Obama Sees 'Significant Progress' on Nuclear Security
by Pamela Dockins April 01, 2016
U.S. President Barack Obama hailed the "significant progress" the world's nations have made on nuclear security, and pledged the United States will continue to cooperate with all efforts to reduce nuclear stockpiles and keep them safe.
Addressing more than 50 world leaders gathered at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, Obama said more than a dozen nations have disposed of their entire supplies of highly enriched uranium and plutonium - the radioactive elements necessary to build nuclear bombs.
During six years of international meetings on nuclear security - including four summits, which he initiated - the U.S. president said, "We've embraced a new type of thinking and a new type of action."
"This is a perfect example of a 21st -century security challenge that no one nation can solve alone," Obama told the leaders at a plenary session of the summit broadcast worldwide. "It requires coalitions and sustained coordination across borders and institutions. And the good news is we've made significant progress."
Obama also met with a smaller gathering of the nations mostly closely involved in last year's nuclear agreement with Iran. He told the so-called P5+1 group the deal with Iran "achieved a substantial success and focused on the dangers of nuclear proliferation in a real way."
He stressed, however, that "full and continued implementation" of the Iran agreement will "take the same level of cooperation" from the international community.
This year's nuclear security summit has come at a time of heightened concern about the possibility that Islamic State militants could acquire nuclear materials to build "dirty bombs" that could spread deadly radioactive fallout over wide areas. North Korea's nuclear-weapons development program also has been closely studied.
Obama said the scores of nations working together on nuclear security have made "260 specific commitments to improve nuclear security," both at this year's summit and their previous sessions.
"And so far," the president reported, "three-quarters of these steps have been implemented. More than a dozen nations have removed all their highly enriched uranium and plutonium."
"Once again, I am making it clear that the United States will do our part," Obama added. "Today we're releasing a detailed description of the measures that our military takes to protect nuclear materials, so that other nations can improve their security and transparency as well.
"For the first time in a decade we are providing a public inventory of our stockpiles of our highly enriched uranium. ... And that inventory is one that we have reduced considerably."
North Korea
Obama has met with leaders from South Korea and Japan on the sidelines of the summit about their mutual concerns over North Korea's provocative gestures and actions. Although there was no specific response from Pyongyang to the trilateral meeting, or to Obama's separate private meeting Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the North Korean military launched another small ballistic missile into the sea early Friday, officially announced it is blocking popular Western websites and stepped up jamming of global-positioning data beamed to Earth by a network of satellites.
In Geneva, moreover, a top North Korean envoy told Reuters that Pyongyang intends to pursue its nuclear and ballistic missile program in the face of repeated warnings from the United States and other nations.
During the U.S. president's meeting with Xi, U.S. officials reported the Chinese leader said: "We want to enhance communication and coordination on the Korean nuclear issue and other regional and global issues."
Washington views Beijing, Pyongyang's ally, as key in enforcing U.N. sanctions against North Korea for its weapons development.
The possibility of nuclear terrorism was also a key focus on Thursday, the first day of the summit.
President Obama said that in the wake of attacks in places including Brussels, there is "not only great urgency around the nuclear issue but eliminating generally the scourge of terrorism."
Some of the world leaders who attended a White House summit dinner Thursday were from countries that have been directly impacted by terrorist attacks.
Slow progress
At a State Department ministerial level dinner, Secretary of State John Kerry said there have been times when nuclear security progress has been slow, and there remains an "enormous amount more to do. But every step forward that we take is a step away from danger."
The U.S. and other world powers may be experiencing a heightened sense of urgency in securing nuclear material and sites from terrorists following the March 22 attacks in Brussels.
News reports say two brothers linked to the attacks were part of a plot to gain information about a Belgian nuclear facility.
"We know that terrorist organizations have the desire to get access to these raw materials and their desire to have a nuclear device," said White House foreign policy aide Ben Rhodes.
Weakest links
One U.S. lawmaker, Congressman Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, "We should assume terrorists will continue to seek out the weakest links at nuclear facilities around the globe."
World leaders also are concerned about the security of nuclear materials and facilities in countries such as nuclear armed Pakistan, where a terrorist attack in Lahore on Easter Sunday killed more than 70 people.
While progress has been made since the first summit in 2010, "the overall objective of securing the most vulnerable nuclear materials in four years …I don't think has been achieved," said Sharon Squassoni with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"There is still material out there and the material that we're talking about is highly enriched uranium," she said.
Experts say security gaps remain for several reasons: there still is no international framework to monitor nuclear materials; some countries are unwilling to open up supplies intended for commercial use, and some militaries have been unable to agree on how to deal with their nuclear material.
"If you wanted to cause a nuclear incident, you might look for the country with the most vulnerable reactors," said James Andrew Lewis, head of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
As the summit got under way, the White House released a statement saying the U.S. has declassified and released data on the national inventory of highly enriched uranium. It said inventories decreased from about 741 to 586 metric tons between 1996 and 2013.
VOA White House correspondent Mary Alice Salinas and Katherine Gypson contributed to this report
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