The three-day international conference on "Fissile Material Treaty: Possibility and Prospects' started here on Monday. The conference being organised by South Asian Strategic Stability Institute (Sassi) aims at intensifying and promoting dialogue between the stakeholder of the 65 members conference on disarmament and the regional and Pakistani security experts working on these issues.
Sassi Director General Dr Maria Sultan, in her opening remarks said that negotiating a FMT through a multilateral process was central to the international non-proliferation efforts, arms control and disarmament measures.
The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 48/75L aimed at "a non-discriminatory, internationally and effectively verifiable treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other explosive devices", sets out the base on which all future treaty negotiations on the issue of fissile material production are likely to develop. Sassi Research Fellows giving background of the treaty said competing expectations with regards to the purpose, scope, mechanism, objective and the outcome of FMT had resulted in the current deadlock at Conference on Disarmament (CD) over the issue of the commencement of negotiation on the FMT for a non-discriminatory, multilateral, verifiable and universal treaty.