UNITED NATIONS, September 22. /TASS/. Russia calls on the United States to take immediate steps to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin said on Friday.
"The United States might have become a driving force to turn the CTBT into a legally binding instrument of international law and set a relevant example. That is why we call on the US government to revise its approaches and take urgent steps to ratify this treaty," he said at the Conference on Facilitating the Entry into Force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.
"We address our call to other countries whom the treaty’s enforcement depends upon: to sign and ratify it as soon as possible. Each of these states bears its share of responsibility for the treaty’s future," he said.
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was approved by the UN General Assembly on September 24, 1996. It bans nuclear weapons test explosions and any other nuclear explosions, for both civilian and military purposes, in all environments. The treaty has been ratified by 178 countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. However, it has not come into forces. To come into effect it needs to be ratified by 44 countries, which either possess nuclear weapons or have potential capacities to obtain them (they are listed in the Annex; the list was drawn on the basis of data from the International Atomic Energy Agency). Eight countries from this list are outside the treaty: India, North Korea, and Pakistan had not signed the treaty; Egypt, Israel, Iran, China, and the United States signed but not ratified it.