The UN General Assembly has passed a resolution every year since 1974 calling for the creation of a "nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East," yet has never determined which countries would fall within this zone. A report of the Secretary-General in 1990 proposed a definition that included "core" and "peripheral" countries. The "core" countries corresponded to a definition of the Middle East drawn up a year earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The "peripheral" countries were other members of the League of Arab States, which the 1990 report said would also be desirable to include in the nuclear-free zone.

Sources: Technical Study on Different Modalities of the Application of Safeguards in the Middle East, 29 August 1989 (IAEA-GC XXXIII/887), 1, 4-8; Study on Effective and Verifiable Measures Which Would Facilitate the Establishment of a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone in the Middle East: Report of the Secretary-General, 10 October 1990 (A/45/435), 20-21; Jan Prawitz and James F. Leonard, A Zone Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East (New York and Geneva: United Nations, 1996).