If Obama is truly serious about eliminating the threat of nuclear weapons once and for all, then he should also be considering the elimination of nuclear power.
Here's the problem: fissionable atoms don't know the difference between atoms for peace and atoms for war. The training and technology for running nuclear power plants and for building nuclear weapons overlap so intimately that we have not been able to untangle the two, more than 60 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even some of the leading promoters of the "peaceful" atom trembled at the risks. Take Dr. Alvin Weinberg, a Manhattan Project veteran and subsequently director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In an article in Science in 1972, Weinberg said in supporting nuclear power, "We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society."
Just how Faustian a bargain, we have learned over and over again, as country after country have used their "peaceful" nuclear power programs as a cover for their successful nuclear weapons development programs.
Ending the threat of nuclear weapons is a radically easier task, in simple physical terms, than ending the threat of biological and chemical weapons. Without highly enriched uranium or weapons-grade plutonium, no one can build nuclear weapons. HUE and PU do not occur in nature; creating the infrastructure to produce these substances requires a very large-scale industrial commitment that only nations have been able to make. (We do not have this luxury in dealing with the threats of biological and chemical warfare, where even very small numbers of people could potentially wreak great damage.)
So here we have a unique opportunity as a species: by renouncing both nuclear weapons and nuclear power, we can put one of the weapons of mass destruction, the only one so far that has clearly threatened the extinction of the human species, back in the bottle.