UNITED NATIONS, May 24 (UPI) -- Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said Tuesday he feared the U.N. nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference will fail to strengthen the measure as needed, more states will get nuclear weapons and the Security Council will have to act.
But, he told reporters at U.N. headquarters, he didn't know what the body charged with the world's peace and security could do, given its five permanent members hold vetoes and all are nuclear states.
The NPT was signed in Washington, London and Moscow July 1, 1968, and entered into force March 5, 1970.
Speaking as robustly as ever as he nears "entering my 90th year," but conceding a loss in hearing, McNamara took part in a panel discussion on the review conference.
He said the objective of the review, "Should be to strengthen the treaty and, in particular, to ensure that North Korea and Iran do not become nuclear powers. I believe there is a high probability that the conference will fail to achieve those objectives."
Defense secretary under U.S. presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and engineer of the war in Vietnam, McNamara said that if Iran and North Korea continued on their paths, "Other nations will follow."
He said both nations fear Washington seeks a change in their leadership.
"It is inconsistent and ineffective to demand disarmament and pursue 'regime change' simultaneously," McNamara said.
He called for negotiations with both and if the review conference fails as he fears, the U.N. Security Council should step in "and take whatever action appears necessary to stop proliferation."
Why he was so concerned, McNamara said in a statement read aloud, and repeated later at a more formal panel discussion in a U.N. conference room was the number of existing nuclear weapons.
"As we talk the United States has deployed 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads," he said. "Each, on average, has the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb that killed 100,000 human beings," referring to the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan by the United States.
"Of the 6,000 (warheads), 2,000 are on hair-trigger alert to be launched on 15-minutes warning by the decision of one man, the president" of the United States, he said. "Russia has similar plans and deployments."
Despite the end of the cold war 15 years ago, McNamara said, U.S. nuclear weapons policies "are today essentially what they were when I was secretary of Defense 40 years ago. I would say they are immoral; illegal; militarily unnecessary; very, very dangerous, in terms of the risk of inadvertent or accidental launch, and destructive of the non-proliferation regime that has served us so well over the 40 years."
He would not comment on the report given the conference Friday by U.S. Ambassador Jackie Sanders, special representative for the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, focusing on the convention's Article VI, which calls for ending the nuclear arms race at an early date, nuclear disarmament and to achieving a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.
Sanders said Washington was in "full compliance with this article."
Said the envoy, "The easing of global tension and strengthening of trust has allowed the United States to undertake systematic, progressive, and effective measures consistent with Article VI," adding, "We have taken these actions unilaterally, bilaterally with the Russian Federation, and multilaterally within NATO."
McNamara said he neither heard nor read it.
In a slick color booklet offered during the conference, Russia pointed out it had signed with the United States the 2002 Moscow Treaty on strategic offensive reductions, aimed at bringing the number of nuclear warheads on each side to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2013.
On the panel with McNamara attended by reporters were Ambassador Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier of Sweden, Canadian Ambassador Paul Meyer and Germany's Deputy Commissioner for the Federal Government for Arms Control and Disarmament Friedrich Groning, who said they agreed with almost everything McNamara said. They said nothing about disagreements.
One theme all pleaded for was a greater awareness among members of the public for the state of nuclear weaponry.
As usual, the most outspoken was McNamara. But he quoted former Defense Secretary William Perry, current director of Stanford University's security program, "Who is not an alarmist," saying last August, "There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear detonation on U.S. soil within the decade."
So it isn't other nation's possession of nuclear weapons that worries McNamara, its just the total number of weapons in the world and the chance of a detonation for whatever reason. He cited human fallibility as a major concern for an accidental detonation.
