The United States Thursday submitted a draft treaty to the Geneva disarmament conference on an international ban on producing fissile material such as uranium and plutonium for military purposes.
"Our draft treaty has a straightforward scope: it bans, after entry into force, the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices," said Stephen Rademaker, acting assistant secretary at the US Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, presenting the document to the 65-nation Geneva disarmament conference.
It was the first time that a member of the conference had submitted such a draft on this topic. The treaty would have to be adopted unanimously by the conference.
It also marked the first occasion that Washington had submitted a disarmament proposal since the end of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s, western diplomats here noted.
The American draft does not cover stocks of fissile material and thus does not propose banning use of fissile material produced before the proposed treaty eventually enters into force.
The Geneva disarmament conference has been at a standstill for the past nine years without any negotiations on any of the points on its agenda because of disagreement between the US and China on the subject of the militarisation of space, and also because of discord between nuclear and non-nuclear powers on nuclear disarmament.
