Experts urge stronger steps to prevent nuke terror

SEOUL — Nuclear experts at a forum on Friday urged world leaders to take stronger steps to protect global atomic stockpiles from terrorists when they hold a major security meeting next week.

Leaders or top officials from 53 countries including US President Barack Obama will gather in Seoul on Monday and Tuesday for the Nuclear Security Summit on safeguarding fissile material and reducing stockpiles.

Leaders agreed at the first such summit in Washington in 2010 to secure the most vulnerable nuclear materials from terrorists in four years.

But the experts, speaking at a pre-summit Nuclear Security Symposium, urged them to set more tangible and measurable goals in Seoul.

“The bottom line is that the goal has been set by the leaders but that was not enough,” said Miles Pomper, researcher for the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in California.

Many agreements at the first summit were non-binding and were sometimes later scrapped after diplomatic disputes with the US, he said.

“There is no definition of what ‘security’ meant... what ‘vulnerable’ meant and no way of verifying whether those goals were met,” Pomper said, calling for a more ambitious goal of legally-binding initiatives.

Page Stoutland, vice president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington, said that despite the 2010 pledges, stockpiles of weapons-usable atomic material had increased in nations including India and Pakistan.

“At the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit... leaders should seize the opportunity to improve stewardship of the world’s most dangerous materials,” he said.

The experts discussed issues ranging from potential cyber attacks on nuclear facilities to the potential threat posed by nuclear-armed North Korea.

Graham Allison, director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, warned of a “catastrophic effect” should the North under its new young leader sell its atomic technology to terrorists.

“The elusive Kim Jong-Un... imagine he could sell a nuclear bomb to a terrorist group like Al Qaeda or some other terrorist groups and get away with it?” he said.