U.N. Urges Cooperation Against Nuclear Terror

A senior U.N. official yesterday joined a well-known nonproliferation expert in calling for greater international cooperation in the fight to prevent nuclear terrorism (see GSN, June 12).

Larry Johnson, assistant secretary general for legal affairs, pushed for every member state of the international body to ratify the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism.

“Advances in technology continue to outpace the efforts undertaken to prevent terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction,” he said at U.N. headquarters in New York, the U.N. News Service reported.

The treaty, which was proposed by Russia and then adopted in April 2005, calls on countries to outlaw specific acts related to nuclear terrorism, such as obtaining nuclear material with the intent to do harm or plotting to attack a nuclear power facility.

The convention, which has been signed by 115 countries and ratified by 22, enters into force on July 7.  It provides for international cooperation in the form of information sharing and help with criminal investigations and extraditions.

“There is an urgent need to enhance international cooperation between states for devising and adopting effective and practical measures for the prevention of acts of terrorism and for the prosecution and punishment of the perpetrators,” Johnson said (U.N. News Service, June 19).

Matthew Bunn, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Project on Managing the Atom, also called for more countries to adopt the treaty.  He noted that creating a nuclear weapon is not as hard as people may think, nor is nuclear material as secure as it could be.  Both Bunn and Johnson spoke at a conference held at the United Nations.

“Theft of the essential ingredients of a nuclear weapon is not a hypothetical worry,” he said, according to the Associated Press.  “It is an ongoing reality.”

Despite several thefts of nuclear material over the last 15 years, there is no convincing evidence that any terror group had gotten acquired the highly enriched uranium or plutonium that could fuel a bomb, Bunn said.

If a nonstate group were to acquire such material, however, getting it across international borders would not be terribly hard.  “These things are small.  They’re not as radioactive as people think they are.  They’re quite difficult to detect at any distance.”

He called for nations, particularly the United States and Russia, to consolidate their nuclear weapons to fewer sites.

Once fissile material is obtained, it would be possible to assemble a bomb of some sort, Bunn said.  “Unfortunately, it does not take a Manhattan Project to make at least a crude nuclear bomb of the kind terrorists might want” (Associated Press/International Herald Tribune, June 18). 

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