President Barack Obama backs Ukraine's efforts to tackle economic challenges through reform and working with the International Monetary Fund, the White House said on Monday, Apr. 12.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Ukraine intended to remove a "substantial part of its stocks" this year and would convert its civil nuclear research facilities to operate with low enriched uranium fuel.
The United States would provide financial and technical assistance to Ukraine and was likely to store some of the highly enriched uranium on U.S. soil, he said.
The move by Ukraine, which voluntarily gave up the nuclear weapons it had inherited with the collapse of the Soviet Union, is designed to make it harder for terrorists to get hold of fissile material that could be used in an atomic bomb.
"Today Ukraine announced a landmark decision to get rid of all of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium by the time of the next nuclear security summit in 2012," Gibbs told reporters at a nuclear summit hosted by President Barack Obama.
"This is something that the United States has tried to make happen for more than 10 years. The material is enough to construct several nuclear weapons," Gibbs said.
Diplomats said the summit’s final communique may urge nations to convert nuclear reactors using highly enriched fuel into reactors using low enriched fuel, which is harder to adapt to produce nuclear weapons.
Gibbs said the United States was a more secure location for the highly enriched uranium than many other places in the world and lauded Ukraine for its decision.
"This demonstrates Ukraine’s continued leadership in non-proliferation and comes in an important region where we know a lot of highly enriched uranium exists," he said.
Gibbs said the location for the 2012 nuclear summit would likely be announced on Tuesday.
The goal of the Washington summit is to reach a common understanding on the threat posed by nuclear terrorism and agree on a plan to secure all loose nuclear material within four years to prevent terrorists from getting it.
