During the last week of June, Argentina participated at the third plenary meeting of the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV) held in the city of Tokyo, Japan. The Argentine delegation, headed by the Ambassador to Japan, Mr. Alan Béraud, joined 25 other delegations that participate in the initiative, which includes Argentina's neighbouring countries Brazil and Chile.
Argentina has traditionally taken a broad approach to the development of actions and initiatives in the field of disarmament, non-proliferation, and arms regulation, areas in which the country has actively participated both at regional and global level, defending the role of multilateralism and of the United Nations. Argentina has a long tradition in facing the challenges raised by the many aspects of disarmament and non-proliferation.
In Argentina's view, weapons of mass destruction constitute one of the main sources of threats to global stability; this is the context in which Argentina has become a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which is considered the cornerstone of the non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament regime.
In particular, the purpose of the IPNDV, launched jointly by the United States and the non-governmental organization Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) in December 2014, is to study the technical challenges in the field of nuclear disarmament. It aims, specifically at the "nuclear weapons life cycle": fissile material production and control, and nuclear warhead production, deployment, storage and final disposal. One of the distinguishing features of the IPNDV is that it brings together both "nuclear weapon states" and "non-nuclear weapon states" in a shared forum. The initiative's activities are classified into three areas: 1) monitoring and verification at the nuclear weapons dismantlement phase; 2) lessons learned from each inspection regime; 3) practical solutions to the technical challenges in the field of nuclear disarmament.
For more than sixty years, Argentina has been pursuing peaceful nuclear activities, in accordance with the highest safety standards and for exclusively peaceful purposes. Therefore, the country prioritizes and promotes negotiation processes´ within existing fora, in order to prevent a potential disruption of the balance and integrity of the current system in the long term. By participating in the IPNDV, Argentina reaffirms its longstanding support to the various initiatives of the international community to make verifiable, transparent and irreversible progress towards complete nuclear disarmament, on the understanding that it will allow for actual, effective compliance with the obligations that arise from the NPT.
Argentina believes that progress in the field of disarmament—one of the three pillars of the NPT—will lead to improvement on the international situation as regards non-proliferation—another pillar—and will place nuclear development for peaceful purposes—the third pillar—within an adequate framework of reliability and transparency. In that context, Argentina reiterates its support for any measure that promotes the complete elimination of nuclear weapons under the principles of transparency, irreversibility and verification of nuclear disarmament measures.