Barack Obama Warns World Leaders Of ISIL 'Madmen' During Nuclear Summit

Washington: US President Barack Obama warned world leaders to be on guard against heightened suspicions that “madmen” in terrorist groups such as The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) wanted to acquire a nuclear weapon or to devise their own ‘dirty bombs’.

During the summit, which was attended by more than 50 world leaders and delegates, Obama said: “ISIL has already used chemical weapons, including mustard gas, in Syria and Iraq”. “There is no doubt that if these madmen ever got their hands on a nuclear bomb or nuclear material, they most certainly would use it to continue to kill as many innocent people as possible,” he further added.

Obama also said about 2,000 tons of nuclear materials are stored around the world at civilian and military facilities, but some of them are not properly secured.

The summit focused on securing global stockpiles of nuclear materials, stored by the military and by the medical and power industries. The summit was the fourth in a series called by Obama to focus on the risk of nuclear terrorism, particularly on North Korea's nuclear defiance. But with his term in office set to finish in January 2017, there is rising anxiety among arms control advocates that the diplomacy championed by Obama is losing momentum.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said during the summit that as ISIL and other groups became more desperate, the international community had a fundamental responsibility to deny terrorists access to the nuclear materials they seek. Australia had been ranked top of the Nuclear Threat Initiative's global review three times in succession.

As the summit wrapped up, the White House released an international action plan geared at removing excess plutonium and highly-enriched uranium from Germany; disposing of stockpiles of highly enriched uranium in Argentina and Indonesia; cutting back stockpiles in Poland, Kazakhstan and seven other countries; and a deal with Japan to remove highly-enriched uranium and separated plutonium from Japanese nuclear plants.