Iran Nuclear-Blix
Former head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission Hans Blix has again criticized the US and its allies for not doing more to resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear programme.

"There are many things that can be done on the western side," Blix said, contrasting the situation with the US approach to the issue of North Korea as but one example.

"The North Koreans have been offered guarantees against any attacks from outside, the Iranians have not been offered this as far as we know, nor have they been offered diplomatic relations which the North Koreans have been," he said.

The former chief weapons inspector, who was also director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was in London to launch his new book, Why Nuclear Disarmament Matters, which includes specific suggestions for credible multilateral disarmament.

Speaking in an interview with Channel Four News on Monday night, he criticized the double standards of the US in threatening other countries.

"When you see talks now with the North Korean and the Iranian, they sit there and are told by the US and other, who retain all these weapons, you should not have all these nuclear weapons, that it is a danger for you, it is not a danger for us, it is for the safety of the world that is very hypocritical," Blix said.

He warned that the world was spending about dlrs 1,300 billion on military expenditure and suggested instead that it would be a better and safer world if the five permanent members of the UN Security Council did not have their arsenal of nuclear arms.

"The P5 are not really imagining any deterrence between themselves any longer, so they are gone the reasons to do away with the threats we have," the former Swedish foreign minister said.

He said that after the end of the Cold War, "the convenient truth is not to get rid of these enormous quantities of weapons and threats.

"We see how the US is building up a new policy of containment." Blix, who now chair of the independent Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission in Stockholm, last year criticized demands made against Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment as "illogical" as a precondition for talks.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he has also been scathing over US and UK fixing of the intelligence to justify the war based upon weapons of mass destruction that never existed.