For years, versions of that nightmare scenario have been grist for doomsday prophets. It was pure hype. A terrorist group with the funds and know-how to develop a knapsack nuke would have had to be so big, rich and sophisticated as to rival a good-sized nation- hardly a recipe for keeping a secret. The routes to the prize–breeding plutonium in a reactor or refining uranium in a giant enrichment plant–are strewn with technical obstacles. Theft of the primary materials was the the only way to short-circuit that laborious process, and the nuclear fraternity’s huge stores of A-bomb ingredients were tightly protected. So what really mattered was keeping sensitive technology out of the hands of would-be nuclear powers, convincing nervous nations that the U.S. nuclear umbrella would protect them, monitoring peaceful uses of atomic energy-and heading off a showdown with the U.S.S.R.
Those goals were achievable- but history has turned the nuclear threat on its head, and the terrorist scenario has become frighteningly real. For veterans of the nonproliferation struggle, these are in one sense the best of times, because the terrifying contest between Washington and Moscow is largely over. The United States and Russia are dis- mantling their ICBMs and their multiple warheads as fast as they can. Their remaining missiles are no longer targeted at each other. And this spring, U.S. negotiators persuaded more than 170 signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to extend it indefinitely-in return only for vaguely worded security guarantees from the nuclear powers. But these are the worst of times, too, because in the debris of the cold war remain tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and thousands of tons of bomb-grade plutonium and uranium. A terrorist bomb made with as little as 15 pounds of pure plutonium would pack the punch of 1,000 tons of TNT even if it fizzled. The main problem, still, is Russia. But today the problem is Russian weakness. not strength. “The situation in the former Soviet Union today is the single most important event in the history of nuclear proliferation,” says a senior Pentagon official.
That history so far is one of restraint. In 1968 President John F. Kennedy said he was haunted by fears that by 1975 there could be as many as 20 nations with nuclear weapons. Back then, there were four declared nuclear powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, France and Britain; China exploded a bomb the next year. That’s still the official roster (three other nations have gone nuclear without admitting it: Israel, India and Pakistan). Meanwhile, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Romania all have elected over the last decade to give up nuclear programs. Taiwan and South Korea began preliminary efforts to build a bomb in the 1970s, but gave up under heavy U.S. pressure. Most recently, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan disavowed the nuclear legacy that fell to them when the U.S. S.R. split up. “The NPT has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its authors,” says John Holum, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “Non-nuclear has become a global norm.”
Those still knocking at the clubhouse door remain a long way from getting the keys. Consider Iraq, which has drawn most of the attention since the end of the gulf war, when U.N. inspectors began carting away boxes of plans outlining Saddam Hussein’s $10 billion nuclear program. Iraqi scientists may not have been as far along as the documents indicated. It seems the scientists lied to please the boss. “[The program] was a disaster,” says Bob Kelley of Los Alamos, who has made 27 trips to Iraq as part of the monitoring effort. “The leadership got taken for a ride. They didn’t know what they were doing.”
Other pretenders are scarcely in better shape. Libya’s Muammar Kaddafi still wants a bomb, but a Russian intelligence study concluded in 1998 that his poor engineering and technology base put that out of his reach for “the foreseeable future.” North Korea has taken a buy out–S4.5 billion worth of nuclear reactors from South Korea. And although the North Koreans may already have produced as much as 26 pounds of plutonium, Russian experts say scientists there don’t have the computers or design know-how to make a bomb. Iran’s nuclear ambitions go back to the shah, but poor infrastructure, demoralized personnel and political factionalism under the ayatollahs create huge barriers to building an “Islamic bomb,” experts agree. In all, the nuclear wanna-bes are a sorry lot.
But what happens when A nuclear power heads in the same direction as such Third World basket cases? The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened the door to proliferation-by states or terrorists- on a scale that previously was unimaginable. In the START treaties of 1991 and 1993, the United States and the former Soviet Union agreed to drastically reduce their strategic warheads. The problem is that in Russia that has meant moving some 8,000 warheads a year from under control of the military, where safeguards have been stringent, to the civilian Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom), where U.S. experts charge the protection against theft has become so slipshod that some think the best answer may be to slow down or even stop the whole disarmament process.
Just about every U.S. specialist on the issue has had an epiphany about how vast the problem is. For Charles Curtis of the u.s. Energy Department, it was when he was taken into Building 116 of the Kurchatov Institute in the Moscow suburbs. About 160 pounds of weapons-grade uranium cast into shiny spheres was stored in high-school-style lockers and secured by a single chain looped through the handles. There was no other security. William Potter, who tracks nuclear thefts for the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, was transfixed by a Russian Navy investigator’s report on the theft of almost 10 pounds of enriched uranium from one of the Russian Navy’s main storage facilities for nuclear fuel, the Sevmor put shipyard outside Murmansk. The thief had climbed through one of many holes in the wooden fence surrounding the fuel-storage area, sawed through a padlock on the warehouse door, lifted the lid on a container and broken off three pieces of a submarine reactor core. “Potatoes were guarded better,” the investigator said.
Flimsy locks aren’t the most weakness. While security for the U.S. nuclear program depends on high-tech gadgetry backed by armed guards, Russia has depended on control of people. “They had watchers watching watchers, backed by very strict control on movement,” said one Energy Department official. Will hard times fray the watchers’ loyalty? Frank yon Hippel, a Princeton physicist, noticed big new dachas going up inside the barbed-wire perimeter of Chelyabinsk-70, a closed city for Russian nuclear scientists. When he asked who owned the houses, his Russian companion cut him a glance and replied, “The night people"black marketers. Former Los Alamos weapons designer Stephen Younger recalls how the director of the weapons lab at another closed city, Arzamas-16, called him aside to beg for emergency financial aid, adding that his scientists were going hungry. “You are driving us into the hands of the Chinese,” the man said.
