The UN Security Council, at a summit chaired by US President Barack Obama, unanimously approved a resolution on Thursday that envisaged a world without nuclear weapons. The resolution also called for an end to the proliferation of atomic weapons but did not name either Iran or North Korea, which western countries regards as the top atomic threats.
However British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicholas Sarkozy specifically called for tougher sanctions against Iran for defying UN demands to halt sensitive nuclear work. Obama presided over the two-hour meeting at UN headquarters in Manhattan, the first time a US president has chaired a Security Council summit since it was formed in 1946.
It was only the fifth time the council has met at the level of heads of state and government and the first to focus exclusively on nuclear proliferation and disarmament. "I called for this (summit) so that we may address at the highest level a fundamental threat to the security of all peoples and all nations - the spread and use of nuclear weapons," Obama said.
"This very institution was founded at the dawn of the atomic age, in part because man's capacity to kill had to be contained, and although we averted a nuclear nightmare during the Cold War, we now face proliferation of a scope and complexity that demands new strategies and new approaches."
Obama said the next year would be "absolutely critical" in determining whether efforts to stop the spread and use of nuclear weapons were successful. The US-drafted resolution called for "further efforts in the sphere of nuclear disarmament" to achieve "a world without nuclear weapons" and urged all countries that have not signed the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to do so.
NO MANDATORY DISARMAMENT STEPS Critics of the resolution said it failed to include mandatory provisions that would have required nuclear weapons states to take concrete disarmament steps. John Burroughs, who directs the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, an advocacy group, said the resolution did nothing to begin a process of disarmament.
All five permanent Security Council members - the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France - have atom bombs. Signatories to the NPT without nuclear arsenals have complained for decades that the world's official nuclear powers have failed to live up to their commitments while seeking to prevent other countries from joining the "nuclear club."
The United States refrained from naming countries in the resolution to avoid disagreements with Russia and China, UN diplomats said. But Brown and Sarkozy had no such qualms in their speeches to the council. "As evidence of its breach of international agreements grows, we must now consider far tougher sanctions together," Brown said.
The United States and Germany are among Western powers that have called for targeting Iran's energy sector. "If we have the courage to affirm and impose sanctions together against those who violate resolutions of the Security Council, we will be lending credibility to our commitment toward a world with fewer nuclear weapons," Sarkozy said.
Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful and rejects UN demands to halt it. In a statement responding to the council debate, Iran said it was open to talks but warned that they would fail unless the West dropped "illegal demands." Diplomats and analysts said the US decision to organise the summit highlighted a sharp shift on disarmament policy taken by the Obama administration. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, angered many NPT members by ignoring disarmament commitments undertaken by previous US governments.