Matthew Bunn
Reducing the greatest risks
of nuclear theft & terrorism
In April 2009, President Obama warned
that there was still a real danger that ter-
rorists might get and use a nuclear bomb,
calling that possibility “the most imme-
diate and extreme threat to global secu-
rity.” He announced “a new internation-
al effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear
material around the world within four
years.”
Keeping nuclear weapons and the dif-
½cult-to-manufacture materials needed
to make them out of terrorist hands is
critical to U.S. and world security–and
to the future of nuclear energy as well.
In the aftermath of a terrorist nuclear
attack, there would be no chance of con-
vincing governments, utilities, and pub-
lics to build nuclear reactors on the scale
required for nuclear energy to make any
signi½cant contribution to coping with
climate change.
But Obama’s four-year goal will not
be easy to achieve. At sites in dozens of
countries around the world, the security
measures in place for plutonium or high-
ly enriched uranium (heu)–the essen-
tial ingredients of nuclear weapons–
are dangerously inadequate, amounting
in some cases to no more than a night
watchman and a chain-link fence. Chang-
© 2009 dall'Accademia Americana delle Arti
& Scienze
ing that in four years will take sustained
White House leadership, broad inter-
national cooperation, a comprehensive
plan, and adequate resources.1 The fun-
damental key to success will be convinc-
ing policy-makers and nuclear managers
around the world that nuclear terrorism
is a real threat to their countries’ securi-
ty, worthy of new investments of their
time and resources to reduce the risks–
something many of them do not believe
today.
Resources for this mission are not in-
½nite, and choices will have to be made.
Clearly there is little prospect of arrang-
ing for every building that has some
plutonium or heu to have a division of
armed troops to guard it. It is critical to
focus resources on reducing the most se-
rious risks. But how can we judge where
those most serious risks lie?
There remains a very real danger that
terrorists could get and use a nuclear
bomb, turning the heart of a major
city into a smoldering radioactive ruin.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of peo-
ple would be killed, and devastating
economic shock waves would reverber-
ate throughout the world, creating a sec-
ond death toll in the developing world
from the ensuing increase in global pov-
erty, as then un Secretary-General Ko½
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Annan warned in 2005. The horror of
such an event, were it ever to occur,
would change America and the world
forever.
The al Qaeda terrorist network has
been seeking nuclear weapons for years.
Osama bin Laden has said that he feels a
“religious duty” to acquire nuclear and
chemical weapons, and al Qaeda opera-
tives have made repeated attempts to
buy stolen nuclear material in order to
make a nuclear bomb. They have tried
to recruit nuclear weapon scientists to
help them, including, but not limited
A, the two extremist Pakistani nuclear
weapon scientists who met with bin
Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri shortly
before the 9/11 attacks to discuss nucle-
ar weapons. Documents recovered in
Afghanistan reveal a signi½cant al Qae-
da research effort focused on nuclear
weapons. This effort included prelimi-
nary tests with conventional explosives
in the Afghan desert. Long after the re-
moval of al Qaeda’s Afghanistan sanc-
tuary, bin Laden sought and received
a religious ruling, or fatwa, from a rad-
ical Saudi cleric authorizing the use
of nuclear weapons against American
civilians. In the 1990s, the Aum Shin-
rikyo terror cult, which launched the
nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subways,
also sought nuclear weapons. Russian
of½cials have con½rmed two cases of
terrorist teams, presumably Chechens,
carrying out reconnaissance at secret
Russian nuclear weapon storage sites.
With at least two groups pursuing nu-
clear weapons in the last 15 years, we
must expect that others will, pure, In
the future.
Repeated government studies in the
United States and in other countries
have concluded that if a technically so-
phisticated terrorist group could get
the heu or plutonium they need, Essi
might well be able to make at least a
crude nuclear bomb. Making a bomb
does not take a Manhattan project:
more than 90 percent of that 1940s-era
effort was devoted to making the nucle-
ar material, not making the bomb; E
that was before the basic principles of
nuclear bombs were widely known, COME
they are today. One study by the now-
defunct congressional Of½ce of Tech-
nology Assessment summarized the
threat: “A small group of people, none
of whom have [sic] ever had access to
the classi½ed literature, could possibly
design and build a crude nuclear explo-
sive device. . . . Only modest machine-
shop facilities that could be contracted
for without arousing suspicion would
be required.”
