AFP: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will give the opening speech at a weekend nuclear disarmament conference to be attended by 24 foreign and deputy foreign ministers, official media reported. 
TEHRAN (AFP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will give the opening speech at a weekend nuclear disarmament conference to be attended by 24 foreign and deputy foreign ministers, official media reported.
"Ahmadinejad is due to give the opening address at the conference," which has as its theme "Nuclear Energy For All, Nuclear Weapons For No-one," state news agency IRNA said on Friday.
Fourteen foreign ministers and 10 deputy ministers, as well as representatives from regional and international organisations were expected to participate in the two-day gathering.
The names of the countries represented were not given in the report, but European officials are not likely to attend.
Iran criticised the 47-nation nuclear disarmament summit hosted in Washington earlier this week by US President Barack Obama, on the grounds the United States holds one of the world's largest stocks of nuclear weapons.
At the biggest US nuclear summit in over six decades, Obama pressed China and other UN Security Council skeptics to back a fourth set of sanctions against Iran for its controversial uranium enrichment programme that Western states say masks a drive for atomic arms.
Tehran counters that it is entitled to enrich uranium as a Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) member and strongly denies it wants nuclear weapons.
"At the Tehran conference, we will discuss nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, which are the bases of the Non-Proliferation Treaty," Iran's atomic chief Ali Akbar Salehi was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency on Friday.
Salehi has also said in recent days that the conference would serve as preparation for the next NPT review meeting in New York early next month, which Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki plans to attend.
