U.S.-Russia I:  Close to Agreement on Access to Closed Cities

By Greg Seigle

Global Security Newswire

The United States and Russia have tentatively agreed on terms to allow foreigners unprecedented access to Russia’s 10 closed nuclear cities, senior U.S. Energy Department officials told Global Security Newswire yesterday.

The accord currently under review by both U.S. and Russian authorities is expected to be approved soon and to provide the rules for access for U.S. or other foreign officials with business in the closed cities, said Steve Black, acting director of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s office of nonproliferation and international security.

“I’ll be blunt.  We have an operational challenge right now and that’s our access to some of these nuclear cities,” said Black, who led a delegation of NNSA officials that last week returned to Washington from Moscow.

“We just came back with an initialed agreement—initialed because it’s been returned to the governments for review,” Black continued.  “We’ve had some difficulty recently getting into some of the [closed] cities because the Russians have said ‘we don’t have an access agreement.’ We went to Moscow recently and we came back with a draft agreement, which I think would be acceptable, ultimately, to both sides.  And then we’ll see if the problem is solved.  I believe it will be.”

Nuclear Cities Initiative

Helping the Russians downsize their nuclear weapons facilities—the maintenance of which has been a drain on the sluggish Russian economy—has been a key goal of the Nuclear Cities Initiative, an NNSA-sponsored program designed to convert much of Russia’s nuclear facilities into civilian commercial ventures. The goal is to downsize the nuclear weapons complex while also providing jobs for displaced workers, particularly scientists, laboratory technicians and other skilled factory workers.

“You can’t create in Russia what wouldn’t be there anyway—that is a market,” Black said. “If the Russians are bound and determined to not permit the elements of a free market to flourish, there’s nothing we can do to change that.  And we also can’t introduce market distortions.  So what we’re trying to do is develop the infrastructure—the business training, the capitalization potentials, all sorts of investment opportunities for Western businesses and Russian businesses for that matter—that will make it possible for businesses to start and flourish in a Russian environment.”

The accord lays down the provisions for access for U.S. government officials, non-government analysts, laboratory personnel and U.S. or foreign business partners with investments in the cities, Black said.

The agreement being forged by U.S. and Russian officials is expected to not only regulate access for Western companies, but also for U.S. officials.  “This is like the overall set of administrative actions for access,” Black said.  “It includes recurring access to managed projects as they’re being worked and it includes a provision for exploratory access as well, which is important.”

The accord is key to determining whether investors will be willing to pour money and resources into the closed cities, which offer a wealth of human resources and industrial infrastructure in return, sources said.

Individual Firms to Negotiate Terms

Under terms of the accord, non-Russian companies that start up businesses within Russia’s closed cities would be able to negotiate their own access—a provision demanded by companies interested in investing in the cities, which serve as the industrial base for Russia’s massive, far-flung nuclear weapons complex, Black said.

Currently access to the cities is extremely limited, making it very difficult for companies interested in starting businesses in them to become established.

“For the longest time it was kind of a ‘build it and we’ll let you in’ [approach by the Russians],” said John Rooney, associate deputy administrator for two NNSA work programs in Russia.  “[The] problem was getting in to start building it, so it was a chicken-and-egg routine.  I think what [Black] brought back in this arrangement was one that allowed for both—allowing for the determining what should be built and then allowing to build it after you determine what both sides agree upon.”

Black agreed, saying the changes are for the better.

“So, for instance, [if] a Western business needs to get to a production line in Russia that has been shut down because of a malfunction of some sort … They should be able to visit their [facility] in 24 hours or 48 hours,” Black said.  “They should be able to negotiate themselves for that access with the Russian partner.

“The Western partner will negotiate its own terms, because one company might be happy to do it in a week or another company might need 24 hours,” he added.  “The Russians expressed their willingness to negotiate [with companies] separately.”

Past Difficulties

Access into the closed cities, which are managed by the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy (MinAtom), has been tightly restricted due to various layers of government bureaucracy, sources said.  Agencies that must give approval for travel in and out of the cities include the Ministry of Defense and the Federal Security Bureau, the latter of which sometimes makes outsiders wait 30 to 45 days for permission, sources said.

“It’s not that MinAtom has authority on its own to grant access—I don’t know what that is, that is a Russian security constraint,” Black said.  “But they will work it from their end.”

Security concerns, Black noted, are “part of the reason why [MinAtom] wants to submit the initialed document to their government for approval … Presumably they are getting their own [government] agencies to buy into the agreement, including whatever [the] security apparatuses require.”

First Contract in September

To date the only Western company planning to start a factory in one of the closed cities is Germany-based Fresenius, the largest provider of dialysis products and services in the United States.  The company signed a contract in September to convert a nuclear facility into a plant that produces kidney dialysis equipment.  The key stumbling block in getting the factory converted and running has been access, Black said.

Fresenius plans to set up its dialysis plant at Avanguard Electromechanical Plant, a nuclear weapons complex that was built in 1949 as the first Russian facility to manufacture nuclear weapons on an industrial scale.  Avanguard is located in the closed city of Sarov (formerly Arzamas-16), 450 kilometers east of Moscow.

“I would like to be confident that [the accord] would work, and the Russians will be forthcoming in granting this access when we need it, but… it remains to be seen,” Black said, adding that he is “cautiously optimistic” that regular and timely access will be allowed in the near future.

Analyst Reaction

The accord has not circulated among analysts yet, but one informed of it today also expressed cautious optimism.

