Is Obama's nuclear security summit another charm offensive or a freak show, ponders Gamal Nkrumah The curious political paradox of our time is that we've actually got a scintillating president in the Oval Office. 2010 could, by a wide stretch of the imagination, mark the beginning of the end as far as nuclear weapons are concerned. However, as we all know, the end of uncanny matters such as nuclear proliferation is never as clear as their beginnings. United States President Barack Obama in a landmark move signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia in the Czech capital Prague barely a week before hosting the improbably dubbed Nuclear Security Summit -- a contradiction in terms, for nuclear can never be secure, nor safe. Key players, or rather those who purport to incapacitate Obama's moralistic perspective of nuclear power, were conspicuously absent. North Korea and Iran were not invited, yet they are widely perceived as posing a threat to world peace. Snubbed, Iran is to host its own counter-proliferation summit next week and officially pointed out that it was not bound by agreements arrived at on the close of the 12-13 April Washington nuclear security summit. "The outcome of the Washington conference is already known," declared Iran's envoy to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Ali Asghar Soltanieh. "The US is not committed to any global rules and regulations," Soltanieh surly summed up his country's position. The summit, indeed, is so clearly a clever concoction of a comic-book universe that most of the 47 nations represented in Washington at the two-day conference conveniently overlooked the fact that the US deploys more than 2,200 nuclear warheads. By comparison, China has only 350. Incidentally, Chinese President Hu Jintao represented the People's Republic at the Washington summit, and while his hosts gave him the red carpet treatment, they were, I am certain, mindful of the fact that Iran supplies 11 per cent of China's energy needs. It is indeed preposterous that a country, such as Iran, that is supposedly toiling hard to produce a nuclear bomb, according to its detractors, be singled out for retribution when America and Russia between them produce 95 per cent of the world's nuclear arms. "Unless the US reduces its reliance and emphasis on nuclear weapons, other states will have a cynical excuse to pursue or to improve the capabilities and size of their nuclear forces," Daryl Kimball, executive director of Arms Control Association, so aptly put it. Obama rightly praised the "moral leadership" of South Africa, the first and only country in the world to voluntarily dismantle its nuclear arsenal. And, just before the commencement of the Washington summit, Ukraine announced that it would dispose of its high-enriched uranium stockpiles. Ukraine, the country that witnessed the world's worst nuclear accident in 1986, also declared that civil nuclear- operated plants would function with low-enriched uranium fuel that cannot be used for producing nuclear weapons. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych told participants that his country would surrender all its nuclear weapons by 2012. Other European nuclear powers were reluctant to follow suit. "I cannot jeopardise the security and safety of my country," French President Nicolas Sarkozy told delegates at the Washington nuclear security summit. "I have inherited the legacy of the efforts made by my nuclear stockpiles and build up France as a nuclear power," Sarkozy stated categorically. "The security of Europe is at stake." "This is an unprecedented gathering," as Obama pointed out, but we in the developing countries of the South cannot ignore the double standards sometimes exhibited by the black president in the White House. "He has positioned himself all over the political map," New York Times columnist Bob Herbert so succinctly put it. "I start off with the premise that nuclear energy is not optimal and so I am not a nuclear energy proponent," Obama said during his presidential campaign in Iowa in December 2007. Yet, this week, and just before the august Washington gathering he called on Congress to give the go-ahead to a $8.3 billion in federal government loan guarantee funds to construct the first new nuclear power plant in the US in more than 30 years. This government bailout for the troubled US nuclear industry is surely not in the least reassuring, neither for Americans, nor for peace-lovers the world over. "From a health perspective the proposal of the Obama administration to increase federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors poses a serious risk to Americans," noted Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. Yet Obama chooses to focus on potential culprits like Iran and Al-Qaeda at international forums. "We must build on our efforts to break up black markets, detect and intercept materials in transit, and use financial tools to disrupt this dangerous trade," warned Obama last April in Prague. "We know that organisations like Al-Qaeda are in the process of trying to secure nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, and would have no compunction at using them," Obama opined. Historically, the only country that ever had no compunction in dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagazaki was the US in 1945. No other state since felt compelled to do so. "The single biggest threat to US security, short-term, medium-term and long-term, is the possibility of a terrorist organisation obtaining a nuclear weapon," Obama postulated. "This is something that could change the security landscape of this country and around the world for years to come," he stressed. That may well be so. But that is no reason to bar Iran from the Washington nuclear security summit and invite three of the only four countries in the world not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) namely Pakistan, India and Israel. There are, after all, 189 signatories to the NPT -- including Iran. According to the Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute, India has between 60-70 nuclear warheads, and Pakistan has 60. Former US president Jimmy Carter is on record stating that Israel possesses at least 150 nuclear warheads. The focus of the Washington gathering was the threat Iran potentially poses and not the evil embodied in Israel's abhorrent nuclear arsenal. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is boycotting the nuclear security summit for fear that Israel will come under fire for its nuclear arsenal. Israel must be brought to book and Obama must hoodwink the world into believing that Israel has the right to defend itself by building a fearsome nuclear arsenal while Iran has no right to construct nuclear plants for civilian purposes. Egypt and Turkey raised the issue of the Israeli arms arsenal in Washington this week. Pressure is mounting on Israel to sign the NPT and to declare the Middle East a nuclear weapons free zone. In Washington, Israel's Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor represented Israel instead of Netanyahu. Unlike Israel, countries like Pakistan were more concerned about the "non-discriminatory access to civil nuclear technology." Another distinguished participant, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, begged to differ. But the Pakistanis protested that their country "fully qualifies for participation in civil nuclear cooperation at the international level. Pakistan has more than 35 years of experience running nuclear power plants." The issue, presumably on the sidelines of the Washington summit, shrouded the real importance of Pakistan's questionable role as a de-facto transmitter, from both Indian and Western perspectives, of nuclear power to pariah states and would-be terrorists -- most of whom happen to be Muslim. These prickly subjects, rather than ballistic missile defence and its financial year budget in the US dominated discussions at the Washington summit. Ballistic Missile Defense Review Report (BMDRR) released on 1 February 2010 outlining long-term US policy on ballistic missile defence did not top the agenda. And, that is where Obama's craftiness came into play. The US Defense Department request for $9.9 billion including $8.4 billion for the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) was not subjected to scrutiny at the Nuclear Security Summit. The new strategic arms reduction treaty Obama concluded with Russia in Prague was applauded by all and sundry. Bilateral relations between nuclear powers were as critical for the conference's success as were the multilateral deliberations. Of special importance was Chinese- US relations. "China and the US should respect each others' core interests and major concerns. This is key to the healthy and stable development of bilateral ties. The two countries should deepen practical cooperation," Chinese President Hu Jintao told reporters in Washington after a meeting with Obama. "China and the US should properly solve their economic trade rifts through consultations on an equal footing." Equality, it seems, is the new ascendant tenor. Still, Obama stole the show. The BMDRR and the MDA were conveniently discounted since diplomacy is a servile discipline that demands the subjugation of national interests to the global good. And, few delegates departed from Washington in whimpers, ennui and irony, and especially not the Israelis.
