PRESIDENT BARACK Obama’s announcement that he will host a nuclear security summit next March reflects his conviction that nuclear terrorism is not only the most immediate and extreme threat to global security, but one that must be addressed multilaterally.
Mr Obama hopes the summit will galvanise an international effort to secure loose nuclear materials by 2012, break up black markets in nuclear materials, detect and intercept materials in transit, and disrupt the trade in these materials.
National Security Council chief of staff Mark Lippert said the list of participants had yet to be finalised, but he expected between 25 and 30 countries to be represented.
“Essentially what we want to do is develop steps that really we can work together on to secure vulnerable materials and combat nuclear smuggling. The other piece is, I think, sort of a communique on best practices that we want to get everybody up to a certain standard,” he said.
Mr Obama first raised the prospect of a nuclear security summit in his speech in Prague last April, but the White House was conscious that the US would lack authority unless it took steps towards reducing its own nuclear arsenal. The nuclear disarmament deal agreed with Russia this week is modest in the number of warheads each side will have to decommission.
Its real significance lies in the fact that it is a legally binding treaty, unlike the informal 2002 “Moscow Treaty” agreed by former president George Bush, which said that, by the year 2012, Russian and American arsenals would be reduced to 1,700-2,200 warheads per side.
The treaty Mr Obama agreed with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev will reduce the warheads to 1,500-1,675.
There are now nine nuclear powers in the world – the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. (Israel does not acknowledge publicly that it has a nuclear weapon but it does not deny it.)
The US and Russia have 95 per cent of the world’s nuclear weapons, but controlling the spread of nuclear materials has proven increasingly difficult since the end of the cold war.
Washington and Moscow are united in their opposition to the further spread of nuclear weapons – either to states like Iran or to terrorist organisations.
In Moscow this week, Mr Obama suggested that next year’s nuclear security summit in the US could be followed a year later by another in Russia.
The White House is satisfied that, despite the fact that US-Russian relations remain uneasy and the issue of missile defence in Europe has yet to be resolved, the two sides are “on the same page” where non-proliferation is concerned.
The next step is to bring together all the countries that have nuclear materials – some of which are not themselves nuclear powers.
“We felt that we have robust bilateral efforts on this score and we wanted to lay down an important multilateral piece on top of this to sort of tie it all together and make sure everybody was co-ordinated on the same page,” Mr Lippert said.
Much remains to be agreed before next year’s summit can produce a joint declaration committing all parties to a common approach to securing vulnerable nuclear materials. To begin with, nobody has yet agreed on how “vulnerable nuclear materials” should be defined.
“We do not harbour, and more importantly, the president does not harbour any particular view that this is going to be easy,” said deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough.
“But I do think that we are continuing to see the impact of the investment of time and resources not only this week in Moscow, but certainly over the course of these last several months, with the trips and the visits in Washington to discuss these issues, particular Iran and nuclear security.”