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Rogue Nuclear Terrorism: Alleviating French Concerns

Contributor:  Laurent Rathborn
Posted:  02/02/2011  12:00:00 AM EST  |  0

Rate this Article: (4.0 Stars | 2 Votes)

Tags:   nuclear | France | Russia | Serbia | START | IAEA | Georgia | bomb | deterrence

Washington, April 2010: a summit on the possibility of nuclear terrorism, attended by 38 heads of state. Result: a joint commitment to improve nuclear security, and a marked sense that nuclear terrorism - even in dirty bomb form - was now a credible threat.  An editorial in Le Monde a few days later laid out wider concerns around the current nuclear security structure.
 
The existing threat
While accepting that, for a terrorist group, bootstrapping a full nuclear device is almost impossible, due to the very high level of technical expertise and very stringent tolerances involved (as well as the difficulty of procuring primary materials), concerns over the security of already - assembled weapons remained. Full-assembled nuclear warheads are still the domain of the nation state, but what of warhead security?
If one cannot build a nuclear bomb, the writer asked, can one be stolen? Supporting the fiercely independent national stance to the point where defence policy advocates maintaining a nuclear deterrent independent of NATO, French nuclear commentators - like others - were worried about the risk of radiological bombs, rather than a full-blown nuclear device falling into terrorist hands.

Current nuclear stockpile safeguards are multi-layered and incorporate a number of different design strategies at each layer. Some are physical, some are organisational. The French stockpile, for example, has a chain of military activation that is completely separated from the chain of political command. Inspection, transfer and maintenance orders must therefore come through two different systems.
 
Add to this the fact that physical safeguards such as locks and seals on missile and warhead components may come from the nation’s military, its internal nuclear energy body, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, and one has a situation where diversion of military nuclear materials is very difficult. It is not, however, impossible.
 
Accidents happen. 

A number of highly publicised cases in the late 1980s and early 1990s showed very clearly what happens when chains of responsibility break down. Alexander Lebev, former Russian National Security Advisor, claimed in 1997 that the KGB had lost details on the whereabouts of around 100 “suitcase nukes”, each capable of causing a blast of up to several kilotons of TNT. When the Soviet Union fragmented in 1991, a large number of military bases also remained, most of which are now defunct. Various international agencies have been unable to confirm the exact number or location of the weapons that were lost, and former KGB/GRU officials publicly deny their existence.
 
The escalation principle
As an example of the consequences of a breakdown of protocols, Georgia is a case of what can happen next; despite the small number of facilities dedicated to nuclear research and materials production, Georgia suffered a fate similar to other satellite republics when the USSR imploded: the handover of the facilities was uncontrolled, chaotic, and in some cases consisted of Soviet personnel simply packing up and leaving, with no proper handover or transfer of records.
 
Economic decline, as in so many other cases, soon followed, and the newly-established authorities lost sight of sources used in industry and medicine. Records were lost, destroyed, or in some cases might have never existed in the first place. Medical and industrial sources were abandoned, with sometimes catastrophic results as they were discovered by civilians ignorant of their potency.

A more active problem also exists; since 1993, the Georgian authorities and the IAEA have uncovered fifteen cases of highly enriched uranium or plutonium smuggling. The range of materials on the black market ran from “red mercury”, which is an invented name for a non-nuclear material and was used in a series of hoaxes (although it was a reporting/code name for Lithium-6, which does have applications), to a few grams of highly enriched (70%) uranium.
 
It is important to state that no single interception so far could be used for an effective radiological bomb due to the fact that most materials recovered have insufficient mass, but taken as a total the amount of material intercepted is a serious cause for concern. However, efforts to secure loose nuclear material, a prime French concern at the time of the 2010 Conference, have progressed sharply. The IAEA has completed a sweep of Georgia with the objective of finding and securing loose nuclear materials, with plans to extend the sweep to other former satellite republics if requested.
 
Transport risks and protocols
What about nuclear material in transport? Current civilian nuclear fuel arrangements between nations are so tight as to preclude any violent theft; diversion, if it occurs, is more likely via confusion of records or corruption. Under bilateral fuel processing agreements, where spent nuclear material is sent from one country to another for reprocessing, security is also incredibly tight.

While the IAEA supplies physical safeguards in the form of non-tamper seals, video monitoring and quantitative verification to static stockpiles, the amount of security applied to nuclear material in transit (for example, under a reciprocal fuel agreement) is truly vast. A recent exercise to transport spent nuclear fuel from Serbia to Russia involved 16 shipping containers, thousands of military personnel from four countries, a three-week voyage by sea and a total budget of $55 million - the largest such exercise ever.
 
In short, diversion of existing material that has already been secured is highly unlikely. The real threat comes from nuclear material unsecured, which was precisely the object of President Obama’s promise in Prague in April 2009 to "secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years". Thanks to greater publicity and a resurgence of goodwill best highlighted by the success of the New START treaty, soon to be completely ratified between Russia and the USA,  that effort is well underway.


Laurent Rathborn Contributor:   Laurent Rathborn

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