Modi may attend US nuclear security summit next year

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to travel to the United States for the fourth Nuclear Security Summit on March 31-April 1, 2016, an initiative of President Barack Obama who considers nuclear terrorism the “most immediate and extreme threat to global security.”

A U.S. diplomat told The Hindu that Mr. Obama had invited Mr. Modi when both met in New York last month and it was now for the Prime Minister to take the decision.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had participated in the first two Nuclear Security Summits, in 2010 in Washington and in 2012 in Seoul, but gave the third in The Hague in 2014 a miss. The External Affairs Minister represented India at The Hague, where 58 world leaders participated.

The fourth and final summit will take place amid Mr. Obama’s renewed push for the nuclear security agenda in the last lap of his presidency. The U.S. presidential election is due in November 2016. It was in 2009 that Mr. Obama announced an international effort to secure vulnerable nuclear material, break up black markets, and detect and intercept illicitly trafficked material, which led to a series of biennial summits starting in 2010.

Unaudited nuclear weapons and radiological material remains a serious threat to global security and the risk of these material reaching terrorist hands is real. Reported incidents of global trafficking in nuclear or radiological material increased from 155 in 2013 to 170 in 2014, according to a study by the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative and James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. And many incidents of theft go unreported.

These risks were mostly associated with the republics that once formed the Soviet Union and were left with a lot of nuclear material, but Pakistan has now emerged as a core concern with the increasing risk of jihadi groups accessing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

A White House announcement recently said the 2016 will be the last one and “these summits have achieved tangible improvements in the security of nuclear material and stronger global institutions that support nuclear security.”