Pakistan and India to attend nuclear disarmament moot

India and Pakistan will attend an international nuclear disarmament conference for the first time in Sydney next month, Australia’s government said on Friday.

The 15-member International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament will meet from October 19-21 to ‘shape a global consensus’ on improving the 28-year-old Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) before it is reviewed in 2010, the government said in a statement.

“The commission’s two-year mandate is to re-invigorate the global debate on the need to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons and for nuclear disarmament,” Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was quoted as saying. Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans will co-chair the event with Yoriko Kawaguchi, an ex-foreign minister in Japan, the statement said.

Senior Indian diplomat Brajesh Mishra and Pakistan’s ex-army chief Jehangir Karamat will be among the delegates. Evans has recently said that all nuclear powers – including those who have refused to join the NPT such as India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – must be included in the new process if the world is to ever achieve disarmament. Commissioners from five nuclear powers – United States, China, Russia, Britain and France – will attend, as well as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Germany, Norway, South Africa and Mexico, the statement said.

Restraint: Ron Huisken, a nuclear proliferation expert from the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, said the inclusion of India and Pakistan was significant since neither country had been directly involved in such negotiations since the treaty came into force in 1970. “Somehow you have to bring them into a regime of restraint,” said Huisken, who described India and Pakistan’s inclusion as ‘very sensible’. “If they’re going to reverse a pretty serious erosion of the whole non-proliferation drive, they do need to get all the players, both incipient and actual, into the exercise,” he added.

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on Sep 28 2008. Filed under Local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry