A panel of nuclear experts yesterday presented a proposed version of a long-awaited international treaty to ban the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons. President Barack Obama said last month that establishing a cutoff treaty would be one of the "concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons...To cut off the building blocks needed for a bomb, the United States will seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile material intended for use in state nuclear weapons." In his April 5th speech in Prague [2] the president said, "If we are serious about stopping the spread of these weapons, then we should put an end to the dedicated production of weapons-grade materials that create them."
The draft treaty was prepared by the International Panel on Fissile Materials [3], which is co-chaired by Ploughshares Fund advisor Frank von Hippel [4] and grantee R. Rajaraman [5]. Read their report here [6].
Links
[1] https://ploughshares.org/file/698
[2] http://www.ploughshares.org/obama-prague-speech
[3] http://www.fissilematerials.org/ipfm/pages_us_en/about/about/about.php
[4] http://www.ploughshares.org/expert/89
[5] http://www.ploughshares.org/expert/196
[6] http://www.ipfmlibrary.org/fmct-ipfm_feb2009draft.pdf
[7] http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/ts_20090512_7881.php