Leaders tackle N-terrorism threat

Obama’s final atomic summit

WASHINGTON, March 31, (Agencies): Still reeling from attacks in Brussels and Paris, world leaders are wrestling this week with the chilling prospect of the Islamic State group or other extremists unleashing a nuclear attack on a major Western city.

Preventing terrorists from obtaining nuclear materials is the central focus as US President Barack Obama hosts leaders from roughly 50 countries for a nuclear security summit starting Thursday. Despite three previous summits and six years of Obama’s prodding, security officials warn that the ingredients for a nuclear device or a “dirty bomb” are alarmingly insecure.

“We know that terrorist organizations have the desire to get access to these raw materials and to have a nuclear device”, said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser. Still, the White House said there was no indication of an imminent plot.

Decades after the Cold War, the threat of a nuclear war between superpowers has given way to growing concerns about non-state actors, including Islamic State and al-Qaeda offshoots operating in North Africa and in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Although the US and its allies still worry about North Korea, Obama believes the threat posed by Iran has subsided due to the nuclear deal, leaving extremist groups among the likeliest perpetrators.

The havoc such an attack could wreak in an urban area like New York or London is concerning enough that leaders scheduled a special session on the threat during the two-day summit. US officials said the leaders would discuss a hypothetical scenario about a chain of events that could lead to nuclear terrorism.

Those concerns have taken on heightened significant following the March 22 attacks at a Brussels airport and subway station. Last year, authorities searching the apartment of two brothers linked to earlier attacks in Paris found video of a senior official at a Belgian nuclear waste facility. The brothers were part of the Islamic State cell that went on to strike Brussels;

Obama has pushed to reform the US criminal justice system to reduce the number of people serving long sentences for both died in the attacks.

On the summit’s sidelines, Obama planned to meet with the leaders of China, South Korea and Japan, who all share US concerns about North Korea’s nuclear program.

Yet other key players will be missing. Russian President Vladimir Putin refused to attend, as Moscow scoffed at what it deemed US efforts to take control of the process. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif canceled his trip following an Easter bombing that killed 72 people.

Some 2,000 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium being used in civilian or military programs could be turned into a nuclear bomb if stolen or diverted, the White House said. And fewer than half of the countries participating in the summit have even agreed to secure their sources of radiological material, needed for a dirty bomb.

“The policies are moving in the right direction”, said Joe Cirincione, who runs the nuclear security group Ploughshares Fund. “But when you’re fleeing a forest fire, it’s not just a question of direction, it’s a question of speed”.

Nuclear security experts say there are four potential scenarios for a nuclear-related attack by an extremist group. Some are more likely than others.

The most devastating but improbable scenario involves a group stealing a fully functional bomb from a nuclear-armed country. Most nuclear experts point to Pakistan as the likeliest source, though that would require cooperation with someone on the inside of Pakistan’s military.

Uranium

Easier to pull off would be for IS or another group to obtain fissile material like highly enriched uranium, then turn it into a crude nuclear device delivered by truck or ship. A third possibility is that extremists could bomb an existing nuclear facility, such as the Belgian waste plant, spreading highly radioactive material over a wide area.

non-violent drug crimes, a rare area where the Democratic president has garnered support from Republican lawmakers.

The most likely scenario that security experts fear is that a group could get ahold of radioactive material, such as cesium or cobalt, for a dirty bomb that could be carried in a suitcase. Those materials are widely used in industrial, academic and hospital settings, with no consistent security standards across the globe. Last year, an Associated Press investigation revealed multiple attempts by black market smugglers to sell radioactive material to Middle East extremists.

Bomb

Unlike a nuclear bomb, the only people killed instantly by a “dirty bomb” would be those close to the blast site. But the blast could spread cancer-causing substances over a vast area, triggering panic and evacuations.

“Even if it is small, such an incident would create such havoc in the world that you have to take it quite seriously”, said former Ambassador Wendy Sherman, who spearheaded US nuclear negotiations with Iran and North Korea before joining the Albright Stonebridge Group.

Detonated in a major city, a dirty bomb could cause tens of billions of dollars in economic damage, said Andrew Bieniawski, who studies materials security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. People and businesses would have to be relocated — potentially for years — while the contamination is cleaned up. Few would be inclined to ever go back, a reality on display in Chernobyl, Ukraine decades after the 1986 accident.

Reducing the threat of nuclear terrorism has been a persistent theme for Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize after emphasizing nuclear disarmament. Four months into his presidency, Obama warned in a much-cited speech in Prague that nuclear weapons were “the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War”.

In related news, the absence of Russia, one of the biggest atomic powers, could detract from decisions reached in Washington this week.

Obama, in an opinion piece in The

“It does not make sense for a non-violent drug offender to be getting 20 years, 30 years, in some cases life in prison. Washington Post, said, “Our massive Cold War nuclear arsenal is poorly suited to today’s threats. The United States and Russia — which together hold more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons — should negotiate to reduce our stockpiles further.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday Russia was skipping the summit because of a “shortage of mutual cooperation” in working out the agenda.

While noting that Moscow had continued joint work on nuclear security, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Russia was going to “miss out on an opportunity” and that its no-show illustrated the “degree to which Russia is isolated”. Russia has chafed over US-led sanctions over the Ukraine conflict.

Efforts to make the world safer have also been complicated by North Korea’s nuclear weapons advance and Pakistan’s move toward smaller, tactical nuclear weapons, which Washington fears may further destabilize an already volatile region.

All of this weighs on Obama’s agenda as he prepares to host world leaders on Thursday and Friday. He inaugurated the event nearly six years ago, after using a landmark speech in Prague in 2009 to lay out the goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons as a central theme of his presidency.

There is no guarantee that once Obama, the driving force behind the initiative, leaves office in January his successor will keep the issue a high priority.

The White House previewed the summit by touting a list of achievements in the US-led effort to tie down loose bomb-grade materials, and arms control advocates commend Obama for galvanizing an international response to the problem.

However, many say progress has slowed since the last summit in 2014 and countries such as Japan, India and Pakistan are preparing activities that could increase stockpiles of nuclear materials. That’s not serving anybody,” Obama said after lunch with several people whose sentences had been commuted.

Obama has now commuted 248 sentences, which the White House said was more than the previous six presidents combined. More than a third of those commuted on Wednesday were life sentences.

“Throughout the remainder of his time in office, the President is committed to continuing to issue more grants of clemency as well as to strengthening rehabilitation programs,” White House counsel Neil Eggleston said in a statement.

Over a burger, Obama talked with four women and three men whose sentences were commuted about what it was like to get a second chance.

He highlighted the story of Phillip Emmert, convicted in 1992 on a charge of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine.

Emmert, who wiped back tears as Obama told his story, served 14 years before then-President George W. Bush commuted his sentence in 2006. Emmert got clean from drugs, took job training in prison and now maintains air-handling systems at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, Iowa.

“It is my strong belief that by exercising these presidential powers, I have the chance to show people what a second chance can look like”, Obama told reporters. (RTRS)