The United States envoy to the U.N. Friday said that the U.S. will seek to strengthen the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) during the treaty's month-long review conference which gets underway Monday in New York. Ambassador Susan Rice said that the U.S. has already shown commitment to the goals of the treaty by signing an agreement with Russia to reduce by 30 percent the number of its deployed strategic warheads. "We don't just come to this conference with the resolute commitment of President Obama to make progress across all three pillars. We also come with months of hard work already underway and already bearing fruit," Rice said. She said President Obama outlined those pillars in his speech last spring in Prague: "Countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them, and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy." There are 189 states that have joined the NPT treaty, which came into force in March 1970. Under the treaty, the five nations with nuclear weapons, the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France, must move toward disarmament; nations without nuclear weapons must forgo them; and all nations have an inalienable right to peaceful nuclear energy. India, Pakistan and Israel have declined to sign the treaty, while the Democratic People's Republic of Korea announced its withdrawal from the treaty in 2003.