“On the face of it [the accord] sounds like a step forward,” said Michele Flournoy, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“In the short term I think a lot of [Russians] are thrilled to get paid,” Flournoy noted.   “Russia needs to grow a high-tech industrial base … This links to much broader issues that Russia’s struggling with.”

The clause in the accord for Western companies to negotiate their own access to the closed cities could leave the door open to differential treatment and perhaps to the need for bribery, which has long been a common business practice in Russia, sources speculated.

“If [the Russians] don’t grant the access, they aren’t going to get the investment,” Black said.  “I don’t believe this sets up an environment for bribery.”

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U.S.-Russia II:  U.S. Congress Keeps Nonproliferation Funds

By Kerry Boyd

Global Security Newswire

Negotiators from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives allotted $226 million this week for Energy Department nonproliferation programs. 

The compromise legislation, which reconciles different versions of the fiscal 2002 defense appropriations bills from each house, is expected to be passed by Congress soon—the Senate could even vote today, said Steve LaMontagne, of the Council for a Livable World Education Fund (see GSN, Dec. 14).  The legislation that the Senate passed in early December included an attached emergency supplemental package that allocated $226 million for Energy Department nonproliferation programs, but the House bill, passed in November, did not (see GSN, Dec. 10).

LaMontagne said the $226 million would be divided as follows:

*         $120 million for material protection, control and accounting

*         $78 million for nonproliferation, verification, research and development,

*         $15 million for the Russian transition initiative,

*         $10 million for international nuclear safety and

*         $3 million for program direction.

Negotiators also gave $403 million to the Defense Department’s threat reduction programs for the former Soviet Union, an amount that had been included in both the Senate and House versions (see GSN, Dec. 19).

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United States I:  Navy Conducts Final Trident I Missile Test

The U.S. Navy successfully fired three Trident I (C-4) submarine-launched ballistic missiles Tuesday from the U.S.S. Ohio submarine off the Florida coast.  The launches concluded a series of tests that began in the 1970s to monitor the safety and performance of the Trident I missiles, which the Navy plans to retire in 2005.  The more modern and accurate Trident II (D-5) missiles will replace the Trident Is, according to a release from Lockheed Martin.

The Trident I, with a range of 4,000 nautical miles and the capacity to carry eight nuclear warheads, is currently deployed on six Ohio-class strategic submarines in the Pacific Ocean.  The Trident I missiles are the oldest continuously operated fleet ballistic missiles the Navy has ever used, according to Lockheed Martin.

The missile has had an 89 percent success rate, according Tom Morton, vice president of strategic missile programs at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which makes the missiles.  “Lockheed Martin is extremely proud of the performance record of the Trident I (C-4) missile,” he said (Lockheed Martin Space Systems release, Dec. 19).

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate-House conference committee for the fiscal 2002 Defense Appropriations Bill (see GSN, today) approved $365 million for a program to convert four Ohio-class submarines, that now-carry Trident Is, into conventional cruise missile carriers (Frank Wolfe, Defense Daily, Dec. 19).

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United States II: Group Questions Pentagon Interest in Low-Yield Nukes

The Pentagon study on destroying deeply buried targets, including those holding weapons of mass destruction, indicated a lack of enthusiasm for developing specialized nuclear weapons for that purpose, according to the Federation of American Scientists (see GSN, Dec. 19).

The FAS assessment was made in spite the report’s conclusion that “nuclear weapons have a unique ability to destroy both [chemical and biological weapon] agent containers and CBW agents …. The current nuclear weapons stockpile, while possessing some limited ground penetration capability and lower-yield options (not yet certified [for military use]), was not developed with this mission in mind.”  Click here to read unclassified portion of the Pentagon report.

The U.S. Congress ordered the study last year and asked the Pentagon for its views on modifying existing U.S. law, which prohibits the development of low-yield nuclear weapons.  The study, however, did not weigh in on the issue (FAS release, Dec. 19).

“They were basically invited to request this weapon and they didn’t,” said Michael Levi, an FAS strategic analyst. 

Only high-level political leaders at the Pentagon are interested in developing “bunker-busting” nuclear weapons, Levi said.  The operational staff doesn’t want to deal with the complicating factors that nuclear weapons entail.

“Nobody wants the president’s permission before they bomb a cave,” Levi said.

The same goals of destroying buried bunkers holding chemical and biological weapons could be accomplished in well-coordinated attacks using existing conventional weapons, Levi said. (Greg Webb, GSN, Dec. 20).

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United States III:  Energy Department Shuts Down Hanford Reactor

The U.S Energy Department yesterday said it would close the Fast Flux Test Facility on the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington.  The department has spent nearly $500 million keeping the facility on standby since 1992, the New York Times reported.

According to the Times, the facility was built to test components for a full-scale “breeder” reactor—a type of reactor that produces more nuclear fuel than it consumes.  Congress canceled the full-scale reactor program in 1983 after spending $4 billion.

The Hanford test facility, however, remained functioning another nine years before it was placed on standby, and has since been maintained in working condition, the Times reported. More than $1 billion has been spent on the test reactor.

Congressional members from Washington and local business leaders tried to find another use for the Hanford facility, including the production of tritium for nuclear weapons (see GSN, Oct. 3). Another proposal was to produce medical isotopes, but Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said there was no market for the isotopes, and it would cost $2 billion to refit the reactor even if there were buyers.

“Million and millions of dollars that could have gone for public health and safety was lost as the Department of Energy went on this scavenger hunt trying to find a mission for this boondoggle,” said Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has worked on efforts to shut down Hanford and clean up radioactive waste there (see GSN, Dec. 12).