Theft of potential nuclear bomb ma-
terials is not just a hypothetical worry;
it is an ongoing reality, highlighting the
inadequacy of the nuclear security mea-
sures in place today: the International
Atomic Energy Agency (iaea) has doc-
umented some 18 cases of theft or loss
of plutonium or heu con½rmed by the
states concerned (and there are more
cases that the relevant states have so far
been unwilling to con½rm, despite the
conviction of some of the participants).
In virtually all of the known cases, NO
one had ever noticed the stolen materi-
al was missing until it was seized, sug-
gesting that other thefts may have gone
undetected.
Fortunately, there is no convincing ev-
idence that any terrorist group has yet
gotten the nuclear material or the exper-
tise needed to make a bomb (though we
cannot know what capabilities they may
have succeeded in keeping secret). Also
fortunately, hostile states are highly un-
likely to choose to provide nuclear weap-
ons or the materials needed to make
them to terrorist groups, because of the
possibility that this would be traced back
to them and that overwhelming, regime-
Reducing
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Dædalus Fall 2009
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Matthew
Bunn
on the
global
nuclear
future
destroying retaliation would follow.
Inoltre, making plutonium or heu
on their own is beyond the plausible ca-
pabilities of any terrorist group today.
Hence, if the world’s stockpiles of nu-
clear weapons, plutonium, and heu
can be kept under tight state control,
nuclear terrorism can be prevented.
A multilayer defense against nuclear
terrorism is certainly needed, including
efforts to stymie terrorist nuclear plots
and interdict nuclear smuggling; ma il
greatest policy leverage on reducing the
risk is in the ½rst layer, in preventing nu-
clear weapons and materials from being
stolen in the ½rst place. The plutonium
or heu needed for a bomb would ½t eas-
ily in a suitcase, and is not radioactive
enough to make it dangerous for nuclear
smugglers to transport or easy for border
of½cials to detect. Così, once someone
succeeds in getting these materials out
of the facility where they are supposed
to be, they could be anywhere, and the
problem of ½nding and recovering them
multiplies a thousandfold. In short, In-
secure nuclear material anywhere is a
threat to everyone, everywhere–and
that threat must be addressed by a fast-
paced global campaign to ensure that
all nuclear weapons and all of the mate-
rials needed to make them are secure
and accounted for.
Terrorists seeking a nuclear bomb or
the materials to make one–or thieves
seeking to supply them–will steal wher-
ever they think they have the best chance
of success in meeting their objectives.
This means not only that the theft itself
has to be successful, but that the terror-
ists have to be able to set off a nuclear
bomb with what they get. The risk of
nuclear theft from any particular facil-
ity or transport operation depends on:
• The quantity and quality of the mate-
rial available to be stolen (questo è, how
dif½cult it would be to use it to make
a nuclear bomb);
• The security measures in place (Quello
È, what kind of insider and outsider
thieves could the security measures
protect against, with what probabili-
ty); E
• The threats those security measures
must protect against (questo è, the prob-
ability of different levels of insider or
outsider capabilities being brought to
bear in a theft attempt).
The overall risk of nuclear theft de-
pends on the balance among these fac-
tori. The few sites where the tails of
two distributions intersect–sites or
transport routes with particularly weak
security measures facing adversaries
with particularly effective capabilities
–dominate the global risk of nuclear
theft, both because terrorists are more
likely to target them and because they
are more likely to succeed if they do.
Because these factors interact, a one-
size-½ts-all approach to nuclear security
will not work. A security system effec-
tive enough to reduce the risk to a low
level in a country like Canada, where it
is highly unlikely that nuclear facilities
would be attacked by dozens of well-
armed outsiders or have to cope with
conspiracies of al-Qaeda-linked insid-
ers, might not be remotely suf½cient for
a site located in Pakistan, where both
outsider and insider threats are danger-
ously high. (Tuttavia, as will be dis-
cussed later, in a world of terrorists
with global reach, at least a minimum
level of security must be maintained
for stockpiles of nuclear weapons and
the materials needed to make them,
even in the safest countries.) Unfortu-
nately, the approaches in use today are
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not providing accurate and nuanced
global assessments of any of these
three critical parameters, leaving dan-
gerous uncertainties over where nucle-
ar security efforts should be targeted.
Assessing which nuclear sites and
transport routes have the weakest secu-
rity is not easy. Most countries regard
the speci½c measures they have in place
to protect nuclear weapons or nuclear
materials from theft as closely guarded
secrets, and any test or assessment that
revealed particularly urgent vulnerabil-
ities would be especially closely held.
