US calls on Pakistan to stop blocking talks to end production of nuclear weapons material

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US asks Pakistan to stop blocking nuclear talks

GENEVA — Pakistan is delaying international talks on a ban on the production of new nuclear bomb material, insisting that any deal must also require its archrival India to reduce its existing stockpile.

President Barack Obama has pushed for the ban, and the United States on Tuesday urged Pakistan to allow a quick start to the talks at the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.

“It is imperative that we work together … and begin substantive work in 2010,” U.S. representative Garold N. Larson told the meeting.

India has a larger stock of fissile material and the capacity to build more warheads than Pakistan. Pakistan fears that India is gaining disproportionate power in South Asia after a 2008 agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and India, and a series of strategic and economic cooperation deals it has concluded with countries including Russia.

The Geneva disarmament conference can only move forward by consensus and Pakistan blocked even the adoption of an agenda for 2010 last week. After dropping that objection, Pakistan now is pledging to block agreement on a U.S. proposal for a work plan, the next bureaucratic step in the negotiation process.

“If we are going to negotiate a treaty which only bans future production, then that asymmetry or imbalance between us will be frozen for ever,” said Pakistan’s Ambassador in Geneva, Zamir Akram, said Monday. “It presents us with a clear and present danger,”

Obama last year called for a verifiable ban on new nuclear material under the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. The Bush administration had objected to such a deal.

The disarmament body has failed to produce any deal of substance since the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

At the moment, only India and Pakistan — and possibly Israel and North Korea — produce plutonium or highly enriched uranium for weapons.