“Washington, London, and Ottawa went for the demolition of consensus. This seems like a very serious mistake based on the inadequate assessment of the situation and its possible consequences. This is even more complex in that such a decision was made not by NPT rank-and-file participants, but by two coauthors of the 1995 Resolution that carries heavy responsibility for reaching progress in the creation of a nuclear-free zone,” Ulyanov told RIA Novosti in an interview.
Ulyanov added that the Defense Conference was not a total failure, though “the United States, Great Britain and Canada, I’m afraid it was a failure.”
The reasons for the United States and Great Britain for not signing the final document during the Survey Conference on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons are convincing and London and Washington had no right to insist on their veto powers after the talks basically failed, Mikhail Ulyanov said Monday.
“Our coauthors [the United States and Great Britain] on the 1995 Resolution announced that they believe the proposed decision on the Middle East [the creation of a zone free of weapons of mass destruction] is unbalanced and doesn’t take into consideration the interests of all Middle Eastern states, obviously meaning Israel. Frankly speaking, their explanations weren’t convincing,” Ulyanov told RIA Novosti in an interview.
Ulyanov suggested that London and Washington did not like that the final document did not contain veto power for each of the three powers.
“In our view, after the last decision of the previous Survey Conference on the Middle East was incomplete, there were no grounds to insist on retaining any type of exclusive prerogatives among the three countries, in any case the majority of the NPT countries were not ready to agree on that,” Ulyanov added.
