[John King:] We don't try to tell you what to think here, there are other places you can go for that. But I would hope we can agree that some issues shouldn't be reflexively political, like keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists who want to kill us all regardless of who we supported for president or Congress or mayor for that matter. Nuclear security is the topic of a major summit here in Washington. And it's scary stuff. One expert, Harvard University's Graham Allison believes it is more likely than not that a terrorist will detonate a nuclear bomb in the United States in the next four years. Many of you seem to share that fear; 55 percent of Americans consider it likely that the United States will be attacked by terrorists with some kind of a nuclear device in the next decade. It's serious stuff worth serious conversation, and worth challenging, maybe even suspending your normal political reflexes. I make the point because of something in our polling that jumped out at me. One piece of the nuclear security debate is the new nuclear arms treaty President Obama negotiated with Russia. At first glance it's not caught up in today's toxic political environment; 70 percent of Americans say they believe the Senate should ratify the agreement. But there is a divide when you take a closer look; 87 percent of Democrats favor ratification and 68 percent of independents, but just 49 percent of Republicans. Yes, our politics have been polarized for a long time, so maybe that shouldn't be a surprise. But national security used to be different. Eight years ago, for example, when President Bush negotiated a similar agreement with Russia, 83 percent of Democrats, 89 percent of independents and 85 percent of Republicans supported it. That of course was back when memories of 911 were still fresh and before the Iraq war, a different time when for a bit the old adage that politics should stop at the water's edge was back in vogue, an oldie but goodie. A busy hour ahead including new names on the president's list for the Supreme Court vacancy and a new effort in the Senate to get checks in the mail to unemployed Americans whose benefits were cut off last week but let's begin by exploring the players and the challenges at the big nuclear security summit. For that we go to the magic wall for a little help, there are 47 nations plus the European Union, the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency represented at the big nuclear security summit. Thirty-eight of those nations sent their head of state or government meaning kings, presidents and prime ministers. It's a two-day summit, the largest gathering of world leaders in the United States since 1945 and it's been designated a national special security event which means the Secret Service takes charge of coordinating all the security and trust me Washington, D.C. has quite a bit of security at the moment. As the summit got underway, Vice President Biden invited some of the participants to his official residence for lunch and used stark and silver language in framing the agenda.
[Joseph Biden, Vice President Of The United States:] There are hundreds of tons of nuclear materials scattered over 40 countries including the United States of America and many of the countries here and just 50 pounds of high purity uranium, smaller than a soccer ball could destroy the downtown of all our capital cities and kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of individuals so it's very much in our interest to gain control. This is the horrific threat that we all face together and one that we are determined we will defeat together.
[King:] Right now President Obama and the national leaders are sitting down for a working dinner at the Washington, D.C. Convention Center. So what do they need to talk about and what do they need to accomplish? Wendy Sherman is here because she helped coordinate the Clinton administration's policy on North Korea and more recently served on a commission that studied ways to keep terrorists from getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction welcome.
[Wendy Sherman, Expert On Nuclear Issues:] Good to be with you, John.
[King:] Talk is cheap I don't mean to say it that way. I don't question the goals of the summit, but what does this president and this world community need to come out of this meeting with in terms of tangible proof and steps that you think would take this problem down a notch?
[Sherman:] We saw one very important step today when President Obama met with President Yanukovych of Ukraine. Ukraine made a commitment that we have been trying to get them to make for 10 years. They have a very large stockpile of highly enriched uranium which is not the kind of material you want sitting around that terrorists could get their hands on and they agreed by 2012 to get rid of that stockpile, they have got to figure out where to put it. The United States is going to help with some technical assistance, but already this is a very important concrete result because as your intro said, there are tons, hundreds of thousands of tons of this material that we have to secure.
[King:] The International Atomic Energy Agency says 100 nuclear smuggling incidents over the past decade or so, since 1993, 18 of them involving highly enriched uranium which is the most dangerous. Is it better now than it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall or is the problem getting worse?
[Sherman:] Unfortunately I think most experts think the problem is getting worse because we have had al Qaeda for many years now absolutely committed to getting its hands on some of that nuclear material. There's probably not a one of us who reads some of that great fiction that hasn't recently read a book where some group of terrorists got their hands on some nuclear material and a great U.S. intelligence officer just at the last moment kept them from setting off the bomb. That's not so from reality and I quite agree with Graham Allison. We served on a congressional commission together looking at this. The greatest danger is making sure that material does not fall into the hands of terrorists and that's what the president and quite frankly these 47 leaders along with the U.N. and the IAEA and others are trying to make sure happens.
[King:] Help us understand because you have had over the course of your career access to the intelligence. So I know you can't share classified information, but what don't we know that perhaps would help people understand, if you could tell us a little bit more about what we don't know that maybe somebody at home would go maybe I better care more about this.
[Sherman:] Well I think we have all read in the newspaper or heard you all reporting about things that have come over the border even from Canada that we got stopped, making sure that they didn't get transported. A ball of plutonium which is the other kind of fissile material that can be used in nuclear weapons, there's highly enriched uranium in plutonium. A ball of plutonium could be put in a suitcase and carried across the border, and nobody would even know it was there. You might not even detect the radiation. So one of the things that actually President Bush began and President Obama has continued is the proliferation security initiative, stopping ships, making sure that we don't have loose nuclear material that's being transported unbeknownst to us or the elements or the tools that would be needed to take such material and create a bomb.
[King:] The overwhelming bulk of this material, not all of it, but the overwhelming bulk is in the United States and in Russia. Do you assume Ukraine will go to Russia and part of the question is where are we now in that process, because the Russians tell us it's none of your business sometimes and we say you need to improve your security? You need to build a better protocol to make sure we're keeping track all this stuff.
[Sherman:] We actually all need to do that. We have highly enriched uranium in some of our research reactors at some of our universities and we have to make sure that's secure and in many of these situations, we can transfer to low enriched uranium and get the same results, so I think that the president's START Agreement which is on strategic arms reduction to really bring down our warheads and deployed warheads of nuclear weapons also will take us to a strategic dialogue with Russia to begin what Senator Nunn, Senator Lugar began was an
[King:] I want to talk to you for a minute after the break about who's not here and why they're so important. But of those who are here, obviously the president is talking to the president of China, he's talking to the president of Russia, you mention the agreement with Ukraine. The prime minister of Pakistan is here. That's a big part of this equation. Who else? Do you see him meeting like the leaders of Nigeria and Malaysia and people would say how do they play into this world?
[Sherman:] They play quite importantly because we want to make sure that people don't think that the only way to show that you're powerful is to have a nuclear weapon and if indeed those two countries, which I assume you want to talk about a little bit, North Korea and Iran are nuclear powers. It's going to encourage others to say well heck I better get a nuclear weapon too. And so we want to make sure that countries like South Africa and Korea and Brazil, which foreswore having nuclear weapons, actually had had nuclear programs and nuclear weapons program and gave them up that they are examples to the rest of the world that you don't have to become a nuclear weapon state to become powerful to be economically prosperous and to make sure that you have a strong nation.
[King:] Ambassador Wendy Sherman is going to stay with us. We'll come back in just a bit. While there are 50 leaders here for the summit, as we noted some important people are missing. Next we'll go "Wall-to-Wall" and we see who didn't come and just why that's important.