South Korean President Lee Myung-bak speaks with U.S. President Barack Obama during the first plenary session of the nuclear security summit in Washington.Jim Young/Reuters
Slapping Iran with sanctions tough enough to make the Islamic regime abandon its clandestine nuclear-weapons program emerged as U.S. President Barack Obama's immediate non-proliferation target in the wake of a two-day nuclear security summit.
"I am going to push as hard as I can to make sure that we get strong sanctions that have consequences for Iran," Mr. Obama said, adding he believes both China and Russia - long opposed to tightening the screws on Tehran - are prepared to support a new UN Security Council sanctions package.
The tough talk yesterday sets the stage for a looming confrontation between Mr. Obama and Tehran more than a year after the President's "extend a hand" speech - which has been pointedly spurned by Iran's ruling mullahs.
Buoyed by demonstrable if modest achievements - including promises by Canada and a handful of other countries to scrap weapons-grade stockpiles of nuclear material - Mr. Obama claimed the two-day summit that gathered nearly 50 countries had made Americans, and the rest of the world, safer.
"Canada agreed to give up a significant quantity of highly enriched uranium. Chile has given up its entire stockpile. Ukraine and Mexico announced that they will do the same," Mr. Obama said.
Dwarfing those promises to scrap a few hundred kilograms of highly enriched uranium, the United States and Russia said they will scrap 68 tonnes of plutonium, enough to make 17,000 warheads capable of obliterating a major city.
In a final communiqué, leaders agreed to secure or destroy thousands of tonnes of weapons-grade nuclear material - mostly enriched fuel rods from nuclear power plants - by 2014.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper called it a major step in "protecting the world from nuclear terrorism."
He also announced - with Mexico and the United States - a tripartite deal that will remove from a small Mexican research reactor about 11 kilograms of highly enriched uranium - roughly one-fifth of a bomb's worth. "This nuclear security project demonstrates that collective action can deliver concrete results," Mr. Harper said.
Keeping terrorists from buying, stealing or building a crude nuclear warhead was the focus of the summit - which also allowed it to avoid vexed issues such as Israel's secret nuclear arsenal or Pakistan's recent buildup of weapons-grade stocks not long after its top nuclear scientist was unmasked as the key figure in a global ring selling nuclear secrets.
Mr. Obama, who last week signed a pact with Moscow cutting nuclear arsenals by roughly one-third, opened Tuesday's working sessions by noting the "cruel irony of history" that "two decades after the end of the Cold War … the risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up."
The President's insistence on keeping the summit focused on locking down nuclear warheads and material "so they never fall into the hands of terrorists, who would surely use them," allowed the summit to avoid nasty splits between nuclear-armed adversaries - such as India and Pakistan - and kept such questions as defanging now-nuclear North Korea and keeping Tehran from joining the nuclear-armed club on the margins.
Asked at a post-summit news conference to discuss Israel's known but unacknowledged nuclear arsenal - the existence of which infuriates Arab states who claim Washington has a double standard when it preaches non-proliferation - Mr. Obama said: "As far as Israel goes, I'm not going to comment on their program."
However, he did restate long-standing U.S. policy, which is that all countries should join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which permits only Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States to possess nuclear weapons.
Mr. Obama stopped short of claiming he had won Chinese backing for sanctions against Iran. But he did say, "the fact that we've got Russia and China … having a serious discussion around a sanctions regime" represents major progress over the last year.
China, which holds a veto-wielding permanent seat on the Security Council and imports 12 per cent of its oil from Iran, has long resisted tough sanctions against Tehran.
Mr. Obama said he wants a new sanctions package imposed within weeks.
"What sanctions … accomplish is, hopefully, to change the calculus of a country like Iran, so that they see that there are more costs and fewer benefits to pursuing a nuclear-weapons program," the President said.
He also said Iran had rejected what he called "a very reasonable approach that would have allowed them to continue their civilian peaceful nuclear-energy needs, but would have allayed many of the concerns around their nuclear weapons."
Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, denounced the U.S.-hosted nuclear summit as "a political show aimed at diverting public attention from the global threat to peace and security emanating from the U.S. nuclear weapons."