Obama to work with world leaders to deter nuclear threat

Apr 12, 2010, 19:24 GMT

Washington - US President Barack Obama was set to get down to work with dozens of world leaders on Monday at an unprecedented summit designed to ensure that dangerous nuclear material does not end up in the wrong hands.

'The single biggest threat to US security, both short term, medium term and long term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon,' Obama said as he held a series of bilateral meetings on the eve of the summit.

Leaders and top officials from 47 nations are participating in the largest summit hosted by a president since 1945, and Obama will be urging then to sign on to his plan to secure vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material within four years.

The summit will address the security of nuclear arms as well as dangerous fuel used in civilian energy reactors that can be used in weapons, and to prevent the smuggling of nuclear technology and knowledge.

Obama has identified nuclear security as the top priority of his broad agenda to confront the challenges, and to capitalize on a speech a year ago in Prague when he outlined his vision of a nuclear- free world.

Obama met with the prime ministers of India and Pakistan - two nuclear powers - on Sunday. He also met with South African President Jacob Zuma, whose country abandoned nuclear weapons in the 1990s but is still holding onto a large stockpile of highly enriched uranium - the key ingredient in a nuclear weapon.

Obama's goal of the two-day summit is to bring leaders together on a common approach to addressing the threat posed by lingering nuclear stockpiles and to agree on an action plan to curtail the threat, aides said.

The summit also comes after a US-Russian pact to reduce their existing nuclear arsenal by one-third, a treaty Obama signed with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday. It also comes after Obama announced a shift in nuclear policy that pledged to not use nuclear weapons against countries who do not have them. That policy, however, excluded Iran and North Korea because they are not seen as cooperating on non-proliferation.

Obama continued to meet with leaders on Monday ahead of the formal beginning of the summit later in the afternoon. He met with Jordan's King Abdullah and had meetings planned with Chinese President Hu Jintao, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich as well as with the leaders of Malaysia and Armenia.

While the focus of the summit is on securing nuclear stockpiles, Iran's continued defiance of international demands to halt uranium enrichment and come clean about its nuclear activities will be a sub-plot at the gathering. Iran denies Western assertions that its nuclear programme is designed at achieving a weapons capability.

The United States and its allies on the UN Security Council are working on creating a fresh round of international sanctions against Iran, but have encountered resistance from Russia and even more so from China. The topic will likely be on the agenda when Obama sits down with Hu.

Moscow appears to be softening its hardline opposition to sanctions. Medvedev said before departing Moscow for Washington that Iran's nuclear work must be closely monitored, but that any sanctions must be 'smart' and avoid harming regular Iranians.

'Sanctions should be effective and they should be smart,' he said through a translator in an interview with ABC News. 'They should not lead to humanitarian catastrophe where the whole Iranian community would start to hate the whole world.'

Iran will likely be a bigger topic at the UN-hosted gathering next month for a review of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which Iran is a member.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are expected to sign a deal Monday to implement an agreement for the two countries to each dispose 34,000 metric tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium from existing stockpiles.

The Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement has been in the works for more than a decade and was agreed to in principle in 2000, but Moscow and Washington had differed over protocols to implement the pact.