WASHINGTON — World leaders declared progress Friday in securing nuclear materials worldwide but warned of a persistent and harrowing threat: terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear bomb. “It would change our world,” President Barack Obama said.
Obama, addressing a nuclear security summit, said there was no doubt that if “madmen” in the Islamic State group obtained nuclear material, they would use it to kill as many people as possible. He urged fellow leaders not to be complacent about the risk of catastrophe and called IS the most active extremist group currently menacing the planet.
So far, no terrorists have gotten a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb, Obama said, crediting global efforts to secure nuclear material. But he said it wasn’t for lack of trying: Al-Qaida has sought nuclear materials, IS has deployed chemical weapons and extremists linked to the Brussels and Paris attacks were found to have spied on a top Belgian nuclear official.
“We have measurably reduced the risk,” Obama said. Still, he added, “the threat of nuclear terrorism persists and continues to evolve.”
At this year’s summit — Obama’s last major push on denuclearization — deep concerns about nuclear terrorism have tempered other, more positive signs of the world coming together to confront the broader nuclear threat.
The U.N. Security Council members who brokered a sweeping nuclear deal with Iran held up that agreement as a model for preventing nuclear proliferation, as they gathered on the summit’s sidelines to review implementation of the deal.
Obama also spent part of the summit huddling with the leaders of South Korea and Japan about deterring nuclear-tinged provocations from North Korea, in a powerful show of diplomatic unity with two U.S. treaty allies. Similarly, Obama’s sit-down with Chinese President Xi Jinping offered the two strategic rivals a chance to illustrate their mutual concern about the North, a traditional Chinese ally.
Undeterred, North Korea only hours later fired a short-range missile into the sea and tried to jam GPS navigation signals in South Korea — precisely the kind of act that South Korean President Park Geun-hye had warned would trigger even tougher sanctions and more isolation.
Aiming to show concrete action to strengthen nuclear security, leaders came to the nuclear summit with commitments in hand, known in diplomatic-speak as “gift baskets.” The White House spelled them out in a flurry of fact sheets.
Latin America and the Caribbean are now free of highly enriched uranium, the White House said, praising Argentina by name for converting its remaining stockpile into a less dangerous form. Fissile materials like highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium are necessary ingredients to make nuclear bombs.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia, whose nuclear weapons stockpile is rivaled only by the stockpile in the U.S., declined to attend this year’s summit.