US News

Obama opens summit to counter nuclear threats

By Mike McCarthy Apr 13, 2010, 14:26 GMT

President of the United States Barack Obama (L) welcomes Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of the United Kingdom David Miliband (R) during the Nuclear Security Summit at the Washington Convention Center in Washington DC, USA, 12 April 2010. EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS

Washington - US President Barack Obama opened an unprecedented summit Monday, welcoming leaders and top officials from more than 40 countries to work on a plan to prevent dangerous nuclear material from falling into the wrong hands.

Obama greeted his guests individually, each with a handshake, as they walked on a stage amid tight security at the Washington Convention Centre in the downtown area of the nation's capital. Obama is hosting a private dinner before a full session of talks on Tuesday.

Obama will be urging leaders to sign onto his plan to secure vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear materials within four years to prevent terrorists from gaining access to them and mounting a potentially devastating attack.

Leaders and top officials from 47 nations are participating in the largest summit called by a president since 1945, when leaders gathered in San Francisco for the founding of the United Nations.

Hours before the formal session was to begin, Ukraine announced in a statement with the United States that it intends to have all of its highly enriched uranium - the key ingredient in a nuclear bomb - removed from the country by 2012.

Obama has identified nuclear security as the top priority of his broad agenda to confront the challenges, after launching his vision of a nuclear-free world a year ago in Prague.

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 aims to prevent the smuggling of nuclear technology and knowledge. The main worry is that terrorist groups like al-Qaeda could get their hands on such materials and carry out devastating attacks, said John Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism adviser.

'There is a strong body of intelligence that goes back over the past decade that clearly indicates that al-Qaeda has been trying to procure these materials on the open market and with criminal syndicates,' Brennan told reporters.

'There are some countries that have these facilities that need to do a better job of locking down these materials and denying them the opportunity for terrorists to take advantage of whatever vulnerabilities might be out there.'

The United States and Russia have been partnering for years to help countries get rid of dangerous nuclear material and convert nuclear power reactors that run on weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium to a much safer, lower grade.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that Russia is among the likely destinations for the roughly 90 kilogrammes of Ukraine's highly enriched uranium, which is enough to make several weapons. He said the United States will continue to provide technical and financial assistance to Ukraine and other countries ready to relinquish stockpiles of highly enriched uranium.

'This demonstrates Ukraine's continued leadership in non- proliferation and comes in an important region where we know a lot of highly enriched uranium exists,' Gibbs said.

The announcement came after Obama met with Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Obama was holding a series of bilateral meetings with world leaders ahead of the formal opening summit dinner Monday night.

He met Sunday with the leaders of India and Pakistan - two nuclear powers - and later with South African President President Jacob Zuma, whose country renounced nuclear weapons in the 1990s but retains a large stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

Obama held meetings Monday with Jordan's King Abdullah and Chinese President Hu Jintao, as well as other leaders.

In addition to acting to secure sensitive facilities, Obama is reportedly seeking tougher control on black markets, more strict prosecution for illicit trafficking and better accounting methods for weapons-grade material. Obama will urge countries to convert civilian reactors to low-enriched uranium.

The summit comes after a US-Russian pact to reduce their existing nuclear arsenals by one-third, a treaty Obama signed Thursday with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

It also comes after Obama announced a shift in nuclear policy that pledged to not use nuclear weapons against countries which do not have them. That policy, however, excluded Iran and North Korea because they are not seen as cooperating on non-proliferation.

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- text at the gathering. Iran denies Western allegations that its nuclear programme is designed to achieve 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 was on the agenda when Obama sat down Monday with Hu.

After the meeting, a top US official said Hu was open to working with the United States on sanctions.

'The two presidents agreed that the two delegations should work on a sanctions resolution,' Jeff Bader, the top White House official for Asia affairs, told reporters.

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 more central topic at a UN-hosted gathering next month for a review of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which Iran is a member.

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are expected to sign a deal Tuesday 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.

A second nuclear security summit will take place in 2012 - possibly in Russia - to update how effective efforts have been to protect an estimated 1,600 tonnes of highly enriched uranium and 500 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium.