Audrey Young: Obama's next test - No more nukes

Barack Obama. Photo / AP

The spring blossoms in Washington are behaving impeccably for the unprecedented summit that President Barack Obama is hosting in Washington.

Whether the traffic does the same when motorcades for 47 leaders and dignitaries begin is another matter.

Washington has been warned to have patience.

That is something that many of President Obama's opponents don't have - like the ones on Fox News who proclaimed recently the health insurance reforms to be as devastating as the bombings of Pearl Harbour.

Former John McCain presidential running mate Sarah Palin - and her almost indistinguishable satirist Tina Fey - is receiving saturation coverage promoting her memoirs around the country and teasing out her presidential ambitions.

She questions his ability to handle the big issues, such as Iran's nuclear capability with his experience as a "community organiser."

Mr Obama's response: "If the Secretary of Defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it, I'm probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin."

His sceptics will be watching the outcome of the summit closely.

Billed as a Nuclear Security Summit, its goals are a lot less lofty than the aspiration speech Mr Obama gave in Prague last year - vowing to rid the world of nuclear weapons

The aim today is get the loose material that could fall into the hands of terrorists under control - to set standards of storage for nuclear material.

That is something so mundane that foreign ministers could easily have handled the task.

But the summit serves several other purposes for Mr Obama in a juggling act between domestic imperatives and global diplomacy.

It allows him to persuade the American public that their security against terrorist attack is paramount.

That is an important factor with the sealing last week of Mr Obama's nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia and the release of the US Nuclear Posture Review diluting the US stance.

Giving the US public confidence that he is addressing their security concerns, gives him greater political capital to pursue other anti-nuclear measures, such as the review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in May and getting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force.

To that end, Mr Obama wants the Non-Proliferation Treaty presented again to the Senate, which voted it down in 1999.

Mr McCain and his fellow Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, who led opposition to it then, have issued a joint statement questioning the new nuclear posture and whether it will allow the US arsenal to be kept in pristine condition.

Mr Obama has also learned the lessons from the way the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit was run - that leaders standing up and reading out prepared statements, as they are want to do - slows down progress.

He has asked leaders in Washington instead to bring "gifts" (statements to table and not be read aloud).

Hosting the most important leaders in the world - and, dare we say, having New Zealand Prime Minister John Key as well - and providing the environment for real and urgent debate should help to create a momentum, perhaps a new spring in the global nuclear agenda.