How much may already have leaked? The CIA lists 31 cases of thefts or seizures, most allegedly involving low-grade Russian materials found by German police, in the first six month s of this year alone. But many of the cases resulted from “sting” operations, part of a pre-emptive strategy initiated by Western intelligence agencies since 1992. Some Russians charge that the operation has actually created a market. Still, some cases are chilling. In Prague last December, police found almost six pounds of highly enriched uranium in the back seat of a Saab; also in the car were a Czech nuclear scientist and two colleagues from Belarus and Ukraine. “We’re starting to see significant quantities of significant material,” says a White House source. Adds a Pentagon official, “If just one bomb’s worth gets out, people are going to wake up real fast.”
Some members of Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s staff are already sounding the alarm. After a presidential inquiry last fall, staffers identified nine facilities they said urgently require modern security systems. But everyone agrees that the list barely begins to address the problem: U.S. experts say not one of the nearly 90 facilities where a total of 700 tons of weapons-grade materials are stored has adequate security. The outcry seems to have had an impact on Minatom, a huge bureaucracy whose director, Viktor Mikhailov, is legendary in Washington for resisting foreign interference. In June, Mikhailov agreed to let teams of U.S. experts go to five of his facilities “to facilitate development of joint improvement plans.” U.S. experts also will install and demonstrate new security systems at the Arzamas and Chelya-binsk complexes. Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute already has the new system.
Paying for all that will require major outlays. U.S. officials estimate that the new equipment will cost $5 million per site: a total of $450 million if Russia agrees to harden security at all its storage facilities. The Clinton administration,has begun discussions in NATO, in the International Atomic Energy Agency and among members of the Group of Seven about how the costs might be spread around. The Russian presidential commission studying the problem paints an even grimmer picture. It says upgrading security will cost $17 billion. Nobody knows where that kind of money might come from. But in the meantime, the Russians have begun to adopt a drastic but simple strategy–closing the doors to nuclear plants, even to their own inspectors. Asked if it would be possible to visit one nuclear site, Mikhailov’s spokesman said that “because of Chechnya, no one can go anywhere.” Evidently security has already been tightened against possible attacks by Chechen separatists.
In place of the arms race, a new race is on-to see how quickly Russia can be cajoled and helped into throwing up enough safeguards to prevent some of the world’s most lethal materials’ leaking into the wrong hands. In the meantime, the Pentagon is spending $100 million this year in an effort to identify high-tech “counterproliferation” tools to track and, if necessary, take out rogue nuclear powers. And policy specialists already are wrestling with the dilemma of how the United States can both cut military spending and continue to convince Japan and other friends around the world that they don’t need their own nuclear weapons. It’s still a battle to make sure “The Day After” isn’t just a day away.
With a leaky nuclear Russia and renegade states in search of the bomb, the risks may be greater today than ever before.
Five countries known as the nuclear club
Have not acknowledged their nuclear capabilities
Thought to have secret nuclear ambitions
Abandoned work on all nuclear programs
Have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons
Cited for insufficient security[1]
- YELTSIN STAFF REPORT; FALKENRATH & COTE, CSIA, HARVARD.
Legend for Chart: A - COUNTRY B - TOTAL DEPLOYED WARHEADS C - ON LAND-BASED MISSILES D - ON SUB-BASED MISSILES E - ON BOMBERS A B C D E Russia[a] 10,100 6,078 2,560 1,410 United States 8,500 2,090 2,880 3,528 France 482 18 384 80 China 284 110 24 150 Britain 234 - 134 100 Israel 50-100 Jericho - - I & II India Capability Agni/Prithvi - - for 80 rockets Pakistan Capability May have - - for 15-25 Chinese M-11 missiles
THE U.S, RUSSIA AND CHINA ALSO HAVE TACTICAL (SHORT-RANGE) NUCLEAR ARSENALS.
a INCLUDES STATES OF THE FORMER SOVIET UNION.
Down from a cold war high of 13,000 strategic warheads, it currently has 8,500 active. If the START II treaty is approved that number will drop to 3,500.
An original party to the NPT, it has about 234 deployed warheads.
All are transferring nuclear stockpiles to Russia and have joined the NPT as nonnuclear states.
Delivered by U.S. authorities to be pursuing a secret nuclear program, at least 8 years away from producing a bomb.
Recently announced plans to resume nuclear testing with 8 underground tests in the South Pacific.
Sole her to the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. It has about 10,100 deployed strategic warheads, which would go down to 3,500 under START II.
Thought to have enough material for two to three bombs. Recently agreed to halt and dismantle its program.
Government of Colonel Kaddafi has repeatedly tried to purchase nuclear material.
May have as many as 100 weapons and is not a party to the NPT.
U.S. bombing during the Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. surveillance has halted its nuclear program.
Believed to have stockpiled plutonium for as many as 80 bombs.
Believed by some U.S. officials to be assisting Pakistan and Iran in their nuclear-weapons programs.
May have material and equipment to produce up to 25 bombs, some within hours.
Terminated its program in 1990.
Joined the NPT in February, halting a nuclear program still in its early stages.
COUNTRIES THAT HAVE NOT SIGNED THE NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION TREATY (NPT):
Andorra Angola Brazil Comoros Cuba Djibouti India Israel Oman Pakistan United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) Vanuatu
SOURCES: CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE, ARMS CONTROL ASSOCIATION, NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL MAP: CHRISTOPH BLUMRICH, RESEARCH: BRAD STONE – NEWSWEEK
