Nuclear Security Summit begins in Washington as ISIS threat looms

Against a backdrop of global concern over the smuggling of nuclear materials, Canada will take a prominent seat at the table today at the international Nuclear Security Summit in Washington as 53 nations gather todiscuss nuclear terrorism in a world threatened by ISIS.

The goal of the two-day event is to come up with strategies for preventing would-be attackers against nation states from obtaining or building nuclear weapons capable of inflicting mass casualties.

This year, fears about ISIS willreframethe agenda from general nuclear security to discussions about the dangers posed by extremistsintent on fashioning their own nuclear weapons or dirty bombs, weaponsthat mixconventional explosives with radioactivematerials.

• Nuclear terrorism threat to be focus of D.C. summit
• Activists want Canada to push for nuclear-free world
• North Korea reportedly readying nuclear weapons

Canada will be represented at the summit byPrime Minister JustinTrudeau, who willput forward a so-called gift-basketinitiative, or joint commitment, that will urge participants to recommit to honouring the 2004United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540. The resolutionbinds UN memberstates to take action to preventthe proliferationofnuclear, chemicaland biological weapons, collectively known as weapons of mass destruction.

Canada's initiative calls on fellow nationsto pledge to do a better job of trackingnuclearmaterialwithin their own borders and keeping it out of the hands ofnon-state actors.

No standards or oversight

Canada's pledgewill be one of 17 joint statements presented at the summit.

Some of the others will focus in more detail onnuclear forensics the technicalaspects oftracking nuclear materialand nuclear trafficking.

"It's fair to say Canada's been very supportive of this endeavour (the summit) since 2009," said Paul Meyer, Canada's former UN ambassador and permanent representative to the Conference on Disarmament. "[Non-proliferation] is an area where Canada was a traditional leader."

There are no standards for security, and there's no oversight mechanism or review process to ensure states have actually implemented sound security.- JoanRohlfing, president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative

The Nuclear Threat Initiative's Nuclear Security Index ranks Canada favourably third overall, behind Switzerland and then Australia when it comes to the extent of itssecurity measures to protect stockpiles of weapons-grade nuclear materials and prevent them frombeing stolen and trafficked.

But JoanRohlfing, president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a D.C.-based organization that works with governments on issues ofnuclear materials security,believes a lot of work remains to be done to ensure that materials needed to make a dirty bomb stay out of the reachof criminal and terrorist organizations.

"There's no agreement on a system of security," she said. "There are no standards for security, and there's no oversight mechanism or review process to ensure states have actually implemented sound security."

'A real threat'

Today's nuclear summit will be the fourth and final one of its kind. The event was the brainchild of U.S. PresidentBarackObamaand stemmedfrom aspeechenvisioning a world free of nuclear weapons thathe made in Prague in 2009 at ameetingwithEU leaders.

This year, however, the summitopens under uneasy circumstances, a little over a week after the attacks in Brussels that killed more than 30 people.

Nuclear smuggling is a very real threat. The International Atomic Energy Agency has documented about 400 cases ofattemptednuclear smugglingsince the1990sand another 700 cases of theft of radioactive material.

There's growing awareness by countries that this is a real threat, that this affects them.- CarlRobichaud, nuclear expert

Belgian authorities acknowledged in February that they had seized 10 hours of surveillance footage that showed aBelgian official from a nuclear facility. The video was retrieved from the home of a suspect linked to the deadlyParis attacks carried outby ISIS last November.

BritishjihadistHamayunTariq, an ISIS militant, also claimed in December 2014 that the group was in possession of adirty bomband was weighing where to detonate it.

"Has the rise of international terrorism changed what's on the agenda of the summit? Yes, it has," said CarlRobichaud, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Corporation of New York think tank. "There's growing awareness by countries that this is a real threat, that this affects them."

Canadasupportsnon-proliferation but also nuclear deterrence

Canada brings strong non-proliferation credentials to the table, although they are complicated by Canada's membership in NATO, whose deterrence strategy reliesin part on thepresence of nuclear weapons in some memberstates, saidErnieRegehr,a research fellow and nuclear expert at ConradGrebelUniversityCollege, which isaffiliatedwiththe University of Waterloo.

"[We]endorse and support NATO's nuclear deterrent policy, including the presence of nuclear weapons in Europe, which I think has no security function," he said. "On the other hand, there's been strong support of multilateral nuclear disarmament and efforts and negotiations."

In past summits, Canada has committed torepatriatingtheenriched uranium that it importsfrom the U.S. for use inmedical isotopes ornuclear reactorsso that it could be disposed of safely. In2014, it also committed to spending$28 milliontohelp other nations improve theirnuclear security.