Obama disappointed over Pak blocking treaty to halt new nuke material production - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

A senior American official has said that US President Barack Obama used his private meeting on Sunday afternoon with Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, to express disappointment over Pakistan blocking the opening of negotiations on a treaty that would halt production of new nuclear material around the world. "The challenges are getting greater - the increasing extremism, the increasing instability, the increasing material," the New York Times quoted Rolf Mowatt-Larssen of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who as a C.I.A. officer and then head of the Energy Department's intelligence unit ran much of the effort to understand Al Qaeda's nuclear ambitions, as saying. "That's going to complicate efforts to make sure nothing leaks. The trends mean the Pakistani authorities have a greater challenge," he added. Taking up the Pakistan-India arms race at the summit meeting, administration officials say, would be "too politically divisive." "We're focusing on protecting existing nuclear material, because we think that's what everyone can agree on," the NYT quoted one senior administration official, as saying in an interview on Friday. To press countries to cut off production of new weapons-grade material, he said, "would take us into questions of proliferation, nuclear-free zones and nuclear disarmament on which there is no agreement." President Obama has said he expected "some very specific commitments" from world leaders. "Our expectation is not that there's just some vague, gauzy statement about us not wanting to see loose nuclear materials," he said. "We anticipate a communiqué that spells out very clearly, here's how we're going to achieve locking down all the nuclear materials over the next four years, with very specific steps in order to assure that," he added. The summit meeting will aim to generate the political will so that other nations and the Obama administration can create a surge of financial and technical support that will bring his four-year plan to fruition. The next phase in Obama's arms-control plan is to get countries to agree to a treaty that would end the production of new bomb fuel. Pakistan has led the opposition, and it is building two new reactors for making weapons-grade plutonium, and one plant for salvaging plutonium from old reactor fuel. Asked about the production, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said, "Pakistan looks forward to working with the international community to find the balance between our national security and our contributions to international non-proliferation efforts." In private, Pakistani officials insist that the new plants are needed because India has the power to mount a lightning invasion with conventional forces.