Simon Tisdall

Many damaging accusations have been levelled at John Bolton, President George Bush’s controversial nominee as US ambassador to the UN.

But perhaps the most serious is that Bolton, as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security since 2001, bungled efforts to dissuade North Korea from developing nuclear weapons.

Bolton helped to scrap the Clinton administration’s 1994 “agreed framework” that froze North Korea’s weapons-related plutonium reprocessing programme. The framework was imperfect — but nothing remotely adequate replaced it.

In 2002, President Bush denounced North Korea as part of the “axis of evil”. In 2003, Pyongyang withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and traded insults with Bolton. In February, it declared itself a nuclear weapons state.

And on April 30-May 01, on the eve of the treaty review conference in New York, North Korea said stalled regional talks were effectively dead.

The Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency conceded last week that North Korea probably now has nuclear-armed missiles capable of hitting US soil.

This signal policy failure risks being repeated in Iran, with which Bolton has also refused to deal directly. Western countries suspect Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons. It says it is interested only in generating nuclear-powered electricity. Unlike Pyongyang, Tehran still belongs to the treaty and has signed the “additional protocol” allowing intrusive UN inspections.

Such problems go to the heart of the conundrum facing the 188-country conference. The treaty’s article IV says state parties have the “inalienable right to develop ... nuclear energy for peaceful purposes”

and to acquire technology to this end.

But post-9/11, the US and its allies, newly alarmed about proliferation, want to curb the availability of such technology, starting with the nuclear fuel cycle.

Bush proposed last year to “cap” the number of states possessing fuel enrichment capabilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency has suggested a five-year moratorium on new facilities in return for guaranteed fuel supplies for certified users.

But as the independent British-American Security Information Council points out: “There is no international consensus on how to deal with the problem.” “The big loophole in the treaty is legal acquisition (of dual-use technology),”

a British official said.

Such pessimism appears well-founded. Non-weapons states accuse nuclear powers of double standards. They say the curbs are biased.

The west’s de facto acceptance of states that have developed nuclear weapons — notably Israel, Pakistan and India — has also weakened potential collective action.

North Korea’s accelerating nuclear activities are linked by some analysts to Iraq.

Pyongyang surmised that if Saddam Hussein really had possessed the bomb, the US would not have dared to attack him. Iran may have reached a similar conclusion.

According to Rebecca Johnson, editor of Disarmament Diplomacy, those states wishing to retain their enrichment and reprocessing capacity while denying facilities to others must ask themselves: “How serious are they about the need to prevent proliferation?”—The Guardian