- Washington (IANS) - The Bush
administration is no longer standing by a 24-year-old U.S. pledge not to
use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, John Bolton, undersecretary
of state for arms control and international security, said Friday.
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- In an interview that appeared in the Washington Times,
the senior administration official said the U.S. was "not looking
for occasions to use" its nuclear arsenal but "would do whatever
is necessary to defend America's innocent civilian population."
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- In case of an attack on the U.S., "we would have
to do what is appropriate under the circumstances, and the classic
formulation
of that is, we are not ruling anything in and we are not ruling anything
out," Bolton said.
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- "We are just not into theoretical assertions that
other administrations have made," he said in reference to a 1978
commitment
by the Carter administration in the country not to use nuclear weapons
against non-nuclear states unless they attack the U.S. in alliance with
nuclear-armed countries.
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- A statement made on June 12 that year on behalf of then
president Jimmy Carter, which later became known as "negative security
assurances," read: "The U.S. will not use nuclear weapons against
any non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty or any
comparable internationally binding commitment not to acquire nuclear
explosive
devices, except in the case of an attack on the U.S., its territories or
armed forces, or its allies, by such a state allied to a nuclear-weapon
state, or associated with a nuclear-weapon state in carrying out or
sustaining
the attack."
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- In 1995, Warren Christopher, the first secretary of state
in the Clinton administration, reaffirmed Washington's commitment.
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- Along with the pledges of the other four permanent
members
of the U.N. Security Council, who are all nuclear powers, it became part
of a resolution, which the Council adopted in April 1995.
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- Bolton, however, said such promises reflected "an
unrealistic view of the international situation.
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- "The idea that fine theories of deterrence work
against everybody, which is implicit in the negative security assurances,
has just been disproved by September 11," he said.
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- "What we are attempting to do is create a situation
where nobody uses weapons of mass destruction of any kind."
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- Bolton spoke a day after returning from Moscow, where
he led the second round of arms-control negotiations that are expected
to produce an agreement on nuclear cuts in time for President George W.
Bush's visit to Russia in May.
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- The undersecretary said the "negative security
assurances"
never came up in the discussions with the Russians. Washington has never
had a no-first-use nuclear policy but Moscow did until mid-1990s.
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- The daily said Bolton's remarks displeased some
arms-control
analysts, who said that significant U.S. government statements as the
"negative
security assurances" should not be repudiated.
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