Iran
calls for US, other nuclear armed states to be ousted from IAEA
ABCD
Tehran - The '1st International Conference on Disarmament and
Non-Proliferation' started
Saturday morning with the participation of officials from some 60
countries. The
Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused Washington and its allies of double standards by calling for nuclear non-proliferation while maintaining stockpiles of weapons of mass
destruction. In an even more uncompromising speech, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the
'bullying and aggressor regime of the United States' of violating their own obligations to disarmament under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) while seeking to punish other NPT states which did not possess
weapons.
He demanded that the US and other nuclear armed nations should be ejected from the board of directors of the UN nuclear watchdog the IAEA. Ahmadinejad said that there are currently over 20,000 nuclear warheads throughout the world half of which are located in the
US. The Zionist regime has over 200 nuclear warheads and has waged several wars in the region is fully supported by Washington and its
allies. This is while other states are prevented from making peaceful use of nuclear energy, he reiterated.
Expecting those countries which have the veto right and are big sellers of weapons in the world to establish security and to disarm other states is
illogical, Ahmadinejad
said, underlining the need for establishment of an independent international group for planning and supervising over the nuclear
disarmament. The group should suspend membership of those countries possessing, using and threatening use of nuclear weapons at the IAEA and its Board of
Governors.
The Tehran gathering comes just days after US President Obama used a meeting of 50 governments in Washington to discuss nuclear disarmament
to support sanctions on Iran. The slogan for the two day meeting is
'Nuclear energy for all, nuclear power for none'. Delegates
to the Tehran Conference were first shown a film of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Ahmadinejad then told them that America was the planet's only 'atomic criminal' and accused it of using a weapon of 'atomic waste' during the
war on Iraq. He stressed meanwhile that Iran, which the West accuses of seeking a nuclear weapons capability, regarded nuclear weapons as forbidden under Islamic teaching. He said a 'handful of arrogant and expansionist states' were determined to maintain their nuclear arsenals and to arm their ally 'the Zionist
regime'.
Russia and China have sent delegates to Tehran. Neither the US nor any of the Eiropean Union's 27 nations are
represented.
