By Pip Hinman
The Coalition government is attempting to squeeze maximum political mileage from the adoption of a resolution it submitted to the UN General Assembly on September 11.
The resolution called for the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but the CTBT in its current form will not outlaw nuclear weapons or proliferation. Furthermore, the treaty is unlikely to become international law.
While the resolution — supported by 158 countries including the five nuclear powers (US, Russia, China, France and Britain) — makes it more likely that the CTBT will be signed later this month, India has said that it will not sign.
This means that the treaty will not be legally binding. The 44 states (including India) considered to have nuclear reactors must sign before the treaty can come into force.
Deliberations at last month's conference in Geneva broke down when the five nuclear powers refused to agree to a timetable to dismantle their nuclear weapons stockpiles. (The US has more than 6500 nuclear warheads and leads the other nuclear powers in advanced computer-simulated testing.) India said it would not sign the CTBT until the five nuclear powers agreed to a timetable and a ban on all nuclear testing, including "subcritical" tests used by the more advanced states to gather data for computer-simulated tests.
By pushing the resolution through now, the Australian government has ensured that the same CTBT text (which contains other glaring anomalies such as the right of nuclear powers to use nuclear weapons when they perceive a threat to their "supreme national interest") will be presented for signing and that the concerns India and other Third World countries such as Zimbabwe will not be addressed.
The Clinton administration, determined to push through the treaty before the elections in November, praised Downer for his "diplomatic coup". In fact, the Australian government stands exposed once again by its keenness to help the biggest nuclear power (and the biggest threat to world peace) to maintain its nuclear superiority.
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth praised the Australian government's intervention and hailed the adoption of the resolution as a significant "first step" on the road to nuclear disarmament.
However the Democratic Socialists' foreign affairs spokesperson, Max Lane, described the CTBT as a "con job". "The treaty entrenches the monopoly of the five nuclear states. It does not force them to disarm, and it certainly does not ban nuclear weapons development. France and the United States are able to continue developing their nuclear arsenals because they have the sophisticated technology to do so.
"The only way to achieve a nuclear-free world is for the nuclear five to dismantle their nuclear stockpiles and stop all nuclear weapons testing", Lane told Green Left Weekly. He condemned the Australian government for its "deceitful role".
"It's not good enough to argue, as some anti-nuclear campaigners are, that something signed is better than nothing", Lane continued. "We've already got a lot of signed nuclear disarmament treaties, and yet the world is still held hostage by the nuclear powers, in particular the US, which has the capability to blow the world up many times over. The CTBT must include a timetable for total nuclear disarmament, and governments must also agree to stop the mining and export of uranium."