the ephemeral Ban Ki-moon... of whom it can be said to his credit that he is not Kofi Annan...
renewed an appeal Monday for global nuclear disarmament, with a special plea to North Korea to divert its scant resources from nuclear weapons to improving living standards.
“Some say nuclear disarmament is utopian…I say the illusion is that nuclear weapons provide security,” Ban said in Seoul where he was accepting a peace prize from his home country.
Stressing the inability of nuclear weapons to defend against the threats of crime, terror and disease, the secretary general argued that their inherently “destabilising” presence was unwarranted in the post-Cold War era.
“How, then, do we explain that…amidst a global financial crisis, the nuclear-weapon states seem intent on modernising their arsenals for decades to come?