AMY GOODMAN: North Korea said today it will regard any U.S. move to seek U.N. sanctions as, quote, “the green light to a war.” The official North Korean news agency said the country will take defensive measures.

The warning came after the White House yesterday rejected North Korea’s offer to scrap its nuclear program, stop selling ballistic missiles, and readmit U.N. inspectors. North Korea said it would disarm after the U.S. provides a guarantee that it will not attack and resumes shipments of oil and food aid. White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer said Pyongyang will not be rewarded for, quote, “bad behavior.”

Secretary of State General Colin Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, quote, “We will not be intimidated by their claims and threats. As the president has said, we will not be blackmailed.”

All of this comes as the nearly 200 nations who have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty are meeting in Geneva to review the implementation of the 1970 pact. In an address to the gathering on the opening day, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation John Wolf criticized North Korea’s withdrawal from the treaty and accused Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons.

Disarmament experts say the risks of nuclear proliferation are worse now than they were for the last 50 years. They say Washington’s lack of commitment to nonproliferation is as damaging as the behavior of the proliferators.

We’re joined now by Rebecca Johnson, director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy. She’s in Geneva covering the talks for the institute’s journal, Disarmament Diplomacy. And she has been in meetings all day.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

REBECCA JOHNSON: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us, Rebecca Johnson. Well, can you talk now about the first addresses of the nuclear weapons-owning states and what those addresses have been, particularly the United States, and what they mean?

REBECCA JOHNSON: Yes. I should say at the outset that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty enshrined two kinds of bargain, and a very central part of it was that in return for agreeing not to try to develop or acquire nuclear weapons by 182 countries in the world, the five that already had them by the year 1967 agreed that they would progressively get rid of their nuclear weapons and eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

So, it’s in that context that the states meeting here in Geneva were very surprised to find that the United States focused almost exclusively on North Korea, Iran, Iraq and also mentioned Libya and Syria as threatening the nonproliferation regime. Now, clearly, all of those countries have serious questions to answer, but the United States itself is not in full compliance with its own obligations under this treaty, or indeed under several other treaties, and has so far refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, that was a very central part of the commitments undertaken in 1995, when the treaty was made permanent.

So, a number of worries are raised by the statement that was made by Assistant Secretary of State John Wolf in relation to North Korea, where he said that although the United States was determined to end North Korea’s threat through peaceful diplomatic means, he also stated, “All our options remain available.” I think it’s in that context that a number of countries here are very concerned that the United States might be looking to take military means with regard to North Korea, which would be profoundly destabilizing for the whole North Asian region.

AMY GOODMAN: In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Bush signed the National Security Presidential Directive 17, which stated, quote, “The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force — including potentially nuclear weapons — to the use of [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States.” How does that weigh in here?

REBECCA JOHNSON: Well, it weighs very, very badly, because also as part of this treaty, the United States and the other nuclear weapon states agree to what are called security assurances. And by those, they promise that they will not use nuclear weapons in any attack on any non-nuclear weapon state party to the treaty. Now, although North Korea has announced that it wants to withdraw from the treaty, the state parties to the treaty here in Geneva have refused to accept that, and the question is still actually unresolved. And so that, you know, quite apart — so, there’s a legal question about whether this kind of threat can ever be justified. And the state parties here are saying it cannot ever be justified in this day and age.

But secondly, there is the commitment that in relation to this treaty, not to threaten states that are non-nuclear weapon-owning parties to the treaty with nuclear weapons. And, you know, it’s just logical. If you have states that say, “We will not ever acquire nuclear weapons,” they need to be assured that they won’t be attacked with them. And what’s happening as a result of the Bush administration’s policy is that in attacking Iraq in the way that they did, in a sense, they provided an appalling advertisement to would-be proliferators but also to national leaders who wanted to prevent the United States from ever trying to interfere in their affairs and threaten them with nuclear weapons by making it clear that any state that already had nuclear weapons would somehow manage to deter the United States. Now, that’s a very, very dangerous precedent for the United States to be setting. They are — really, at this point, their policies are damaging and seriously eroding international law and the international treaty-based system of relations for trying to find peaceful ways of dealing with conflict and dealing with states such as North Korea that are trying to hedge their bets with regard to nuclear weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Rebecca Johnson, director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy. Can you talk about the meetings that you’ve been in today, and whether conferences like these, the conference that you’re attending in Geneva right now on nuclear nonproliferation, matter at all?

