In an age of pressing global challenges, none threatens our nation or our world as urgently as the possible spread of nuclear weapons. The United States has a special responsibility to meet this challenge, and under President Obama, we seek to lead the international community in minimizing these dangers and reinvigorating the nuclear nonproliferation regime.
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Recent developments underscore the threat. The international community failed to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. Iran continues to ignore resolutions from the U.N. Security Council demanding that it suspend its enrichment activities and live up to its international obligations. Too much of the world's nuclear material remains vulnerable to theft or diversion, even as illicit state and nonstate networks engage in sensitive nuclear trade. And as we saw with the failure to detect Iran's covert enrichment plant and Syria's reactor project, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) doesn't have the tools to carry out its verification mission effectively.
If we do not reverse this trend and strengthen the international nonproliferation regime, we will find ourselves in a world with a steadily growing number of nuclear-armed states, and an increasing likelihood of terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons.
No nation is safe from the threat of nuclear proliferation, and no nation can meet this challenge alone. In the early days of the atomic age, a handful of powerful countries could effectively set nonproliferation strategy. But in today's changing world, with information and technology leaping across borders, industrial capacity more widely distributed, and nonstate actors wielding increasing influence, it will require unprecedented international cooperation.
That is why the United States has launched a major diplomatic effort to forge a renewed international consensus on nonproliferation that is based on the shared interest of meeting a common threat and on the requirement that all nations understand and abide by their rights and responsibilities.
Last month, President Obama chaired a historic U.N. Security Council session that unanimously adopted a resolution outlining a framework for action in the years ahead. This resolution should serve as a guide for the international community as we work to strengthen the nonproliferation regime, including through the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference next spring. As we have done for four decades, we must build on the NPT's solid foundation with measures designed to tackle evolving challenges.
We seek to strengthen each of the three mutually reinforcing pillars of global nonproliferation -- preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, promoting disarmament, and facilitating the peaceful use of nuclear energy. And to those three pillars, we should add a fourth: preventing nuclear terrorism.
The most effective way to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism is to ensure that nuclear materials that can be used to build weapons are well protected against theft or seizure. That is why the United States has proposed a plan to secure all vulnerable nuclear material worldwide within four years -- a plan that has now won the endorsement of the U.N. Security Council.
We will use financial and legal tools to better disrupt illicit proliferation networks, including by tightening controls on transshipment, a key source of illicit trade. We will seek to strengthen Nuclear Suppliers Group restrictions on transfers of enrichment and reprocessing technology. And we will also promote multilateral nuclear fuel supply and spent fuel arrangements so that states embarking on or expanding nuclear power programs can pursue their civil nuclear plans without going to the great expense and difficulty of building their own enrichment or reprocessing plants.
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