The recently concluded two-day Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul (March 26-27), a follow-up to the first summit in Washington in 2010, ended with a promise of meeting again in the Netherlands in 2014 for what will be the third and final global summit of this kind.

The focus of the 2012 summit as the name suggested was ‘Nuclear Security’, a term not to be confused with ‘nuclear safety’ (of nuclear plants) or ‘nuclear safeguards’ (that nations accept under the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  In simple terms, nuclear security is an effort to prevent the use of an atomic bomb by terrorists or illicit actors and security against ‘nuclear terrorism’ was the key debate as participating countries pledged to tighten security of their civilian nuclear plants and pressed on the need for putting in place minimum security standards for all nuclear reactors, plants, hospitals and research laboratories, so that it does not fall in the wrong hands. Indeed, an issue that needs much attention and the recent revelations of 25 possible intrusions (based on fake IDs) at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), India's premier nuclear facility in Mumbai, further highlights this threat and point to the vulnerability to ‘threats by insiders’.

However, in assessing the success of this summit, I would say much of it was rhetoric, re-stating and re-pledging of what had been agreed to in 2010 at the Washington summit. Thus, the Seoul summit focused on a framework of 11 core issues reiterating the goals laid down earlier in the Washington summit. Broadly speaking, this included: Global nuclear security architecture; role of the IAEA; nuclear materials; radioactive sources; nuclear security and safety; transportation security; combating illicit trafficking; nuclear forensics; nuclear security culture; information security; and international cooperation. The summit ended with a ‘13-point Seoul Communiqué’ that set out a number of general pledges in which nations voluntarily agreed to bolster protection of loose nuclear materials, but with no legally binding agreements.

One of the few tangible steps taken in this summit was probably an agreement between the US and the European nations (Belgium, France and the Netherlands), focused on reducing the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and shifting to low enriched uranium (LEU) by the next summit. The use of HEU is dominant in civilian plants to produce nuclear energy and the danger is that HEU can also be used for producing a nuclear bomb. Several articles in the media have criticized the summit for not mentioning North Korea or Iran, two counties that have been in news as a serious threat to non-proliferation. I see this as one of the positive outcomes of the summit of not being politicized to propagate this agenda. For the reality is that North Korea has a small stock of plutonium, much less than most nuclear weapons states, and Iran has not yet begun to produce weapons-usable material, and has only been ‘suspected’ of a clandestine programme.

Interestingly, a few other ‘relative’ expectations were met at the summit. The official website of the summit provides an overview of its objective and expectations and one such objective stated was that ‘the 2012 Seoul Nuclear Security Summit will serve as an opportunity for (South) Korea to earn international recognition on its enhanced status following its hosting of the G20 Seoul Summit in 2010’. Indeed, this was an expectation that the summit seemed to have clearly met as it enhanced South Korea’s standing more so in light of North Korea’s act of defiance of planning to launch a ballistic missile in the near future.

Ironically enough, the issue of ‘nuclear security’ should as much be viewed a consequence of the failure of the existing nuclear regime that has proven weak in terms of controlling either illicit transfer of nuclear technology in the past or preventing the diversion of nuclear material meant for peaceful purposes towards military use. This points to a nuclear regime that lacks the effectiveness and ability to enforce compliance by even its member and fails to ensure the obligations of all member-states. As much as I want to avoid sounding cynical, yet the nuclear summit might have been a success for some participating states as the summit did fall prey to political manipulation by states that managed to use this as a platform to prove either their eligibility and need for nuclear trade (as Pakistan did) or to prove that they are responsible nuclear states with committed to the issue (as India, South Korea and many others pledging to the issue have done) or that they are fair in upholding the rights of all nations to peaceful trade by ensuring nuclear security (as the P5 also the recognized nuclear weapon states seemed to have done).

In my view, the nuclear summit has only further legitimized the existence of a reality that will be dominated by nuclear power and energy thus reinforcing an existing status-quo and sidelining what I believe is one of the most important issues to be addressed:  the need for complete nuclear disarmament by the existing nuclear weapon states.