Some nuclear experts had debated the idea of using the reactor to destroy surplus plutonium taken from nuclear weapons, according to the Times.  Nuclear weapons opponents, however, said it would be better to mix the weapon fuel with contaminants to ensure it would never be used in a weapon again (Matthew Wald, New York Times, Dec. 20).

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Iran:  Russia to Continue Peaceful Nuclear Assistance to Iran

Russia could increase its assistance to Iran’s nuclear power program, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Losyukov told the Russian Duma yesterday.

“Russia’s willingness to take part in implementing the plans for the development of the Iranian nuclear power industry might in the future grow into new contracts on building new nuclear power plants,” he said.

Russia would comply with its international nonproliferation agreements and International Atomic Energy Agency requirements while providing assistance to Iran, Losyukov said.

The Duma was holding hearings on the ratification of a Russian-Iranian treaty to frame the fundamentals of the countries’ relations (Moscow Interfax news agency/BBC Worldwide Monitoring, Dec. 19).

Russia is not assisting Iran with developing missile technology or creating similar weapons, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said in Brussels yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 5).

“Peaceful cooperation in the nuclear sphere is developing successfully between Russia and Iran, and it is fully in line with international standards of nonproliferation,” he said.  “In any case, the reactors which Russia supplies to Iran are fundamentally no different from those to be built in North Korea by the U.S.A. and other countries,” Ivanov said (ITAR-Tass/BBC Worldwide Monitoring, Dec. 19).

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CTBT: Central African Republic Signs Treaty

The Central African Republic signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 20).  Two sites participating in the treaty’s verification system are located in the Republic. 

To date, 165 nations have signed the accord and 89 have ratified it, including 31 of the 44 nations whose ratifications are required for the treaty to enter into force (CTBTO release, Dec. 19).

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Threat Assessment: Could Terrorism Go Nuclear?

By James Kitfield

National Journal

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- The recent disclosure that documents about nuclear bombs and radiological “dirty bombs” had been found at captured al-Qaeda terrorist network facilities in Kabul, Afghanistan, immediately triggered alarms among the nuclear scientists who work atop the high desert mesas in this remote region of New Mexico. For more than 50 years, nuclear experts at Los Alamos and at nearby Sandia National Laboratories have studied terrorist and criminal groups for any signs that they were on the verge of cracking the nuclear code first broken here. Everything they knew about al-Qaeda told them that these terrorists might be drawing too close to a terrible discovery.

Indeed, ever since members of the Manhattan Project tested the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945, scientists at Los Alamos have been the pre-eminent keepers of the nuclear flame. When the former Soviet Union created the secret nuclear city “Arzamas-16” as the birthplace of its own atomic bomb, it hewed closely to the Los Alamos blueprint. So much so, in fact, that Russian residents later jokingly referred to their town as “Los Arzamas.”

Almost from the inception of the nuclear age, no one understood better the apocalyptic threat of these weapons than the nuclear scientists who made them. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project and the father of the atomic bomb, eventually fell out of favor with the U.S. military at least partly over his strident support for arms control and his opposition to development of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb. The scientists at Los Alamos developed and help train and man the Energy Department's secretive Nuclear Emergency Search Teams that for 30 years have stood poised to respond to the threat of nuclear terror or the smuggling of a nuclear weapon onto U.S. soil.

Most important, the scientists at the Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories helped devise a U.S. nuclear doctrine designed to strictly limit the spread of nuclear weapons and technology, and to render their use unthinkable through the dynamic tension of "mutually assured destruction." And for the past decade, they have watched with growing concern as unpredictable world events have repeatedly tested the tolerances of that careful calculation and narrowed its margins for error.

Weakened Security

The breakup of the former Soviet Union, followed by the fundamental restructuring of a Russian society that accounted for the world's largest stockpile of both nuclear weapons and the fissile material necessary to make them, created a gaping hole of vulnerability in terms of nuclear proliferation. U.S. experts concede that that hole remains open to this day.

"We've been worried about Russia for 10 years, because initially the Russians insisted they didn't need any help securing their weapons and nuclear material, which was a ludicrous assertion," Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow and former longtime director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, told National Journal. "The Russians simply failed to take into account how dramatically their country had changed with the breakup of the Soviet Union. With the evolution toward an open society, the old Soviet security system based on guns, guards, and gulags was simply not good enough anymore. So we've spent a lot of time educating the Russians about the gaps in their own security system, and I still don't think the Russian leadership fully appreciates just how real the continued vulnerabilities are in the Russian nuclear complex."

On top of Russian instability has come the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, particularly the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which has -- or had, until recent weeks -- strong links with the government of Pakistan, an emerging nuclear power. Pakistan's detention of two of its nuclear scientists for suspected connections to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, and recent news reports suggesting previously undisclosed contacts between other Pakistani nuclear weapons experts and al-Qaeda, underscore the difficulty such societies have in safeguarding their nuclear secrets in times of extreme turmoil.

John Immele, a deputy director of Los Alamos, said: "The biggest security threat in terms of nuclear weapons or expertise falling into the wrong hands has always been the 'inside job,' because it short-circuits so many of the traditional barriers to nuclear proliferation. From that standpoint, the threat to the Pakistani government from Islamic fundamentalists, and the close ties between fundamentalists inside the government and Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, are obviously causes for concern. If a terrorist group were to get its hands on nuclear fissile material," he said, "the main impediment to making a bomb would be to find an expert to assemble it. As cases concerning Pakistani and some Russian nuclear scientists in the past have shown, there are an increasing number of nuclear experts out there, and some find themselves in desperate circumstances. That's one more way the bar to a terrorist group acquiring a nuclear device has dropped."

