FMCT and Deterrence Stability in South Asia

Byline: Ali Sarwar Naqvi I must begin with a bit of personal history regarding the Fissile Materials Treaty. I may have been the first Pakistani to know of the proposal relating to the conclusion of such a treaty. This was the year 1993, and I was the Deputy Chief of Mission in our Embassy in Washington. Sometime in the summer that year, I remember being called to the State Department by the Assistant Secretary for Non- Proliferation and Disarmament, Robert Galucci, who gave me a non- paper containing the main points of the US proposal for a termination of fissile material production. I recall sending a cable to Islamabad forwarding the proposal. The US State Department continued its bilateral consultations with key countries during the next few months and when the UN General Assembly met in New York in September that year, the then US President, Bill Clinton, in his speech to the world body, called for a multilateral convention banning the production of fissile materials for nuclear explosives.