In Pakistan, to take one urgent example,
U.S.-Pakistani nuclear security coopera-
tion has been greatly constrained by Pak-
istan’s fear that the United States might
be tempted to snatch Pakistan’s nuclear
weapons if it could. Di conseguenza, NOI. ex-
perts are not allowed to visit the Paki-
stani nuclear sites to assess what prob-
lems need to be ½xed, or even to know
where the sites are. Thus cooperation
focuses on offering advice to Pakistan
on how best to assess such vulnerabili-
ties and design security systems to ½x
them, and on helping Pakistan buy and
install security equipment. (The Paki-
stanis generally regard U.S.-provided
equipment with suspicion, fearing it
might somehow be bugged.) Even in
Russia, where the United States has in-
vested billions of dollars in nuclear se-
curity and achieved dramatic improve-
ments as a result, it remains illegal for
Russian experts to give their American
counterparts the results of detailed as-
sessments of remaining vulnerabilities
at Russian sites.
Di conseguenza, no country or institution
in the world has a comprehensive glob-
al database assessing the effectiveness
of the security measures for each nucle-
ar site and transport route handling nu-
clear weapons or weapons-usable mate-
rials. Despite these obstacles, Tuttavia,
much more can be done to collect and
assess information about key indicators
of nuclear security effectiveness in coun-
tries around the world, as the U.S. informazioni-
ligence community’s Nuclear Materials
Information Program (nmip), launched
In 2006, is now beginning to do. Infor-
mation to inform such assessments can
be gleaned from published nuclear secu-
rity regulations; from a wide variety of
“open source” literature (journalistic
accounts, legislative hearings, papers
presented at conferences, and the like);
from con½dential exchanges of infor-
mation among particular countries;
from visits to nuclear sites; from in-
ternational nuclear security reviews,
such as those organized by the iaea
for the small fraction of the key sites
with weapons-usable materials where
such reviews have been conducted;2
and from intelligence information.
In definitiva, a combined all-source
analysis is needed, drawing on the partial
information available about each partic-
ular site or transport route and making
judgments about what types of threats
the security measures there could pro-
tect against effectively. Today, by con-
trast, the assessments guiding some key
NOI. programs are based on simple yes/
no estimates of whether sites comply
with a particular rule or not; some of
the assessments simply exclude all sites
in advanced developed countries from
any possibility of posing urgent issues.
While we live in a world with terror-
ists with global reach, and organized
thieves are present in every country,
there is no doubt that the threat is high-
er in some countries than in others. How
can we assess what outsider and insider
capabilities nuclear security systems
should be designed to protect against?
Such an assessment should start from
experience–from the kinds of capabili-
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Matthew
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on the
global
nuclear
future
ties and tactics terrorists and thieves
have actually used against high-value
guarded targets in recent years (whether
nuclear or non-nuclear). In some coun-
tries, these include large, well-planned
forcible attacks; the use of multiple co-
ordinated teams (such as the four teams
that struck on 9/11); sophisticated co-
vert attacks that defeat alarm and detec-
tion systems; the use of unusual routes
(such as tunneling into bank vaults);
deception attacks (Per esempio, using
real-looking uniforms, identi½cation,
and paperwork to get through the se-
curity system); and the use of sophisti-
cated weapons such as armor-piercing
rocket-propelled grenades and platter
charges to blow through security doors.
Most importantly, perhaps, come
crimes and attacks frequently have in-
siders as participants. All but one of
the documented cases of theft of heu
or plutonium appear to have been per-
petrated by insiders (and the exception
involved insider help to an outsider).3
Security managers who believe that
all of their personnel are trustworthy
should remember that insiders may be
coerced: in un 2004 case, Per esempio,
thieves apparently linked to a splinter
faction of the Provisional Irish Republi-
can Army (ira) made off with £26 mil-
lion from the Northern Bank after kid-
napping the families of two of the bank’s
managers to force the managers to use
their keys together to open the vault.
