WASHINGTON, April 12, (Agencies): US President Barack Obama opened a 47-nation summit dedicated to keeping nuclear arms from terrorists on Monday and planned to seek momentum with China in his push for a new round of sanctions on Iran.
Obama began the unprecedented two-day gathering with a series of meetings with some of the world leaders gathered for the summit, one of the largest international groupings ever staged by the United States.
Obama will hold talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao that should go some way toward determining whether China is prepared to join the United States, Britain, France, Russia and Germany in a fourth round of UN sanctions against Iran. Tehran says its nuclear program is peaceful and it does not intend to build a weapon.
Hu’s agreement to attend was perceived as a positive sign in Washington after US-Chinese relations were strained by Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama, China’s Internet censorship, and US pressure over China’s currency.
Financial markets will be seeking further signs of China giving ground over its currency valuation. The United States agreed to delay its planned mid-April determination of whether China was considered a currency manipulator, sparing Hu from potential embarrassment.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who made a brief visit to Beijing last week to discuss US concerns that the yuan is seriously undervalued and that this
 contributes to a trade imbalance, was to attend Obama’s talks with Hu.
Iran dismissed the US summit and said it would not be swayed by any decisions made there.
“World summits being organized these days are intended to humiliate human beings,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in Tehran.
Obama began a series of one-on-one meetings by seeing Jordan’s King Abdullah, who like many Arab leaders is worried about the potential for Iran developing a nuclear weapon and triggering a Middle East arms race.
He was also meeting the leaders of Malaysia, Ukraine and Armenia inside Washington’s downtown convention center, which was surrounded by a heavy security cordon of troops and police and high fences.
The summit is the culmination of a hectic period of nuclear diplomacy for Obama. Last week he signed a new treaty to cut US and Russian nuclear arsenals and unilaterally announced the United States would limit its use of nuclear weapons, a plan that came under heavy fire from his conservative critics.
The summit — the biggest US-hosted assembly of world leaders in six decades — will be a test of Obama’s ability to rally global action on his nuclear agenda.
In a sign of progress on the issues, the foreign ministry in Moscow said Russia and the United States would sign a deal on Tuesday on reducing stocks of weapons grade plutonium.
Speaking on the eve of the conference, Obama said he expected it to yield “enormous progress” toward the goal of locking down loose nuclear materials worldwide.
“We know that organizations like al-Qaeda are in the process of trying to secure a nuclear weapon, a weapon of mass destruction that they have no compunction at using,” Obama told reporters, calling it the biggest threat to national security.
A draft final communique shows leaders will pledge to work toward safeguarding all “vulnerable nuclear material” within four years and take steps to crack down on nuclear smuggling.
Iran and North Korea are not on the guest list or the summit agenda. But their nuclear standoffs with the West were likely to weigh heavily in Obama’s talks with Hu and other leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She will sit down with the US president on Tuesday after the summit is over.
“I think time is pressing and a decision on potential sanctions will need to be made soon,” Merkel, referring to Iran, said in Berlin before leaving for the United States.
The list of leaders in attendance ranged from heads of state of traditional nuclear powers like Russia and France to nuclear-armed foes like India and neighboring Pakistan.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani assured Obama in talks on Sunday his government has “appropriate safeguard” for its nuclear arsenal. Experts say Pakistan’s stockpile of weapons-grade material poses a high risk because of internal security threats from the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Missing will be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who withdrew fearing Muslim leaders would use the summit as a forum to demand Israel give up its assumed nuclear arsenal.
Sanctions
China has made clear to the United States and four other world powers that it dislikes a proposed ban on new investments in Iran’s energy sector as part of a new round of U.N. sanctions, diplomats said on Sunday.
After months of delay, China reluctantly agreed to join the other permanent members of the Security Council and Germany — a group often referred to as the “P5-plus-one” — in New York last week to begin drafting a sanctions resolution against Iran for refusing to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
But the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that Chinese UN Ambassador Li Baodong indicated his displeasure at the proposals affecting Iran’s energy sector during the three-hour meeting with his US, British, French, German and Russian counterparts on Thursday.
