The most serious concern is that the treaty text allows Russia to deploy or move nuclear weapons in or through the zone. Article 12 says the zone doesn’t affect the rights and obligations that its members might have assumed under prior accords, which could include the Collective Security Treaty, signed in Tashkent in 1992 by Russia and the other CANWFZ parties. But the CST can be read as allowing Russia to use nuclear weapons to defend its members or to move nuclear weapons on their territories, so Western governments want to ensure that the zone prohibits the entry of any nuclear weapons within its area of jurisdiction before they agree to support it.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, North Korea presented even more serious problems for the conference, and the NPT more broadly, with the United States and its allies citing the need to close a loophole exposed by Pyongyang a few years ago.
In 2003, the North Korean government, after IAEA monitors detected its illicit diversion of plutonium, simply announced it was withdrawing from the NPT. North Korea was never penalized for its cheating or subsequent withdrawal, though it was later sanctioned after it tested a nuclear bomb and launched long-range missiles. Yet, other countries resisted Western proposals to impose automatic penalties, or at least conduct an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to deliberate on possible sanctions or other responses, on countries that withdraw from the NPT while exploiting nuclear assistance they received within the treaty framework to develop nuclear weapons. There was, though, more unanimity on the need for North Korea to eliminate its nuclear weapons. Although the Final Declaration toned down the condemnatory language in some earlier drafts, it did call on North Korea to rejoin the Six-party Talks and implement its previous commitments to the ‘verifiable abandonment of all nuclear weapons.’
There was a timely reminder at the end of the conference of why many governments feel it is critical to make progress over North Korea as new fears surfaced that it was assisting Burma to acquire nuclear weapons.
According to documents and testimony provided by a defecting Burmese military officer, the government has been importing specialized material and technologies used to manufacture a nuclear weapon. Although Burma’s current nuclear capabilities are rudimentary, fears persist that North Korean assistance could enable Burma to make rapid progress toward developing a nuclear weapon. Such a move would undoubtedly risk contributing further nuclear proliferation in Asia, which already has more countries with nuclear weapons than any other continent.
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