US, Israel nukes brought no advantage in Mideast war talks: ICAN

GENEVA, Switzerland: The US-Iran framework agreement to end the Middle East war proves that nuclear weapons provide no strategic advantage, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) said Thursday.

US President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a deal Wednesday meant to end the Middle East war, which has rocked the global economy.

The agreement lays the groundwork for detailed negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme and sanctions relief for Tehran.

ICAN highlighted that “Israel remains the only state in the Middle East with nuclear weapons”.

Israel, it said, was known to have around 90 nuclear weapons and remains outside both the NPT and the TPNW.

“A durable peace requires confronting the arsenal that actually exists, rather than concentrating enforcement on the state that has none,” it said.

ICAN, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its key role in drafting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), said the deal revealed how little advantage US and Israeli nuclear arsenals provided.

The war began at the end of February with US and Israeli strikes on Iran.

“The lesson of this war is the opposite of what the nuclear-armed states would have us believe,” ICAN chief Melissa Parke said in statement.

“Two nuclear powers attacked a country with no nuclear weapons, and it is the nuclear powers who have been forced to stop.”

It was clear, she said, that “nuclear weapons bought no security and no leverage; they only brought the US to the brink of ending a civilisation”.

Included in the text is a commitment from Iran that it will “not procure or develop nuclear weapons”.

But that declaration merely “reaffirms what international inspectors had established long before the war that produced it: Iran is a non-nuclear-weapon state”, ICAN said.

It pointed out that Iran had been a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) since 1970 and “is legally bound, as a non-nuclear-weapon state, not to acquire nuclear weapons, while also being subject to the safeguards mechanisms of the International Atomic Energy Agency”.

ICAN voiced hope that governments would “draw the right conclusion from a war in which nuclear weapons proved both dangerous and strategically irrelevant”.