Foreign Affairs Committee Calls for Clarity on a Nuclear Weapons Convention

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Foreign Affairs Committee today published its Global Security: Non-Proliferation' report. It contains several welcome conclusions and recommendations to Government including:
 
    * A call on the UK to increase its efforts to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) e.g. through enhanced verification and enforcement measures
 
    * A recommendation that the UK encourages “greater transparency and disarmament measures by Israel” with the goal of “Israeli accession to the NPT and the establishment of a WMD-free Middle East”
 
    * An observation that UK support for the US-India civil nuclear cooperation agreement is “regrettable” as it “undermines...the international non-proliferation regime”
 
    * A call for the UK to “come away from the 2010 NPT Review Conference with agreement on a concrete plan to take the multilateral nuclear disarmament process forward”
 
    * A recommendation that the decision to proceed with the planning and design phase of the replacement for Trident should wait until 'Parliament has had the chance to scrutinise the matter in a debate”
 
    * A recommendation for a Parliamentary debate on US plans for a European Ballistic missile defence system given that planned deployments do not “represent a net gain for European security”
 
Also amongst the recommendations in the section on nuclear weapons is a call for the UK Government to make its position on a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) clear: 
 
“We recommend that in its response to this report, the FCO should set out its attitude to a possible Nuclear Weapons Convention banning such weapons, including the relationship which it sees between such a Convention, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its stated goal of the elimination of all nuclear weapons”.
 
ICAN UK welcomes this call for clarity on a NWC and looks forward to a swift response from the Government.