The world's major powers will gather in Washington for a summit on nuclear weapons security in March 2010, dpa quoted Group of Eight (G8) leaders as announcing Today. "We agreed to a proposal which has come from (US) President (Barack) Obama that we will hold a nuclear security conference, a summit of world leaders, next year in the spring," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, one of the attendees of the G8 summit in the Italian city of L'Aquila, told journalists. The summit will involve around 20 to 30 countries, and will be timed to fall ahead of an international review of the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), Brown said. "You can see from the announcement of this summit that we take seriously the spread of nuclear weapons," he said. Obama highlighted the danger of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism in his election campaign, and has made the topic a key plank of his foreign policy. The US president "believes nuclear terrorism is the most immediate and extreme threat to global security," US National Security Council Chief of Staff Mark Lippert said. "He feels the need to help lead an international effort to secure vulnerable nuclear materials within four years, break up black markets, detect and intercept materials in transit, and use financial tools to disrupt the illicit trade in these materials," Lippert said.
