Joint New America Foundation – BASIC meeting in Washington, DC.
This private roundtable discussion was held at the New America Foundation\’s office and involved about 25 participants, including representatives from NATO-member embassies.
Jan Lodal (recent President of the Atlantic Council of the United States and a former senior Defense Department and White House official) and Arnold Kanter (former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs) started off the meeting with brief presentations.
During their All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) and BASIC organized-visit to Washington, DC, the Rt. Hon. Des Browne, MP (Labour), Dr. David Lidington, MP (Conservative), Tony Lloyd, MP (Labour), and Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Crossbench), shared their views on the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and the prospects for success on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation at this joint Carnegie Endowment for International Peace-BASIC event.
Senior politicians and former generals call for a wider nuclear debate
Senior UK politicians and former generals have set up a group to push for multilateral nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, the group\’s convener announced in Washington today.
The cross-party group is made up of almost all of the former senior ministers of foreign affairs and defence over the last two decades and includes three former defence chiefs who served during that time.
Cross-party delegation will talk with their US counterparts.
From next Tuesday (8 September 2009), the most senior cross-party parliamentary delegation focused on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation ever to visit Washington will be holding talks with key Senators and administration officials. Their meetings come at a critical and timely juncture with:
Keith Payne, a member of the US Strategic Posture Review Commission, has decried as folly the ongoing Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) follow-on negotiations between the United States and Russia.
Obama\’s chairing of this historic UN Security Council session has increased the chances of success in moving towards the goal of a world without nuclear weapons, said Anne Penketh, Washington Program Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC).
NATO officials, civil society and policy experts gathered to examine the organization’s future and explore how civil society groups and parliamentarians could advance NATO-related policies and actions.
This event was organized by NATO Watch, BASIC, Bertelsmann-Stiftung, and ISIS-Europe, with support from the Marmot Charitable Trust.
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