Nuclear Security Summit

President Barack Obama embarks this week on the most elaborate diplomatic undertaking of his presidency, playing host to nearly 40 heads-of-state at a high-wattage summit intended to avert the catastrophic possibility of nuclear terrorism.

Setting the stage for the “sense of urgency” he’s called for at the summit, Obama spent four hours Sunday meeting with heads of state from Pakistan, India, South Africa, and Kazakhstan, as well as “courtesy call” with the acting president of Nigeria..

In remarks Sunday before his bilateral meeting with South African President Jacob Zuma, Obama set the stage for the two-day summit beginning Monday, calling terrorists with nuclear weapons “the single biggest threat to U.S. security... something that could change the security landscape of this country and around the world for years to come," and warning that "we know that organizations like al Qaeda are in the process of trying to secure a nuclear weapon."

Monday, Obama will have bilateral meetings with heads of state from China, Jordan, Malaysia, Ukraine and Armenia.

The gathering of high-level delegations from 46 nations at the call of an American president is almost without precedent, White House officials said. They say the last such meeting was the 1945 conference President Harry Truman hosted in San Francisco that led to the organization of the United Nations.

The large turnout for this week’s two-day meeting is testament to the relatively uncontroversial notion behind the session, said Steven Pifer, an arms control expert with the Brookings Institution.

“Most of the countries in the world, with the exception of North Korea, have an interest in limiting the threat posed by nuclear smuggling efforts,” Pifer said. “President [Obama] wants, four years from now, to have a high degree confidence that stocks of highly enriched uranium anywhere in the world are under very strong safeguards.”

However, the formal large-group sessions of the summit may end up taking a backseat to the one-on-one meetings leaders are holding along its fringes. Obama is planning at least nine such sessions on the summit’s sidelines. It is in those meetings where the president’s top foreign policy priority at the moment, winning international sanctions to dissuade Iran from pursuing its nuclear ambitions, will be hashed out.

“That is an issue that is separate from the agenda of the summit. However, of course, the United States continues to work through the U.N. Security Council…to insist that Iran meet its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” Obama National Security Council spokesman Ben Rhodes said last week. “This, I’m sure, will be a subject at some of the President’s bilats.”



Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/35633.html#ixzz0ku0hz7sl

source: politico.com article by Josh Gerstein