U.S. and Iraq break deadlock, clearing way for nuclear accord

UNITED NATIONS - An agreement between the United States and Iraq on Saturday cleared the way for the five established nuclear powers to eventually eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

After all-night deliberations, and intense pressure on Baghdad and Washington not to sabotage a key nuclear conference, delegates of the 187 nations that have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty burst into applause as Canadian Ambassador Chris Westdal announced the agreement.

"This means that assuming the members of this body approve, the last piece in our puzzle is complete," said Westdal, who had worked through the night trying to negotiate an agreement.

On Thursday, the five first nuclear powers - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China - agreed to "an unequivocal undertaking" to totally eliminate their nuclear arsenals, a decision praised by several non-nuclear countries as an important step toward nuclear disarmament.

Following Westdal's remarks, the conference president, Algerian U.N. Ambassador Abdallah Baali, announced agreement on several other outstanding issues.

Many delegates, who spent the past four weeks reviewing the global treaty to control the spread of nuclear weapons, were determined not to leave without consensus on the final document.

Baali, responded to pleas from many nations by asking Westdal late Saturday morning to press ahead with efforts to reach an agreement.

Signaling the importance Washington placed on the issue, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Einhorn, who is in charge of nonproliferation, flew to New York to take part in the final talks.

The conference had been scheduled to end at midnight Friday.

The most serious dispute centered on Iraq's compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions which placed Iraq under sanctions until its capability to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons has been destroyed. The United States maintains that Iraq has not adequately accounted for its weapons programs.

Iraq's U.N. Ambassador Saeed Hasan initially said Baghdad would accept an account of the International Atomic Energy Agency's January inspection of its nuclear reactors under the NPT treaty - but was vehemently opposed to U.S. demands for a statement that the IAEA inspection was no substitute for its Security Council obligations.

Under the compromise language, the conference takes note of an April 24 statement by the IAEA director-general that since Iraq has suspended weapons inspections since December 1998 "the agency has not been in a position to provide any assurance of Iraq's compliance with its obligations under U.N. Security Council Resolution 687."

At Saturday's plenary session, Mexico's disarmament ambassador in Geneva, Antonio de Icaza, speaking on behalf of a coalition of non-nuclear states, urged the United States and Iraq "to go that extra mile" to solve an issue "which is mainly of interest to two state parties."

The conference operates on the rule of consensus - which means any of the 187 parties to the NPT can block final agreement.

A message from Japan's foreign minister read by the Japanese ambassador said the issue was "critically important for the peace and security of the entire world."

Even though the new agreement gives no timetable for eliminating nuclear weapons, and delegates said it would take many years to achieve a nuclear-free world, it marked the first public statement by the major nuclear powers of their obligation to total disarmament.

The delegates agreed on other important steps: a moratorium on nuclear weapon testing pending the activation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, further reductions of tactical nuclear weapons, increased transparency by the nuclear powers on reporting information about their nuclear arsenals and provisons for taking weapons off "hair-trigger" status.

The nonproliferation treaty, which went into force in 1970, represented a bargain between the nuclear haves and have-nots. In return for a pledge from non-nuclear states not to acquire nuclear weapons, the treaty committed nuclear-weapon states to pursue nuclear disarmament.

Delegates stressed the importance of getting the four holdouts to sign the treaty - India and Pakistan which conducted rival nuclear tests in 1998, Israel which is believed to have nuclear weapons, and Cuba.

However, the new agreement was unlikely to satisfy India, which has insisted on a timetable for nuclear disarmament as a precondition for its approval of the treaty.

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