The United Nations conference to negotiate a legally binding nuclear weapons prohibition will begin its session next month in New York. The conference held its first organizational meeting last week, where it adopted a draft provisional agenda and elected Elayne Whyte Gomez of Costa Rica as conference president.
The U.N. General Assembly First Committee voted last October to begin negotiations on a treaty banning all nuclear weapons, an effort that was strongly opposed by the nations that are simultaneously the five permanent U.N. Security Council members and recognized nuclear-weapon states: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
A total of 123 countries voted for the resolution; 38 countries voted in opposition and 16 abstained. The United States, one of the countries that opposed the resolution, has long resisted this approach and has called instead for step-by-step reductions in nuclear stockpiles rather than an outright prohibition.
Nevertheless, the U.N. conference will hold its substantive session for negotiations from March 27 to 31 and June 15 to July 7. The conference will then submit a report on its progress to the General Assembly’s 72nd session in September. The U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs has also launched a new website for the ban treaty effort.
Laura Holgate, the previous U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Vienna, Austria, Office of the United Nations, has joined the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a non-resident senior fellow.
Holgate began her service in Vienna last year, returning to the United States in January upon the end of former President Barack Obama’s term. Her nomination had been blocked for months due to political disagreements over the Iran nuclear deal. She was eventually confirmed last May and arrived in July.
Holgate has now been tapped to lead a new initiative at the Belfer Center, an international security, diplomacy, and science policy think tank, that will examine the role of multilateral institutions – such as the IAEA – in reducing the threats posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and materials.
Holgate previously served in the Obama administration as special assistant to the president and senior director for weapons of mass destruction terrorism and threat reduction on the National Security Council. She worked with the Belfer Center in the early 1990s, contributing to its work on the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which had just launched to secure weapons of mass destruction and materials from the former Soviet Union. She later moved to the Pentagon to direct the Nunn-Lugar program.
Holgate will appear at ExchangeMonitor Publications and Forums’ annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit next week, where she will speak alongside other Obama administration officials and experts on the state of U.S.-Russian relations and international nuclear security and arms control efforts.
From the Wires:
From Lockheed Martin: The defense giant will relocate its Fleet Ballistic Missile Program, encompassing roughly 650 employees, from Sunnyvale, Calif., to other sites. Facilities in Colorado and Florida are being considered.
From The Hill: Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) suggests a nuclear weapon could be smuggled into the United States in a bale of marijuana. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) has made the same claim repeatedly, the Washington Post reported.
