UN session seeks to kick-start stalled nuke talks

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged world governments on Friday to end the "long inertia" at the Geneva disarmament talks and free up much of the money spent on arms for use alleviating hunger, disease and other ills in impoverished nations.

A new coalition of nuclear-activist nations, meanwhile, said that moving quickly in Geneva on a treaty to shut down all production of uranium and plutonium for atomic bombs is an "essential step" toward global nuclear disarmament.

Negotiations for the long-proposed Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, currently blocked by Pakistan at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, should instead "be pursued with vigor and determination," said the 10-nation group, led by Japan and Australia and including Germany, Canada and Mexico.

Ban addressed foreign ministers at an unusual high-level meeting he convened in an effort to build political momentum for action at the Geneva talks, which Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Satoru Satoh dubbed "the sleeping conference."

The UN chief noted that in the past decade world military spending had risen by 50 percent to more than $1.5 trillion. "Imagine what we could do if we devoted these resources to poverty reduction, climate change mitigation, food security, global health and other global development challenges," he said.

"Disarmament and nonproliferation are essential across the board, not simply for international peace and security."

The 65-nation, 31-year-old Conference on Disarmament, the world's only multilateral forum for nuclear arms diplomacy, has not produced anything substantial since the 1996 nuclear test-ban treaty, a pact now on hold because key nations, including the US, have not ratified it.

A fissile-material treaty has been proposed since the 1990s, after decades in which nuclear-weapons powers accumulated hundreds of tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium - sitting today in deployed or disused weapon warheads, in storage, in fuel stores for nuclear-powered Russian icebreakers and US missile submarines, in research reactors, and elsewhere.