At April’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference (RevCon) in New York, the U.S. will focus on assessing and updating the NPT action plan developed in 2010, and on better explaining its position on disarmament to states not aligned with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, according to Tom Countryman, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation. “We need now at next month’s conference to take stock of the action plan and update it,” he said during a March 6 speech at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. The State Department posted Countyman’s remarks yesterday. “We developed a series of working papers on how to update the action plan which we are now circulating in diplomatic channels. We want to reinforce all the parts that are relevant, which is most of it, and identify what can be advanced as a result of next month’s Review Conference. And of course we are actively studying all the papers produced by friends around the world because they contain valuable ideas on how to advance the goals of disarmament and nonproliferation.”
Countryman also called the 2010 RevCon agreement to develop a consensus-based action plan a “breakthrough,” and emphasized the U.S. would continue to promote the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol, a legal document enabling the IAEA to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material and to provide assurances about the absence of a nation’s undeclared nuclear materials and activities. Countryman cited the need to enforce violations and abuse of NPT Article 10. “We need to discuss how to hold accountable violators of the their own obligations and we also want to develop a consensus about how to address states that may abuse Article 10 of the treaty which gives states the right to withdraw from the NPT,” he said. “The treaty is not perfect, it is not immune to challenge, but it is irreplaceable and could not be replicated if we allow it to fall apart.”
