Obama steps back from sweeping nuclear security goal

As President Obama prepares for the last of the global summits he organized to lock down or eliminate nuclear explosive materials around the globe, his aides are hoping for modest achievements rather than pressing for broad new measures to help protect the world from a nuclear terror attack, according to current and former administration officials.

Obama set a high bar five months after his election when he said that nuclear armed terrorism was “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security” and promised that he would lead an effort to lock down all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years. But more than six years later, there is a consensus inside and outside the government that such a sweeping achievement remains out of reach.

Over the course of his presidency, Obama has scaled back his goals in this area and settled for what a senior White House official publicly described in 2012 as “the incremental nature of success," rather than throwing his full weight behind the creation of global security standards for nuclear materials that independent experts say could have a more lasting and significant impact.

The administration’s focus on what its officials depict as the art of the possible has provoked grumbling from outsiders that progress achieved so far could be undermined after Obama departs in 2017, unless the government mounts a last-minute push for a more sweeping agreement — even one involving only a few dozen like-minded nations instead of a global pact.

“I completely understand that putting forth ambitious ideas is putting your hand into a buzz saw,” said Kenneth Luongo, senior advisor to the secretary of energy during the Clinton administration and former director of arms control and nonproliferation at the Energy Department, referring to opposition by several nuclear-weapons states and some others to a new system of nuclear material controls.

“But you have to do it, so you can show people the scar,” he said, and demonstrate to the world that the United States is prepared to take political risks to reduce this threat.

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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.