“In general, the Chinese ambassador did not want to discuss specifics of the text,” a diplomat said, referring to a US sanctions proposal that is the basis of talks among the six.
“The first meeting in New York was for an initial exchange of views on the US draft,” the diplomat added. Another envoy confirmed his comments.
The Chinese did convey the impression that Beijing had problems with the proposals regarding Iran’s energy sector, a diplomat said.
“It was perceived that the Chinese do not agree with the energy proposals,” one of the diplomats said.
Those proposals include a ban on new investments in Iran’s energy industry, several diplomats have told Reuters. The US draft does not include a call for import or export restrictions on Iran’s oil and gas industries, as some in the United States and Israel had hoped for, the diplomats said.
Li told reporters after last week’s three-hour meeting of the six powers that it was “a very constructive negotiation.”
He said the group planned to meet again this week.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview aired Monday that while he agreed sanctions were needed to halt Iran’s nuclear drive, they should not crack down on its oil trade.
Medvedev, who will arrive in Washington later Monday for a two-day summit on nuclear security hosted by US President Barack Obama, warned that energy sanctions on Iran could lead to “humanitarian catastrophe,” despite the popularity of such measures among US lawmakers.
“If we’re talking about energy sanctions, I’ll tell you my opinion. I don’t think on that topic we have a chance to achieve a consolidated opinion of the global community on that,” Medvedev told ABC News television.
“Sanctions should not be paralyzing. They should not cause suffering.”
The handpicked successor of ex-president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Iran’s nuclear program “is not transparent” and should be monitored carefully.
If world powers slap a fourth round of UN sanctions on Iran, they should be smart and effective because previous ones often have not worked, he said.
“They should not lead to humanitarian catastrophe, where the whole Iranian community would start to hate the whole world,” Medvedev added.
Russia has joined an effort led by Washington to toughen sanctions within weeks on Iran over what the United States and its allies say are efforts to produce nuclear weapons under the cover of what Iran insists is a civilian energy program.
“Are they pursuing the nuclear weapon or not? I don’t know,” Medvedev said. “But we should carefully monitor it.”
He said Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium on its soil despite an offer by the major powers to supply the fuel “could be considered as at least the desire to enter into conflict with the world community.”
Uranium enrichment is the sensitive process that lies at the heart of Western concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. It can produce the fuel for nuclear reactors but in highly extended form can also make the fissile core of an atomic bomb.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave instructions in February for Iran to begin enriching uranium to the 20 percent level required for a Tehran medical research reactor after long-running international talks to supply the fuel from major powers failed to bear fruit.
The ABC interview was conducted on Friday, a day after Medvedev and Obama signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty in Prague. It first aired on Monday.
Medvedev warned in an interview Monday that he could walk away from a nuclear disarmament treaty signed last week if a US missile defense program in Europe creates “imbalance.”
Medvedev said former Cold War foes Russia and the United States negotiated specific language in the preamble of the new START treaty he signed last week with US President Barack Obama.
This “formula” states that there is an “interconnection between the strategic offensive arms and missile defense,” Medvedev told ABC News.
“So if those circumstances will change, then we would consider it as the reason to jeopardize the whole agreement.”
If the United States “radically multiplies the number and power of its missile defense system, obviously that missile defense system is indeed becoming a part of the strategic offensive nuclear forces, because it’s capable of blocking the action of the other side,” he added.
“So an imbalance occurs, and this would be certainly the reason to have a review of that agreement.”
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is urging negotiations on a new treaty banning production of nuclear bomb material.
The secretary-general told reporters Monday before heading to Washington to attend a nuclear security summit hosted by US President Barack Obama that he has repeatedly called for the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament to start treaty talks because “nuclear terrorism is one of the greatest threats we face today.”
In January, Pakistan delayed the start of talks on a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, insisting that any deal must also require its archrival India to reduce its existing stockpile of nuclear material.
The Conference on Disarmament, based in Geneva, can only move forward by consensus.