Senior Aide to Zarif: Disarmament conference should focus on nuclear disarmament

Geneva (IP) - Speaking at the United Nations (UN) Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland, a senior aide and assistant to Iranian foreign minister Mohsen Baharvand said the disarmament conference should focus on nuclear disarmament as the most urgent concern for the international community.

Iran Press/Europe: The Conference on Disarmament is a multilateral disarmament forum established by the international community to negotiate arms control and disarmament agreements.

Delegates from Croatia, Russia, United Kingdom, Greece, Japan, Romania, Estonia, Iran, Malaysia, and Indonesia attended the conference.

Deputy Iranian Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs, Mohsen Baharvand, called Tuesday on the Disarmament Conference held in Geneva to start negotiations on nuclear disarmament as an integral part of its Program of Work.

“We should avoid politicizing the CD and respect its rules of procedures.”

Mohsen Baharvand also criticized a US move to deploy low-yield nuclear missiles on submarines, saying at a disarmament conference on Tuesday it made nuclear war “more likely”.

The US Defense Department said earlier this month the Navy had fielded a low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead.

“Such provocative actions must be condemned,” Mohsen Baharvand, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for international and legal affairs, told the Conference on Disarmament in the UN building in Geneva.

“A new nuclear arms race is being accelerated,” he added.

Low-yield nuclear weapons, while still devastating, have a strength of less than 20 kilotons, which is about the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

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