Kaveh L. Afrasiabi: Iran Takes up the Nuclear Cudgel!

The second international conference on nuclear disarmament hosted by Tehran gets barely a mention in the Western media, despite featuring delegates from 40 nations as well as representatives from both the United Nations and its nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). "What we want to convey is a message to the entire world, that Iran is trying its best for this argument for non-proliferation." Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salchi told the audience in an opening address on Sunday. Forty years on non-proliferation conventions had produced no significant breakthrough in nuclear disarmament, and the nuclear powers have not implemented their obligation under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), he said, adding that Iran believed that the use of atomic weapons should be legally banned, as chemical and biological weapons were through mandatory conventions, he said. As Iran gears up to assume leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) next year, such an initiative represents a step in the right direction, in light of the NAM countries' strong misgivings about nuclear double standards on the part of Western countries and the growing restrictions on the transfer of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, pursuant to articles of the NPT. As expected, some Western "pundits", such as David Frum, the man behind George W Bush's notorious "axis of evil" speech, cast a cynical gaze at the Tehran disarmament conference, describing it as a "theater of the absurd". What seems MORE absurd to many is the simple fact that with the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads still in existence presenting a calamitous potential for human existence and planetary survival, so little attention has been placed in the West on practical mechanisms to achieve the lofty objective of "a world without nuclear weapons".