Stopping nuclear terrorism

President Obama and the leaders of 60 nations agreed at a summit in South Korea this week to secure all nuclear materials to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. “It would not take much, just a handful or so of these materials, to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and that’s not an exaggeration,” Obama said. The national leaders set a goal of 2014 for locating and securing all nuclear materials that could be used to produce nuclear weapons. Their discussions were upstaged, though, by North Korea’s surprise announcement that it would launch a rocket this month. The U.S. suspects that Pyongyang will test a long-range missile, and warned that the launch would kill a recent deal to trade U.S. aid for a North Korean nuclear freeze.

On the summit’s sidelines, an open microphone picked up Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev discussing negotiations over a U.S. missile-defense system in Europe, which the Russians oppose. “After my election I’ll have more flexibility,” Obama said. Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney said the remark was “troubling” and called Russia “our No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

More flexibility to do what—sell out our allies again? asked Peter Wehner in CommentaryMagazine.com. Obama already reneged on an agreement with allies Poland and the Czech Republic to build a land-based missile-defense shield on their territory, and he got no concessions from Russia for that. “We can only imagine what a second Obama term would mean in terms of unwise concessions and reckless agreements with Russia, Iran, North Korea, and countless other nations.” Such “campaign-year outrage from Obama’s rivals over the remarks is probably inevitable,” said Bloomberg.com in an editorial. But it’s completely disingenuous. Everyone knows that Obama was simply stating the obvious fact that little gets done on foreign policy during an election year.

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The North Korean threat, though, won’t wait for November, said Naoko Aoki in TheDailyBeast.com. We know that Pyongyang has nuclear bombs, but so far it has not mastered a long-range missile that could carry one to the U.S. Pacific Coast. If past behavior is a guide, the belligerent and unstable regime will follow the missile test with a nuclear test, moving it closer to developing a warhead small enough to fit on a missile. That would be a “nightmare,” and it must be prevented.