PREVIEW: Obama seeking stronger nuclear security measures

By Mike McCarthy Apr 7, 2010, 6:54 GMT

Washington - International efforts to curb the danger of nuclear material winding up in the wrong hands do not go far enough and need to become more sweeping and focused, analysts and experts say.

The issue will be the topic of an unprecedented global nuclear security summit in Washington Monday and Tuesday.

Leaders including Russia's Dmitry Medvedev and China's Hu Jintao are expected to attend in the pursuit of stronger international protocols for safeguarding nuclear material. Forty-seven countries are to particiapte, including the leaders of Pakistan, India, Germany, Spain and France.

The summit will take place a year after President Barack Obama outlined his vision for a nuclear-free world in a speech in Prague, and is part of a series of efforts in his administration to reduce the nuclear threat.

Starting with his presidential campaign, Obama has pushed for a tighter safeguarding regime to secure all vulnerable nuclear stockpiles and material within four years, breaking up black markets, using financial leverage and interdicting transport of dangerous nuclear material.

Obama wants to strengthen the Proliferation Security Initiative, launched by his predecessor George W Bush, that includes more than 90 countries who cooperate in intercepting illicit shipments of nuclear technology and other dangerous items. He also wants to bring other international initiatives together to take a more comprehensive approach toward addressing the threat.

US Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher said recently that Obama takes the issue as a top priority and plans to use the April forum for 'very, very serious engagement at very high levels.'

'This is another example of where the president every day takes these issues very seriously, works very hard,' she said, before adding: 'But we also want to make clear that every country is responsible for nuclear security.'

But independent organizations that advocate for a reduction in nuclear arms and enhanced security believe the goals of the summit fall short of thoroughly addressing the problem. While applauding the effort, analysts say more stringent measures are needed to prevent terrorists from accessing nuclear material and launching a potentially devastating attack.

That includes taking steps to reduce civilian use of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for making a nuclear bomb.

'What they need to be focused on is not necessarily what they will focus on,' said Charles Ferguson, the president of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington and expert on nuclear proliferation.

One critical item on the agenda will be the effort for a ban on producing highly enriched uranium with the intention of using it for weapons. Negotiations on the so called Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty have stalled in the past, but even that proposal, backed by Obama, does not go far enough to alleviate the threat, critics say.

Miles Pomper, an associate at the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington, said the proposal would not address the same high-enriched uranium that is also used in civilian research and power reactors.

A ban on only highly enriched uranium intended for weapons use 'is not going to take care of the terrorism aspect, because of other potential proliferation,' Pomper said.

Keeping highly enriched uranium around for civilian use without adequate security could still pose a danger because it could be rather easily applied to a weapon, Ferguson and Pomper said, adding that in many cases civilian facilities are not as well guarded as military ones.

They said the civilian use of highly enriched uranium can be replaced by low-enriched uranium, which is at concentrations too small to build atomic weapons.

There are extensive international efforts underway to convert civilian reactors from highly enriched uranium to the low-enriched version. The US government spends millions of dollars at home every year and in other countries to carry out the conversions. The Obama administration plans to spend 200 million dollars on the effort in 2011.

Russia is also playing a leading role in conversions in other countries and taking back dangerous material, but has been slow to do so on its on soil, where the effort is complicated by regional politics and a sense of prestige in running highly enriched uranium reactors, Ferguson said.

The United States and Russia both continue to stockpile thousands of kilogrammes of highly enriched uranium, which makes it more difficult to persuade smaller countries to abandon their stockpiles, he said.

The tendency is for other countries to say 'don't tell us to get rid of ours, you need to do more to get rid of yours,' Ferguson said.

He said the conference also apparently will fail to consider nuclear material used in medical facilities, where there is no worldwide standard to ensure those facilities are secure. If terrorists were able to obtain that material it would be easy to convert it for use in a radioactive attack in the form of a 'dirty bomb,' Ferguson said.

'If someone had advanced knowledge of how to break into the devices they could extract radioactive material in a short amount of time,' Ferguson said.