The Nuclear Threat Initiative has released its annual "Securing the Bomb" report, which focuses largely on what the federal government is doing and needs to do to reduce the chance of nuclear terrorism. The Washington Post had a short article on the report.
Matthew Bunn, associate professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and author of the report, said many nations need to address weaknesses in guarding bulk supplies of bomb-grade uranium and plutonium. In the past, "almost all the cases of theft are bulk materials," as opposed to finished weapons, he said.
The report notes that "it is a sobering fact that nearly all of the stolen HEU and plutonium that has been seized over the years had never been missed before it was seized," referring to highly enriched uranium.
Russia still possesses "the world's largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons and materials, located in the world's largest number of buildings and bunkers," an estimated 250 structures at dozens of sites, the report found. The study concluded that "some serious weaknesses still remain" in Russia, including "widespread insider corruption and theft," "poorly trained and motivated conscript guards forces" and a poorly developed security culture.
The report also calls on the United States to get its house in order, pointing to the inadvertent flight of six nuclear warheads last year to Barksdale Air Force Base.
The report says it is plausible that a sophisticated terrorist group could make a crude nuclear weapon, but so far none has. "The use of a nuclear bomb would be among the most difficult types of attack for terrorists to accomplish," the report says, "but the massive, assured, instantaneous and comprehensive destruction of life and property that would result may make nuclear weapons a priority for terrorists despite the difficulties."
The report is actually much more optimistic, from my point of view, than this short summary, pointing to progress in many of the areas that it assesses, such as better security conditions at Russian nuclear stockpiles, increased dialogs with other nuclear weapons states, working with non-nuclear states to keep them from getting fissile material, and so on. But of course, the author needs to make noises as to the vital need to keep focusing on the threat of nuclear terrorism. There is a new administration coming into power, and new opportunities to make inroads if the right people are impressed by the threatening noises in the report.
Terrorists are still seeking nuclear weapons—and al-Qaeda is reconstituting its ability to plan and conduct complex operations in the mountains of Pakistan. If a technically sophisticated terrorist group could get the needed nuclear materials, it might well be able to make at least a crude nuclear bomb—capable of turning the heart of a modern city into smoldering ruins. The horror of a terrorist nuclear attack, should it ever occur, would transform America and the world—and not for the better.
Oh, my. Well, we ought to triple the funding going to DHS and place radiac detectors at every sea port, commercial airport, border crossing, and also all the private harbors and airports across America. And let's give every US citizen a radiac detector to carry around and report on their findings. Let's keep the fear level up high, because the fact that we haven't seen any terrorist radiological or nuclear incident over the past 40 years, despite all of the stories of stolen and missing radioactive material, is just sheer luck.
Or we could take more rational measures, such as opening up Yucca Mountain and moving all of our radioactive waste there, instead of letting Luddites squeek about what the 10,000 year projected environmental outlook for that repository is. We could tighten up our own nuclear weapons security (hopefully underway), and work with the few nuclear weapon states as we continue to do now. We could work increasing security of cesium isotopes in medical equipment. And we could focus on reducing the overall threat of terrorism instead of freaking out over one single form of tactics that remains the least likely approach that they will take. These are all things that we could have been doing for the past eight years with little cost, but haven't for various reasons. That's just my crazy point of view.
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