An Inconclusive Nuclear Security Summit Held in Washington – But Some Progress

In 2009 in Prague, Barack Obama announced "a new international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years." The aim was to ensure that none of the more than 2,000 tons of weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium ended up in terrorists' hands.

What followed was a series of Nuclear Security Summits successively in Washington (2010), Seoul (2012), Amsterdam (2014) and again in Washington this April, even as recent terrorist attacks and the persistent menace of ISIS extremism added urgency to the warning.

Addressing world leaders at the summit, Obama warned that "madmen" could kill and maim hundreds of thousands of innocent people if they got their hands on "just the smallest amount of plutonium – about the size of an apple. That," said the President, "is one of the greatest threats to global security." Belgian investigators found video evidence that two of the terrorists involved in the March Brussels bombings had secretly filmed the head of Belgium's nuclear research and development program's daily routine. Belgian media said the two had considered an attack on a nuclear site in that country.

Commenting on the summit, British Prime Minister David Cameron said, "So many summits are about dealing with things that have already gone wrong and [that] we are trying to put right. This is a summit about something we are trying to prevent."

One thing is clear following the fourth, and possibly last, summit – the initiative has failed to meet its self-imposed four-year deadline. Furthermore, the consensus on the last meeting is that it did little to further the global nuclear security architecture, and it turned out to be more in the nature of a tribute to Obama's initiative at the end of his second presidency. Two conspicuous absences, Russia (the state with the biggest nuclear arsenal) and Iran, were seen to have contributed to the lack of momentum, the former reflecting increasingly strained relations between Moscow and Washington. Iran was not invited to take part despite its recent commitment to halt its weapons-grade uranium enrichment program.

But the process has its defenders who argue that progress has been made and should be continued. "The summit process has been largely successful in reducing the risk posed by nuclear terrorism," said Kingston Reif, the Arms Control Association's Director of Disarmament and Threat Reduction Policy. For one thing, the process has focused high-level global attention on the problem. Six years ago 47 leaders attended the first Washington summit; while 53 were present at the most recent one. Observers point out that the meetings managed to stick to the security issue without enlarging the scope to include nuclear disarmament and other related issues.

This is one reason why the emphasis has been on securing uranium for commercial use and in scientific and university laboratories. Uranium in military hands is presumably involved in the larger political questions such as nuclear disarmament. In addition, nuclear materials under military control should, by definition, be more secure from theft. That said, 14 countries have voluntarily given up their weapons-grade enriched uranium since Ukraine was included in the 2012 summit, two years before Russia's Crimean land grab, thereby removing a potentially major danger from the ensuing conflict.

In addition, 24 research reactors and isotope facilities that had previously used weapons-grade fuel have either been shut down or converted to using lower enriched uranium. Security has been heightened at other commercial reactors in at least a dozen more countries, and 31 facilities storing fissile materials have also upgraded their security.

But 24 states still hold large quantities of highly enriched nuclear material that could be used for bomb-making, with the United States and Russia in the lead. In addition, India, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan and the United Kingdom actually increased their stocks of HEU. By 2014, "summit fatigue" had slowed down the momentum. Since then only one state, Uzbekistan, has removed its nuclear materials.

At the root of the problem was the fact that security standards set by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were voluntary. A system was needed that would impose those standards and hold states accountable for their nuclear security commitments. The summit did agree on what it called "action plans"

for each of the five international organizations and initiatives (the UN, the IAEA, Interpol, the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT) and Partners Against the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction) working to ensure nuclear security. The final communiqué went on to say that adherence by individual states would be "on a voluntary basis."

A special session devoted to ISIS was designed to test the preparedness of individual countries to handle a terrorist attack. Participants were told what sounded like the synopsis of a Hollywood movie, in which a radioactive material had been stolen from a hospital and sold to a global terrorist network. The terrorists planned to use a drone to launch a deadly "dirty bomb" in an urban setting. Film footage was used to illustrate the narrative, and Obama then urged world leaders to think about how they would respond if it played out in reality.

On the sidelines of the main event Obama also had key meetings on Asian security issues. Obama met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Guen-hye and assured them of the U.S.' continued commitment to their defense. This followed a statement by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that Japan and South Korea should consider arming themselves with nuclear weapons. Obama also had separate talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, urging him to use Beijing's influence to restrain North Korea. In January, Pyongyang detonated a nuclear device and launched a long-range rocket a month later.

"Among those attending there's a bittersweet feeling that this may be the last [summit] for a while," Jim Walsh, Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was quoted as saying after the summit. "It's hard to build an international regime in six or eight years." A nuclear-free world had been one of Obama's campaign commitments, so whatever progress has been made is part of his legacy. In reality, though, whether it continues will depend almost entirely on the next president of the United States.