U.S. Proposes New Disarmament Treaty

Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, waves to the crowd during a public gatheing in the city of Zarandieh as a part of his tour to the Markazi province southwest of the capital Tehran, Iran, Thursday, May 18, 2006. Ahmadinejad on Wednesday mocked a package of incentives to suspend Uranium enrichment, a defiance that appeared certain to complicate U.S. efforts to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions. (AP Photo/Sajjad Safari, Mehr News) (Sajjad Safari - AP)

The stripped-down U.S. proposal _ only 3 1/2 pages long _ leaves out verification measures to avoid years of protracted negotiations and get the treaty passed faster. Rademaker said U.S. officials thought it better just to sign the treaty and rely on countries to abide by it.

The proposal says governments could use "national means" _ or intelligence _ to detect violations by other countries and report them to all treaty members or to the Security Council.

Rademaker said the proposal has widespread support and should be taken up by the conference, which has not written a treaty for 10 years.

North Korea claimed in 2004 to have harvested plutonium from a pool of 8,000 spent nuclear rods for weapons material _ something that apparently would be illegal under the treaty as proposed.

The U.S. initiative appeared to have less relevance to the nuclear tensions with Iran because it does not propose banning uranium enrichment outright.

Tehran has enriched small amounts of uranium at levels far below the purity used to make the fissile cores of nuclear warheads. Tehran has said it does not intend to enrich uranium above the low levels needed to create fuel for a civilian power plant. But once a nation masters enrichment technology, it can potentially create material for a weapons program _ which the United States and other nations claim is Iran's ultimate goal.

The U.S. proposal would go into force with the approval of the five permanent members of the Security Council _ Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.

Other nations said they welcomed the U.S. initiative but indicated differences with the approach.

Both China and Russia said progress on fissile materials should not come at the expense of other treaty proposals. The two countries have proposed a treaty to ban weapons in outer space, which is clearly aimed at the United States' anti-missile program.

Britain and France said they were ready to start negotiating a new fissile material treaty, while India and nuclear rival Pakistan said they saw the proposal as a positive step.

Johann Kellerman of the South Africa delegation said that "to be truly credible" the treaty should curb existing stockpiles of fissile material rather than just banning the production of new plutonium and highly enriched uranium.

Otherwise, he said, "a complete halt of the production of fissile material would nevertheless leave enough of the material available to further increase, and not decrease, the number of nuclear weapons."

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Associated Press Diplomatic Writer Barry Schweid in Washington and George Jahn in Vienna, Austria contributed to this report.