The US and Iran clashed at the UN on Monday during the first day of a month-long conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which began amid a very fragile ceasefire between the two countries and a continued US blockade on Iranian ports.
Christopher Yeaw, the US assistant secretary for arms control, fumed over the fact that Iran was chosen as one of the 34 vice presidents of the conference, which is being chaired by Vietnam.
“Rather than choosing to use this review conference to defend the integrity of the NPT and call Iran to account, we instead elect Iran a vice president,” Yeaw said, according to The Associated Press. “It is beyond shameful and an embarrassment to the credibility of this conference.”
Iran’s representative at the conference, Reza Najafi, who serves as Tehran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), fired back at Yeaw, pointing out that the US is the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon.
“It is indefensible that the United States, as the only state ever to have used nuclear weapons, and the one that continues to expand and modernize its nuclear arsenal… seeks to position itself as an arbitrator of compliance,” Najafi said.
He pointed out the US and Israel’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, calling the attacks a “grave violation of international law and a direct assault on the integrity of the global nonproliferation” system.
Najafi also said that the US was obstructing progress toward a nuclear weapons-free Middle East by supporting Israel, which, unlike Iran, is not a signatory to the NPT and has a secret nuclear weapons program and an undeclared nuclear stockpile. The US also doesn’t acknowledge Israel’s nukes, a policy that allows the US to provide military assistance to Israel without worrying about the 1976 Symington Amendment, a foreign assistance law that prohibits aid to countries that traffic in or receive nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.
“I can’t comment on that specific question. I’d have to refer you to the Israelis on that,” Thomas DiNanno, the US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said last month when asked about Israel’s nuclear capabilities.
Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which is estimated to be somewhere between 70 and 400 nuclear warheads, is almost always missing from the conversation in US media coverage and political discussions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, which has never been used to develop weapons.
Last year, the AP reported that satellite images showed construction work on a major new facility at the Dimona nuclear site, and seven experts who examined the images all told the AP that they believed the construction was related to Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
