Iran to lead UN Conference on Disarmament

Iran is set to lead the United Nations Conference on Disarmament for four weeks this year while member nations discuss potential major arms limitation and disarmament agreements. 

Iran, which has previously faced U.N. restrictions on its missile program, will be president of the conference from March 18 to 29 and May 13 to 24, the intergovernmental organization said last week. 

Because the presidency rotates by alphabetical order among member states, other countries that are set to lead the conference this year include India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland and Israel. 

The Conference on Disarmament and its predecessors have produced major deals such as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Core items in the conference agenda include the "cessation of the nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament; prevention of nuclear war, including all related matters" and the "prevention of an arms race in outer space," among other things. 

Meanwhile, experts, such as Heritage Foundation Foreign Policy Vice President Victoria Coates, are raising the alarm about increased production of weapons-grade uranium in Iran. 

"This is what they’ve spent the last three years doing while they were being engaged by the Biden administration in Vienna, technically in nuclear talks," Coates told the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show earlier this month, referring to the Biden administration's efforts to reenter the Iran nuclear deal. "They just kept enriching, kept deploying more centrifuges, and now we’re in this situation where the decision is in their hands John, it’s not in ours."

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