Iran supports UN-imposed universal nuclear disarmament.

Embedded, but largely ignored, in a well-publicized interview with Time magazine was a statement from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterating a call made last year for universal nuclear disarmament through the United Nations.

In the interview with Time, conducted in Cuba during a summit of "non-aligned" nations, Iranian President Ahmadinejad was asked: "Does Iran have the right to nuclear weapons?" "We are opposed to nuclear weapons," replied the figurehead for Tehran's revolutionary clerical regime. "We think it has been developed just to kill human beings. It is not in the service of human beings. For that reason, last year in my address to the U.N. General Assembly, I suggested that a committee should be set up in order to disarm all the countries that possess nuclear weapons."

Ahmadinejad was not the first to make this suggestion to the General Assembly. President John F. Kennedy did so on September 25, 1961, and the Kennedy administration's proposal, which calls for a "global police force," is found in Freedom From War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World (State Department Publication 7277). The United Nations has been pursuing this plan ever since. But if fully implemented, weapons would not disappear--military power would merely shift to the global police force.