The Obama administration on Friday announced measures to reduce and eventually eliminate its stockpile of antipersonnel land mines, with the aim of joining the global treaty that prohibits them.
The announcement, made by a U.S. observer delegation to a conference in Mozambique on the progress of the 15-year-old treaty, was stronger than the previously stated administration position – that it was studying the treaty’s provisions. It appeared to put the United States on a trajectory to signing the treaty.
The administration did not indicate when the United States would sign the treaty, known as the Ottawa Convention, which the Clinton administration had originally encouraged and which most nations have signed.
The U.S. delegation said in a statement read out by the U.S. ambassador to Mozambique, Douglas M. Griffiths, that the United States would no longer produce or acquire antipersonnel land mines or replace old ones that expire.
The United States has not disclosed precise details about the size of its stockpile. Arms control experts have estimated it to be 10 million to 13 million.
The statement by the delegation, which is led by Steven R. Costner, the deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, also said the United States was “diligently pursuing solutions that would be compliant with and ultimately allow the United States to accede to the Ottawa Convention.”
Human rights groups and disarmament advocates cautiously welcomed the announcement, although they had been pressing for more.
“We are very pleased with the U.S. announcement that it intends to accede to the mine ban treaty, and that it has instituted a new policy banning future production of antipersonnel mines,” Stephen Goose, the director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch, who was attending the treaty conference in Maputo, the Mozambique capital, said in a statement.
But Goose was also critical of the new U.S. position, a view shared by many other disarmament advocates.
In an indication the United States is researching ways to replicate the strategic value of antipersonnel land mines without their collateral damage, Griffiths said in the statement that the U.S. policy included experimental work “to ascertain how to mitigate the risks associated with the loss of antipersonnel land mines.”
U.S. defense officials have argued that these weapons have an important purpose – in deterring ground invasions, for example – and that the United States would put itself at a disadvantage by renouncing them.