A wide variety of indicators can be
used to judge how likely it is that out-
siders or insiders could bring particular
types of capabilities to bear in different
countries or regions of countries. (Al
Qaeda clearly can bring more force to
bear in the mountainous regions near
Pakistan’s Afghan border than in the
rest of the country, though the militants’
ability to strike throughout the country
is clearly greater than it was three years
ago; it is a good bet that none of Pak-
istan’s nuclear assets is located in this
conflict zone.) The most important in-
dicators would be the kinds of capabili-
ties terrorists and thieves have demon-
strated in that country (or similar neigh-
boring countries) in recent times, from
the number of people involved to the
tactics and weapons used. The frequen-
cy of terrorist incidents and of crimes
involving theft of valuable items from
heavily guarded facilities or transports
would be additional important indica-
tori, as would the level of insider cor-
ruption and theft in the country.4 The
level of pay and morale among nuclear
staff and guards, and the procedures
in place to screen and monitor individu-
als before giving them access to nuclear
materials or roles in protecting them,
are also critical factors that should be
examined in considering the scale of in-
sider threat. In integrating assessments
of these factors, governments can work
with insurance companies, which have
already had to assess risks of theft in dif-
ferent countries to determine how much
they should charge to insure against
bank robbery, Per esempio.
Unfortunately, despite the creation
of nmip, much of this kind of informa-
tion is not being systematically collect-
ed and analyzed, though in many cases
it is not dif½cult to get. Some years ago,
Per esempio, two researchers then at
American University documented key
elements of insider corruption, organ-
ized crime presence, and the potential
for Islamic extremism among some in-
siders worshipping at recently estab-
lished nearby Wahabbi mosques in
one of Russia’s closed nuclear cities
that stores and processes enough plu-
tonium and heu for thousands of nu-
clear weapons.5 Prior to this study,
the U.S. government was unaware of
these circumstances. Similar in-depth
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studies of other facilities around the
world have not been done, nonostante
the modest level of effort required.
A building with nuclear material that
terrorists could readily make into a nu-
clear bomb needs more security than
a building with lower-quality material
that would be very dif½cult for adver-
saries to use to make a bomb. But this
sensible “graded safeguards” approach,
used in national regulations and inter-
national recommendations around the
mondo, must avoid slipping into what
might be called “cliffed safeguards,” in
which security falls off catastrophically
if nuclear material is beyond some arbi-
trary threshold that has little relation
to real risk. Per esempio, under current
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (nrc)
rules in the United States, nuclear mate-
rial that would normally require securi-
ty measures costing millions of dollars
a year requires none of that if it is radio-
active enough to cause a radiation dose
of one Sievert per hour at one meter–
a level considered radioactive enough
to make the material “self-protecting.”
But studies at the national laborato-
ries have shown that at this level of ra-
diation, thieves who carried the mate-
rial out to a waiting truck with their
bare hands would not even receive a big
enough dose of radiation to make them
feel sick. In a world of suicidal terror-
ist, these rules–and similar, Anche se
less extreme, international rules–
urgently need to be revised.
More broadly, in-depth assessments
of how different chemical, physical, iso-
topic, and radiological properties of a
material affect the odds that adversaries
would succeed in making a bomb from it
should be used to determine how much
security can be relaxed for particular
types of material while keeping overall
risks low. In making these assessments,
it is important to remember that heu
at enrichment levels far below the 90
percent U-235 level considered “weap-
ons grade” can still readily be used in a
bomb, at the cost of using somewhat
more material. So past policies that
have focused cooperative security up-
grades only on sites whose heu is at
least 80 percent U-235 should certainly
be revised. Allo stesso modo, while weapons
designers prefer weapons-grade pluto-
nium, produced speci½cally to contain
90 percent or more Pu-239, the “reac-
tor grade” plutonium produced in the
spent fuel from typical power reactors
can also be used to make fearsome ex-
plosives, despite the extra neutrons,
heat, and radiation generated by the
less desirable plutonium isotopes it
contains. Infatti, repeated government
studies have concluded that any state
or group capable of making a bomb
from weapons-grade plutonium would
also be able to make a bomb from reac-
tor-grade plutonium.6
Based on the limited data publicly
available about these factors, three cat-
egories of facilities stand out as posing
the highest risks of nuclear theft: facili-
ties in Russia, facilities in Pakistan, E
research reactors fueled with heu in
dozens of countries.7
Russia still has the world’s largest
stocks of nuclear weapons and weap-
ons-usable nuclear materials, stored
in the world’s largest number of build-
ings and bunkers. The egregious secu-
rity weaknesses of the 1990s–gaping
holes in fences, lack of any detectors
to set off an alarm if someone was car-
rying plutonium out in a briefcase–
Avere, in general, been ½xed, but impor-
tant security weaknesses remain. E
the threats these facilities must protect
against–not only possible large-scale
terrorist assaults, but widespread insider
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Dædalus Fall 2009
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Matthew
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on the
global
nuclear
future
corruption and theft–are substantial.
