Mbeki urges moderate nuke line

2006-03-30 23:06

Cape Town - South Africa, the only country to have acquired secretly and then voluntarily dismantled nuclear weapons, on Thursday urged a diplomatic solution to the stalemate on Iran.

President Thabo Mbeki said the International Atomic Energy Authority, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, was best placed to solve the ongoing crisis, rather than the UN security council.

He warned that any future imposition of sanctions risked escalating tensions in a troubled part of the world, and said that no one country or group of countries had the right to play global "dictator".

Mbeki told parliament that all countries must have the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful means.

But, he urged Iran to co-operate with the IAEA to reassure critics, such as the United States and the European Union, that it had no plans to develop a weapons capability.

South Africa regarded itself as a potential honest broker in the crisis because of its own experience.

The apartheid government assembled a secret nuclear arsenal at the height of its international isolation in the 1980s and publicly acknowledged this to the rest of the world in 1993.

The weapons programme was dismantled under IAEA supervision.

- AP