Van Rompuy gets handshake in Washington

EU President Herman Van Rompuy on Monday joined leaders of nearly 50 countries invited by US President Barack Obama to an unprecedented ‘nuclear summit’ aimed at containing the threat of nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands. bit.ly The two-day gathering is the largest called by an American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt organised the 1945 meeting that created the United Nations, the US press reports. According to the guest list, Europe was represented by Van Rompuy and a number of national leaders, including Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme, Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The Washington summit is the culmination of a hectic week of nuclear diplomacy for Obama and comes a year after he laid out his vision of a world free of atomic weapons in Prague (see ‘Background’). The US administration hopes that the summit will strike an agreement to secure the world’s stockpiles of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium (HEU) essential ingredients in building nuclear weapons by 2013. The BBC quotes Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former investigator at the CIA and the US Department of Energy, as saying that there are three headlines that keep …