The Nuclear Security Summit scheduled to be held in Seoul at the end of this month is not likely to improve on progress made at the 2010 summit held in Washington, nuclear security experts from the Fissile Materials Working Group said yesterday. The Obama Administration’s goal to secure vulnerable nuclear material around the world in four years, which was cemented with other countries at the 2010 summit, “almost certainly will not be met,” Will Tobey, former deputy administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said at an event yesterday at the National Press Club. He added that “there may even be some regression” from the 2010 meeting. “The Washington summit both relied upon and completed a pipeline of available summits. In other words, there were specific projects that were already being contemplated well in advance of the Washington summit. Those were used to fill out the goal of national commitments. In the absence of those projects, it will be more difficult for governments to make progress.”
Tobey, and Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, also criticized the hefty cuts in NNSA’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget request for the Second Line of Defense Program and Global Threat Reduction Initiative. “It doesn’t make any sense, there’s no rationale for it,” Luongo said. He added that the cuts were partly a result of ambiguity in the four-year goal to secure nuclear materials. “Everybody gave the Obama Administration a free ride on what the four-year goal was. I don’t think there is any way to sugarcoat it at this point, frankly because they are using it to their advantage by saying ‘We can cut the budget because everything we are doing is consistent to meeting the four-year goal.’ Well, nobody ever defined what the four-year goal was.”