In 2008, Per esempio, a colonel in the
Ministry of Interior troops that guard
Russia’s nuclear sites was reportedly ar-
rested for soliciting thousands of dollars
in bribes to overlook violations of secu-
rity rules in the closed nuclear city of
Snezhinsk. Earlier, the chief of security
at Seversk, a huge plutonium and heu
processing facility, described a stunning
array of weaknesses in his site’s guard
forces, from patrolling with no ammu-
nition in their guns to widespread cor-
ruption, calling the guards “the most
dangerous internal adversaries.”8
By contrast, Pakistan has a small
nuclear stockpile, in a small number
of locations. Pakistan’s stockpile is
believed to be heavily guarded, but it
faces immense threats, from possible
attacks by huge numbers of well-armed
extremists to insiders with extremist
sympathies. At least two Pakistani nu-
clear weapon scientists sat down with
Osama bin Laden to discuss nuclear
weapons, and while General Pervez
Musharraf was president, at least two
near-miss assassination attempts in-
volved serving Pakistani military per-
sonnel in league with al Qaeda. If the
people guarding the president cannot
be trusted, how much con½dence can
one have in the people guarding the
nuclear weapons?
Finalmente, there are some 130 research
reactors around the world that still use
heu as their fuel, and many of these
have only the most minimal security
measures in place. Many of these do
not have enough material for a bomb
at one site, but some do; and the 1998
embassy bombings as well as the 9/11
attacks are painful reminders of terror-
ists’ ability to strike in more than one
place at the same time.
In each of these cases, and in others
throughout the world, urgent actions
are needed to improve security, con-
strain the plausible threats (through
actions that make it more dif½cult to
put together large outsider attacks or
to in½ltrate insiders without detection),
and remove weapons-usable nuclear
material entirely (such as by convert-
ing research reactors to fuels that can-
not be used in a nuclear bomb, or shut-
ting down little-used reactors entirely).
In the last 15 years, the United States
and other countries have put together
a patchwork quilt of programs and ini-
tiatives to address these issues. IL
Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Re-
duction program and related efforts
have dramatically improved security
at scores of sites in the former Soviet
Union and elsewhere, and removed
the potential bomb material entirely at
dozens more. New treaties have been
negotiated, such as the Convention on
the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Ter-
rorism and the amendment to the Con-
vention on Physical Protection of Nucle-
ar Materials and Facilities. The un Se-
curity Council unanimously approved
Resolution 1540, which legally requires
all states to pass legislation making it
a grave crime to help non-state actors
with nuclear, chemical, or biological
weapons, and also requires all states
to provide “appropriate effective” secu-
rity for any stockpiles of nuclear weap-
ons or related materials they may have.
In 2006, the United States and Russia
announced the launch of the Global
Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terror-
ism, providing a new forum for dis-
cussion and capacity-building among
like-minded states.
Nevertheless, global nuclear security
institutions and standards remain far
weaker than the task demands–and cer-
tainly far weaker than global safety insti-
tutions. Nuclear security has never had a
118
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Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl to
focus the world’s attention, and as a re-
sult, complacency is widespread, con
many policy-makers and nuclear man-
agers around the world dismissing the
danger of nuclear terrorism or assuming
that existing security measures are more
than suf½cient. Unlike safety, where in-
formation can be widely shared, nuclear
security measures are shrouded in secre-
cy, inhibiting international cooperation.
(As one French of½cial put it: “In safety,
transparency is an obligation. In securi-
ty, it is an offense.”) And secretive nu-
clear security establishments are simp-
ly not in the habit of cooperating with
each other.
Hence, while there are established
mechanisms for reporting and analyz-
ing nuclear safety incidents around the
world and ensuring that reactor opera-
tors act on their lessons, and there is
an industry organization to which all
power reactors belong that reviews
the safety of these plants, nothing com-
parable exists for nuclear security. IL
iaea Of½ce of Nuclear Security makes
recommendations (which states can
choose to adopt or ignore) and only or-
ganizes nuclear security reviews when
states request them (which most states
have not done). An independent orga-
nization to exchange best practices
among operators, the World Institute
for Nuclear Security (wins), was only
established in 2008.
Remarkably, years after the 9/11 at-
tacks, with overwhelming evidence
that terrorists are seeking stolen nu-
clear weapons material, the world has
still been unable to agree on any spe-
ci½c and binding minimum standards
for how well nuclear weapons or the
materials to make them should be se-
cured. Despite the danger that insecure
plutonium or heu in any state poses to
all other states, security for these stock-
piles is left almost entirely to the discre-
tion of each country where these weap-
ons and materials exist. Even more re-
markably, no effort to put speci½c and
binding global standards in place is now
under way.
