Read @ The Washington Post

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Obama secures 47-nation pact at nuclear summit

President Obama persuaded 46 countries Tuesday to sign on to a plan to put the world's nuclear material beyond the reach of terrorists within four years, but the commitments are voluntary, and experts said reaching the goal will be difficult.

The governments attending Obama's Nuclear Security Summit agreed to take their own measures to safeguard nuclear material used in bombs, civilian nuclear reactors and power plants, and to strengthen international efforts. The gathering raised the profile of an issue long considered a sideshow in discussions of international security.

"This is an ambitious goal, and we are under no illusions it will be easy. But the urgency of the threat and the catastrophic consequences of even a single act of nuclear terrorism demand an effort that is at once bold and pragmatic," Obama said at a news conference.

The summit was part of Obama's "nuclear spring," a broad initiative to revive U.S. arms-control efforts and elevate the role of international treaties in U.S. nuclear weapons policy. The idea is to enhance the standing of the United States as it tries to prevent the world's nonproliferation system from collapsing. A key conference will be held next month on strengthening the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has long restrained countries' nuclear ambitions but has been flouted in recent years by Iran and North Korea.

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said Obama's summit should be seen in a broader context that includes the recent signing of a U.S.-Russia arms-reduction treaty. "What they've done is break a culture of cynicism" about nuclear issues, Miliband said.

But some questioned whether the gathering of 37 government leaders, as well as delegations from 10 other countries, went far enough.

"The summit's purported accomplishment is a nonbinding communique that largely restates current policy and makes no meaningful progress in dealing with nuclear terrorism threats or the ticking clock represented by Iran's nuclear weapons program," said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a prominent critic of Obama's nuclear policies.

Kenneth Luongo, an expert on nuclear security at the Partnership for Global Security, said Obama "has put his personal prestige on the line like no other world leader has before" on the issue. The commitments were positive, he said. "But, when the lights go down tonight, leaders need to hit the ground running on implementation."

The most obvious result of the summit was a series of pledges, nicknamed "house gifts" by the Obama administration. For example, India declared that it will build a center to promote nuclear security, in what experts called a significant change in its focus on the issue. Ukraine, Mexico, Chile, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and Canada agreed to dispose of hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium used in civilian facilities. The material, a key ingredient in nuclear bombs, can often be replaced for civilian uses with far less dangerous low-enriched uranium.

The Obama administration, for its part, said it recently submitted legislation so Congress will ratify two international agreements on nuclear material. In addition, Washington will request a security review of a U.S. neutron research center by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

"We used the summit shamelessly as a forcing event" to get concrete actions, said Gary Samore, the top nuclear official on the National Security Council.

A follow-up meeting to gauge countries' progress is to be held in six months, and another summit in two years.

Continues @ The Washington Post

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This is excellent news.  [Occasionally, my yardstick for such news is how would I react if this was accomplished by Hillary, and I must say that I would be over the moon.]

I hope that this leads to some reduction in defense spending except in targeted manner with global cooperation to reduce terrorism.