Thirty-five countries pledged today to turn international guidelines on nuclear security into national laws, a move aimed at preventing terrorists from getting their hands on nuclear material.
Today's initiative following a two-day summit of leaders also commits countries to open up their security procedures to independent review, a further step toward creating an international legal framework to thwart nuclear terrorism, said a joint statement from the Netherlands, the United States and South Korea US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said the guidelines are now "the closest things we have to international standards for nuclear security."
In a closing communique, all 53 countries that participated in the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague agreed to keep looking for ways to ensure nuclear material doesn't fall into the hands of terrorists.
But the agreement on adopting guidelines into law was endorsed by just 35. Among other countries that agreed were France, Britain, Canada and Israel; notably absent were Russia, China, India and Pakistan.
"We need to get the rest of the summit members to sign up to it, especially Russia, and we need to find a way to make this into permanent international law," said Miles Pomper of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
Over the course of three summits since US President Barack Obama launched the series in 2010, the number of countries that have enough material to build a nuclear weapon has fallen from 39 to 25.
This summit featured new reduction commitments, with Japan, Italy and Belgium pledging to reduce their stocks of highly enriched uranium and plutonium.
Other groups of nations have pledged to increase efforts to combat illicit trafficking in nuclear material, boost maritime security and to develop low-enriched uranium for research reactors instead of the highly enriched, weapons-grade nuclear fuel currently widely used.
