UNITED NATIONS: Pakistan has assailed the double standards practiced by some states, which preach nuclear disarmament but fail to take necessary steps themselves.
Speaking in a session of the UN Disarmament Commission, a subsidiary of the General Assembly, Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi said that a handful of nuclear weapon states advocate abstinence for others but are unwilling to give up their large inventories of nuclear weapons or their modernisation.
“This doublespeak has only aggravated the sense of insecurity among other states,” she told the 35-member commission.
“Instead of fulfilling their legal disarmament obligations, these States have almost exclusively pursued non-proliferation with messianic zeal,” the Pakistani envoy added. “This gap between legality and reality has eroded the global faith in the mutually reinforcing nature of these processes.”
Hinting towards the US-India nuclear pacts, Ambassador Lodhi said that some nuclear weapon states have also concluded discriminatory nuclear cooperation agreements and helped grant waivers in an unfortunate departure from long held non-proliferation principles.
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The Pakistani envoy said it was a grim irony that weapons, which propel and sustain conflicts, come from areas or regions that enjoy peace. Only four countries account for two thirds of global arms exports, while major importers are developing countries, mainly in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
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