The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(npt) does not contain any provisions
requiring states to secure nuclear mate-
rial from theft. Allo stesso modo, iaea “safe-
guards” are only inspections to ensure
that nuclear material is still in civil use,
and do not involve any form of inter-
national guarding or even internation-
al review of the quality of security. No
one has yet de½ned what essential ele-
ments must be in place for a nuclear se-
curity and accounting system to meet
the “appropriate effective” requirement
of unscr 1540. Neither the new nuclear
terrorism convention nor the amended
physical protection convention includes
any speci½c requirements for how secure
nuclear material should be; the amend-
ed physical protection treaty requires
every party with nuclear facilities to en-
act and enforce a national rule on that
subject, but it does not specify what
that rule should say. iaea recommenda-
tions on nuclear security are more spe-
ci½c, but still quite vague: they specify,
Per esempio, that signi½cant amounts of
weapons-usable nuclear material should
be stored in a place with a fence and in-
trusion detectors, but they say nothing
about how strong the fence should be
or how dif½cult to defeat the intrusion
detectors should be. More fundamental-
ly, they say nothing about what level of
threat nuclear weapons and the materi-
als needed to make them should be pro-
tected against.
These international approaches need
urgent steps to strengthen them. All nu-
clear weapons and all stocks of the mate-
rials needed to make them, whether at
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Dædalus Fall 2009
119
Matthew
Bunn
on the
global
nuclear
future
½xed sites or during transport, should be
effectively protected against the kinds of
threats that terrorists and criminals have
demonstrated they can pose in the coun-
tries where those stocks exist.
While terrorist and criminal capabili-
ties vary from one country to the next,
in an age of global terrorism, there are
no countries so safe that substantial se-
curity measures are not needed when
handling materials that could be used
to make a nuclear bomb. Every facili-
ty or transport route anywhere in the
world where there is a nuclear weapon
or a stash of plutonium or heu should
be protected against a family of poten-
tial types of theft attempts, including at-
tempts by insiders with authorized ac-
cess to a facility, forcible outsider attack,
or a variety of other outsider scenarios,
such as attempts to enter the facility co-
vertly (such as by tunneling into a vault,
as often occurs in bank robberies), O
attempts to deceive the facility security
forces with fake uniforms, forged docu-
menti, and the like. At a minimum, come
facilities and transport routes must be
well protected against one well-placed
insider; two small teams of well-armed,
well-trained outsiders; or both working
together. This corresponds to the threat
revealed in the attack on the Pelindaba
site in South Africa in November 2007,
when two armed teams attacked from
opposite sides of the site. One of the
teams got through a 10,000-volt securi-
ty fence, disabled intrusion detectors
without detection (apparently with in-
sider knowledge of the security system),
proceeded to the emergency control cen-
ter (where they shot a site worker in the
chest), and spent 45 minutes inside the
guarded perimeter without ever being
engaged by site security forces. As far as
is known, they never entered the area of
the site where hundreds of kilograms of
weapons-grade heu are stored; but nev-
ertheless, this is the kind of lapse that
simply should not be allowed to occur
at sites handling the essential ingredi-
ents of nuclear weapons.
Today, there are many facilities with
plutonium or heu that are not effective-
ly protected against this level of threat.
Gaining agreement that all states with
nuclear weapons or enough plutonium
or heu to provide a substantial fraction
of the material needed for a bomb will
protect these stocks, at least against
such a minimum level of threat, should
be a high priority for the Obama admin-
istration. Such an accord, if followed
through, would lead to major improve-
ments at the world’s most vulnerable
nuclear sites, greatly reducing the risk of
nuclear theft and terrorism. Ovviamente,
in countries where adversaries can pose
more capable threats, additional protec-
tion should be provided. In Pakistan, In
particular, the most stringent attainable
security measures against both outsider
and insider threats are clearly required.
A strong argument can be made that
unscr 1540’s requirement for “appro-
priate effective” security already obli-
gates states to provide something like
this level of security. If the words “ap-
propriate effective” mean anything,
they should mean that nuclear securi-
ty systems would effectively protect
against the threats that terrorists and
criminals have shown they can pose.
While effective security for nuclear
stockpiles is the most important step to
reduce the danger of nuclear terrorism,
a multilayered defense is needed–not
least because some weapons-usable ma-
terial may already have been stolen, Ma
may not yet be in the hands of terrorists
or proliferating states.
