NEW DELHI — U.S. President Bill Clinton's weekend announcement to delay a decision on deployment of the U.S. national missile defense system will do little to end the gridlock at the United Nations' main disarmament body, the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. The CD has been without work for four full years, and last month's failure to reach agreement on next year's work program shows that the deadlock will continue into 2001.
China almost single-handedly has held up the CD, using U.S. development of missile defenses as justification. This has meant no negotiations on the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, which had been proposed as a naturally corollary to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. China's logic, stated privately if not publicly, is that if the United States goes ahead with missile defenses, it would need to produce more fissile material for a larger nuclear arsenal. FMCT talks have yet to start five years after a negotiating mandate was agreed upon.
The CD has engaged only in procedural squabbling in the past four years since concluding the CTBT. Even the CTBT has run aground, with no clear sign whether the test ban in its present form can still be salvaged or whether it is beyond redemption. The CD's only other success during the 1990s, the Chemical Weapons Convention, has been damaged by the U.S. decision to attach 20 different conditions to its ratification.