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They have the ability to acquire nuclear weapons...
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| Here is the bad news: |
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Only 55 pounds of heavily enriched uranium is needed to make a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb, the same size bomb used against Hiroshima during World War Two. If plutonium is available, even less is required - just 18 pounds.
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2.
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There are over 1 million pounds of highly enriched uranium merely in storage in the ex-Soviet Union alone.1 Due to the break-up of the Soviet Union and the poor state of the Russian economy, over half of this material is poorly secured. For example:
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- 1,278 pounds of HEU -- enough for over 20 nuclear bombs -- was found abandoned in a warehouse in Khazakstan in 1993. Security at the warehouse consisted of a single padlock, easily removed with an ordinary bolt cutter. The Soviet Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) rejected efforts to pay for the return of the material. Fortunately, the U.S. government agreed to move the HEU to a secure site in the U.S.2
- Today, at Seversk, one of Russia's largest nuclear material processing plants, guards routinely patrol without ammunition in their guns.3
- Experts who visit Russia's nuclear sites continue to report broken intrusion detectors that remain un-fixed, guards turning off detectors, gates providing access to nuclear material propped and left open for convenience, and accounting systems not designed to detect the theft of nuclear material. 4
- In Vilca, Yugoslavia, a research nuclear facility in the suburbs of Belgrade had enough HEU to build 3 nuclear bombs. It sat for over three years after the Balkan war's end, potentially allowing alleged war criminal Slobodan Milosevic to sell it to terrorists. U.S. officials could not get the approval from the U.S. government to spend the $5 million needed by the Yugoslav government for closure and cleanup in order to withdraw and secure the material. A private U.S. foundation had to agree to cover the costs!5
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Nuclear material has been stolen - repeatedly.. In Germany alone, after the fall of the Soviet Union, over 700 cases of attempted nuclear sales were reported within just three years, including 60 instances that involved seizure of nuclear materials.6 The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has on file 18 accounts of the seizure of stolen uranium or plutonium since 1992.7 In the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia in 2006 alone there were multiple seizures of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium that was carried by smugglers coming from Russia.8 And those are only the publicly announced successful recoveries. Most likely, more has gone unreported and unrecovered. It is also worrisome to note that as recently as November, 2007 one of the "most heavily guarded 'national key points'" housing nuclear material - including enough highly enriched uranium estimated to make 25 nuclear bombs - was attacked in a well-coordinated assault in South Africa. The attackers successfully penetrated into the center of the facility for over forty-five minutes before an alarm was even able to be raised, and were then able to escape.9
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Nuclear material has been sold, and is currently for sale, on the black market. "With confirmed incidents of Russian-origin fissile materials turning up for sale on the black market, this danger is more than hypothetical."10 Another example: before it was broken up in 2002, the network run by the head of Pakistan's nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, and his network was selling centrifuge designs, centrifuge parts, completed centrifuges, uranium hexaflouride (enough to make a bomb if sufficiently enriched - by centrifuges), blueprints for nuclear warheads, and consulting services for assembly and repair. Everything you would need to make and run a nuclear bomb factory was for sale. Libya and Iran were among the buyers.11
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Nuclear weapons are also a target.
- As early as 1991, the U.S. Secretary of Defense noted on Meet the Press: "If the Soviets do an excellent job at retaining control over their stockpile of nuclear weapons - let's assume they've got 25,000 to 30,000; that's a ballpark figure - and they are 99 percent successful, that would mean you still have as many as 250 that they were not able to control."
- Some of Russia's "suitcase" nuclear bombs - literally, a nuclear bomb in the shape of a suitcase - seem to be missing, most likely having either been sold or stolen.12 As these bombs do not have serial numbers, it is now impossible to account for them accurately.
- In 2001 and 2002, on four separate occasions terrorists discovered and surveyed Russia's secret transportation and storage sites of nuclear weapons.13
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Civilian manufacture of plutonium - which is not needed for nuclear power plants - is enormous; more than 400,000 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium has been put in commercial storage sites. Over five times more is available that could be extracted from spent fuel rods.14 These sites are even less secure than military sites. Recall that only than 18 pounds of plutonium is needed to make a bomb equivalent to those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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| 4. |
Once you have enough material, building a nuclear bomb is (surprisingly and frighteningly) relatively straightforward. Merely dropping enough highly enriched uranium onto more highly enriched uranium from a sufficient height can turn into a 10 kiloton nuclear explosion.15 It is that simple.
As testified before Congress by the nation's nuclear laboratories themselves, except for the nuclear material, a simple nuclear bomb can be made entirely using off the shelf, commercially available, and completely legal components.16
What it boils down to is this: a terrorist group cell with only a small number people, a few of whom haveappropriate expertise (such as explosives), could make a working nuclear bomb that can fit in a car in less than a year using nothing more than commercially available products if they have the nuclear material.17
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| Here is the good news: |
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It is quite hard and expensive to actually make highly enriched uranium or weapons-grade plutonium make from scratch. |
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If we can stop terrorists and their state sponsors from stealing, buying, or otherwise acquiring highly enriched uranium or plutonium, we can effectively prevent nuclear terrorism. |
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1 U.S. Department of Energy, A Report Card on the Department of Energy's Nonproliferation Programs with Russia, 10 January, 2001.
2 G. Allison, Nuclear Terrorism - The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004), pg. 64-65.
3 M. Bunn and A. Wier, Securing the Bomb; An Agenda for Action (Washington, D.C.: Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Project on Managing the Atom, Harvard University, 2004).
4 General Accounting Office, Nuclear Nonproliferation: Security of Russia's Nuclear Material Improving; Further Enhancements Needed, 2001.
5 G. Allison, pg 66-67.
6 G. Allison, pg 71.
7 International Atomic Energy Agency, "Calculating the New Global Nuclear Terrorism Threat," November, 2001.
8 L.S. Sheets, "A Smuggler's Story," The Atlantic Monthly, April, 2008.
9 M. Zenko, "A Nuclear Site is Breached: South African Attack Should Sound Alarms," Washington Post, 20 December, 2007.
10 www.nci.org/nuketerror.htm . See also the Nuclear Threat Initiative's "Overview of Confirmed Proliferation-Significant Incidents of Fissile Material Trafficking in the NIS, 1991-2007" at http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_special_nuctrafficking.html .
11 W. Langwewiesche, The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007) pg. 74.
12 Russian General Alexander Lebed, 60 Minutes, CBS, 7 September, 1997.
13 V. Bogdanov, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 1 November, 2002; P. Koryashkin, ITAR-TASS, 25 October, 2001; and Associated Press, 26 October, 2001.
14 R.S. Norris and W.M. Arkin, World Plutonium Inventories - 1999, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept/Oct 1999.
15 Nobel Prize winner Luiz Alvarez, Adventures of a Physicist (Basic Books, 1989) and Wald, New York Times, 2 January, 2002.
16 Senator Joseph Biden, remarks from speech at the Paul C. Warnke Conference On the Past, Present, and Future of Arms Control, Washington, D.C., 28 January, 2004.
17 M. Bunn and A. Wier, pg. 20 and (referencing) U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear Proliferation and Safeguards (Washington D.C.: OTA, 1977), pg 140.
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