Tehran urges timetable on global nuclear disarmament
Iranian envoy to UN says world’s nuclear powers have not fulfilled their pledges to reduce nuclear stockpiles
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UNITED NATIONS — Iran on Wednesday night accused the five nuclear powers of failing to take concrete action to eliminate their stockpiles and called for negotiations on a treaty to achieve nuclear disarmament by a target date.
Iran’s deputy UN ambassador Gholam Hossein Dehghani told the told the UN Disarmament Commission on Wednesday that “a comprehensive, binding, irreversible, verifiable” treaty was the most effective and practical way to eliminate nuclear weapons.
He accused the nuclear powers — the US, Russia, China, Britain and France — of promising nuclear disarmament but making no progress and said the timetable should be set during negotiations.
Dehghani’s speech came days after the announcement of a framework agreement between Iran and the five nuclear powers and Germany aimed at keeping Tehran from being able to develop a nuclear weapon.
The commission, which includes all 193 member states, is supposed to make recommendations in the field of disarmament but has failed to make substantive proposals in the past decade.
Its three-week meeting is taking place ahead of the five-year review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the world’s single most important pact on nuclear arms, which begins on April 27.
The NPT is credited with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to dozens of nations since entering into force in 1970. It has done that via a grand global bargain: Nations without nuclear weapons committed not to acquire them; those with them committed to move toward their elimination; and all endorsed everyone’s right to develop peaceful nuclear energy.
Dehghani said that as a non-nuclear weapon state and NPT member, Iran believes it’s time to end the incremental approach toward disarmament and to start negotiations with all nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states on a convention that would set a deadline for ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
He noted that a proposal in 2013 by the Nonaligned Movement, which represents over 100 developing countries, to start negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear weapons convention in the Conference on Disarmament gained wide support.
Russia said President Vladimir Putin has confirmed that Moscow is ready for a serious and substantive dialogue on nuclear disarmament.
But Olga Kuznetsova, a counselor in Russia’s Foreign Ministry, warned in a speech Tuesday that the US deployment of a global missile defense system could lead to the resumption of a nuclear arms race.
The only way to change the situation, she said, is for states that pursue anti-missile capabilities follow the “universal principle” of not trying to strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other states.
Kuznetsova also warned that development of high-precision non-nuclear weapons threatened “strategic parity” between the two nuclear powers and could lead to “global destabilization of (the) international situation in general.”
Chinese counselor Sun Lei urged countries to “abandon Cold War mentality” and said those with the largest nuclear arsenals should be the first to make “drastic and substantive” cuts in their nuclear weapons.
Ukraine’s representative called for the urgent development of a binding agreement that would give assurances to countries without nuclear weapons that they will not be threatened by nuclear weapons. Pakistani Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi echoed that call.
The United States said the negotiation of a treaty that would cap available fissile material “is the next logical step on the multilateral nuclear disarmament agenda.” John Bravaco said the US has not produced fissile material for nuclear weapons since 1989.
North Korea’s deputy UN ambassador, An Myong Hun, declared that “our nuclear forces are the life and soul of our nation” and will not be given up as long as nuclear threats remain in the world.
Earlier Wednesday the Iranian defense minister made it clear that international inspectors would not be granted access to the state’s military sites under the framework agreement.
“No such agreement has been reached and basically, visiting military centers are among the red lines and no visit to these centers will be allowed,” Brigadier General Hossein Dehgan said, according to Iranian media reports quoting a Defense Ministry statement.
Dehgan said international media reports to the effect that the deal will allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts to inspect military centers across Iran were “lies” and “deceits.”
“The determination of the nuclear negotiating team of the Islamic Republic of Iran is so that it will not allow anything be imposed on the Iranian nation,” he added.
Ever since the framework agreement was announced last week, the various parties have set out sometimes sharply differing accounts of what has been agreed, provoking escalating controversy and criticism over a deal that President Barack Obama has hailed as historic and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned is “very bad” and paves Iran’s path to the bomb.
According to the official American fact sheet on the framework agreement, the IAEA “will have regular access to all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, including to Iran’s enrichment facility at Natanz and its former enrichment facility at Fordo, and including the use of the most up-to-date, modern monitoring technologies.”
In addition, “Iran will be required to grant access to the IAEA to investigate suspicious sites or allegations of a covert enrichment facility, conversion facility, centrifuge production facility, or yellowcake production facility anywhere in the country.”
The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Friday issued its own fact sheet, which differs starkly from the official American parameters and from a French fact sheet obtained by The Times of Israel.
The Times of Israel Community.