"President Obama: Al Qaeda Is Seeking a Nuke -- and They Will Use It"

President Obama: Al Qaeda Is Seeking a Nuke -- and They Will Use It
Jake Tapper - April 11, 2010 8:15 PM

On the eve of his Nuclear Security Summit, President Obama issued a dire warning: terrorist groups are trying to obtain nuclear weapons -- and they will use it.

“We know that organizations like al Qaeda are in the process of trying to secure a nuclear weapon -- a weapon of mass destruction that they have no compunction at using," the president said.

Appearing alongside President Zuma of South Africa before a bilateral meeting, Mr. Obama said that "if there was ever a detonation in New York City, or London, or Johannesburg, the ramifications economically, politically, and from a security perspective would be devastating.”

Leaders from almost 50 nations are attending the two-day summit, aimed at shoring up efforts to obtain loose nuclear materials throughout the world so they don’t fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue nations. The summit is the third event in the last week in which President Obama is trying to demonstrate a commitment to denuclearization. Last week he issued a new policy on nuclear deterrence and signed a disarmament treaty with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.

South Africa is the only nation in the world that once had a nuclear weapons program and subsequently dismantled the weapons.

"South Africa has special standing in being a moral leader on this issue," President Obama said.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/04/president-obama-al-qaeda-is-seeking-a-nuke-to-kill-innocents.html

Secret mission marks Obama nuclear strategy
By MEG KINNARD AND MICHAEL WARREN

updated 3:17 p.m. ET, Sun., April 11, 2010
SANTIAGO, Chile - Deep inside the containment building of a nuclear reactor that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet built for his army, an aging engineer in a white lab coat struggled with a common house key to unlock a closet door.

Opening a dusty wooden box he pulled from a shelf, he revealed an array of thin aluminum-coated plates, and lifted one out with his bare hands.

"This is it," said Hugo Torres, the reactor's operations manager.

"It" is highly enriched uranium 235, HEU for short. It's the material that most worries anti-terrorism experts. Just 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of it in a nuclear bomb could devastate an entire city, in the same way the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

President Barack Obama's major shift in U.S. nuclear strategy puts a new emphasis on securing this kind of weapons-grade nuclear material, recognizing that terrorists and rogue states pose a much more immediate threat than the old fears of a communist nation provoking nuclear Armageddon by attacking the U.S. or its allies.

"For the first time, preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is now at the top of America's nuclear agenda," Obama said before signing a new START treaty with Russia to sharply reduce the number of warheads each country has ready to fire.

Obama now hopes to enlist leaders of 47 other nations at a White House summit beginning Monday to help him keep an ambitious promise, made a year ago this week, to secure all the world's vulnerable nuclear material within four years.

Obama has proposed a 68 percent increase in the Global Threat Reduction Initiative's budget to $559 million next year, to recover more HEU and fight smuggling of nuclear material by strengthening border controls and port security.

But the U.S. needs extensive cooperation from other nations to get the job done — and Chile has become an example of how small countries can play a big part in the process.

Chile was among the first to agree to surrender its last HEU, 18 kilograms (40 pounds) it got from Britain and France for its two research reactors. A team of Americans finally shipped it out last month just after the country's massive earthquake, weaving a convoy of trucks around shattered highways in the middle of the night to reach a functioning port.

The Associated Press documented the transfer, agreeing to keep the details secret until the material arrived safely in the United States.

The mission will be the first of many if Obama is to keep his promise.

http://ow.ly/172DGQ