hankyoreh

The two-day Nuclear Security Summit is set to begin Monday in Seoul. This summit, which comes two years after the first in Washington, DC, is notable for taking place a year after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Japan, a catastrophe that is still ongoing. Spearheaded by US president Barack Obama, who made an April 2009 call in Prague for a world without nuclear weapons, the summit can basically be described as a meeting for measures against nuclear terrorism.
The issue of nuclear power safety management is also expected to be a major focus there, and the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs are also likely to be discussed. We certainly hope it achieves the hoped-for outcome.
But there are some doubts about this, as well as concerns that the summit could end up bolstering nuclear interests and worsening the nuclear threat.
The Nuclear Security Summit takes for granted the established interests of the five major nuclear powers. While there have been independent efforts to discuss strategic (nuclear) arms reductions, one gets the sense that these have been mere gestures. The US has yet to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and continues to carry out subcritical nuclear testing. The problem cannot be solved when it maintains a conflicting approach of guarding its own nuclear interests while clamoring for bans on nuclear development or capabilities elsewhere.
This is no way to reach a world without nuclear weapons. The fact that India, Pakistan, and Israel now possess nuclear weapons, while North Korean and Iran have launched their own nuclear development efforts, is not unconnected with this. There are clear limits to trying to prevent proliferation and terrorism while at the same time guarding nuclear capabilities.
It is also questionable whether Seoul's summit, the first since the Fukushima Nuclear Accident in 2011, properly reflects the fundamental doubts raised about human nuclear management capabilities. The 200 or so attendees at the Nuclear Industry Summit have vested interests in nuclear power and have been called a "nuclear power mafia" by critics. Among them are CEOs of the world's nuclear power companies and heads of related international organizations.
The South Korean government has refused to admit foreign activists hoping to represent the citizen campaign against nuclear power. This is a long way from a worldwide movement to find an alternative to nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima. The ideas suggested by the government, including improvements to the management system for radiation disasters, nuclear power plant safety technology, enrichment technology, and information processing systems, come across as a shallow ploy to use the Seoul summit as an opportunity to usher in a "nuclear power renaissance." This is in defiance of the apocalyptic warning given to humankind by the Fukushima disaster. We hope they do turn a major international event at a time that could mark a turning point in human history into an opportunity to increase profits, or a forum for political denunciations aimed at North Korea.

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