REBECCA JOHNSON: I think these treaties matter a very great deal. Without international law, we would have a nuclear free-for-all. You know, President Kennedy said back in the early ’60s that he expected to see 20, 25 countries with nuclear weapons and incredible insecurity as a result. It was precisely because he had that fear that he ensured that the United States went into negotiations with the Soviet Union that ended up — after, you know, his time, but ended up under the subsequent president with the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, of which nuclear disarmament was a very, very important part. And the other treaties, like the Biological Weapons Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Treaty, these completely prohibit, eliminate and ban the possession or the production of biological and chemical weapons. But, of course, they have to be verified.

And when you get a country such as the United States, the most powerful country in the world, wanting all of these treaties’ restrictions to be applied to other countries, to weaker countries, but refuse to accept reciprocal constraints on their own manufacturing and weapons development capabilities, then they make a nonsense of the idea that the international law, as with your own domestic law, needs to be applied without regard to kind of status or size. It’s the equivalent of a judge who pronounces on the crimes of others and then goes out and kills people with drunken driving. Of course that judge has to be under the law, as the United States must be under the law, if it wants this law, these laws, to be applied to proliferation states and also to terrorist actors.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask this. Senator Edward Kennedy warned that the Bush administration is preparing to restart the testing of nuclear weapons so it could develop a new generation of bunker-busting bombs and tactical mini nukes, potentially triggering a new arms race. And then you have Dr. Sidney Drell, who is a theoretical physicist who once served as a consultant to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and currently sits on the National Nuclear Security Administration Advisory Committee, saying it’s unlikely that so-called nuclear bunker busters will ever penetrate far enough into the earth to prevent massive radioactive fallout. He said, “In order to destroy the most worrisome underground targets, which are believed to be at depths of some thousand feet, the U.S. would need a bomb 10 times the strength of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima.” Drell said, “We’re not talking about low-collateral-damage, low-yield weapons. That is a physical myth.” Are these so-called mini nukes included in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?

REBECCA JOHNSON: Absolutely, yes. Not only are they included, all nuclear weapons of whatever size are included under this treaty. But not only that, but as part of the agreement to extend the treaty in 1995, the U.S. and, indeed, all the other countries there agreed to conclude a comprehensive nuclear test ban by 1996. And at that time, the assistant secretary of state spoke publicly here at the U.N. in Geneva and promised that as a result of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the United States would not develop mini nukes or micro nukes or any of these other destabilizing new tactical-type developments. He promised that no new nuclear weapons would be developed. Now, the United States is — it was the first country to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, and it still has not ratified. And that is causing immense dismay here. There are some very real concerns about the developments.

And Sidney Drell is absolutely correct. I mean, who should know better than he, with his experiences? These deep-penetrating warheads are presented by politicians as if they’re going to burrow deep in the ground and be the equivalent of a deep underground nuclear test that would somehow be contained. That is not the case. They would be the equivalent of virtually an above-ground detonation, in that they would lift large amounts of earth and whatever was on top of them high into the sky in a devastating mushroom cloud that would contaminate and kill for miles around the area in which they had so-called penetrated. This is the reality of those so-called mini nukes. They would be a nuclear weapon that would result in a mushroom cloud and a large number of deaths.

So, if the United States really wants to address the terrorist uses of nuclear weapons and terrorist acquisition, if it’s really serious about wanting to stop these weapons getting into the hands of any malign terrorist or leader, then they have to pursue a comprehensive policy of disarmament and verified elimination of the weapons and of the materials that are used to produce them. And for the United States and all countries with its still some 30,000 nuclear weapons, many of which may be in storage but are perfectly usable, for the United States to say that it has not got enough nuclear weapons and it needs more and newer developments makes a mockery of the notion of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca Johnson, I want to thank you very much for being with us, director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, in Geneva to cover the talks for the institute’s journal, Disarmament Diplomacy, website www.acronym.org.uk.

When we come back, we’re going to Iraq. Stay with us.