On 7 July 2011, the VCDNP hosted a briefing by William Tobey, senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Tobey has formerly served as Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration. The event was co-organized by the Stanley Foundation.
Mr. Tobey's briefing was based on a recently published paper entitled "Planning for Success at the 2012 Seoul Nuclear Summit". Addressing a number of Vienna-based diplomats, academics and other experts, he analyzed the outcome of the 2010 Washington Nuclear Security Summit and offered ideas aimed at contributing to a successful completion of the forthcoming 2012 Seoul Summit.
According to Tobey, the Washington Summit was overall successful and confirmed the importance of preventing nuclear terrorism. Nevertheless, Tobey also referred to a number of shortcomings, both substantive and procedural. Among them are the "vague and non-binding language of the final communiqué," absence of a baseline for security improvements, and loopholes for inaction. Mr. Tobey argued that the security of nuclear materials should remain the sole focus of future nuclear security summits. He also put forward a number of specific proposals that could be considered at the 2012 Seoul meeting and provided recommendations for establishing metrics to assess the implementation of summit decisions. The debate that followed the presentation demonstrated differing views among individual states on the focus of the 2010 and in particularly the 2012 Summit, on the composition of the summit, and the nature of summit documents.
Read William Tobey's paper, "Planning for Success at the 2012 Seoul Nuclear Summit"
