By Alexander Manda
MEXICO CITY, Sept. 9 (Xinhua) -- Ban Ki-Moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, on Wednesday called for more nuclear free zones, modeled on the Latin America wide area created in Mexico in the late 1960s, at the opening session of a disarmament conference here.
"We are hoping to see progress on this topic, especially in the Middle East," Ban told the opening session of the 62nd United Nations conference on disarmament which began on Wednesday in Mexico City.
He praise Central Asian nations for putting such a zone in place in 2006, and Latin America for pioneering the trend with the Tlalteloco agreement, signed in Mexico City in 1967.
He said that disarmament is the United Nation's top priority under his administration, and that while nuclear weapons are the top priority, the UN also seeks to massively reduce the use of and trade in small arms including pistols and rifles which kill many more people each year.
Despite the end of the Cold War, "military spending continues to rise today and is now well above one trillion dollars," he said.
"Many of the world's 12,000 nuclear weapons are still on hair-trigger alert, threatening the survival of our species," he said.
UN statistics show that world weapons spending is above 200 dollars a person, while around a billion people worldwide are struggling to survive on a dollar a day, a widely used definition of absolute poverty. Ban said that the UN pursues the idea that development cannot be secured without disarmament and that disarmament cannot be secured without development.
"We are very pleased that the UN Security Council will hold a meeting on Sept. 24 to discuss nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament," he added. The meeting will be chaired by U.S. President Barack Obama, who Ban said had revived disarmament effort worldwide.
Ban said the UN was pursuing disarmament based on five guiding principles, the first of which was never to lose focus on disarmament.
The second is that "disarmament must be reliably verified. The UN is seeking a new convention or mutually reinforcing instruments," he said. Thirdly "disarmament must be related to legal obligations."
In this context he praised Obama for committing to the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on nuclear weapons. The agreement requires ratification by all 44 nations that have nuclear reactors or weapons to enter into force. India, Pakistan and North Korea, which have nuclear capabilities, have not signed the treaty. Nuclear armed India and Pakistan went to war in the early part of this decade, but did not use nuclear weapons and signed a ceasefire in 2003.
"The UN will host a special meeting at the sidelines of the general assembly to urge early adoption of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," he said.
The fourth principle is seeking the greatest possible transparency from nations with nuclear weapons and the fifth is that disarmament must anticipate new types of weapons like those based on vehicles in space.
Ban stressed that disarmament is needed because security can never be completely guaranteed by even the most spectacular weapons alone.
"No nation acting on its own, no matter how powerful, can solve this on its own," he said.
Ban said that he was hopeful for an agreement pursued by Obama, to check the production of fissionable materials, which can later be used for nuclear bombs.
The conference is run by the United Nations Department of Public Information alongside leading non-government organizations, under the headline "For Peace and Development: Disarm Now." It is the first time the annual conference has been held in Latin America and only the second time outside of UN headquarters in New York.
