06/16/2005
Russia: The Nuclear Threat
On May 29, 2005, Tim Russert’s panel on “Meet the Press” was comprised of Former Senator Sam Nunn, Senator Richard Lugar, 9/11 Commission Co-Chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, and Former Senator Fred Thompson. The issue was nuclear proliferation. Years ago Nunn and Lugar helped found the Nuclear Threat Initiative to ensure that the paramount issue of our times, securing nuclear weapons and materials, stayed at the forefront of debate. A little over two years ago I summarized one of their reports and as the “Meet the Press” appearance proved the other week, the situation is just as critical as before.
[Senator Thompson, by the way, is the star in a docudrama on the nuclear threat titled “Last Best Chance” which is available on nti.org.]
With Nunn et al promoting their cause anew, I thought it was important I repeat what I wrote back in March 2003. I also add some new material at the end.
Matthew Bunn, Anthony Wier, and John P. Holdren of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University authored most of what follows.
---
In summary, among the key findings:
--Al Qaeda has been attempting to secure nuclear weapons or material to make them for over a decade – “and hundreds of tons of potential bomb materials, in hundreds of buildings around the world, are dangerously insecure, making the possibility that they might succeed frighteningly real.”
--The easiest way to prevent the material from being stolen in the first place is to secure it. “In that sense, homeland security begins abroad, wherever insecure nuclear stockpiles exist.”
--By the end of 2002, a little over 1/3 of Russia’s potentially vulnerable nuclear material was considered secure. “Scores of research reactors fueled with highly enriched uranium (HEU) around the world remain dangerously insecure.”
From Nunn and Lugar:
“Today, the most likely, most immediate, most potentially devastating threat is the terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction. The best way to address the threat is to keep terrorists from acquiring weapons or weapons material in the first place. But the chain of worldwide security is only as strong as the link at the weakest, least-protected site. The odds are dangerously uneven. The terrorist margin for error is almost infinite – numerous failures will not end the threat. Our margin for error is miniscule; one failure anywhere in the world could lead to catastrophe.”
In June 2002, the G8 announced a Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, pledging $20 billion over 10 years to reduce the threats, but the effort is not as fast-paced as Nunn, Lugar and the others feel is critical.
Back to al Qaeda, Nunn and Lugar add:
“Four times, terrorists have been caught ‘casing’ Russian nuclear warhead storage facilities or the trains that carry these warheads. Osama bin Laden has met with top Pakistani nuclear weapons scientists to seek information on making nuclear weapons. And the essential ingredients of nuclear bombs are spread around the world in abundant and poorly secured supply
“In Russia, for example, comprehensive security and accounting procedures must be installed for every facility that houses nuclear material. That will take several years We are only 37% of the way to completing our short-term goal of installing rapid security upgrades and 17% of the way to our longer-term goal of putting comprehensive security measures in place. That pace must be accelerated to protect us from this deadly threat.
“We do not have the luxury of time.”
---
From authors Bunn, Wier, and Holdren:
“Hundred of tons of HEU and separated plutonium, the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons, located in hundreds of buildings in scores of countries around the world, are dangerously insecure – demonstrably unprotected against the scale of outsider attack that the terrorists have already proven their ability to mount, as well as against the more insidious danger of insider theft. Yet the amounts of these materials required for a bomb are measured in kilograms, not tons – amounts small enough that unless proper security and accounting systems are in place, a worker at a nuclear facility could put in a briefcase or under an overcoat and walk out.”
“If detonated in a major city, a terrorist nuclear bomb could wreak almost unimaginable carnage. A 10-kiloton bomb detonated at Grand Central Station on a typical workday would likely kill some half a million people, and inflict over a trillion dollars in direct economic damage. America and its way of life would be changed forever.”
On leadership:
“The effort to ensure that nuclear weapons and materials around the world are effectively secured and accounted for faces a wide range of impediments that are slowing progress, and cannot move forward at anything like the pace required without sustained, day-to-day engagement from the White House. The lesson from the history of U.S. arms control and nonproliferation efforts is very clear: when the President is personally and actively engaged in making the hard choices, overcoming the obstacles that arise, and pushing forward, these efforts succeed. When that is not the case, they fail.”
While the authors of the report don’t fault President Bush, per se, “the level of sustained, day-to-day engagement from the highest levels in accelerating efforts to secure nuclear warheads and materials has been very modest (as, indeed, it was in the previous administration, and the one before that)...”
