President Obama said late Wednesday that while his administration has made strides toward reducing the global nuclear threat, more work needs to be done to strengthen non-proliferation efforts with Russia and North Korea.
“I’m the first to acknowledge that we still have unfinished business,” Obama conceded in an op-ed for the Washington Post. “Along with our military leadership, I continue to believe that our massive Cold War nuclear arsenal is poorly suited to today’s threats. The United States and Russia — which together hold more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons — should negotiate to reduce our stockpiles further.”
“The international community must remain united in the face of North Korea’s continued provocations, including its recent nuclear test and missile launches,” he added. “The additional sanctions recently imposed on Pyongyang by the United Nations Security Council show that violations have consequences.”
“The United States will continue working with allies and partners for the complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner,” he said.
Obama’s op-ed was released just hours before he was set to host the fourth Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, which will involve individual meetings between Obama and leaders from South Korea, Japan, France and China.
Obama wrote that “preventing terrorists from obtaining and using a nuclear weapon” is a key way to boost global security and peace, and said the world has made significant progress under his watch.
Among those, Obama said, are the U.S.-Russia commitments to meet their New START Treaty obligations, which are aimed at reducing the number of deployed American and Russian nuclear warheads to their lowest levels since the 1950s.
He said efforts to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty have also helped, as did the controversial Iran nuclear agreement.
“We’ve succeeded in uniting the international community against the spread of nuclear weapons, notably in Iran,” Obama wrote. “A nuclear-armed Iran would have constituted an unacceptable threat to our national security and that of our allies and partners. It could have triggered a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and begun to unravel the global nonproliferation regime.”
Obama said the U.S. will “remain vigilant to ensure that Iran fulfills its commitments” to the historic nuclear deal reached last summer, which he says makes Tehran “subjected to the most comprehensive inspection regimen ever negotiated to monitor a nuclear program.”
