The US-Iran framework agreement to end the Middle East war proves that nuclear weapons provide no strategic advantage, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) says, according to AFP.

The agreement lays the groundwork for detailed negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme and sanctions relief for Tehran.

ICAN, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its key role in drafting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), insists the deal reveals how little advantage US and Israeli nuclear arsenals provided.

“The lesson of this war is the opposite of what the nuclear-armed states would have us believe,” ICAN chief Melissa Parke says in a statement. “Two nuclear powers attacked a country with no nuclear weapons, and it is the nuclear powers who have been forced to stop.”

It was clear, she said, that “nuclear weapons bought no security and no leverage; they only brought the US to the brink of ending a civilisation.”

Included in the text of the agreement is a commitment from Iran that it will “not procure or develop nuclear weapons”. But that declaration merely “reaffirms what international inspectors had established long before the war that produced it: Iran is a non-nuclear-weapon state”, ICAN says.

It points out that Iran has been a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) since 1970 and “is legally bound, as a non-nuclear-weapon state, not to acquire nuclear weapons, while also being subject to the safeguards mechanisms of the International Atomic Energy Agency”.