Iran asks UN to make Israel give up nuclear arms

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 20 (Reuters) Iran, whose President said last week that Israel's days were numbered, called on the UN Security Council yesterday to compel the Jewish state to give up its nuclear weapons.

Iranian UN Ambassador Javad Zarif wrote to the 15-nation UN body after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in a German TV interview, implied for the first time that his country had nuclear weapons.

Israel had never before acknowledged having atomic bombs and, unlike Iran, is not a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, known as the NPT.

Israel is assumed to have about 200 nuclear weapons, Hans Blix, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog, said last June.

Olmert's statement triggered widespread criticism from Arab states that the West was working under a double standard in pressing Iran to suspend its nuclear activities while ignoring Israeli arms.

The Iranian letter marked the first formal call for action against Israel by the UN Security Council, which is currently negotiating a resolution that would impose sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear ambitions.

Tehran says its nuclear programme seeks only to produce electricity but Western powers fear it is using a domestic nuclear programme as a cover for making bombs.

Olmert's hint that Israel has a nuclear arsenal ''has removed any excuse -- if there ever were any -- for continued inaction by the council in the face of this actual threat to international peace and security,'' Zarif said.

He urged the council to ''compel it (Israel) to abandon nuclear weapons, urge it to accede to the NPT without delay and demand this regime to place promptly all its nuclear facilities under IAEA full-scope safeguards.'' Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, referring to Israel at an international conference questioning the Holocaust last week in Tehran, told delegates that ''the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want.'' ''Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out,'' he said.

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