It may be the most significant security threat to the West in the post-cold-war era. But until last week Washington considered black-market nuclear dealings a hypothetical risk. The United States addressed the danger of Russia’s huge weapons stockpile by setting aside $1.2 billion to dismantle and dispose of nuclear weapons. Intelligence officials have made sure that the assembled nuclear weapons are well guarded. And until this summer, nearly all of a fast-growing number of nuclear smuggling cases involved low-grade materials passed off by con artists as the real thing. But a string of new cases has given credence to a nightmare scenario – that some of the hundreds of tons of plutonium in Russia could fall into the hands of mobsters, terrorists or countries on the nuclear threshold.
Though the 12 ounces of plutonium-239 seized Aug. 10 was less than the amount needed to make a bomb, it wasn’t much less. Newsweek has obtained a new study by the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council estimating that a one-kiloton nuclear bomb could be made with just one kilogram of plutonium – an eighth of the amount the International Atomic Energy Agency uses as its threshold. The Munich seizure contained more than enough plutonium to poison all of a city’s water supply, or make a devastating “dirty bomb” that would disperse radioactive particles in the air. The nuclear traffickers can cause deadly problems even inadvertently: several couriers who have body-packed radioactive contraband have died from radiation burns, according to German investigators. One smuggler stashed a shipment in a locker in Frankfurt’s main train station. Police quickly found it, but if they hadn’t, “regular commuters might eventually have died [from radiation poisoning],” said Jim Moody, head of the FBI’s organized-crime department. There was little doubt that the deadliest substances known to man have leaked from cracks in the former Soviet Union’s massive nuclear infrastructure – though Russian officials angrily denied it. “This is a day of reckoning,” says Sen. John Glenn.
The Clinton administration took care to avoid pushing the Russians into a corner. The State Department announced that there was no conclusive evidence the seized nuclear material came from Russian government stocks, even while U.S. experts said privately they had no doubts about its provenance. But Germany, where no issue is hotter than the nuclear threat, wasn’t buying the strategy. Law-enforcement officials sounded the alarm about a string of cases involving weapons-grade nuclear materials that began in May (chart), and Chancellor Helmut Kohl sent a top security adviser to Moscow for urgent talks.
Russia’s heated denials recalled the bad old days of the cold war. “Not a single gram of plutonium-239 has gone missing from storage in Russia,” said Sergei Vasilyev of the Russian counterintelligence service. Some officials suggested that the West invented the leaks as part of a plot to take over Russia’s nuclear program. “They want our nuclear industry to be under international control,” said Georgy Kaurov, a spokesman for Russia’s giant Atomic Energy Ministry, known as Minatom. “We won’t ever let this happen.” Western experts scoffed at this line. “They have absolutely no idea of the real amount of material that’s unaccounted for,” said William Potter of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, which tracks Russian nuclear material and trains Russian scientists in nonproliferation measures. Some Russians concede the point – and late in the week Russia announced its own investigation. One official commented, only half in jest, that the Soviet Union’s nuclear labs and institutes used to be guarded by stern KGB agents with machine guns. Now, he said, it’s just “a babushka in a hut with a key. And she’s gone home.”
In fact, the military installations are still well guarded. But Minatom, a giant empire within a state, is cracking. Once pampered with comfortable housing and abundant food, its estimated 1 million employees were known as the “chocolate eaters.” But the last four years have robbed them of their perks and most of their pay. The country’s 3,000 top atomic scientists are paid less than Moscow bus drivers – when they’re paid at all. Scientists at the plutonium-production plant in Krasnoyarsk, one of 10 closed cities, recently refused to leave their underground facility because they hadn’t been paid for months. Technicians and service workers share the humiliation – and the opportunity to steal.
U.S. intelligence sources say workers at the major weapons production and assembly plants, where plutonium is produced and put into warheads, routinely steal silver, gold and platinum. But they still are strip-checked for nuclear material. It is at the dozens of nuclear research institutes and laboratories that security has broken down. Employees are trusted to account for the nuclear material on their own. “You can check it out like a book in the library,” says one U.S. official monitoring the Russian labs. “Only in this case it’s worse than a library. No one will tell you the book is overdue.” Some Russian labs haven’t opened up containers for a decade to see if the nuclear material inside matches what was listed on their inventories, according to U.S. intelligence sources.
German scientists using chemical “fingerprints” from the seized samples are homing in on the thieves. U.S. sources who have been working on the case say that the nearly pure plutonium found in May came from an isotope-separation lab at the Arzamas-16 warhead design and assembly plant – a kind of Russian Los Alamos. These sources also said that plutonium from the other major seizure, in Munich, probably came from a submarine-research reactor or from a plant preparing isotopes for civilian use. U.S. experts suspect a senior lab technician stole the plutonium.
That would fit with a frightening pattern:
In Moscow this year, a man walked out of a Minatom lab with about six pounds of highly enriched uranium, took it home and weighed it out on a vegetable scale. His cousin and an accomplice packed the powder into glass jars, took it by train to St. Petersburg and stashed the jars in a refrigerator. They were caught trying to sell it on the black market, and could go to prison – if radiation poisoning doesn’t kill them first.
Senior managers at the Institute of Power Engineering Problems in Belarus privately acknowledge that because of sloppy accounting they have no idea exactly how much highly enriched uranium they have in their facility. They began with about 35 kilograms, enough to fuel one to seven bombs.
U.S. intelligence sources say they know of no case in which a nuclear smuggler has had a final buyer lined up. And “the European market consists almost entirely of undercover policemen,” says one German expert. So far the major Russian organized-crime groups have shied away from nuclear smuggling, because other rackets are much more profitable. But that could change once word of the huge prices for black-market nuclear material spreads. Shipping the contraband clearly is no problem. For $500, military aviators will fly a dubious package from Chkalovo air base, near Moscow, to Leipzig, avoiding all customs inspections.
The May seizure, although unpublicized at the time, may be the most ominous sign of who’s in the market for nukes. Police found a fifth of an ounce of nearly pure plutonium-239 in the garage of a suspected counterfeiter in the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg. German TV has reported the suspect was financed with $100 million by an unnamed country. Notes found in his home implicated five Iraqis – including a business associate of Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear scientist, say FBI sources.
The challenge to the world community is daunting. In a round of emergency talks among the Western allies last week, the United States and European nations agreed to raise $100 million immediately to improve nuclear security in Russia. The U.S. Energy Department and State Department officials have begun secret talks with Moscow on how the U.S. Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) might work with Russian authorities to hunt a nuclear weapon if it got loose. European police officials called for stiffer sentences, better legal protection for undercover agents and informants and greater freedom to use phone taps on suspected smugglers. For the moment, the proven techniques of undercover police work may hold the line. But in the long term, staving off a catastrophe hinges on the hugely complicated and expensive task of transforming Russia’s nuclear behemoth.
