UK PM to set out plan for nuclear talks

L’AQUILA, Italy — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Thursday he will soon propose sweeping changes to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that would require states suspected of seeking to build nuclear weapons to prove that they are not.

The current language requires those seeking sanctions under the treaty to prove that suspect countries such as Iran are trying to make nuclear arms.

Brown also indicated that he was ready to negotiate on reductions to Britain’s own Trident nuclear arsenal to foster a spirit of cooperation for the talks slated to take place in Washington in March. President Barack Obama announced the summit at the Group of Eight leaders meeting in L’Aquila, Italy.

Brown said that the number of states with nuclear weapons had risen to nine from the treaty’s five original signers and that there was the “threat of a big rise in nuclear weapon states in this decade.”

He said that he would put forward specific recommendations in the next few days for a nuclear non-proliferation deal in 2010.

Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Mark Lippert, said that Obama will send personal invitation letters to leaders of 25 to 30 nations when he returns to the United States next week.

“I think we will probably want to have a more tough regime, that the onus will be on the countries that don’t have nuclear weapons to prove that they don’t have nuclear weapons,” Brown said. “At the moment, one of the problems that we’ve had with Iran is the question of whether you can prove or not if someone is developing a nuclear weapon.”

Brown suggested that Britain’s framework would also include promises from nuclear-armed powers to reduce their arsenals and the offer of assistance to non-nuclear states to develop a civil atomic energy capability.

The British leader said there was no question of Britain offering unilaterally to abandon its 160-warhead Trident arsenal or scrap plans to replace the fleet of submarines which act as its platform, but that collective action was necessary.

“Unilateral action by the United Kingdom would not be seen as the best way,” he said. “What we need is collective action by the nuclear weapons powers to say that we are prepared to reduce our nuclear weapons, but we need assurances also that other countries will not proliferate them.”

“And we need new kinds of assurances to prevent a situation such as we have got in Iran emerging in exactly the same way again.”

The nuclear non-proliferation issue has been given fresh impetus by talks between Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow earlier this week, at which they signed a preliminary agreement to reduce the world’s two biggest nuclear stockpiles by as much as a third.

Brown is also under domestic pressure to cut back on his planned multibillion investment in Trident as Britain’s debt burden spirals.