Halting a Thousand Suns Bridging the Chasm between the Nuclear Haves and Have-Nots.

• Author: Daley, Tad
• Position: Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons

The biggest problem of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) may simply be its name. Stop a hundred "ordinary Americans" on the street and ask them what the NPT is about. In our civically impoverished age, 90 would undoubtedly reply: "Don't know and don't care." But 9 of the remaining 10 would likely say: "It's about nuclear non-proliferation. It's about stopping new countries from getting 'the bomb.'" It seems unlikely that even 1 in 100 Americans know that their own Government, in the NPT, formally committed itself to getting rid of its entire atomic arsenal. Perhaps if the NPT had been called the "Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Elimination Treaty", the nuclear age might have ended long ago.

In 1970, the NPT was the result of a "grand bargain" between the few "nuclear haves" and the many "nuclear have-nots". Over 100 non-nuclear-weapon States (182 today) agreed never to develop or acquire atomic arsenals, on the understanding that the five nuclear-weapon States agreed, under Article VI, "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".

As the NPT's 30-year Review Conference approached last spring, it was "almost universally conceded", according to former United States President Jimmy Carter, that the five had made no serious attempt to comply with their Article VI obligation. "The NPT is supposed to lead to a nuclear-free world", said Ben Sanders, a member of the Dutch delegation. "The non-nuclear countries see it as a bargain which the weapons States have failed to keep." That failure is what Indian officials have repeatedly called "nuclear apartheid".

That failure helped motivate India and Pakistan to conduct atomic tests in 1998 and to proceed steadily toward operational nuclear-weapon deployments today. During the Conference, Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh rose in his country's Parliament and thundered that the five had "arrogated a permanent special right to possess nuclear weapons for their exclusive security".

As the Conference unfolded, the five, beginning to feel some heat, took a bold step. In their first-ever joint statement on nuclear-weapon issues, they pledged an "unequivocal commitment to the ultimate goal of a complete elimination of nuclear weapons". But the proclamation provided neither a time-frame nor any new ideas as to how to move toward that goal. It was greeted with derision by most of...