FEATURE-NPT:Dealing with a nuclear sword of Damocles

Louis Charbonnea, Reuters:

In 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy warned that the human race could exterminate itself at any moment.

"Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us," Kennedy told the United Nations General Assembly.

That General Assembly adopted an Irish draft resolution which resulted in the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the global pact to halt the spread of atomic weapons which required the five nuclear powers to take steps to disarm.

The NPT came into force in 1970, but the sword still hangs. Nine countries possess some 30,000 atomic weapons -- enough to destroy the planet many times over -- and dozens more could build a bomb if they wanted to.

With this in mind, the 189 states which signed the NPT meet in New York throughout this month to review its strengths and loopholes. READ MORE

Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian who heads the Vienna-based agency that polices compliance with the NPT, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), lists three reasons why the treaty is in urgent need of review.

"They are the emergence of a nuclear black market, the determined efforts by more countries to acquire technology to produce the fissile material useable in nuclear weapons and the clear desire of terrorists to acquire weapons of mass destruction," ElBaradei wrote on the IAEA Web site.

Despite the increasing threat of a nuclear holocaust, Gary Samore, a security expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said NPT signatories were now too divided to agree on anything that would improve the situation.

Some want the conference to pass a resolution calling for universal acceptance of a tougher regime of IAEA inspections, created after the 1991 discovery of Saddam Hussein's covert atom bomb programme in Iraq. But Samore said this was unlikely.

"The problem is there's not an international consensus," he said. "I predict sound and fury signifying nothing. The NPT review conference is not going to produce a positive result."

NPT UNDER PRESSURE

The situation does not look good for the NPT. Four presumed nuclear power states -- India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea -- are outside the pact.

The NPT's five nuclear powers -- the United States, Russia, France, Britain and China -- have yet to scrap their arsenals, and Washington and Moscow are exploring new weapons. This, experts say, encourages other countries to go for the bomb.

Making matters worse, the IAEA is still trying to stamp out a global black market linked to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the disgraced engineer who built Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme. Khan supplied Libya, Iran and possibly North Korea with centrifuge technology used to make atomic fuel for power plants or bombs.

ElBaradei has described this network as a virtual "supermarket" for states interested in getting the bomb.

Khan is under house arrest and much of his network has been dismantled. But U.N. diplomats say Pakistan is still using illicit channels to upgrade its own nuclear arms programme.

Pakistan denies this, saying its equipment is all home made.

Some non-U.S. diplomats accuse Washington of turning a blind eye to Islamabad, which they say allowed to Khan to operate.

While Khan may no longer be running it, Joe Cirincione of the U.S. think-tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the nuclear black market was still active.

"The network hasn't been shut down," he said. "It's just gotten quieter. Perhaps it's gone a little deeper underground."

NORTH KOREA: THE BIGGEST PROLIFERATION THREAT

ElBaradei says nuclear-armed North Korea is the greatest proliferation threat facing the world. The reclusive Stalinist state recently suspended participation in the six-party talks aimed at persuading it to abandon its atomic arsenal in exchange for economic aid and security guarantees.

"This has been a pending issue for 12 years, and frankly it is getting worse," ElBaradei said.

Two years ago, North Korea became the first country to withdraw from the NPT. Analysts and U.N. experts say that if another country were to do the same, the treaty might collapse.

The other headache for the IAEA is Iran. After years of inspections, it has found no hard evidence that Iran's atomic programme is aimed at making bombs, as Washington asserts.

But some IAEA officials say privately they doubt Iran's programme was always intended to be peaceful, as Iran says.

To this end, the European Union has offered Iran economic and political incentives to give up its uranium enrichment programme, but Iran refuses to renounce what it says is the sovereign right of every NPT signatory to produce atomic fuel.