Perhaps the greatest disruption to the equilibrium of the nuclear "balance of terror" is the emergence of criminal and terrorist organizations with a level of power and technological sophistication once associated only with nation-states. Should Al-Qaeda or another one of these terrorist groups with global reach succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons, experts say, it would turn on its head a nuclear doctrine that is based on the deterrent value of mutually assured destruction. Doomsday cults or religious zealots bent on martyrdom may not care much about traditional theories of deterrence.

Roger Hagengruber, the senior vice president for national security at Sandia, has spent much of his career contemplating the threat of nuclear terror. "For 50 years, the United States has closely watched various terrorist organizations for telltale indications that they might become a nuclear threat," he told National Journal. Possible warning signs include evidence of state sponsorship, a display of rapidly increasing technological sophistication, or persistent attempts to acquire materials or expertise associated with nuclear weapons.

"The reason we've been so concerned about al-Qaeda for some time is because all the warning indicators are positive," Hagengruber said, citing bin Laden's statements that acquiring nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction was a "religious duty" for Muslims, and intelligence reports of persistent attempts by al-Qaeda operatives to acquire nuclear fissile material. "You have a large, seemingly well-funded terrorist organization that has persisted over a long period of time. They have operated with either direct or indirect state support in a region of the world where the security infrastructure guarding nuclear materials is under significant stress. And they have an unprecedented degree of enmity toward the United States. I still think it's relatively unlikely that bin Laden actually acquired a crude nuclear weapon, or even significant amounts of weapons-grade fissile material, but that is not a set of circumstances that engenders either confidence or complacency. The consequences of being wrong or not paying the requisite attention are just too catastrophic."

Suitcase Bombs

Even a brief visit to the National Atomic Museum at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., reveals the degree to which the nuclear flame threatened to become a wildfire during the arms race of the 1950s and '60s. On display are full-scale models of both of the original nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," and a mockup of a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile with multiple thermonuclear warheads, arguably the most fearsome weapon ever devised. In between sit replicas of virtually every nuclear weapon designed at Los Alamos and fielded by the U.S. military: nuclear air-to-air missiles, atomic mines, atomic depth charges and torpedoes, nuclear artillery shells -- even the equivalent of an atomic bazooka to put atom-splitting destructiveness into the hands of the U.S. infantry.

Implied by this exhibit of nuclear inventiveness run amok, but not on display at the museum, are perhaps the least-talked-about of all nuclear weapons -- portable atomic demolition charges, or nuclear "suitcase bombs." Speculation has been heated, although unsubstantiated, that al-Qaeda may have acquired such weapons from the former Soviet arsenal.

Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, a former Russian national security adviser, sparked the speculation in 1997 when he told CBS's 60 Minutes that the Russian military had lost track of more than 100 suitcase-sized nuclear weapons, out of a total arsenal of some 250. The Russian atomic energy commission denied the report -- and even the existence of such weapons -- and Lebed later seemed to back away from his own assertions. However, other Russian experts have confirmed the reality of such bombs. For instance, the Los Angeles Times recently quoted Russian START II negotiator Nikolai Sokov as saying the suitcase bombs existed but speculating that they have been dismantled. Russian scientist Alexei Yablokov, a former member of the Russian National Security Council, told Congress that the suitcase nukes were actually controlled by the KGB, the former Soviet intelligence service, and were thus outside the inventory-accounting system of the Russian military.

Yossef Bodansky, the director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, heightened concerns over the Russian suitcase bombs. Citing unnamed intelligence sources in his 2000 book, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, Bodansky claimed: "Although there is debate over the precise quantities of weapons purchased, there is no longer much doubt that bin Laden has finally succeeded in his quest for nuclear suitcase bombs. Bin Laden's emissaries paid the Chechens $30 million in cash, and gave them two tons of Afghan heroin worth about $70 million" for the bombs. Bodansky's book seemed to lend credence to bin Laden's assertion in a recent interview that al-Qaeda possessed nuclear weapons as a "deterrent."

Nuclear experts at Sandia and Los Alamos confirm that both the Soviet Union and the United States developed portable nuclear weapons. The U.S. weapon is the MK-54 Small Atomic Demolition Munition. Given the stringent security systems that nuclear states create to guard such weapons, however, the scientists consider the threat of loose mini-nukes as the least likely of all nuclear terror threats.

"Every state that has ever created a nuclear arsenal has come to a sobering realization of what it possesses, and has established extraordinary levels of security to protect those weapons," said Hagengruber of Sandia. "So while we can never dismiss the possibility of a stolen Russian nuclear weapon, that would be extremely difficult to accomplish, and the Russian president would almost certainly know about such a theft immediately."

Immele of Los Alamos concurs. "There is no question that both the United States and the Russians developed suitcase-sized atomic demolition munitions," he said. "We studied Lebed's comments very closely and compared them to our extensive knowledge about what the Russian military has done to account for its nuclear weapons, however, and we have no intelligence leading us to believe that those weapons have escaped Russian control. What you find is that even a country with 25,000 nuclear weapons and a less-than-state-of-the-art accounting system will keep a very close accounting and jealously guard control of its actual nuclear weapons." However, he cautioned, "nuclear materials and expertise are much harder to account for and keep track of, which is why so much of our concerns about Russia are focused on its nuclear fissile material and scientists."

