Business | Economy
Laureate seeks to get rid of nuclear arms
Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammad Al Baradai on Monday reiterated calls to free the world of nuclear weapons and beef up campaign against poverty.
- By Cleofe Maceda, Staff Reporter
- Published: 23:29 November 17, 2008
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Dubai: Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammad Al Baradai on Monday reiterated calls to free the world of nuclear weapons and beef up campaign against poverty.
At a press conference on the sidelines of the Leaders in Dubai Business Forum, Al Baradai said efforts to disarm nuclear-weapon states require a collective and multinational approach and that a treaty has to be in place to ban the production of nuclear materials for weapons purposes.
"We need to drastically reduce the 27,000 warheads that still exist in the world. About 95 per cent of these weapons are in the hands of the United States and Russia. We need to change the deployment of weapons between these two countries," Al Baradai said.
He recalled that in 1970, the nuclear-weapon states committed themselves to a world free of nuclear weapons, but the promise has yet to materialise. He, however, is hopeful that things are going to change under the upcoming term of US president-elect Barack Obama.
"People forget about that. We still have 27,000 warheads in existence. Hopefully, the tide will change with Obama coming into power. Hopefully, we will go back into the right direction," he noted.
He also lamented that people's core values are distorted, saying that countries pay more attention to losses incurred during the financial turmoil instead of reducing poverty around the world.
"You are not going to have peace in this world when you continue to have two billion people who live under $2 (Dh7.35) a day. You don't have peace if you have a repressive regime, which in turn is linked to poverty. You won't have peace if there's a huge gap between the rich and the poor," he said.
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