Hans Blix
Hans Blix
Hans Martin Blix; born 28 June 1928) is a Swedish diplomat and politician for the Liberal People's Party. He was Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairsand later became the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. As such, Blix was the first Western representative to inspect the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union on site, and led the agency response to them. Blix was also the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission from March...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionDiplomat
Date of Birth28 June 1928
CountrySweden
Disarmament by war and democracy by occupation are difficult prospects.
Iraq did not spontaneously opt for disarmament. They did it as part of a ceasefire, so they were forced to do it, otherwise the war might have gone on. So the motivation has been very different.
The South Africans decided that they would like to prove to the world they did not have any nuclear weapons and their decision was not doubted because it was the end of the Cold War, it was also the end of apartheid.
For some twenty years the window that opened at the end of the Cold War has been allowed to hang flapping in the wind. It is high time that the five nuclear-weapon states take seriously their commitment to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament.
To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war...I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.
On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There's no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.
I also hear your president say that war is the means of last resort and I think he means that. I met him last autumn and he assured me that they wanted to come through and disarm Iraq by peaceful means, and that's what we are trying to do as hard as we can.
What surprises me, what amazes me, is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons.
The inspections started in 1991, right after the Gulf War. One of the conditions for the ceasefire was that Iraq had to do away with all of its weapons of mass destruction - biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.
We will want to see a lot more (cooperation) this weekend.
We expect them to accept what we have said and destroy the missiles as we have stated, ... They have done so in past always when we have requested so.
It would be awkward if we were doing inspections and then a new mandate, with new, changed directives were to arise, ... It would be better have those earlier. My impression is that there is good intensity with talks about that, and we will abide by whatever the council decides.
The situation is tense at the moment, but there is a new opportunity and we are here to provide inspection which is credible.
The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.