly look very much forward to hearing from them once their Capitals have scrutinized the proposal further. It has obviously been around for a long time, Madame President, and the proposals that you have made to make the proposal more acceptable to some delegations are more recent. I am confident that colleagues in Capitals are treating this with the same urgency as we are here in the CD treat it. There is an obvious overhaul and an overwhelming desire on the part of the members of the CD to be able to move on and if we are not able to move on we will face some quite fundamental questions as to what we do because most of the delegations as member of the CD are not large delegations and the amount of resources you can apply to doing something, unless you are a large country, are finite. Certainly we are committed to the CD and we are willing to commit to the resources to the CD but have some difficulty in justifying in the CD if it is going through some sort of charade. But hopefully we are not going to be in that type of situation and we will hear back quite soon from those colleagues who have expressed difficulties—that we will hear back from them quite soon that they have managed to overcome those difficulties and have alternatively given more specific indications on solutions that may be found to those difficulties, provided of course that they are solutions that can be realistically considered as likely to solve the problem.

Just a couple of other brief comments- I agree completely with my colleague from Pakistan that there are security implications with regard to L.1 and in proceeding with FMCT. We regard this as a matter of considerable national security. We have a number of states that have nuclear weapons and that have stocks of nuclear material—some are increasing stocks of fissile material. We regard this as a complete anathema in terms of national security and in terms of global national security. Obviously when one is operating in a multilateral context one needs move beyond specific precise national concerns to look at the greater global good. And certainly in our perspective, moving forward on an FMCT is something we see as an issue of nuclear disarmament for the great global good.

It was interesting to note that our distinguished colleague from Iran expressed concerns that the package falls short in field of nuclear disarmament. But we, in this regard, see proceeding with FMCT as a matter that would promote nuclear disarmament. No one in this body has done more to promote nuclear disarmament than New Zealand. And so that is why we attach so much importance as we do to moving forward on an FMCT. We don’t see it in a vacuum, we see it as something that will let us to seriously engage in nuclear disarmament and certainly from our perspective it would involve verification of existing stocks. It will involve a number of elements that we know will be extremely controversial. But until we actually get down to negotiate those issues, we will not be able to move forward on this.

As for the existing asymmetry, we often hear comments in the CD about regional asymmetries and other asymmetries. There is one fundamental asymmetry and this is between those states who hold nukes and those of use who have given up that right. That is the fundamental asymmetry that we need to move forward on and that is the fundamental asymmetry that negotiation an FMCT would allow us to move forward on.

So we very much hope that the three states that have raised issues or raised concerns—I wouldn’t say issues because I think it was more in the nature of concerns—will enable us to move forward with our program of work. We request the future Presidency to also pursue this matter, it would be an unfortunate matter once you leave the chair, Madame President, given all of your work, and I know that our Swiss colleague will also give it his very best. But I think that we need to keep this issue very much alive. I think it would be helpful at this stage to have an indication from delegates who have indicated that they cannot accept the consensus to get an indication from them as to when they might think they might be able to respond on this so that we might have a sense as to when we can move forward.

What I think would be very damaging is to allow the existing vacuum—we have no consensus but we don’t precisely know what the issues are, we don’t precisely know what would solve the consensus, we do not know how long it will take Capitals to provide an answer—and that I think would be extremely damaging to the CD because it would commit us to some sort of vacuum in no-man’s land where we simply drift along and we have been drifting along for too long.

Certainly from the comments that have been made we hope that the concerns that those delegations have are a procedural nature and then we can resolve them. If, on the other hand, what we are to hear when colleagues refer to national security is an indication that they believe that negotiating an FMCT and moving forward on nuclear disarmament would be damaging to their national security in terms of their wish to hold or develop or increase holding of fissile materials then we have a very different situation. I think it would be helpful to have clarification and I hope that colleagues may be in a position to give that.

Thank you very much Madame President.