Obama pointed out that America has "moral obligation" to lead nuclear disarmament

Washington, March 31 (EFE) .- US President, Barack Obama, said that his country has a "moral obligation" to follow leading the way towards the elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide, something that "will not occur quickly" and that "maybe" he does not get to see, as he admitted in an article published on Thursday.

"I believe that we should not resign ourselves to fatalism that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable," argued Obama in the article, published in the newspaper "The Washington Post" on the occasion of the Fourth Nuclear Security Summit, which starts today in Washington with the participation leaders from more than 50 countries and the notable absence of Russia.

Achieve "security and peace of a world without nuclear weapons" is something that "will not occur quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime. But we started" to move toward that goal, said the president.

According to Obama, the United States, as "the only nation" that has used nuclear weapons in combat during the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, "has a moral obligation to follow leading the way in the elimination" of such arsenals.

In the article, Obama noted that the summit which begins today in Washington aims "to prevent terrorists from obtaining and using nuclear weapons," as he had anticipated the White House.

The advances of the Islamic State (EI) beyond Iraq and Syria and the terrorist attacks last week in Brussels raised the interest of the White House by addressing the summit the risk that this or other terrorist groups have access to nuclear materials that many countries harbor for its civilian or military use.

This international summit is held every two years since 2010 by Obama initiative that promised the beginning of his mandate to transform the nuclear non-proliferation a priority.

Since then, there have been "significant progress", the ruling of the trial, as the signing of a new START treaty disarmament between the US and Russia to the number of nuclear warheads that have to be in 2018 at their lowest levels since the early 1950.

US and Russia, which together have more than 90% of the world's nuclear weapons, "should negotiate to further reduce our reserves," Obama said in the article.

In turn, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said on Wednesday that Russia decided not to attend the Washington summit because he felt there was "lack of cooperation for drafting the agenda" of the meeting.