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UN council backs broad nuclear agenda
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-25 11:47 "We may all be threatened one day by a neighbor, by a neighbor endowing itself" with nuclear weapons, Sarkozy said. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called on the council to consider "far tougher sanctions" against Iran. In reaction, the Iranian UN mission later issued a statement denouncing "fear-mongering" and "falsehoods," and repeating its claim that its nuclear program is designed for civilian energy purposes only. The flare-up came just a week before a scheduled Oct. 1 meeting in Geneva between the Iranians and European, US and Chinese representatives to try to move toward resolving the long-running standoff. In his speech, Libya's UN ambassador, Abdurrahman Mohamed Shalgam, filling in for absent leader Moammar Gadhafi, targeted another suspected nuclear weapons program, that of Israel, which rejects the Nonproliferation Treaty. Israel's nuclear sites should be subject to international oversight, Shalgam said. "Otherwise, all the states of the Middle East will say, `We have a right to develop nuclear weapons. Why Israel alone?'" Thursday's omnibus resolution also expressed "grave concern" about the threat of nuclear terrorism, and urged states to take firmer steps to keep potential bomb material out of terrorist hands. It encouraged governments to lay down stricter guidelines for exporting nuclear technology, for example, and to do more to detect and disrupt nuclear trafficking. The White House said Thursday's action demonstrated "growing international political will behind the (Obama) nuclear agenda." It also endorsed ideas that have not always found favor in Washington. China's president focused on one of those ideas, a late addition to the final resolution referring to "negative security assurances," guarantees to non-nuclear-weapon states that they will never be attacked with nuclear weapons. The US has resisted making such assurances all-encompassing and legally binding. Addressing this, China's Hu Jintao said all weapons states "should make an unequivocal commitment of unconditionally not using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states." The resolution also identified global nuclear disarmament as a "pillar" of the Nonproliferation Treaty, a point much ignored in past years by the Republican White House of George W. Bush. The resolution called on states to negotiate "a treaty on general and complete disarmament." In his agenda-setting speech in Prague last April, Obama embraced such a goal, as he did earlier in a joint statement with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. He repeated that commitment on Thursday. "The historic resolution we just adopted enshrines our shared commitment to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons," he told the summit. "And it brings Security Council agreement on a broad framework for action to reduce nuclear dangers as we work toward that goal." Arms-control advocates applauded the unprecedented Security Council action. It "brings much-needed global focus to the risks posed by the spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear know-how and nuclear material," said a statement from four leading US ex-statesmen — former Secretaries of State Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry and ex-US Sen. Sam Nunn. The four have led a 2-year-old campaign to move toward abolition of nuclear arms.
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