Obama a rare chance for nuclear peace, rivals say

Feb 6, 2009, 18:07 GMT

Munich - The inauguration of US President Barack Obama offers the world a rare chance to cut back on nuclear weapons, some of his country's greatest rivals said Friday in Munich.

But in order to take that chance, the US will have to scale back its own ambitions, top officials from Russia and Iran said.

Obama's election and his call for nuclear arsenals to be cut back is a 'window of opportunity' for the US and Russia to come to a new deal on arms reduction, Russian deputy premier Sergey Ivanov told a VIP audience at the annual Munich Security Conference.

The end of the regime of former US president George W Bush is a 'golden opportunity' for the US to change its stance on Iran's controversial nuclear programme, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani, said.

'The US should appreciate that the countries of the (Middle East) region are calling for a chess game, not a boxing match,' he said.

The current head of the US House of Representatives' strategic forces sub-committee, Ellen Tauscher, answered that Obama 'wants to work on the elimination of nuclear weapons and repair the badly-damaged arms-control regime.'

The US should therefore lead global talks for a ban on the production of nuclear material, ratify a treaty banning nuclear testing and 'engage in immediate unconditional direct negotiations with North Korea and Iran' over their nuclear programmes, she said.

The comments came as top diplomats from around the world debated the problems of nuclear security and arms control on the first day of the three-day conference.

'As proliferation continues in Iran and North Korea in the face of all ongoing negotiations, the incentives for other countries to follow the same path will become overwhelming,' former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger warned the conference.

His argument was backed by the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, who warned that the world risked seeing the rise of another 20 nuclear-armed states if proliferation was not curbed.

But India's national-security advisor, Mayankote Kelath Narayanan, warned that his country would not trade its nuclear weapons for anything less than a guarantee of a nuclear-free world.

'While nuclear weapons are a dreaded item, for some of us the questions relating to their control, reduction and elimination are not a matter of academic debate, they involve serious and vital questions of national security,' he said.

The Munich conference opened just two weeks after Obama's inauguration raised hopes that the US would be willing to hold talks with both Moscow and Tehran on disarmament issues.

'My impression from Washington is that, after a long freeze, the administration is prepared to enter into a direct dialogue with Iran,' German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said.

Larijani was quick to damp hopes of a speedy rapprochement, saying that the US 'must accept (its) mistakes and change (its) strategies.'

Iran is under pressure from the international community over its nuclear programme, which it says is peaceful, but which observers fear is intended to create a nuclear bomb.

International diplomatic efforts are 'not about blocking a country from its right to peaceful use of atomic energy. Rather, it is about preventing the cover of peaceful work from being used to build up a military programme,' Steinmeier stressed.

Ivanov also called on the US to consider a string of Russian proposals aimed at revising conventional and nuclear arms-control deals in Europe.

Washington and Moscow are at odds over US plans to site elements of a missile-defence system in Europe, and over Russia's retaliatory withdrawal from the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, which limits the deployment of heavy weapons, in protest.

But on Friday Ivanov stepped back from confrontation, stressing that his country would only deploy missiles in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad if the US missile system were deployed.

And Tauscher echoed his tone, saying that the US Congress 'does not believe that the (missile-defence) system is effective' and would not approve its deployment unless it were shown to work.

Steinmeier said that he intended to call an international conference of defence experts in Berlin in June to debate ways of reviving the CFE treaty.