Nuclear dangers threaten world

The international community must work together to protect the world from nuclear weapons, President Barack Obama said as a conference aimed at combating nuclear terrorism came to a close on Tuesday.

"The security of the world depends on the actions that we take," he said. "There are still too many bad actors in search of these dangerous materials and these dangerous materials are still vulnerable in too many places."

The two-day meeting, which brought together 53 states, had been upstaged by North Korea's plans to launch a nuclear missile in mid-April and Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Off-topic

Responding to what he called Obama's "confrontational mindset," a spokesman for the North Korean foreign ministry said his country would be sticking to its plans.

"We will never give up the right to launch a peaceful satellite, a legitimate right of a sovereign state and an essential step for economic development," the official told the country's official KCNA news agency.

Neither North Korea nor Iran was invited to the conference in South Korea and discussion of them was limited to the sidelines of the meeting. However, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda did bring up North Korea in a speech to the summit on Tuesday.

"The planned missile launch North Korea recently announced would go against the international community's nuclear non-proliferation effort and violate U.N. Security Council resolutions," he said.

Rogue threat

The main subject on Tuesday was "non-state actors," that is, terrorists who pose a threat.

"It would not take much, just a handful or so of these materials, to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people and that's not an exaggeration, that's the reality that we face," Obama said.

Germany's foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, warned that nuclear security goes beyond the countries with nuclear weapons or nuclear power plants, pointing out that radioactive material was available from other sources, such as medicine research and industry, and could be used to construct "dirty bombs." This material must also be secured, he said.

A final statement from the conference included a pledge to reduce stockpiles of nuclear material.

mz, ncy/ng (AP, dapd, Reuters, dpa)