Safeguards vital to avoid terror nightmare

Seoul:  Material that can be used to make nuclear bombs is stored in scores of buildings spread across dozens of countries around the globe. If even a fraction of that stockpile fell into the hands of terrorists, it could be catastrophic.

Nearly 60 world leaders who gathered yesterday in Seoul for a nuclear security summit agreed to work on securing and accounting for all nuclear material by 2014. But widespread fear lingers about the safety of nuclear material in countries including former Soviet states, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.

While the threat of nuclear terrorism is considered lower now than a decade ago, especially after the death of Osama Bin Laden, the nightmare scenario of a terrorist exploding a nuclear bomb in a major city isn't necessarily the far-fetched stuff of movies.

"It would not take much, just a handful or so of these materials, to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people and that's not an exaggeration, that's the reality that we face," US President Barack Obama told world leaders at the meeting, a follow-up to a summit he hosted in Washington in 2010.

Building a nuclear weapon isn't easy, but a bomb similar to the one that obliterated Hiroshima is "very plausibly within the capabilities of a sophisticated terrorist group", according to Matthew Bunn, an associate professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

There's an "immense difference between the difficulty of making safe, reliable weapons for use in a missile or combat aircraft and making crude, unsafe, unreliable weapons for delivery by truck," Bunn said.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based nonproliferation group that tracks the security of world nuclear stockpiles, said in a January report that 32 countries have weapons-usable nuclear materials. Some, such as the US, maintain strict controls but others including Russia have struggled to secure their stocks.

Supply of lifesaving isotopes

President Barack Obama said the United States and several European countries have struck an agreement meant to sustain the supply of lifesaving isotopes without the use of highly enriched uranium.

Medical isotopes are used to treat cancer and heart disease worldwide. Scientists have been working on using low enriched uranium because highly enriched uranium can be used to create nuclear bombs.

Obama announced the agreement on Monday during a nuclear security summit in Seoul. The other countries are Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

World leaders are in Seoul to seek ways to improve nuclear security.