http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5776026&cKey=1115858111000UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - More than 180 nations hoping to strengthen global protections against the spread of nuclear arms ended a week and a half of paralysis centring on Israel's presumed atomic arsenal on Wednesday and adopted an agenda enabling them to begin their work.
The agreement came nearly halfway through a four-week conference reviewing the 1970 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which had been deadlocked over a demand by Egypt that the issue of nuclear weapons in the Middle East be on the agenda.
A compromise worked out by conference president Sergio Duarte of Brazil added an asterisk to the proposed agenda referring to a separate piece of paper ensuring that the practice of previous NPT conferences, in which the Middle East had been discussed, would be "taken into account."
"It was the miracle of diplomacy," Duarte told Reuters. "The next step is the organisation of work, and I hope this can be done fairly quickly.
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