Apr 27 (Reuters) – The United States and Iran clashed at the United Nations on Monday over Iran’s nuclear program and the country’s choice to be one of dozens of vice presidents at a month-long conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The 11th conference to analyze the implementation of the NPT, which came into force in 1970, began this Monday at the UN in New York. Different groups nominated 34 vice-presidents of the conference, and the conference president, Vietnam’s UN ambassador Do Hung Viet, said that Iran was chosen by the ‘group of non-aligned states and others’.
Christopher Yeaw, assistant secretary of the US Office of Arms Control and Nonproliferation, told the conference that the choice of Iran was an ‘affront’ to the NPT.
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He said it was ‘indisputable that Iran has long demonstrated its contempt for NPT non-proliferation commitments’ and refused to cooperate with the UN nuclear watchdog to resolve questions about its program.
He called Iran’s choice ‘beyond shameful and an embarrassment to the credibility of this conference’.
Reza Najafi, who serves as Tehran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, dismissed the US statement as ‘baseless and politically motivated’.
‘It is indefensible that the United States, as the only state that has ever used nuclear weapons and that continues to expand and modernize its nuclear arsenal… seeks to position itself as the arbiter of compliance,’ he said at the meeting.
The nuclear issue has been at the center of the United States and Israel’s two-month war against Iran, with US President Donald Trump reiterating on Sunday that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.
Iran has long demanded that Washington recognize its right to enrich uranium, which Tehran says it seeks only for peaceful purposes but which Western powers say could be used to make nuclear weapons.
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Iran has insisted it does not seek nuclear weapons. But the IAEA and the US intelligence community have separately assessed that Tehran had a nuclear weapons development program that was terminated in 2003.
Iranian sources on Monday released Tehran’s latest proposal to end the conflict, which would set aside discussion over Tehran’s nuclear program until the war is over and disputes over Persian Gulf shipping are resolved.
Trump and his top national security advisers met to discuss the conflict on Monday and White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters that ‘the president’s red lines on Iran have become very, very clear, not just to the American public, but to them as well.’
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