Washington was faulted for using procedural challenges to smokescreen its own nuclear policies and to avoid discussion of them and Beijing for apparently wanting to shield North Korea from criticism.

At the final day of the Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, chairmen of the three main committees said their panels and their subsidiary bodies, said they were unable to reach consensus and their reports were largely of a technical nature.

The panels deliberated on nuclear disarmament and security assurances, safeguards and regional issues, including establishment of a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East, and implementation of the treaty's provisions related to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the participants "missed a vital opportunity to strengthen our collective security against the many nuclear threats to which all states and all peoples are vulnerable."

"This is the most acute failure in the history of the NPT," Thomas Graham, a negotiator for the United States at the 1995 NPT review, said Thursday, anticipating Friday's outcome.

"By refusing even to discuss the commitments it made at past meetings, the United States has turned the world of nuclear proliferation into the Wild West, with a complete disrespect for the rule of law," said Alice Slater, founder of Abolition 2000 a non-governmental organization seeking the elimination of nuclear weapons at the session's windup.

The Drafting Committee held just one meeting, Wednesday, in which it considered and agreed to recommend to the conference for adoption a draft final document which carried no conclusions or recommendations. It was approved by consensus.

Perhaps its most substantive information was a list of the 150 states parties to the NPT participating, and that 119 research institutes and non-governmental organizations also attended.

Obviously missing from the list of 150 nations were India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.

Israel has long been believed to have developed nuclear weapons as India and Pakistan have boasted, while North Korea withdrew from the pact. Iran remains a member of the NPT, although insisting its nuclear research is for peaceful use.

Conference President Sergio de Queiroz Duarte of Brazil, said he regretted the meeting had been unable to achieve consensus in either the main committees or their subsidiary bodies and, therefore unable to deliver any recommendations.

Ambassador Paul Meyer of Canada said the conference had let the pursuit of short-term, parochial interests override the collective long-term interest in sustaining the treaty's authority and integrity.

It had seen precious time that might have been devoted to exchanges on substance and the development of common ground "squandered by procedural brinkmanship," he said, without referring directly to the United States.

Meyer said the conclave had witnessed intransigency from more than one state on the pressing issues of the day, coupled with "the hubris that demanded the priorities of the many be subordinated to the preferences of the few."

He added "the community had been weakened by the refusal of the delinquent to be held to account by its peers," an apparent reference to Iran, and "by the defection from that community of a state, without suffering any sanction," an obvious reference to the Democratic Republic of Korea.

The Ottawa envoy said that, if there was a silver lining in the otherwise dark cloud, it lay in the hope that leaders and citizens would be so concerned by its failure that they mobilized behind prompt remedial action.

Yoshiki Mine, the envoy from Japan, the only state to have suffered a nuclear attack, said states should take the undesirable result seriously and renew their determination to explore ways to maintain and strengthen the credibility and authority of the NPT regime.

He called on North Korea to completely dismantle all of its nuclear programs including its uranium enrichment endeavors. Japan, Mine said, would continue to work with other partners to peacefully resolve the issue through the six-party talks.

Iran's nuclear issue was no doubt a matter of concern for the international community, he said, adding that Japan considered it extremely important that Iran, through its negotiations with European Union members to provide sufficient "objective guarantees" that its nuclear program was exclusively for peaceful purposes.

As the final speaker Friday, Iran's Ambassador Javad Zarif let loose on Washington with both barrels delivering a withering attack of U.S. nuclear policies and its behavior at the conference.

"Serious is the intention and actions rigorously pursued by the world's remaining superpower without the slightest concerns of the rest of the international community," he said.

He said the United States adopted its nuclear posture by stressing the essential role of nuclear weapons as an effective tool for achieving security and in foreign policy objectives; developing new nuclear weapons system and constructing new facilities for producing new nuclear weapons, resuming efforts to develop and deploy tactical nuclear weapons despite commitments to reverse this process and effectively reduce them, targeting non-nuclear weapons states party to the treaty "and planning to attack these states."

Zarif, who took part in the recent EU-Iran talks was critical of the United States for abrogating the anti-ballistic missile treaty, rejecting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, continuing deployment of nuclear forces in other territories, providing a nuclear umbrella for non-nuclear weapon states and signing an agreement of cooperation with Israel to provide scientists access to its nuclear facilities.

"The extremist attitude," he said, "seems to indicate that no lessons have been learned from the nightmares of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (in Japan). If history is any guide nuclear arms, ladies and gentlemen, are in the most dangerous hands."

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