Doomsday Ingredients

Most analysts cite as a success story the joint U.S.-Russian programs designed to rid the former Soviet states of their nuclear weapons, and to help Russia secure and dismantle its own weapons. The United States has spent roughly $4 billion on the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program (named for legislative co-sponsors former Sens. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind.). To date, the Nunn-Lugar program has deactivated 5,700 nuclear warheads, destroyed 434 ICBMs and 483 air-to-surface missiles, and eliminated hundreds of Russian bombers, submarines, and missile launchers.

However, attempts to consolidate and safeguard the much larger Russian stockpile of nuclear fissile material -- the essential ingredient of these doomsday weapons -- have had a more checkered record. Indeed, the first indication that Russia might be leaking lethal nuclear material from its increasingly decrepit inventory came as early as 1992, when a Russian was caught attempting to steal 1.5 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from a facility in Podolsk. Other incidents soon followed. In March 1993, authorities in St. Petersburg seized 6.6 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from smugglers. In August 1994, police in Munich, Germany, seized 360 grams of plutonium and 5 pounds of uranium, part of a shipment apparently stolen from a nuclear research center in Obninsk, Russia. In one of the most worrisome incidents, an anonymous tip enabled the Czech police to seize 2.7 kilograms of highly enriched uranium in December 1994.

Because nuclear experts consider the difficulty of acquiring weapons-grade fissile material as the single greatest impediment to a group or nation that wants to build nuclear weapons, these seizures sounded a loud wake-up call. The theft of significant amounts of uranium is particularly frightening because uranium can be used as the key ingredient in relatively rudimentary nuclear devices that experts consider most within the technological grasp of fledgling nuclear states or terrorist groups.

The Energy Department's efforts, under its "Lab-to-Lab" initiative, to protect Russia's stockpile of fissile material have encountered severe obstacles. One is the continuing Russian reluctance to open its secret nuclear cities and research facilities to prying Western eyes. The second has been the unwillingness of both Russian and American authorities to acknowledge the vast scope of the problem of securing the enormous Russian stockpile of fissile material.

"I think it's fair to say that the Russians themselves didn't have a complete handle on the quantities and scattered locations that made up their fissile-material stockpile," said Kent Biringer, who works on cooperative international programs at Sandia. "As we started out on these programs, we didn't have a solid baseline from which to work that told us what we were trying to get our arms around."

When the true size of the Russian stockpile eventually came into clearer focus, U.S. officials realized they had greatly underestimated the challenge. Richard Wallace, the program manager for material protection, control, and accounting in the Russian Nonproliferation Program at Los Alamos, said: "What we found was that Russia had produced roughly 10 times more nuclear fissile material during the Cold War than the United States, and they had it scattered at many more sites. They also had 10 secret nuclear cities," Wallace said, "and each one dwarfed one of our comparable nuclear weapons laboratories. The Russians also had to go through a major cultural change in how they thought about security at their stockpile sites."

Eventually, U.S. experts were able to estimate that Russia had a total of 850 metric tons of weapons-usable fissile material -- enough for more than 70,000 nuclear weapons -- stored at 95 separate sites. Because it takes only about 17.5 pounds of plutonium or 55 pounds of enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb, securing that vast trove of fissile material became one of the United States' top nonproliferation priorities of the 1990s.

The lax security systems at some of those Russian sites have become legendary within the weapons-lab community. Security experts talk about perimeter fences with gaping holes; fissile material stored in unguarded boxes in hallways of poorly guarded facilities; and facilities without air conditioning, where windows without bars were routinely kept open to ease the summer heat. According to experts at Los Alamos, managers of Russian nuclear reactors also routinely set aside extra stashes of plutonium and uranium "off the books" to make up for potential shortfalls in their production quotas at the end of each accounting period.

U.S. experts thus focused in the early years of the Lab-to-Lab program on rudimentary fixes such as consolidating fissile material at fewer sites, and protecting it with radiation detectors, closed-circuit television camera systems, electronic sensors on perimeter fences, and computerized accounting systems. Even some of these relatively simple fixes went awry. U.S. experts discovered, for instance, that the batteries in some of their security systems failed in the harsh Siberian winters. Levels of radiation dust and radiation contamination on workers that were considered routine at some Russian facilities often set off U.S. radiation detectors.

Today, U.S. experts at Los Alamos estimate that roughly 570 tons of Russia's total 850 tons of weapons-usable material are more secure as a result of the security upgrades. They concede, however, that more than 200 tons of fissile material remain largely unsecured. A May 2000 report by the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, found that U.S. officials have yet to gain access to 104 of 252 nuclear sites "requiring improved security systems."

"There is still a lot of room for improvement in securing Russia's fissile materials," according to Larry Walker, the manager of Cooperative International Programs at Sandia. "What you find is, the closer you get to Russia's actual nuclear weapons, the more secretive and less willing to give access the Russians become. Access remains an issue, because it's difficult to improve security unless you can actually see a storage site and witness how things are stored and handled."

Stalled Progress

After making significant headway in the early years, the U.S.-Russian cooperative programs to secure Moscow's fissile-material stockpile got stuck in 1998 and have not yet recovered. The reasons for the lagging progress are varied, experts say. As the materials protection program grew in cost from a few million dollars to more than $100 million annually, Congress and Administration officials began demanding a higher level of access to Russian nuclear facilities, and the Russians balked. A bureaucracy that had been thrown into disarray by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s also began to reassert itself, throwing up red-tape barriers to greater Western access. And the Russians angered the United States by insisting on exporting a civilian nuclear reactor to Iran. The State Department lists Iran as the most active state sponsor of terrorist groups in the world.