“Currently, the United States is spending roughly $1 billion per year for all cooperative threat reduction The total budget (for this) represents less than 1/3 of one percent of U.S. defense spending.” [They add that the answer, of course, is not just to spend money but to implement other changes as well.]
Progress has been made, but, again, it is still “measured by the fraction of potentially vulnerable nuclear warheads and materials secured, the fraction of the excess stockpiles destroyed, or the fraction of unneeded nuclear weapons experts and workers provided with sustainable civilian employment, much less than half the job has been done.”
“ If there was intensive, sustained leadership focused on this mission from the highest levels of the U.S. government; a single senior leader in the White House with full-time responsibility and accountability (it would be a giant step forward).”
---
WARNING: In all seriousness, some of the following is incredibly depressing stuff.
Continuing with our look at the latest report from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the authors cite a comment once made by former Senator Sam Nunn. “A gazelle running from a cheetah is taking a step in the right direction,” but the question is whether the steps being taken are fast enough to avoid a fatal catastrophe. In the case of the weapons threat, the authors believe the answer is no.
Other observations:
“Mother Nature has been both kind and cruel in setting the laws of physics that frame the nuclear predicament the world faces. Kind, in that the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons, highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium, do not occur in significant quantities in nature, and are quite difficult to produce. Making them is well beyond the plausible capabilities of terrorist groups .Cruel, in that, while it is not easy to make a nuclear bomb, it is not as difficult as many believe, once the needed materials are in hand .And cruel, in that HEU and plutonium, while radioactive, are not radioactive enough to make them difficult to steal and carry away, or to make them easy to detect when being smuggled across borders.
“ Detailed analysis of al Qaeda’s efforts suggests that, had they not been deprived of their Afghanistan sanctuary, their quest for a nuclear weapon might have succeeded within a few years – and the danger that it could succeed elsewhere still remains.”
---
There are well-documented instances of al Qaeda attempting to secure HEU since 1993, at least, though in many early instances the group itself was scammed. Al Qaeda has attempted many times to purchase materials in the former Soviet Union.
As far as the issue of controlling nuclear warheads and materials, the authors write, “Many of the more than 130 HEU-fueled research reactors around the world have little more security on- site than a night watchman and a chain-link fence. At some facilities where the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons reside, there are literally no armed guards on duty; at some, there is no security camera in the area where the material is stored, and no detector at the door to sound an alarm if someone was carrying out nuclear material in their briefcase; a few of these facilities are so impoverished that they have dead rats floating in the spent fuel pool.”
---
“Nuclear materials could readily be smuggled across U.S. borders, or other nations’ borders .Today, none of the major ports that ship cargo to the United States are equipped to inspect that cargo for nuclear weapons or weapons material, and few of the points of entry into the United States have an effective ability to carry out routine searches for nuclear materials either .
“Those seeking material for a nuclear bomb will go wherever it is easiest to steal, or buy it from anyone willing to sell. Thus insecure nuclear bomb material anywhere is a threat to everyone, everywhere. The world has the warning it needs to know what needs to be done. Failing to act on this clear warning would simply be irresponsible.”
---
The following is particularly depressing, but while I mentioned the scenario of an explosion in New York’s Grand Central Station in last week’s piece, the Nuclear Threat Initiative report has far greater detail on a potential 10-kiloton nuclear bomb.
“Some 550,000 people work within a half-mile radius of the station. This figure does not include the tourists and visitors present on an average day, and hence is quite conservative. Within this radius, the blast overpressure would be over five pounds per square inch (psi), enough to destroy wood, brick, and cinderblock buildings. The heat from the blast would be enough to ignite paper and other combustibles throughout the area, and to give everyone not protected by a building second degree burns over much of their body. The possibility of a firestorm – a coalescence of the many fires that would be set by the blast into a raging storm of fire consuming everything and everyone within it, as occurred at Hiroshima, Dresden, and Tokyo in World War II – would be very real. The prompt radiation from the blast would be enough to sicken everyone in this zone, and kill most of those not protected by buildings. If the skyscrapers fell, those inside would virtually all be killed. Falling would be a near certainty for all the buildings within roughly 500 meters of the blast (where the blast wave pressure would be over 15 psi, with winds of 400 miles per hour), and a serious possibility for every building in this half-mile zone, given the combination of blast overpressure and fire. From the combination of these effects, the vast majority of the people in this zone would die, as would a substantial number of the people beyond. More than half a million people would likely be killed by the immediate effects of the explosion .
