GENEVA Jan 23 (DPA-NT) - United Nations Secretary General Butros Ghali and U.S. President Bill Clinton have called on the 38 member states of the U.N. Disarmament Conference in Geneva to draft by year's end a convention comprehensively banning nuclear tests. Nothing ought to be allowed to stand in the way of this completion, Ghali said Tuesday in a message to delegates of the 38 states that are participating in the conference. The target is to draft a final text within six months and diplomats at the meeting say this is feasible. Clinton, in a similar message, said a test ban would bring the world closer "to our real target of a nuclear-free world. The convention will ban all nuclear tests, even those underground or underwater. Such a comprehensive ban has been under discussion since the 1950s but formal talks only began in 1994. The environmentalist group Greenpeace says that since 1945, more than 2,000 nuclear bombs have been exploded by weapons testers. rg /AA1234/231356 Jan 96 nnnn

---