North Korea’s plans to launch a long-range rocket next month overshadowed discussions at the nuclear summit that ended in the South Korean capital, Seoul on March 27, 2012, the BBC said. Despite calls for the plans to be shelved, North Korean authorities yesterday vowed to go ahead, saying US President Barack Obama should stop his confrontational attitude toward the country.
They also insisted on their right to peaceful satellite launches, KCNA news agency said. The Telegraph newspaper reported that the 53-nation summit that was meant to focus on the threat of uranium and other nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists, extensively discussed North Korea’s posture with the US, Japan, South Korea and other countries arguing that the launch would in fact be a long-range missile test currently banned under UN resolutions. They said it would be in breach of a February 2012 US-North Korean deal.
While appealing to North Korean leaders to pursue peace and pointing out that the US was not an enemy of the country, President Obama on the concluding day of the two-day summit warned that if nuclear material was allowed to fall into the hands of wrong people, they would gladly use it to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people. World leaders at the end of the summit called for closer co-operation to tackle the threat of nuclear terrorism, noting that there was urgent need to secure vulnerable material given that nuclear terrorism remains a grave threat.
The communiqué noted that nuclear terrorism was still one of the most challenging threats to international security and defeating it requires strong national measures and international cooperation, given its potential global, political, economic, social and psychological consequences. Leaders also tackled the threat posed by loosely-guarded radioactive material in hospitals and other sites, which could be combined with high explosives to make a ‘dirty bomb.’
The International Criminal Police Organisation, Interpol, disclosed at the summit that there had been 3,000 cases in 119 countries in which nuclear material had gone missing. The world still has 1,600 tonnes of Highly Enriched Uranium, HEU and 500 tonnes of plutonium – enough to make more than 100,000 nuclear weapons, South Korean President, Lee Myung-bak warned.
