The commitment of nuclear powers to disarmament faces a severe test at an international conference beginning in New York today to review the 30-year-old non-proliferation treaty.
At the last treaty review conference five years ago the nuclear powers, including Britain, committed themselves to "the determined pursuit . . . of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons".
That high-minded objective received a setback when India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests.
The mood in New York as ministers gather is not optimistic. The US has not helped by threatening to go off in pursuit of a new missile programme. The talks are also being held against a background of indifference in the post-cold-war age.
The mood is beginning to change, however. The first stirrings of unease began four years ago when India and Pakistan, neither of which has signed the NPT treaty, tested nuclear weapons.
Worrying
Just as worrying is the the attitude of the US. Last year congress voted against the comprehensive test ban treaty, the Republicans insisting that the US should not permit any international constraints on its ability to test and modernise its nuclear forces.
The prospects for a concrete conclusion to the NPT discussions in four weeks' time look remote. Those in the nuclear club, while urging other countries not to join, show little sign of being flexible.
Nato's "strategic concept", announced at its 50th anniversary summit in Washington last year, stated that "the circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated [by the allies] are . . . extremely remote". But it added: "Nuclear weapons make a unique contribution . . . They demonstrate [to enemies] that aggression of any kind is not a rational option."
Nato continues to reject a "no first use" commitment, and one of Vladimir Putin's first initiatives on becoming president of Russia was to abandon Moscow's "no first use" policy. Against the background of deteriorating conventional forces, he also suggested that Russia would in future rely on a lower nuclear threshold.
The Russian parliament's recent ratification of the Start II arms reduction treaty, which commits each of the two powers to cut its nuclear warheads from
6,000 to 3,500 by 2007, will put further pressure on the US congress to follow suit.
"The Russians will go into the non-proliferation treaty review conference looking like good guys. The spotlight will be on us," a US diplomat said.
The US and Russia are preparing to begin talks on Start III. The Russians want to cut the number of each side's long range nuclear warheads to 1,500. The US does not want to go below 2,000 or 2,500.
But the New York conference also takes place under the shadow of US plans for a national missile defence system (NMD). The project will be "the ghost at the wedding", said Rebecca Johnson, director of the Acronym Institute, a respected London disarmament thinktank. A decision to go ahead with NMD would require an amendment to the anti-ballistic missile treaty signed by Washington and Moscow in 1972, which enshrines the traditional
concept of deterrence and "mutual assured destruction".
Moscow opposes any change to the ABM treaty, despite Washington's insistence that its anti-ballistic missile project is designed to protect the US from "rogue" states such as North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Libya. But analysts suggest that the US is seeking "absolute security". They argue that the project reflects a dangerous shift from long-held assumptions about deterrence towards a belief in the "limited use" of nuclear weapons, shared by other countries, not least Pakistan.
Violation
"There is a move towards the concept of a 'normalisation' of nuclear weapons, towards reintegrating them into general weapons arsenals," Ms Johnson warned.
Some observers believe that Nato's strategic concept opens the way to it
using nuclear weapons against biological and chemical weapons, in violation of the "negative security assurances" given by the nuclear powers in 1995.
The British American Security Information Council argues that Nato's existing "nuclear sharing" arrangements in time of war - whereby European non-nuclear states could gain access to US nuclear bombs - clearly breach the NPT.
The nuclear powers will come under pressure from two groups fed up with what they regard as hypocritical preaching: the "New Agenda" countries, including Japan, Canada, Egypt, Brazil and South Africa, and the Non-Aligned Movement. But those at the opening meeting are not preparing for some huge step forward. At best they hope for a form of words on which they can agree. The nuclear risk is huge, but the ambitions in New York are small.
