Obama offers vision of world without nuclear weapons

Strasbourg: US President Barack Obama called for a world without atomic weapons on Friday after arriving at the Rhineland border in France for a two-day Nato summit, where he won French endorsement of his new Afghanistan strategy.

Obama reached out to Russia and urged allies to stand firm against Iran's nuclear ambitions and North Korea's planned missile launch. Security was tight in the eastern French city of Strasbourg and Kehl as France and Germany put final touches to their preparations for the Nato summit celebrating the alliance's 60th anniversary.

Obama said the threat of a nuclear catastrophe still remained. "Even with the Cold War over, the spread of nuclear weapons or the theft of nuclear material could lead to the extermination of any city on the planet," Obama said at a town hall meeting in Strasbourg.

"This weekend in Prague, I will lay out an agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons," he said, referring to a EU-US summit in the Czech Republic on Sunday.

Obama, who helped broker a deal at a G20 summit in London to tackle the global financial crisis, sought similar consensus from Nato leaders on how to tackle the worsening Afghan crisis. French President Nicolas Sarkozy immediately threw his weight behind Obama's new plan, which aims to get a grip on rising violence by Al Qaida and Taliban militants.

Hundreds of Nato officials and journalists thronged Strasbourg and the town of Kehl in Germany amid tight security. "We have never seen such security measures even during the visits of Ronald Reagan and Yasser Arafat," Kuntz, a French taxi driver, told Gulf News.

— With inputs from AP and Reuters