Foreign Policy
May 5, 2010
The world’s five original nuclear states — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — on Wednesday reaffirmed their commitment to “take concrete and credible steps towards irreversible disarmament” of their nuclear arsenals and to take “concrete steps” to establish the a nuclear-weapons free zone In the Middle East. But the big powers set no fixed deadline for achieving either of those goals, and the United States has made it clear it will not press Israel to eliminate its undeclared nuclear weapons program until there is peace in the Middle East. The so-called P-5 also made no commitment to halt efforts to modernize their nuclear warheads. Still, the U.S. and its nuclear partners signalled a willingness to engage the non-nuclear weapons states on issue they care about, including a pledge to start negotiations in Geneva on a pact providing security assurances for non-nuclear states.
more