The United States has, over the past decade, joined with nations around the world in establishing four major nuclear-free zones that play an important role in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons by carving out huge slices of the earth where, by international agreement, the nuclear arms race is prohibited.
There has been bipartisan approval by several U.S. administrations of the concept and practice of nuclear-free zones in other regions of nonproliferation concern, specifically, in the South Asia subcontinent, Africa, and the Middle East.
Our nation is now a member of the Treaty of Tlatelolco, the Antarctic Treaty, the Seabed Arms Control Treaty, and the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space. These declare nuclear-weapons-free zones, respectively, for all of South America, Antarctica, the deep seabeds of the world, and all of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies.
These are vital pacts that complement bilateral and multilateral arms reduction treaties among the nuclear powers. The zones act, in a sense, to set borders on the arms race, to limit it, and to provide assurances to nervous nations that their neighbors are not attempting "to steal a nuclear arms march" on them.
We should not ignore the exclusion-zone front because of preoccupation with bilateral negotiations. Neither should we encourage or join zones that jeopardize our strategic interests by hampering our existing nuclear forces. That, to my mind, would be a form of unilateral disarmament that would undermine the strong deterrence we need to bring the Soviets to the nuclear arms reduction-negotiating table.
The United States has a new opportunity to create movement on this lesser-known front, but we remain mired in the trenches because of a lack of clarity among policymakers on whether a South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone hampers or helps our strategic interests.
The Treaty of Rarotonga, which came into effect in December 1986, has been endorsed by more than a dozen nations of the South Pacific, including such firm U.S. allies as Australia and Fiji.
The treaty prohibits the testing, manufacture, acquisition, and stationing of nuclear weapons in the territory of the signatories to the agreement. That zone stretches from Australia to Kiribati, from the Equator to the Antarctic - an immense trapezoid covering some 12 million square miles of the Earth's surface.
The United States was asked to sign protocols along with the other nuclear powers. The Reagan administration, citing worldwide security interests, earlier this year declined to sign.
China signed, as did the Soviet Union, although it did so only with significant reservations. France, which would be most directly affected because of its controversial nuclear weapons testing program in Polynesia, refused to sign. The United Kingdom also has not signed.
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