The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) has lauded the Philippines for its contributions to global peace and security, the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) said Wednesday.
In a meeting with President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. at Malacañan Palace in Manila on Tuesday, CTBTO executive secretary Robert Floyd acknowledged Filipino scientists’ high-quality data gathering and scientific monitoring.
“Your colleagues, your people here, they are doing a super job, and they are contributing to global peace and security by [providing] consistent, good, high-quality data which we put together in Vienna,” Floyd told Marcos, as quoted by the PCO in a news release.
“We share it with all 187 states that belong to our treaty, so you are making a material contribution towards the confidence states can have that nobody can cheat,” he added.
Floyd said the CTBTO would exhaust all efforts to protect the global norm against nuclear testing during turbulent and uncertain times.
He said one of the initiatives includes the International Monitoring System (IMS), a unique global network of 321 monitoring stations and 16 laboratories hosted by 89 countries.
Around 90 percent of the 337 IMS facilities are already up and running, providing a steady flow of real-time data of monitored phenomena, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and meteor strikes, as well as non-nuclear explosions such as the blast that devastated Beirut in 2020.
Floyd was scheduled to visit the IMS stations in Tanay and Tagaytay.
“It does my heart good to meet your technical people and down at the Taal Volcano Observatory who are doing that work and they’re so proud of it. It was a wonderful thing yesterday to visit them,” he said.
Floyd is in Manila to participate in the 16th ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) Inter-Sessional Meeting on Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ISM NPD). He will deliver the keynote address during the ARF ISM NPD dinner and present CTBTO’s work.
The Preparatory Commission for the CTBTO was established in 1996, with headquarters in Vienna, Austria.
It is an organization tasked with building up the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) verification regime, in preparation for the treaty’s entry into force and promoting its universality. (PNA)