Political tensions over the bombing of Serbia, NATO expansion, and a U.S. national missile defense system also soured relations between senior American and Russian officials in the late 1990s. Finally, because of a financial collapse in 1998, many Russian nuclear scientists and technicians were not paid for months at a time, raising fears that they would peddle their expertise on the world market. The Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, for instance, was known to have actively recruited Russian nuclear design specialists, and even student physicists from Moscow State University, in an attempt to acquire nuclear weapons.

"After making enormous progress in the first three to four years, our cooperative programs with the Russians basically ground to a halt, and I don't think many officials in the Bush Administration still understand just how broken this process now is," said Hecker, the former director of Los Alamos. "Partly because the U.S. government lost its way and switched from an approach of cooperation to one that dictated an unnecessarily intrusive level of access into sensitive Russian facilities, we've lost the spirit of partnership necessary to make these programs work. Couple that with the fact that the Clinton Administration never really had a strategic vision or overarching strategy for dealing with the Russian nuclear complex and setting priorities among all these various programs, and you have a process that has essentially ground to a standstill in many respects. And until we can restore a common sense of purpose between us and the Russians, no amount of money will fix the Russian nuclear security problems."

Meanwhile, indications of serious Russian security lapses continue. Russian officials in 1998 broke up a conspiracy by employees of a major nuclear facility in the Chelyabinsk region of the Ural Mountains to steal 18.5 kilograms of weapons-usable material. The Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies has documented 11 cases involving diversion and recovery of Russian weapons-grade material between 1992 and 1997. The International Atomic Energy Agency further documents six seizures of weapons-grade material linked to states of the former Soviet Union between 1999 and 2001. Four Russian sailors were arrested at a base on the Kamchatka Peninsula in January 2000, with radioactive materials that they were suspected of stealing from a Russian nuclear submarine. According to a New York Times report, Turkey recently revealed that its undercover police had broken up a smuggling ring holding 2.2 pounds of what appeared to be enriched uranium, bought from a Russian of Azeri origin. The head of the Russian agency responsible for nuclear security recently told reporters that, on two occasions last year, terrorists had staked out Russian nuclear facilities. Earlier this month, on December 6, Russian police arrested members of a criminal gang who were trying to sell uranium for $30,000.

Reports coming in a steady drumbeat from U.S. commissions and blue-ribbon panels have warned that the inadequate security of the fissile-material stockpile of the former Soviet Union remains a glaring weakness in the global system designed to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. A 1997 Defense Science Board Study noted: "Defense planners are increasingly concerned about possible state and non-state use of radiological dispersal devices [dirty bombs] against U.S. forces and population centers abroad and at home, as technological barriers have fallen and radiological materials have become more plentiful." A 1999 congressional commission chaired by former CIA Director John Deutch and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., warned that power outages, inadequate inventory control, and unpaid Russian guards and technicians had all increased the threat of an "insider" diversion of Russian nuclear fissile material.

Perhaps the starkest warning was issued earlier this year by an Energy Department advisory group headed by former Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., and former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler. "The most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen or sold to terrorists or hostile nation-states," the Baker-Cutler study concluded. The group recommended that the United States spend $30 billion over the next eight to 10 years on a crash program to finally secure Russia's weapons of mass destruction and its stockpile of fissile material.

Ominously, the steady stream of warnings in recent years resembles similar unheeded alarms raised before September 11 about the possibility of a catastrophic terrorist attack. Nonproliferation advocates were thus dismayed that the Bush Administration's fiscal 2002 budget proposed cutting the Pentagon's Nunn-Lugar programs by 9 percent (from $443.4 million in fiscal 2001 to $403 million), and the Energy Department's nonproliferation programs by 11.5 percent (from $872.4 million in fiscal 2001 to about $773.7 million). Congress has since moved to restore some of the proposed funding cuts, however. And in a December 11 speech at the Citadel, Bush promised expanded efforts and increased funding for securing Russian fissile material and for finding peaceful employment for Russian nuclear scientists.

In an attempt to jump-start the stalled threat-reduction programs, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., and Lugar recently introduced the Debt Reduction for Non-Proliferation Act, which would forgive Russia's debt of $3.7 billion to the United States in exchange for its cooperation with U.S. efforts to secure and monitor Russian weapons of mass destruction and fissile material.

"Time after time, the United States has put together groups of objective, bipartisan policy experts to study this problem, and each time, they have concluded that this is an urgent national security issue -- and every time, their reports are ignored," said Joseph Cirincione, the director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Part of the problem, he says, is that such programs have no natural domestic constituency in Russia, and in the United States they smack of unpopular foreign aid. And because cooperative threat-reduction programs do not command the same priority within the Administration as missile defense, they can easily get shoved off the summit-level agenda.

"Another problem is, this seems like a distant threat because nothing terrible has happened yet," Cirincione said. "The general feeling among experts, however, is that we've been lucky so far. There is absolutely no doubt that there are bad people out there trying very hard to get their hands on Russian weapons of mass destruction and nuclear materials, and if we don't secure the source, sooner or later they will succeed. After September 11, the once-inconceivable is now all too easily imagined."

