member Conference on Disarmament to start negotiations to draft a universal, unconditional and legally binding instrument to guarantee that nuclear weapon states would not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states that have formally renounced them. Addressing the Conference, Pakistan's Ambassador Masood Khan said that Pakistan, for its part, had made a solemn pledge that it would not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states, a message received by the government in Islamabad said. Developing a law to give security assurances to nuclear states was not merely a “moral imperative but a legal obligation”, Khan said. He said that, all along, Pakistan had been trying to build consensus around the negative security assurances for the non-nuclear states. Khan reminded that Conference that it was due to the efforts of Pakistan and several other members of the conference that an Ad Hoc Committee was established in 1998, which regrettably could not continue its work. In the Conference, he said, extensive ground work had been done to developing a legally binding instrument. The ambassador said that the crisis of confidence stemmed partly from the absence of progress in codifying negative security assurances.
