Iran's Call for Nuclear Abolition by 2025 is unreported by New York Times
By Alice Slater
August 28, 2012
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), formed in 1961 during the Cold War, is a group of 120 states and 17 observer states not
formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. The NAM held its opening 2012 session yesterday under the new
chairmanship of Iran, which succeeded Egypt as the Chair.
Significantly, an Associated Press story in the Washington Post headlined, “Iran opens nonaligned summit with calls for nuclear arms ban”, reported that “Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi opened the gathering by noting commitment to a previous goal
from the nonaligned group, known as NAM, to remove the world’s nuclear arsenals within 13 years. ‘We believe that the
timetable for ultimate removal of nuclear weapons by 2025, which was proposed by NAM, will only be realized if we follow
it up decisively,’ he told delegates.”
Yet the New York Times, which has been beating the drums for war with Iran, just as it played a disgraceful role in the deceptive reporting
during the lead-up to the Iraq War, never mentioned Iran’s proposal for nuclear abolition. The Times carried the bland
headline on its front page, “At Summit Meeting, Iran Has a Message for the World”, and then went on to state, “the message is clear. As Iran plays host to the biggest international conference …it wants
to tell its side of the long standoff with the Western powers which are increasingly convinced that Tehran is pursuing
nuclear weapons”, without ever reporting Iran’s offer to support the NAM proposal for the abolition of nuclear weapons
by 2025.
Surely the most sensible way to deal with Iran’s nascent nuclear weapons capacity is to call all the nations to the
table to negotiate a treaty to ban the bomb. That would mean abolishing the 20,000 nuclear bombs on the planet—in the
US, UK, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel—with 19,000 of them in the US and Russia. In
order to get Russia and China to the table, the US will also have to give up its dreams of dominating the earth with
missile “defenses” which, driven by corrupt military contractors and a corporate- owned Congress, are currently being
planted and based in provocative rings around Russia and China.
The ball is in the U.S. court to make good faith efforts for nuclear abolition. That would be the only principled way to
deal with fears of nuclear proliferation. The US must start with a genuine offer for negotiations to finally ban the
bomb in all countries, including a freeze on further missile development. It should stop beating up on Iran and North
Korea while it hypocritically continues to improve and expand the US arsenal, with tens of billions of dollars for new
weapons laboratories and bomb delivery systems, and fails failing to speak out against the nuclear activities of other
nations such as the enrichment of uranium in Japan and Brazil and the nuclear arsenal of Israel.
ENDS