United States Mission Geneva

A useful reference list of leading nonproliferation institutions, web sites and publications.

The U.S. delegation led by Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller has returned for a recess from the START negotiations in Geneva. The team has gone through an intensive period of negotiations with their Russian counterparts over more than two months. Our goal remains to conclude a solid treaty for the President’s signature as soon as possible, and we expect that the teams will resume their negotiations in Geneva in mid-January.

Recognizing our mutual determination to support strategic stability between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, we express our commitment, as a matter of principle, to continue to work together in the spirit of the START Treaty following its expiration, as well as our firm intention to ensure that a new treaty on strategic arms enter into force at the earliest possible date.

We’re actively pursuing the means to continue transparency and verification measures on a bilateral basis with Russia during the period between START expiration and entry into force of the new treaty. We believe that the success of the verification procedures in the existing START treaty has given us a positive base to build on in the new treaty.

We now face a different kind of threat, a threat that is more diffuse and perhaps even more dangerous. The range and intensity of current nuclear proliferation challenges is alarming. The international community failed to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. We are now engaged in diplomatic efforts to roll back this development. Iran continues to ignore resolutions from the United Nations Security Council demanding that it suspend its enrichment activities and live up to those international obligations.

Ian Kelly: “we have very intensive negotiations going on. We have a very firm deadline that’s coming up very quickly, a little more than – well, it’s December 5th, so it’s – we’re talking about a month and a half now. So we have very intensive negotiations going on. We do not want to negotiate in public. We are taking the tasking from our two presidents very seriously, the Russian side and the American side.”

I would like today to discuss the views of the United States on nuclear disarmament. I will describe our fundamental approach, what we have accomplished in recent years and our current objectives, and some more long-range questions as we consider how to create, in the words of Security Council Resolution 1887, “the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons, in accordance with the goals of the NPT”.

The United States and Russia are making progress in replacing a current treaty for reducing nuclear arsenals with one that goes further in physically reducing arsenals and also lessening perceived tensions over nuclear weapons, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says.

This is an exciting time to appear with my colleagues in this body to discuss nonproliferation and disarmament. My government applauds the dedicated engagement of the First Committee, as well as the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, in addressing the compelling issues of nonproliferation and disarmament that we confront. Last month, at a historic United Nations Security Council meeting, the United States led an effort to approve a ground breaking resolution on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. And, for the first time in a decade, the United States participated in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Article XIV Conference.