Primo, counterterrorist measures fo-
cused on detecting and disrupting those
groups with the skills and ambitions to
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attempt nuclear terrorism should be
greatly strengthened, and new steps
should be taken to make raising funds
and recruiting nuclear experts more
dif½cult (including addressing some
sources of radical Islamic violence and
hatred and challenging the moral le-
gitimacy of the mass slaughter of civil-
ians–already a matter of debate even
among violent Islamic jihadists).
Secondo, a broad system of measures
to detect and disrupt nuclear smuggling
and terrorist nuclear-bomb-acquisition
efforts should be put in place, including
expanded international police and intel-
ligence cooperation, increased emphasis
on intelligence operations such as stings
(questo è, intelligence agents posing as
buyers or sellers of nuclear material or
nuclear expertise), and targeted efforts
to encourage participants in such con-
spiracies to blow the whistle.
Radiation detectors such as those
now being installed at ports and border
crossings in the United States and doz-
ens of other countries have a role to play
in this effort, but there is a limit to what
can be done with large, readily observ-
able detectors that adversaries can easi-
ly bypass by taking other routes. (And it
is important to understand that neither
the detectors now being installed nor the
proposed Advanced Spectroscopic Por-
tals would have any signi½cant chance
of detecting heu metal with even mod-
est shielding.) Congress would be well
advised to abandon the current legislat-
ed requirement that 100 percent of car-
go containers be scanned for radiation
before entering the United States, focus-
ing instead on requiring the administra-
tion to develop an integrated approach
that places as many barriers in the path
of an intelligent adversary trying to get
nuclear material into the United States
on any pathway as can be done at rea-
sonable cost.
Third, while the danger of conscious
state decisions to transfer nuclear weap-
ons or materials to terrorists is only a
small part of the overall risk of nuclear
terrorism, more can be done to reduce
that danger. This is yet another motiva-
tion for putting together international
strategies that can convince the govern-
ments of North Korea and Iran that it is
in their own national interests to con-
strain their nuclear ambitions in a veri½-
able way. And the United States should
make one “red line” clear: any transfer
to terrorists of nuclear weapons or the
materials to make them would provoke
a swift and sure response.
Fourth, while the focus must be
on preventing nuclear terrorism from
ever occurring, there is also much to
be done to prepare for the ghastly af-
termath should these efforts fail, from
better preparations to keep the govern-
ment and the economy functioning to
a strengthened ability to treat tens or
hundreds of thousands of injured peo-
ple, including making use of the mili-
tary’s capabilities.9 Many of the need-
ed steps would help respond to any ca-
tastrophe, natural or man-made, E
would pay off even if efforts to prevent
a terrorist nuclear attack succeeded.
Fortunately, there is good news in
this story as well. The initial overthrow
of the Taliban government in Afghani-
stan and the death or capture of many
of al Qaeda’s top leaders have made it
more dif½cult for al Qaeda to carry out
the large, complex operation of getting
and using a nuclear bomb. As noted ear-
lier, at scores of sites that once posed
particular dangers of nuclear theft, se-
curity has been dramatically upgrad-
ed or the dangerous nuclear material
removed, as a result of cooperative
threat reduction programs and coun-
tries’ own efforts.
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Dædalus Fall 2009
121
Matthew
Bunn
on the
global
nuclear
future
Inoltre, the expected growth and
spread of nuclear energy need not in-
crease the chance that terrorists could
get their hands on the material for a nu-
clear bomb. Today, most nuclear pow-
er reactors run on low-enriched urani-
um fuel that cannot be used in a nuclear
bomb without further enrichment, Quale
is beyond plausible terrorist capabilities.
These reactors produce plutonium in
their spent fuel, but that plutonium is
1 percent by weight in massive, intense-
ly radioactive spent-fuel assemblies that
would be extraordinarily dif½cult for ter-
rorists to steal and process into material
for a bomb. In some countries, the pluto-
nium is removed from the spent fuel (an
approach known as “reprocessing”) for
recycling into new fuel; that process re-
quires extraordinary security measures
to ensure against terrorist access to the
separated plutonium. Fortunately, eco-
nomics and counterterrorism point in
the same direction in this case: because
reprocessing is much more expensive
than simply storing spent fuel pending
disposal, few countries that do not al-
ready reprocess their fuel are interest-
ed in starting, and some of the existing
plants are running far below capacity
or will soon be shut down.
