The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference convened in New York from 27 April to 22 May. The conference is held every five years to review the extent of nuclear proliferation in the world and ponder what the treaty has achieved. Egyptian and Arab interest in these conferences, together with other issues of disarmament, is their initiative to establish a zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. They believe that the zone is the right response to threats of nuclear proliferation, including established Israeli nuclear capabilities (believed to include 200 to 400 nuclear warheads). The Egyptian initiative for a nuclear free zone was launched, with Arab support, in 1991. The American and European response was all but indifferent. The 1995 Review Conference was of vital interest to the US in suggesting the indefinite extension of the treaty. Egypt and some other Arab countries raised reservations that might threaten an extension. The US, in order to maintain the support of Arab countries, included in the final declaration what was called “The Middle East Resolution”, promising to support the quest for a WMD-free Middle East. However, the promise was not fulfilled. The Arabs felt they were deceived. At the 2010 Review Conference, the United Nations issued a resolution that called for an international conference to be held in December 2012 in Helsinki and appointed a facilitator. At the last moment, the US frustrated the convening of the conference on the pretext that the environment in the Middle East was not appropriate. Egypt and the Arab states continued to raise the issue in regional and international forums. At the last review conference, the Arab group introduced a paper that called on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to convene a conference within 160 days of issuing the final document of the review conference. Three main countries the US, Canada and Britain frustrated the Arab effort. Apart from the Middle East nuclear-free-zone issue, the conference failed to achieve consensus on other issues of disarmament. The American response was surprising. It blamed Egypt for the failure of the review conference. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry criticised the American accusation, recalling the comments of Egypt's representative to the conference, Ambassador Hisham Badr, that throughout the last five years Egypt and the Arab Group spared no effort to implement the 2010 Action Plan pertaining to the Middle East, engaging positively with the facilitator's efforts. This was strongly demonstrated by full engagement in the informal meetings convened in Vienna, Gilon and Geneva, and amply reflected in the annexes of the Arab working paper. Days before the latest review conference, the Weekly published an open letter I had written to President Barack Obama. In it I reminded him of his speech on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, when he promised to make the world safe from nuclear arms. I questioning whether this goal could be achieved when a strategic region like the Middle East remains threatened with established nuclear programmes and the potential of other nuclear programmes. It seems that Obama, frustrating for a second time the initiative to make the Middle East a zone free of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction, prefers another scenario, mainly to please Israel, in order to maintain its support for current US negotiations with Iran on its nuclear programme. In its editorial of 3 June, The New York Times was more objective when it attributed the failure of the NPT Review Conference not only to the dispute between Egypt and Israel, but to tension in recent years in US-Russian relations, where efforts to further reduce their nuclear arsenals have stalled. Russia refused Obama's offer to negotiate a further one-third cut in deployed nuclear weapons beyond the 2010 New Start Treaty limits of 1,550. American sources claim that Russian officials threatened to use nuclear weapons in their country's confrontation with NATO over Ukraine. The Times concluded that despite the backsliding in disarmament efforts, there is one bright spot: negotiations between Iran and major powers on Iran's nuclear programme could inspire an initiative to rid the world including the Middle East of the most destructive weapons. So far, when it comes to their efforts to establish a nuclear-free zone, Egypt and the Arab Group are facing four difficult dilemmas: to continue, maybe for another 25 years, calling for the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East; to live with Israeli nuclear weapons and even accept the American argument that Israel is a rational state and won't use nuclear weapons; to mobilise the world community and its civil society organisations to keep this issue alive; or to start building their own nuclear facilities. The writer is executive director of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs.
