Obama’s Broken Pledge on Nuclear Weapons

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Five months after his election, President Barack Obama set an impossibly high bar for himself, describing nuclear terrorism as “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security” and promising to lead an international effort to lock down all vulnerable nuclear material worldwide within four years.

In so doing, he placed the need to bottle up loose nuclear weapons or their spark plugs — the fissile materials that make them go bang — even higher on the list of his priorities than slowing climate change, stopping an Iranian nuclear weapon, or brokering a historic Middle East peace deal.