What's good for the goose is good for the gander: If nuclear weapons in the hands of his country is a bad idea, Iran's deputy UN ambassador Gholam Hossein Dehghani told the UN Disarmament Commission, then it's a bad idea in the hands of any country, and all the nuclear powers in the world should disarm.
In a speech at the UN on Wednesday, Dehghani accused the world's top nuclear powers, including the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France, of dragging their feet on prior commitments to reduce or eliminate their stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
Iran, he said, would demand a timetable for disarmament. A timetable, he argued, was a decade overdue.
Dehghani spoke just days after Western powers and Iran agreed on a framework deal that the US claims will reduce Iran's capability to produce a nuclear weapon.
Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf Arab states have expressed grave misgivings about the deal, saying that it would exacerbate a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and lead not to peace, but to war.
The UN is set to begin talks in the coming days on renewing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which was established in 1970. The Treaty urges member states to work toward eliminating nuclear weapons, and instead use nuclear power for peaceful purposes.