White House Renews Push for Fissile Material Ban

The Obama Administration says it’s revitalizing efforts to end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons by way of a multilateral, verifiable agreement: the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty. The State Department announced the renewed push for the treaty in an Oct. 10 release. Since, as State Secretary Hillary Clinton has said, an FMCT is “too important a matter to be left in a deadlock forever,” the United States is “consulting with China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, as well as others, to find a way to reach consensus and move forward,” states the release. The treaty would be “the next fundamental step towards multilateral nuclear disarmament,” as it would ban, for the first time, the production of fissile materials for use in nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, states the release. The State Department noted that the United States has not produced plutonium for weapons since 1988.