An Unseen Hand

A decade's worth of seizures and the breakup of numerous smuggling rings in Russia and Europe clearly point to a lucrative black market in nuclear fissile materials. No one knows with any certainty whether terrorists have successfully smuggled any of that material through the porous southern Russian border into Central Asia or nearby Afghanistan. Few intelligence experts doubt, however, that one of the unseen hands creating the demand for fissile material was that of Osama bin Laden.

The most unambiguous testimony to date on al-Qaeda's methodical, well-financed campaign to acquire nuclear bomb-making material came from Ahmed Al-Fadl, an al-Qaeda operative who turned state's witness in the trial earlier this year of men accused of bombing two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. Al-Fadl claimed he was the middleman in a mid-1990s deal between al-Qaeda and Sudanese officials for the purchase of $1.5 million worth of highly enriched uranium, apparently diverted from South Africa's former nuclear program. Though Al-Fadl was not present for the final exchange, his testimony convinced U.S. prosecutors that "at least since 1993, bin Laden and others made efforts to obtain components of nuclear weapons."

Recent years have yielded a steady stream of news reports and intelligence leaks about al-Qaeda's attempts to acquire fissile material. In 1998, for instance, bin Laden aide Mamdouh Mahmud Salim was arrested in Munich and charged with acting on behalf of al-Qaeda to acquire nuclear materials. As The Christian Science Monitor recently reported, a Bulgarian businessman claimed to have met bin Laden himself last year to talk over a complex deal to transship nuclear materials across Bulgaria to Afghanistan.

Pakistan, meanwhile, continues to detain Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and a second nuclear scientist considered key to Pakistan's nuclear program. Mahmood has reportedly acknowledged meeting bin Laden and Taliban leader Mohammed Omar during at least three visits to Afghanistan last year, and he is said to have talked at length about developing nuclear and biological weapons. According to The New York Times, CIA Director George J. Tenet, during his recent trip to Pakistan, raised U.S. concerns about additional contacts between Pakistani nuclear weapons experts and al-Qaeda.

If the al-Qaeda network has successfully acquired enough weapons-grade uranium, U.S. experts say the group's last major challenge in eventually constructing a workable nuclear bomb would be to entice a trained nuclear scientist to spearhead the project. "The history of nuclear programs suggest that they depend on only a few key, knowledgeable scientists, with sufficient time and bankrolling, to bring a program to fruition," said Biringer of Sandia. "That's why we have focused a lot of effort on trying to retrain Russian scientists in other disciplines so they will not attempt to sell their services on the open market."

U.S. experts say that Russian nuclear scientists are generally much better off today than in 1998, when they went unpaid for up to eight months because of a financial crisis and the collapse of the ruble. Nevertheless, they worry that Energy's "Nuclear Cities Initiative," designed to retrain Russian scientists and shrink the Russian nuclear complex, has suffered from erratic funding and tepid congressional support.

"Virtually all Russian scientists we have dealt with are enormously loyal and patriotic, and most of them would like to stay where they are and continue to conduct meaningful work and research," Hagengruber said. "So we are not worried about Russia hemorrhaging nuclear scientists. These scientists remain one of our major concerns, however -- because unfortunately, all it takes is enough fissile material and one or two good scientists to create a real problem. Even a 99 percent solution is not really good enough."

Experts at Los Alamos and Sandia doubt that al-Qaeda has had the requisite time, weapons-grade fissile material, and nuclear expertise to actually construct a crude nuclear weapon, though they would not rule the possibility out. One expert who concurs in those doubts is Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza, who headed Saddam Hussein's secret nuclear bomb program through the mid-1990s and co-authored the book, Saddam's Bombmaker. Despite obvious weaknesses in global nuclear nonproliferation defenses, Hamza insists that the difficulties inherent in constructing a nuclear weapon remain daunting.

"We in Iraq were in the market for nuclear materials, and not a week passed without us getting an offer from somebody to sell us such materials," he told CNBC's Geraldo Rivera on October 26. "People came to Baghdad with bags of samples, and left with bags of money, and we never got any serious nuclear materials. Despite what people say, the [protections of such materials] are not that loose, and this radioactive material is very difficult to transport." As for actually constructing a nuclear bomb, "that's not that easy either," Hamza said. "Iraq is a country with thousands of nuclear workers, and we still couldn't get a bomb ready in time for the Gulf War."

U.S. experts are much less skeptical that al-Qaeda or another terrorist organization could build a dirty bomb by packing a conventional explosive with fissile material that would kill and injure, mainly through radioactive dispersal and contamination. On the spectrum of nuclear threats, experts consider this a "high-likelihood, low-lethality" scenario.

Bruce Blair, an arms control expert and former nuclear missileer who is now the president of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said: "There's almost no credible evidence that al-Qaeda acquired a portable nuclear device that could actually split the atom, but I think it's very plausible that bin Laden acquired fissile material that could be wrapped around dynamite and exploded in an urban center like Lower Manhattan to cause panic and terror, and require the evacuation of large portions of the city for a considerable period of time."

According to Blair, the Defense Department ran an analysis of just such a worst-case scenario involving a dirty bomb made with 50 kilograms of nuclear power plant spent fuel packed around 100 pounds of conventional explosives. "The calculation was that lethal doses of radiation would be dispersed over roughly a half-mile area, leading to hundreds, if not thousands, of casualties," Blair said. "There is also considerable data on what would be involved in cleaning up after such a terrorist attack, and that dates back to 1966, when an Air Force plane carrying nuclear weapons crashed in Spain."

