NYT LETTERS

Re: Op-Ed: India’s Role in the Nuclear Age

July 12, 2014   ·   0 Comments

Above: Opening Session of the Preperatory Committee for the 2010 Review Conference of the State Parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. (NTP Prepcom), 2008 in Geneva.

From: Alice Slater

To: Editor
[email protected]
New York Times
July 6, 2014

You misstate the legal obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of the five states who had nuclear arsenals at the time the NPT became law in 1970.

Asserting that the NPT commits all states, except the US, Russia, China, France and the UK, to forego the acquisition of nuclear weapons, fails to acknowledge that the NPT commits those nuclear-armed states “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”

The International Court of Justice ruled unanimously in 1996 that those states are legally bound to “conclude negotiations on nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

Nearly 45 years since the five nuclear-armed states agreed to eliminate their nuclear weapons, there are still 17,000 nuclear bombs on the planet, while new weapons and delivery systems- airplanes, submarine, and missiles- are being modernized, with two new bomb factories coming to Oak Ridge and Kansas City.

The US is planning to spend a trillion dollars over the next 30 years on its nuclear program. The hypocrisy of providing India with nuclear technology, in violation of the NPT’s Faustian bargain for an “inalienable right” to nuclear power only to NPT members to encourage their promises to forego nuclear weapons, is matched only by the flagrant disregard by the five nuclear-armed NPT states for their promise to eliminate their nuclear arsenals nearly half a century ago.

Alice Slater
New York, NY

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