“In addition to those killed, there would be hundreds of thousands of people injured – burned, battered, irradiated, hit by flying glass and debris. Every bed in every hospital for a hundred miles would not be remotely sufficient to handle the casualties. Tens of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of injured people would likely go without treatment for day, and many would die.
“Such a blast would also draw thousands of tons of rock and debris into the fireball, to be distributed as a cloud of lethal radioactive fallout extending miles downwind from the blast. If the blast occurred in late afternoon, with the wind headed north, all of Manhattan that remained would have to be evacuated. Depending on factors such as wind, weather, the effectiveness of the evacuation, and the degree to which people were able to take shelter from the radioactive fallout, tens to hundreds of thousands more people downwind from the blast might suffer a lingering death from radiation exposure .
The economic consequences would, of course, be staggering.
“The New York City Comptroller has estimated that the direct cost of the September 11 attacks to the city of New York alone was approximately $93 billion – measured only by the income those killed would have received in the remainder of their lives, the value of the property destroyed, and the first three years of the reduction in economic output resulting from the destruction in the city.”
Using a formula similar to that used for September 11 and applying it to the Grand Central nuclear bomb example would result in total lost future income of $875 billion, but the direct costs would be well over $1 trillion, including potentially hundreds of billions in cleanup costs. This figure is roughly 10% of total gross domestic product in America.
---
“Dirty Bombs” vs. Nuclear Bombs
Both U.S. and British intelligence have reportedly concluded that al Qaeda has succeeded in making a radiological “dirty bomb.” But this is a far cry from an actual nuclear explosive. A dirty bomb, instead, would be “more of a weapon of mass disruption than a weapon of mass destruction, designed to sow panic and chaos. By forcing the evacuation of many blocks of a city, it could potentially cause billions of dollars in economic disruption, and billions more in cleanup costs, but it would not kill tens of thousands of people in a flash or obliterate a major section of a city as an actual nuclear bomb could.
---
So what to do? The Nuclear Threat Initiative has a large number of proposals, but in listing just the basics, you can see how daunting the task will be let alone the fact that we need an ongoing commitment from world leaders, and it’s this last point that depresses me.
-Securing nuclear warheads and materials. -Interdicting nuclear smuggling. -Stabilizing employment for nuclear personnel. -Monitoring stockpiles and reductions. -Ending production. -Reducing stockpiles.
Lastly, in a totally separate report from the past few days, Greenpeace in Russia, along with other activists there, recently blasted the Russian government for what Greenpeace feels is a huge crisis at the nuclear facilities in the country. And what specifically may it be? Alcoholism and drug abuse among plant workers.
---
Addendum, June 2005
From Matthew Bunn’s report titled “The Threat in Russia and the Newly Independent States”:
“Russia is estimated to have roughly 170 metric tons of weapons-usable separated plutonium (counting both military and civilian stockpiles) and over 900 tons of HEU. As four kilograms of plutonium is enough for a nuclear explosive, and roughly 3 times that amount of HEU, these stockpiles of fissile material would be enough for over 100,000 nuclear bombs.
“Currently, roughly half of these stockpiles are believed to be incorporated into some 20,000 nuclear weapons that remain in assembled form. Of that large weapons stockpile, only a fraction are operationally deployed – “fewer than 5,000” strategic warheads and “several thousand” tactical warheads, according to U.S. intelligence estimates. The remainder are either in non- deployed reserves, or are excess to military needs; many are believed to be awaiting dismantlement, which is believed to have been proceeding at a pace averaging 1,000 per year or more for a decade – reducing the stock of warheads to be secured, but increasing the stock of weapons-usable nuclear material outside of warheads, which must also be secured. In addition to the weapons on various types of missiles, nuclear weapons are stored at some 65-75 warhead storage sites remaining in Russia, each of which typically has several individual warhead storage bunkers; this figure does not include the many temporary warhead sites, such as jail junctions or submarine loading docks.”
Well, I think you get the picture. Pet the dog if you feel distressed.
Hott Spotts will return June 30 North Korea.
Brian Trumbore
|