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Duma Ratifies Nuclear Treaty

Combined Reports

MOSCOW — The State Duma on Friday ratified a global treaty intended to prevent nuclear terrorism, a year after President Vladimir Putin became the first leader to sign the pact.

Lawmakers voted 424-0 in favor of ratification, following remarks by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

"Ratification of this document answers the interests of Russia and the entire international community," Lavrov said.

The Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism makes it a crime to possess radioactive material or weapons with the intent of committing a terrorist act, or to damage a nuclear facility with the intent of killing or seriously injuring someone, or substantially damaging the environment.

Russia sponsored the seven-year effort leading to the treaty's adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in April 2005, and Putin was the first leader to sign the treaty last September, followed swiftly by U.S. President George W. Bush, in a display of solidarity amid persistent fears that terrorists could acquire nuclear weapons.

Lavrov said five countries had ratified the treaty, signed by 107 nations, and that ratification by a total of 22 was needed for it to go into force.

Russia's backing of the Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism highlights the importance of the global struggle to keep nuclear weapons out of terrorists' hands, said Matthew Bunn, nuclear security scholar at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Bunn added, however, that the convention should be complemented by "a fast-pace global effort to ensure that every nuclear weapon and every kilogram of potential nuclear bomb material worldwide is secured and accounted for."

Groups based in Chechnya have actively sought weapons of mass destruction and technology needed to stage acts of catastrophic terrorism in the past.

During the first Chechen war they acquired radioactive materials, threatened to attack domestic nuclear facilities, plotted to hijack a nuclear submarine and attempted to put pressure on the national leadership by planting a device containing radioactive materials in Moscow and threatening to detonate it.

Since armed conflict resumed in Chechnya in 1999, the rebels have scouted nuclear facilities and tried to contact an insider at one such facility.

Many scholars argue that groups of militant Islamists and other ideologically driven extremists based in the North Caucasus crossed the moral threshold between conventional and catastrophic terrorism when they seized School No. 1 in Beslan in 2004, leading to the deaths of more than 300 people.

(AP, SPT)

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