In his address to the United Nations last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country wouldn't be a "puppet for the United States," and repeatedly threatened President George W. Bush.

Ahmadinejad's speech showed why the Iranian leader is irrational and why his country is dangerous. And this danger will only be exaggerated if Iran is able to obtain nuclear weapon capabilities. The entire world, as well as the United States, must do everything in its power to put a stop to Iran's nuclear weapons aspirations.

Nuclear proliferation in general is a grave danger. The greater the number of nuclear weapons, the greater the likelihood that one nation will fire one at another nation. And it won't just stop at one nuclear weapon, it could snowball into a worldwide battle that would lead to an unprecedented number of human casualties.

Moreover, if nuclear weapons are proliferated, there's a greater chance they will end up in the hands of terrorist organizations. In these groups, the decision to launch a nuclear weapon can lie in the hands of an extremist with an itchy trigger finger leading to catastrophic results.

In order for our nation to be in the best position to combat these nuclear ambitions, we must comply with a treaty we agreed to obey 36 years ago: the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The NPT is a treaty that bans all those who sign it, excluding a select few, including the United States, from having weapons. The treaty also commits these nations to eventually eliminating their nuclear arsenals.

Unfortunately, the United States is nowhere near fulfilling the commitments it made by agreeing to the NPT. According to an article written by George Bunn in the journal Arms Control Today, "[T]he Bush administration has undertaken efforts to create new types of nuclear weapons that might well require new testing."

Former President Jimmy Carter agreed, saying, "While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including antiballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating 'bunker buster' and perhaps some new 'small' bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states." Although Carter is a well-known opponent of the Bush administration, his criticism in this instance is well-founded.

Criticism of the United States' compliance with the NPT isn't limited to the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party. Robert McNamara, the defense secretary for John F. Kennedy and someone who could hardly be described a pacifist in terms of U.S. foreign policy, said, "[The] current U.S. nuclear weapons policy [is] immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous." McNamara also said this policy leads to "unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own."

Our nation isn't the only one not fulfilling its commitment to the NPT. Yet, as Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, points out, "reluctance by one party to fulfill its obligations breeds reluctance in others."

Furthermore, how can we ask Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program when we are doing the exact same thing they are? In proliferating this double standard, we are playing into the hands of Iranian leaders, who exploit our hypocrisy for power.

Of course, this doesn't mean Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions are legitimate - because they're not. But if we're going to ask a foreign nation, particularly one President Bush included in "the axis of evil," to stop doing something, we shouldn't be doing the same thing.

In other words, our policy should not be, "do as I say, not as I do," but rather simply, "do as I do."

Roeloff Opperman is a College junior from Philadelphia.