Nuclear security summit to focus on Putin and Kim

Obama and Xi meet today at a summit that will test their capacity to push Putin to help strengthen nuclear security.

Barack Obama and Xi Jinping in Le Bourget, France, in November.

The world’s two most powerful leaders, presidents Barack Obama of the US and Xi Jinping of China, meet in Washington today at a summit that will test their capacity to push ­Russian’s President ­Vladimir Putin to join their efforts to strengthen global nuclear ­security.

The credibility of the Nuclear Security Summit will also require a response to growing inter­national concerns about plans of Islamist terrorists to get ­access to nuclear weapons — reinforced by the Belgian police discovery at the home of an Islamic State suspect four months ago — of a surveillance recording of a researcher at a Belgian nuclear centre.

The summit, which Mr Obama initiated in 2010 as a two-yearly event, follows the historic Iran ­nuclear agreement reached last year by the UN Security Council permanent members — those three, plus Britain, France and Germany.

North Korea remains the major thorn in the side of the powers are seeking to control the spread of nuclear weapons, but concerns also continue to be raised about the potential leakage of materials and of weaponisation expertise through the porous borders of Pakistan’s badlands.

This meeting involves representatives — many of them nat­ional leaders — from 52 countries.

Even modest, mere rhetorical success at the summit will be seized on by the Chinese and US governments as a sign that despite the tensions over Beijing’s South China Sea moves, they remain capable of managing the relationship towards positive outcomes in other international arenas.

Thomas Countryman, the US Assistant Secretary of State for international security and non-proliferation, set this scene up by stating that co-operation between China and the US was “vital” for global nuclear security.

The director of the nuclear sec­urity office of the International Association for Atomic Energy, Khammar Mrabit, from Morocco, said recently that China had taken effective steps to ensure the security of nuclear materials, including those at its rapidly growing number of nuclear power plants, and at medical research centres.

Beijing’s establishment of a ­Nuclear Security Centre of ­Excellence was, he said, “a big achievement”.

A commentary published in People’s Daily yesterday stressed that “eliminating the root causes of terrorism is essential to nuclear security … The combination of terrorism and nuclear materials constitutes a nightmare for humanity.”

The representatives in Washington would certainly agree.

However, the Communist Party newspaper went on to say that eliminating this threat required “Western countries, especially the US, to reflect on and change their anti-terror strategies, which are based on self-interest and geopolitical considerations, and feature double-standards”.

The commentary reiterated Beijing’s bitterness at Washington’s criticisms of its anti-terror legislation and the US failure to label Chinese Muslim Uighurs as terrorists on a par with Islamist murderers.

It underlined Mr Xi’s statement during a recent Middle East visit that “efforts should also be made in promoting economic development and reducing poverty in war-torn countries and beyond, in order to wipe out the breeding ground for terrorism”.