NUCLEAR SECURITY SUMMIT 2010
By: Puneet Riar, Grade 12
Remember that time in Social Studies 11, when you were half asleep, the teacher just kept droning on and on about some “The Manhattan Project” or “The Cuban Missile Crisis”? How about the whole “Cold War” thing? Do you remember what any of that stuff was about? Well, questions like those might be on your next test, so I’ll give you the answer: they all revolved around the theme of nuclear weapons; that theme also applies to the Nuclear Security Summit that occurred this past April.
“It’s impressive,” Obama told reporters as world leaders and delegations from 47 countries converged in Washington, D.C. from April 12th to the 13th for the president’s Nuclear Security Summit. The point of the summit was to “reduce the threat of having a nuclear weapon fall into the hands of terrorists” by agreeing on an action plan that ensured security for the nuclear substances of many countries so that they would not be stolen by terrorist groups. This summit is a warm-up for the conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which will be held this month in New York. In advance of the summit, the United States and Russia — which together hold 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons — signed a treaty April 8th which would reduce the limit of nuclear warheads of the two countries to 1,550 per country over seven years.
