G8 extends plan to prevent WMDs spread despite bin Laden's death: U.S. official

Despite the death of terrorist kingpin Osama bin Laden, the spread of weapons and materials of mass destruction remains a threat, a U.S. State Department official told Xinhua on Friday.

"Al-Qaida remains a threat, but it is not our only threat," Bonnie D. Jenkins, coordinator for threat reduction programs at the U.S. State Department, told Xinhua in a phone interview.

"We still need to secure our borders. Weak borders are weak borders. The threat of bad actors exists and therefore bio-pathogens, nuclear material and radiological sources still need to be secured," she said.

That is why the Group of 8 (G8), in the summit that ended Friday, agreed to extend the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, an agreement comprising 23 partner nations. The initiative has been in place since 2002, for which a sum of 20 billion U.S. dollars was allocated for a 10-year period, most of which has been spent, according to Jenkins.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the United States and global authorities feared that extremists would acquire nuclear or other materials of mass destruction and explode a device that would result in large numbers of casualties and public panic, and authorities said terrorists are actively pursuing such capabilities.

The global partners hope to prevent such a nightmare scenario from unfolding by extending this agreement, the security expert said.

The original plan focused on the former Soviet Union and on such activities as destroying nuclear submarines and chemical weapons, as well as redirecting nuclear scientists and engineers in the former Soviet Union towards more peaceful enterprises, Jenkins said.

Now the plan is expected to go global and encompass a broader variety of projects, although the specifics have not yet been worked out, she said.

"Because the threat is increasingly global, we will be focusing more on global activities," she said, adding that the program now seeks to bring in additional partners from such regions as Asia, Africa and Latin America.

"At this point we need to just figure out how we turn this into a mechanism where we can coordinate, figure out what we want to do as a group and individually, and start to figure out how we are going to fund that work," she said.

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