Iran to Host Own Nuclear Summit Saturday

The Iranian government is hosting a nuclear conference Saturday and Sunday in Tehran, in counterpoint to the Washington summit this week to which it was not invited. The meeting comes as the U.S. pushes for a fourth set of sanctions over Tehran's disputed nuclear program, a drive that appears to be gaining momentum.

Looking ahead to the Tehran meeting, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted that his country is doing its best to work with world powers.

In an interview on state television, Mr. Ahmadinejad said "we are actually after cooperation and negotiation. We still are.” He added that Iran was willing to deal with a formula that protects Iran's rights, includes its independence, dignity and honor - and excludes the nuclear issue.

It's that kind of mixed message that frustrates so many. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian purposes. But by refusing to comply with U.N. nuclear agency requests, it deepens suspicions that it seeks nuclear weapons.

Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, political science professor at the American University in Cairo, says the Iranian program is worrying for almost everyone, both in the region and in the international community.

“The fact that Iran insists on pursuing these features and refusing to reassure the international community and its neighbors,” Fishere said, “means that those who are worried about it enough to take action, will eventually take action."

The conference in Iran appears aimed at showing Tehran still has supporters. India is one nuclear power sending a representative, though at a far lower official level than at the Washington summit.

There are signs others are losing patience. China, which has been holding out against further U.N. sanctions, has agreed to be involved at least in the drafting of new measures. The veto-wielding nation depends on Iran for some ten percent of its oil, although in recent months has been looking at other Persian Gulf nations as possible suppliers.

Further complicating efforts of those wishing to support Iran are comments by authorities that leave many simply baffled.

Earlier in the week, a senior official at Iran's atomic energy agency declared the country would become a member of the "nuclear club" within a month. The term is commonly used to describe nations with nuclear weapons.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was quick to dismiss the idea, saying he didn't believe it.

“I think most estimates that I've seen haven't changed since the last time we talked about it, which is, at least a year, maybe more," Gates said.

Political science professor Fishere argued both sides need to go beyond reacting to statements like that about the nuclear club, which he says could be aimed at a domestic audience or simply a matter of mistranslation. He urged the United States and Iran to sit down to direct dialogue about all the issues at stake. But he argues that the offer by President Barack Obama to reach out to Iran didn't go far enough.

"What the Obama administration did was incurring the political cost of calling for a dialogue with Iran, but without actually the benefit of engaging in that dialogue,” Fishere said.

He added that he hopes the administration will be bold enough to finally engage in face-to-face dialogue and put on the table the serious issues and the real issues it is worried about.

Fishere said the U.N. offer last year to enrich Iranian uranium abroad -an offer rejected by Iran - was a good start, arguing that broadening that dialogue will help bring Iran back from what he calls the "abyss" that it appears to be approaching.

Could terrorists get hold of a nuclear bomb?

World leaders are heading for Washington to discuss what Barack Obama has described as "the most immediate and extreme threat to global security" - the risk that terrorists could acquire a nuclear bomb. But how likely is this scenario?

A former investigator with the CIA and the US department of energy, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, says there are three headlines that keep him awake at night:

• Pakistani 'loose nukes' in the hands of terrorists

• North Korea supplies terrorists with nuclear bombs

• Al-Qaeda launches nuclear attack

The good news is that he thinks "the odds are stacked against" terrorists acquiring a nuclear bomb.

But the low probability, he argues, has to be weighed against the awfulness of the consequences.

In today's unpredictable world, he writes in an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "a probability-based approach to managing risk" makes less sense than one "focused on mitigating threats in descending order of their possible consequences".

It's an argument that Barack Obama was making long before his election.

"Instead of taking aggressive steps to secure the world's most dangerous technology, [the US has] spent almost $1 trillion to occupy a country in the heart of the Middle East that no longer had any weapons of mass destruction," he said in a speech at Purdue University, Indiana, in July 2008.

Three months later, a commission set up by the US Congress warned that without decisive action it was "more likely than not" that a terrorist attack involving WMD would occur by the end of 2013.

Pakistan

In Rolf Mowatt-Larssen's view, there is "a greater possibility of a nuclear meltdown in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world".

The region has more violent extremists than any other, the country is unstable, and its arsenal of nuclear weapons is expanding.

Once a new plutonium reactor comes on line in the near future "smaller, more lethal plutonium bombs will be produced in greater numbers", he says.

The possibility of a Taliban takeover is, he admits, a "worst-case scenario".

But the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not the only shadows on the Pakistani landscape. There is also the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, which is accused of carrying out the Mumbai attack in November 2008, and like the Pakistani officer corps, recruits mostly in the Punjab.

