Assessing Obama's Nuclear Security Summit: Takeaways from Experts at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center

Graham Allison
Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

This Nuclear Security Summit was, to paraphrase Vice President Biden, "a bleeping big deal." We are all familiar with the cliché about the urgent driving out the important. With all the urgent issues pressing upon him today, ranging from financial reform to climate disruption, to focus the minds of leaders around the world on what he rightly identified as "the single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short term, medium term and long term" is remarkable -- indeed perhaps without precedent.

The big insight he attempted to drive home is that these leaders have in their power to prevent the only terrorist attack that could kill hundreds of thousands of individuals in a single blow. This would indeed be a civilization changer. But if nations lock down all nuclear weapons and bomb-usable material as securely as gold in Fort Knox, they can reduce the likelihood of a nuclear 9/11 to nearly zero.

Matthew Bunn
Associate Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom

Major progress from Nuclear Security Summit: Focusing the attention of presidents and prime ministers around the world on securing nuclear materials, the nuclear security summit was a major step toward locking down nuclear stockpiles around the world and keeping them out of terrorist hands. The assembled leaders identified nuclear terrorism as a major threat to global security and endorsed President Obama's goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear material worldwide within four years. Individual countries made important commitments to take steps to improve nuclear security, including:

• Ukraine announced it would eliminate all its highly enriched uranium (HEU) by the end of 2012;
• Canada announced that it would send a large stock of HEU back to the United States;
• Mexico announced that it would convert its research reactor and eliminate the last HEU on its soil;
• Britain said that it would host an international peer review led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of nuclear security at its Sellafield site, where over 100 tons of plutonium is stored -- by far the most important and sensitive facility where such a review has ever been carried out, and a major step toward making such international reviews a normal part of doing business in the nuclear field, as international safety reviews are;
• France also announced that it would host an IAEA-led peer review;
• The Republic of Korea will host a follow-on summit in 2012

Mikhail Saakashvili, the President of Georgia, revealed that there had been another seizure of stolen HEU in Georgia in March, and that there had been eight seizures of enriched uranium in Georgia over the past ten years (though he did not reveal how many of those were highly enriched).

The key now is to hit the ground running in turning the summit words into real action on the ground in the weeks and months to come. For an assessment of global nuclear security and a set of recommendations to achieve effective security for all nuclear stockpiles in four years, see the new report, Securing the Bomb 2010: Securing All Nuclear Materials in Four Years. A press briefing on the communiqué, work plan, and country commitments is also available from the White House website.

William Tobey
Senior Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

The summit was a successful extension of longstanding US efforts to improve nuclear security worldwide -- from the Nunn-Lugar program beginning in 1992 to the Bratislava Initiative in 2005, which completed major nuclear security upgrades in Russia. The longterm significance of the summit, however, will depend upon translating the political impetus in Washington into tangible actions across the globe.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen
Senior Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

The crux of the nuclear terrorism issue is not terrorist intent and to acquire a nuclear weapon -- that much is clear -- but whether they have the capability to do so.

Is the threat real?

Skepticism is understandable and must be addressed forthrightly. But in the final analysis, it would be a profound mistake to assume "men in caves" cannot overcome the considerable difficulties in acquiring or building a crude nuclear bomb. Thus far they have failed in their efforts to do so.

The Washington Nuclear Summit was a success because it has stimulated global leadership acknowledgement to treat nuclear terrorism as a potentially serious threat to world order.

In this context, it's not an exaggeration to say that the task at hand is all about denying terrorists access to nuclear weapons and weapons usable material.

No material -- no bomb.

Hopefully, leaders will leave Washington with a shared sense of urgency to secure all materials to a gold standard in the next four years, to consolidate materials, reduce the number of locations materials are stored, and continuously upgrade all aspects of nuclear security to ensure terrorist groups are never able to gain access to these deadly materials.