Mr. Fallon’s statement came just ahead of next month’s 33rd anniversary of Britain's successful war to restore its sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, a tiny territory that Buenos Aires still wants back but London refuses to give up.
"[The accumulation of British weapons on the islands] is generating unnecessary and unfair tension in the South Atlantic region, which wants to be a zone of peace and free from nuclear weapons,” the Argentine Foreign Ministry said in a statement Tuesday.
Apart from the UN, Argentina filed similar protests with Mercosur, the Union of South American Nations and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.
Argentina’s worries about London’s intention to spend more on the defense of the disputed isles are shared by many regional powers, the statement emphasized, adding that the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner favored a negotiated solution to the long-running territorial dispute between the two countries.
The isolated and sparsely-populated Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory in the south-west Atlantic Ocean, remain the subject of a sovereignty dispute between Britain and Argentina, who waged a brief war over the territory in 1982.
Argentine forces, who had landed on the Falklands to stake a territorial claim, were eventually ejected by a British military task force.