"As one senior Pakistani general once told me," wrote Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution last week, "the relationship between the army and the Lashkar-e-Taiba is a family affair".

He went on: "Pakistan has taken serious measures to protect the crown jewels of its national security, but it lives in a perilous time. If there is a nightmare nuclear security scenario in Pakistan today it is probably an inside-the-family-job that ends up in a nuclear armageddon in India."

The point is echoed by Ian Kearns of the British American Security Information Council (Basic), who writes of the danger that states could use terrorist groups to attack adversaries "by proxy", engineering nuclear security breakdowns to facilitate terrorist access to weapons or materials.

BBC correspondents say there is every indication that the Pakistani military is in total control of the country's nuclear facilities.

North Korea

The reason North Korea keeps Rolf Mowatt-Larssen awake at night is connected with the mysterious site at al-Kibar in Syria, destroyed by Israeli missiles in 2007.

It's his view that North Korea was helping Syria build a reactor there and that the outside world only found out because of a "windfall of intelligence".

"Taking into account the sobering reality that Kim Jong-il came close to providing Syria with the building blocks for nuclear weapons... how confident can the international community be that there is not a long-running 'AQ Kim' network in North Korea that is analogous to the AQ Khan rogue state nuclear supplier network in Pakistan?" he asks.

The episode showed, in his view, that it is hard enough for the intelligence community to spot state-related clandestine nuclear activity, let alone clandestine nuclear trafficking of non-state actors, which would have a much smaller footprint.

North Korea's "erratic and irresponsible behaviour" makes it a leading potential source for terrorists seeking to acquire nuclear-related technologies and materials, he says.

Al-Qaeda

Though he now works in academia, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen led US efforts to determine whether al-Qaeda possessed a nuclear bomb, in the wake of 9/11.

He doesn't believe it does. But "the group's long-held intent and persistent efforts to acquire nuclear and biological weapons represent a unique means of potentially fulfilling their wildest hopes and aspirations," he writes.

Al-Qaeda's experience on the nuclear black market has taught its planners that its best chance lies in constructing an "improvised nuclear device (IND)," he says.

For this they would need either a quantity of plutonium or 25kg-50kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU), the size of one or two grapefruits.

HEU is held in hundreds of buildings in dozens of countries. "Security measures for many of these stocks are excellent, but security for others is appalling," according to a report published in 2008 by the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

The IAEA registered 15 confirmed cases of unauthorised possession of plutonium or HEU between 1993 and 2008, a few of which involved kilogram-sized quantities. In most cases the quantity was far lower but in some cases the sellers indicated there was more. (If there was, it hasn't been traced.)

There is no global inventory of either material, so no-one can be sure how much has gone missing over the years.

Neither are there agreed international standards for security and accounting of these materials. UN Security Council Resolution 1540 merely calls for "appropriate and effective" measures, without defining this in detail.

"It is a stark and worrying fact, therefore, that nuclear materials and weapons around the world are not as secure as they should be," writes Ian Kearns, in his Basic report.

The main goal of the Washington summit is to make progress on this issue.

Turkish PM does not want any country to have nukes

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. AP photo

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Monday that his country does not want Iran or any other nation to have nuclear weapons.

Erdoğan is among dozens of world leaders in Washington for President Barack Obama's nuclear security summit. He spoke Monday at George Mason University's new Center for Global Islamic Studies in Fairfax, Virginia, just outside the U.S. capital.

Turkey currently holds one of the rotating seats on the U.N. Security Council, and the United States is hoping Turkey will cooperate with efforts to impose sanctions against Iran as punishment for its alleged work toward creating nuclear weapons.

While the United States worries about Iran's nuclear program, Turkey has its own concerns about Israel's nuclear program. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opted not to attend the Obama's summit, and insiders said he had expected Turkey and Egypt to use the conference as a platform to challenge him over his country's widely assumed nuclear arsenal, which the Tel Aviv never has acknowledged.

Erdoğan, in his remarks, did not specifically mention Israel's nuclear program, but he criticized its treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and called Gaza an "open-air prison."

While he specifically said Turkey does not want nuclear weapons in "our region," he also said Ankara "would like to see all countries possessing nuclear weapons work to eliminate them in a certain time frame." His remarks in Turkish were translated by an interpreter.

As for Iran's nuclear ambitions, Erdoğan noted that Tehran has denied it is pursuing a nuclear weapon, but he also said that the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world's nuclear watchdog, has faulted Iran for a lack of transparency.

