Humankind’s worst nightmare is a terrorist letting off a nuclear bomb in one of the world’s large cities. Governments are terrified of even the threat of total devastation hitting cities like London, Beijing or Moscow, leaving millions dead and buildings destroyed forever.
And just in case we assume that nuclear material is all safely locked up in secure vaults, making such a terrorist horror too remote to contemplate, in 2013 alone 140 cases of missing or unauthorised use of nuclear and radioactive material were reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). They were all explained or resolved in some way, but this high number of incidents proves that nuclear security is nowhere near as tough as we all like to hope.
An even more embarrassing example of nuclear failure was reported by the BBC in July 2012, when intruders broke into the US nuclear weapons facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, by simply cutting through three fences. They managed to get as far as the wall of a building that housed enough highly-enriched uranium to make thousands of nuclear weapons, where they were confronted by a single guard. The intruders were revealed to be protesters making a political point, which was that they could easily have been terrorists who could have broken through the wall and made off with tonnes of uranium.
Just after he took office, US President Barack Obama made nuclear security one of his main initiatives, along with nuclear disarmament. Obama would like to be remembered as the president who left the world a much safer place and it is hard not to agree with the proposals. Obama got widespread agreement in April 2009 when he gave a thoughtful speech in the Czech Republic on the importance of nuclear proliferation disarmament, describing nuclear weapons as the most immediate and extreme threat to global security and promising to take “concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons”.
He was talking just after the rogue North Koreans had launched a long-range multi-stage rocket, but he saw any potential threat from nuclear nations as outweighed by the terrorist threat, saying that “terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal a nuclear weapon. And one nuclear bomb can kill hundreds of thousands of people.
His speech was publicly praised the world over, then quietly ignored. At the height of the financial crisis, all the leaders were thinking about saving their economies and dismissed Obama’s warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons as no more than his particular hobby horse. But Obama continued with the first summit on global nuclear security in Washington in 2010 and another in Seoul in 2012.
Hague summit
At The Hague summit this week, 35 out of 53 nations attending agreed to take the recommended international guidelines on tightening their nuclear security into national laws, thus making the guidelines binding and far more effective. The final communique contained clear agreements to prevent nuclear terrorism by reducing stockpiles of hazardous nuclear material, making stocks more secure and intensifying international cooperation. The US, UK and Japan were among the countries that agreed to make this move, even if several important nuclear powers like Russia, China, India and Pakistan refused to incorporate the recommendations into their legal structures.
In his closing remarks, an upbeat Obama noted that 12 countries and two dozen nuclear facilities around the world had now “rid themselves entirely of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium” and he added that “we’ve seen a fundamental shift in our approach to nuclear security, but we still have a lot more work to do to fulfil the ambitious goals we set four years ago to fully secure all nuclear and radiological material, civilian and military, so it can no longer pose a risk”. Obama is looking forward to the next nuclear security summit in 2016 in Washington, when he will have a more definitive treaty ready to sign based on the ground work done during this series of meetings and so help build something from his presidency that will endure beyond a few years.
Useful gathering
The summit was also useful as a gathering for world leaders, who took the opportunity of them all being in one place to address a variety of issues. The G7 met on the sidelines of the main conference without Russia (the G8 is dead for the foreseeable future) to review what they wanted to do about President Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea and consider how to counter any further aggression from Russia.
And Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met Korean President Park Geun Hye with Obama in a three-way summit that tried to support US attempts to build a united front to contain a more assertive China and pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme. Just like in 2009, North Korea responded by launching two ballistic missiles, which served to remind the main nuclear security summit that security should never be assumed and must be worked for continuously, a point Obama would have made very cogently to his guests at the event.