PRAGUE -- Under a hazy spring sky, before a swelling Czech crowd, U.S. President Barack Obama called for an international effort to lock down nuclear weapons materials within four years, one of a host of steps he said would move the globe to nuclear disarmament.Speaking just hours after North Korea launched a controversial multistage rocket, the U.S. president took to the stage in Castle Square here, testifying "clearly and with conviction" to an audience of at least 20,000 of "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons."
"We have to insist, 'Yes, we can,'" he said, reprising a battle theme recognizable to a crowd a continent away from his campaign victory.
It was the first public, set-piece speech on the fifth day of his first major trip abroad, but the promise of renewed arms-control efforts may have been overshadowed by the reality of North Korea's launch. Mr. Obama said he would consult with Japan, South Korea and other Asian neighbors before seeking sanctions at the United Nations Security Council, which was to convene in New York Sunday afternoon for an emergency session.
"Rules must be minded. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something," the president told the crowd, calling the launch a provocative act that violated United Nations Security Council resolutions. "The world must stand together to stop the spread of these weapons."
Mr. Obama's European tour has become increasingly ambitious as he has proceeded eastward. He has vowed to help end the global recession and remake the world's financial architecture, ramp up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's war on Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan and now secure nuclear material and work toward "a nuclear-free world."
A foreign-policy agenda that grows fuller by the day comes on top of an already jam-packed domestic agenda that includes a national health plan, financial restructuring and rescue, a new alternative-energy economy and an aggressive federal intervention in education.
Specifically, Mr. Obama called for an international convention to draft a treaty abolishing the production of fissile materials that can be used to create nuclear weapons. An international "nuclear fuel bank" -- stocked in part by scrapped nuclear warheads -- could be accessed by nations seeking to develop and sustain peaceful nuclear-energy programs. That way, they wouldn't have to develop their own nuclear-enrichment programs.
He also called for new steps to secure existing nuclear materials and warheads, especially in Russia, before it leaches onto a black market where terrorists could acquire it. He vowed to lock down such weapons and materials within four years, calling for a global summit in the U.S. within a year.
Lamenting "the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War," Mr. Obama said, "In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up."
He reiterated the pledge he made Wednesday with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to conclude a new bilateral treaty reducing the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals below the 1,700 to 2,200 deployed warheads agreed on in 2002. The treaty is to be concluded by the end of the year, with progress assessed at a July summit in Moscow.
He will also "immediately and aggressively pursue" Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, concluded by President Bill Clinton in 1996, then abandoned by President George W. Bush after a Republican-controlled Senate voted it down.
North Korea's missile launch put new urgency into the arms control agenda, Mr. Obama said before a morning meeting with the Czech leadership.
But it also threatened to overshadow the message. The White House received confirmation just after 4:30 a.m. Prague time. Shortly afterwards, staff woke the president up for consultations with Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Secretary Gates, National Security Adviser James Jones and his NSC staff.
The Prague speech was billed as a sober, serious policy address, but the White House disregarded the advice of some in the Czech government and opened it to the public on a large square behind the castle that overlooks what Mr. Obama called "this golden city, both ancient and youthful."
Rock music from the Obama campaign pulsated, while Czechs waved small American flags. A camera swept over the crowd on a boom that extended over the square, flanked by baroque government buildings. Mr. Obama ascended the stage with First Lady Michelle Obama to the symphonic strains of the Moldau, by Czech composer Bedric Smetna. Under a temperate April sky, he evoked the Prague Spring of 1968, when the city tried to rise up against communist oppression, and the Velvet Revolution of 1989, when the city finally and peacefully overcame communism.
A Jumbotron beaming his English speech in Czech was invisible to all but a few of the crowd, a fact that likely subdued the crowd.
The site was chosen carefully. Czechs have been deeply divided over the efforts by former President George W. Bush to deploy elements of an antimissile system in their country, a move Russia angrily opposes but which Washington insists is targeted as Teheran, not Moscow.
Applause rose up in only part of the crowd when Mr. Obama vowed to pursue the missile shield as long as Iran pursued its nuclear ambitions. Another part of the audience cheered when he suggested he could drop the effort if Iran is deemed no longer a threat.
White House aides said the Kremlin was one of the target audiences of the speech, but so were North Korea and Iran.
Ahead of a review conference next year of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Mr. Obama wants to take concrete steps to make good on the nuclear nations' side of the bargain in the treaty: In exchange for nonnuclear nations' promises to forgo nuclear weapons development, the nuclear club was supposed to work toward disarmament while aiding the spread of peaceful nuclear technology.
White House national security aides hope Mr. Obama's efforts will isolate Teheran and Pyongyang.
"We're trying to seize the moral high ground," said Gary Samore, White House coordinator for weapons of mass destruction, security and arms control.
Source:online.wsj.com
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