Many more nuclear power reactors in
many more countries would mean more
potential targets for terrorist sabotage–
and more chances that some reactor’s
security would be weak enough that a
terrorist attack would succeed. Sabotage
would not cause the kind of massive, In-
stantaneous destruction a nuclear bomb
would cause, but in the worst case, suc-
cessful sabotage might cause a massive
radiation release–a “security Cherno-
byl.” Such an event would be a catastro-
phe for the country where it occurred,
and for its downwind neighbors; but un-
like readily transported nuclear weapons
or materials, it would not pose a threat
to countries thousands of kilometers
away. It would, Tuttavia, pose a threat
to the global nuclear power industry,
for the public reaction to such an event
would almost surely doom any prospect
for nuclear growth on the scale needed
to play a signi½cant role in mitigating
the threat of climate change.
The bottom line: nuclear terrorism
remains a real and urgent threat. IL
way to respond is through internation-
al cooperation, not confrontation and
war. Immediate action is needed around
the world to improve security for nucle-
ar weapons and the materials needed
to make them, focusing on those sites
and transport routes that pose the high-
est risks. The job is big and complex,
but ½nite and doable. With suf½cient
high-level leadership and political will,
the world can meet the four-year target
for achieving effective nuclear security
that President Obama has laid out. IL
clock is ticking.
ENDNOTES
1 For comprehensive recommendations for meeting this objective, see Matthew Bunn,
Securing the Bomb 2008 (Cambridge, Massa.: Project on Managing the Atom, Harvard
Università, and Nuclear Threat Initiative, novembre 2008), and Matthew Bunn and
Andrew Newman, “Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: An Agenda for the Next President”
(Cambridge, Massa.: Project on Managing the Atom, Harvard University, and Nuclear
Threat Initiative, novembre 2008); http://www.nti.org/securingthebomb.
2 It is important to understand that iaea “safeguards,” which cover all nuclear material
in non-nuclear-weapons states, involve inspectors visiting every few weeks or months to
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check that nuclear material is where the state says it is; they do not protect the material
from theft. The iaea only reviews a state’s arrangements for protecting against theft if
the state in question asks for such a review, and the states with nuclear weapons and most
of the world’s weapons-usable nuclear materials have not asked for such reviews.
3 The exception was a 1993 case at a Russian naval base in which the perpetrator was an out-
sider who was informed of how to steal the nuclear material by a relative who worked at
the base. See Oleg Bukharin and William Potter, “Potatoes Were Guarded Better,” Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists 51 (3) (May/June 1995): 46–50.
4 See Matthew Bunn, “Corruption and Nuclear Proliferation,” in Corruption, Global Securi-
ty, and World Order, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Washington. D.C.: Brookings Institution Press,
2009).
5 For a summary of part of their results, see Robert Orttung and Louise Shelley, “Linkages
Between Terrorist and Organized Crime Groups in Nuclear Smuggling: A Case Study of
Chelyabinsk Oblast,” ponars Policy Memo No. 392 (Washington, D.C.: Program on
New Approaches to Russian Security, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
Dicembre 2005).
6 For the most detailed authoritative, unclassi½ed statement on this point, see Nonprolifer-
ation and Arms Control Assessment of Weapons-Usable Fissile Material Storage and Excess Pluto-
nium Disposition Alternatives, doe/nn-0007 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Energy,
Gennaio 1997), 37–39.
7 For a more detailed assessment, see Bunn, Securing the Bomb 2008, 7–10, 21–44.
8 Report of the Snezhinsk incident is from “An Employee of the Department of Classi½ed
Facilities of the mvd Was Arrested in Snezhinsk: What Incriminates the ‘Silovic,’” trans.
Jane Vayman; reported on www.ura.ru, May 29, 2008. The Seversk description is from
Igor Goloskokov, “Refomirovanie Voisk mvd Po Okhrane Yadernikh Obektov Rossii
(Reforming mvd Troops to Guard Russian Nuclear Facilities),” trans. Foreign Broad-
cast Information Service, Yaderny Kontrol 9 (4) (Inverno 2003).
9 For an especially useful recent discussion, see Ashton B. Carter, Michael M. May, E
William J. Perry, The Day After: Action in the 24 Hours Following a Nuclear Blast in an Amer-
ican City (Cambridge, Massa.: Preventive Defense Project, Harvard and Stanford Univer-
sities, May 2007); http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/½les/dayafterworkshopreport
_may2007.pdf (accessed May 29, 2009).
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