Speaking yesterday at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea, Argentine Foreign Minister Hector Timerman directly confronted the British government, repeating earlier charges that Britain has sent a submarine capable of carrying nuclear weapons to the South Atlantic and demanding that the Cameron government "confirm the absence of nuclear weapons" in that region.
Timerman's accusations so unnerved British Deputy Prime Minister Nicholas Clegg, that he had to entirely rewrite his speech in order to respond, beginning his remarks with the angry denial that Timerman's allegations are "unfounded, baseless insinuations," and insisting that Britain has respected the 1969 Tlatelolco nuclear non-proliferation treaty since its inception, "and will continue to do so." He seethed that Timerman had "crowbarred" Argentina's complaint against the UK into his speech in Seoul, when it wasn't on the agenda! What nerve!
Against the backdrop of the approaching 30th anniversary of the 1982 Malvinas War on April 2, Timerman charged that the UK had violated the Tlatelolco treaty by engaging in "recent episodes of militarization," in the South Atlantic, by which "an extra-regional power sends a nuclear submarine to a zone whose sovereignty is the object of a dispute recognized by the United Nations, and at the same time, refuses to confirm that...it isn't introducing nuclear weapons to a denuclearized zone." Argentina demands, Timerman said, "that the commitment to peace which we South American nations have chosen be respected."
Speaking to an audience that included Barack Obama and 50 other world leaders, Timerman underscored that a treaty that establishes a zone free of nuclear weapons is above all, "a security treaty. What protection can a non-proliferation regime offer when a nuclear power threatens us either directly or surreptitiously, with the introduction of nuclear weapons into a denuclearized zone? Nuclear dissuasion," he said, "shouldn't be used against countries that have rejected weapons of mass deestruction."
Clegg's remarks contrast with the silence with which London met Timerman's earlier allegations at the United Nations on Feb. 10, in which he asserted that a nuclear weapons-carrying submarine would violate the Tlatelolco Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, designed to create a nuclear-free zone in the region.
Britain's U.N. Ambassador, Mark Lyall Grant, felt compelled to hold his own news conference responding to Timerman, claiming that "we do not comment on the disposition of nuclear weapons, submarines....I don't know how [Timerman] knows about submarines," he added. "I certainly don't know. The whole point of nuclear submarines is that they go all around the world and you don't know where they are. That's why they're a deterrent."