President Obama wrapped up two days of a Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in which 46 presidents, prime ministers and senior officials committed to securing all vulnerable nuclear material within four years. While the agreement is voluntary and there are no automatic enforcement mechanisms, many perceived the Summit as another step in building momentum toward maintaining nuclear security and nonprofileration.
At the Summit’s conclusion Obama acknowledged that tough choices lay ahead on many of the far more politically volatile issues in stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, while issuing a stern warning to Iran, not present at the meeting.
New York Times: The meeting that Mr. Obama convened, and to a great degree stage-managed, was unlike any negotiations over arms control with the Soviets during the cold war or, more recently, the so-far fruitless talks to get North Korea to disarm. This was a far broader effort to persuade African, Latin American, Asian and European nations to agree on steps to deny terrorist groups the two materials necessary to make a bomb: plutonium and highly enriched uranium.
Mr. Obama began the session arguing that while superpower confrontation was far more remote, the risk of nuclear terrorism had never been greater, and he quoted the warning of Albert Einstein soon after the beginning of the nuclear age: “We are drifting towards a catastrophe beyond comparison.”