Previously Turkey has indicated it did not support sanctions to punish Iran. Other current Security Council members, specifically Lebanon and Brazil, also are opposed to sanctions. China, a permanent member that can veto Security Council action, said last week it was willing to join in consultations about sanctioning Iran.

Chinese President Hu Jintao and Obama met Monday and the White House said they agreed to work on potential sanctions against the Islamic Republic

In his prepared remarks, Erdoğan also criticized a long-running effort in the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution declaring that Armenians were victims of Turkish genocide nearly a century ago.

"We are against a one-sided interpretation of history," Erdoğan said. "History cannot be written in Parliament and judged by Parliament."

Turkey recalled its U.S. ambassador last month in protest after the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring that the Ottoman-era killings amounted to genocide. The full House has not voted on the resolution.

Armenians claim that up to 1.5 million of their kin were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I. Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.

Obama Opens 47-Nation Nuclear Security Summit

President Barack Obama says the 47-nation Nuclear Security Summit he is hosting here in Washington will produce specific, concrete actions to make the world safer. The president says he wants new commitments to secure nuclear materials to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. With concerns about the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea a major backdrop to the conference, this is the biggest U.S.-sponsored gathering of world leaders in more than 60 years. With this summit and efforts to follow, President Obama faces a test of his ability to further a nuclear agenda focused on nonproliferation and countering potential nuclear terrorism, with support from like-minded nations. All of the world's major nuclear powers are here - Russia, China, Britain and France - along with South Asian nuclear rivals India and Pakistan. Israel, which is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, but has never confirmed their existence, is also represented. North Korea, which is believed to have tested a nuclear weapon in 2006, was not invited nor was Iran, which is still engaged in a standoff with the international community over its uranium enrichment program that Tehran maintains is for peaceful purposes and not for nuclear weapons. Syria was also not invited. Iran dismissed the outcome of the Washington conference in advance as it faces the possibility of a fourth round of sanctions under a U.N. Security Council resolution that President Obama says he hopes can be finalized in coming weeks with support from Russia and China. President Obama greeted each delegation on Monday at the summit site, before the leaders went into a working dinner. John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, called the threat of nuclear terrorism real and growing. Although there is no indication that al-Qaida has a nuclear weapon, he said every step must be taken to ensure that it does not acquire one. "I am determined to ensure that they are not going to be able to obtain that type of capability," said John Brennan. "And the best way to do it as we continue to degrade and destroy al-Qaida is to take away the opportunities they may have to acquire the fissile material, highly enriched uranium or separated plutonium, or the expertise that is required to use that fissile material to create an improvised nuclear explosive device." Saying some countries need to do a better job of "locking down" nuclear materials, Brennan added that a key goal is to ensure that nations understand their responsibilities. In bilateral meetings with countries such as Kazakhstan and Ukraine, President Obama appears to have achieved the support he wants for the final communiqué to be issued on Tuesday, committing nations to securing nuclear materials over a four year period. To that end, the White House announced an agreement in which Ukraine committed to eliminating its stockpile of highly enriched uranium by the time of the next Nuclear Security Summit in 2012, with a substantial amount to be removed by the end of this year. Saying this was something the United States had sought for more than a decade, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about the commitments President Obama wants to see from the summit. "There are a host of roles that the countries represented here can play," said Robert Gibbs. "Again, some have that highly enriched uranium that we are seeking to secure, others can play an effort in how to secure that. Others can play an effort in the interdiction of these types of materials in the event that they leave where they are." President Obama's 90-minute meeting with China's President Hu Jintao produced what U.S. officials describe as an agreement that Iran must meet its international nuclear nonproliferation obligations. White House national security aide Jeff Bader said President Hu shared U.S. concerns about Iran's nuclear program and the overall goal of preserving the nonproliferation regime, adding that the two presidents agreed to instruct U.N. delegations to work with the P5 + 1 on a new Security Council sanctions resolution. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman told reporters after the meeting that China hopes the Iran issue can be resolved through dialogue and negotiations. On concerns about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, a White House statement after the president's Sunday meeting with Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said the Pakistani leader gave an assurance that his country "takes nuclear security seriously and has appropriate safeguards in place." Vice President Joe Biden hosted leaders and officials from 11 Non-Aligned Movement nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, telling them that "adding more nuclear weapons or more nuclear-weapon states is the exact wrong approach at this moment in the world's history." President Obama has two additional bilateral meetings scheduled on Tuesday - one with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the other with Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey. As for the location of the next Nuclear Security Summit, White House spokesman Gibbs says there will be an announcement on that on Tuesday at the conclusion of the Washington conference.