HAVANA - Cuba announced on Saturday that it would sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a contribution
to peace in the post-Sept. 11 world.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said his country had not signed the treaty before because it allowed a club
of nuclear powers to exist with no commitment to disarming.

"As a sign of the clear political will of the Cuban government and its commitment to a effective process of
disarmament that guarantees world peace, our country has decided to adhere to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,"
he said.

Cuba will also ratify the Latin American and Caribbean nonproliferation agreement, known as the Treaty of
Tlatelolco.

Havana signed this treaty in 1995 but had not ratified it due to the hostility of the United States, the hemisphere's
only nuclear power, he said.

Communist Cuba has offered to cooperate on terrorism with its longtime political foe, the United States, since the
Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked airliner attacks in New York and Washington.

But Washington had ignored its proposals, Perez Roque said.

Washington has enforced economic sanctions against Cuba for four decades and keeps Havana on a list of states that
sponsor terrorism, along with Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria and North Korea.

Perez Roque said Cuba firmly opposed what now seems to be an "inevitable" war against Iraq and warned that the United
Nations would lose credibility if the United States imposed such a war on the U.N. Security Council.

That would mean "the birth of a century of unilateralism and the forced retirement of the United Nations," he said.