NEW YORK, Dec 14: “By defaulting on its commitment to nuclear arms reduction and winking at nuclear-armed allies like India, Pakistan and Israel that remain outside the non-proliferation treaty, Washington makes it harder to build an international consensus against programs like Iran’s and to discourage other countries from following Tehran’s dangerous example”, said the New York Times on Tuesday.

In an editorial — Mohamed ElBaradei’s Nobel Message – the newspaper noted that the Nobel laureate ‘infuriated the Bush administration a few years ago by challenging its baseless claims that Iraq was preparing to resume nuclear weapons work. It turns out that Dr ElBaradei can also be usefully outspoken about real nuclear dangers’.

Saying that Dr ElBaradei stressed the importance of global non-proliferation efforts, the Times noted that there were still about 27,000 nuclear warheads lying around, many of them on hair-trigger alert. An overwhelming majority are located in Russia and the United States.

“The excess nuclear warheads increase the risk of an accidental launching, particularly by Russia, whose aging command-and-control systems grow less reliable every year.

If this large number of warheads is poorly secured (again, a real risk in Russia), rogue states or terrorists may find it easier to get their hands on fissile material. And the credibility of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) is undermined,” the newspaper observed.