Indeed, a display at Sandia's National Atomic Museum depicts the collision of a B-52 and a KC-135 tanker during midair refueling over Palomares, Spain, on January 17, 1966. Photos document how three thermonuclear weapons that burst open in the crash contaminated a 285-acre area with highly enriched plutonium, which has a half-life of 24,000 years. More than 4,000 Air Force personnel were drafted into the cleanup effort, which required plowing hundreds of acres and removing 4,810 barrels of plutonium-contaminated earth to a storage site in South Carolina. In 2001 dollars, the cleanup operation cost $230 million.

In a post-September 11 world, a Palomares-type incident occupies the "high-likelihood, low-lethality" end of the spectrum of threats to U.S. national security. Such a classification is a testament to the almost unthinkable menace posed by nuclear-armed terrorists.

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United States:  Pentagon Considers New Bunker Buster

A Pentagon study has concluded that new earth-penetrating, low-yield nuclear weapons may be the only way to destroy deep underground bunkers that hold biological and chemical weapons, the Albuquerque Journal reported yesterday.

In a recent presentation to Congress, researchers concluded that conventional weapons would be unable to destroy the deepest reinforced bunkers of biological or chemical weapons without dispersing the contents.  According to the study, called Project Sand Dune, specially designed low-yield nuclear bombs “have the unique ability” to do the job, destroying both the bunkers and the weapons they might hold.

New nuclear weapons could be designed to burrow into the ground and then detonate precisely on target in a low-yield nuclear explosion, said the study.  Current U.S. nuclear weapons have overly large yields as well as limited capabilities for penetrating the ground before exploding (John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal, Dec. 18).

The bombs would have a yield less than five kilotons, compared to the approximate combined 30 kilotons of the two nuclear bombs the United States dropped on Japan during World War II (H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press/Yahoo.com, Dec. 19).

Critics of the U.S. nuclear program released the Sand Dune study to the public last week, saying it indicates the Pentagon is moving toward creating a new generation of nuclear weapons.

“I fear that this report is the beginning of a reversal of the current U.S. policy to not produce new-design nuclear weapons,” said Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico (Fleck, Albuquerque Journal).  Congress would have to lift a 1994 ban on designing new nuclear weapons before the United States could actually build the special low-yield warheads. 

Martin Butcher of the Physicians for Social Responsibility said the type of warhead the report discussed was “the dirtiest kind of all.  It’s highly radioactive.”  Building the bomb would increase the risk of nuclear proliferation, he said (Hebert, Associated Press).

The U.S. government has made no move to actually start building the weapons, but the Energy and Defense departments have established a joint nuclear planning group to study the possibility of using nuclear weapons to destroy underground targets, according to the Journal.

Project Sand Dune began in 1997 after the Defense Department concluded conventional weapons could not destroy very deep bunkers, the report said, adding that about 10,000 deep bunkers exist in rogue states (Fleck, Albuquerque Journal).

Click here to read the report on the Nuclear Watch of New Mexico Web site.

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U.S.-Russia:  U.S. Delegation Arrives at Nuclear Plant

A U.S. delegation arrived Monday at the Krasnoyarsk-26 plutonium production and reprocessing facility in Russia, plant officials said.  The U.S. experts came to the facility to discuss funding for additional security measures to prevent the theft of plutonium, said Karasnoyarsk-26 Chief Engineer Yuriy Revenko (ITAR-Tass, Dec. 17, in FBIS-SOV, Dec. 17).

Initial U.S. Energy Department-funded security measures for the Krasnoyarsk plant include increased access control, material surveillance equipment, sensors and tamper-indicating devices, according to a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The facility has three layers of protection, the report said.  The first layer is the protective zone, which includes the facility’s outer perimeter protected by a double barbed wire fence.  The next layer is the inner zone, which includes the production site.  The most sensitive zone is the high-security zone, which includes the plutonium-oxide storage facility.  Personnel move between the three zones via security checkpoints. 

The external threat to the facility is considered “minimal,” according to the report (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, June 2001).

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U.S.-Russia:  Nuclear Talks to Start in January

Russia and the United States will meet formally in January to discuss major cuts in strategic nuclear weapons, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced yesterday.  The two officials are in Brussels for NATO talks that start today.

U.S. President George W. Bush announced last month that the United States would cut its nuclear arsenal by about two-thirds, to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads (see GSN, Nov. 14), and Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed last week that the two countries reduce their stockpiles to between 1,500 and 2,200 warheads (see GSN, Dec. 17).

After meeting with Rumsfeld for about two hours, Ivanov said in a joint press conference that Russia’s top priority at the talks in January would be to hammer out an agreement between both countries on the cuts, including “levels of reductions and the time frame for those reductions ... [and] the issues of verification and transparency” (Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, Dec. 18).

The two countries would limit negotiations to the aggregate limits of deployed warheads and would not include the structure of the nuclear forces. Ivanov predicted the two countries would likely reach an agreement on the cuts by June (Pavel Koryashkin, ITAR-Tass, Dec. 18).

“One way to characterize what’s happened in the United States-Russian relationship is the way President Bush did—that we’re moving from mutual assured destruction to mutual assured cooperation,” Rumsfeld said (Loeb, Washington Post, Dec. 18).

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Russia:  Keep ICBMs Only, Arbatov Says

Russia should consolidate its strategic nuclear forces by integrating them back into the general armed forces and deploying only land-based ICBMs, said Duma Defense Committee Deputy Chairman Alexei Arbatov yesterday.

“When you have little money, you concentrate all your resources on what is best and strongest,” Arbatov said in a wide-ranging Moscow press conference on nuclear arms policy.  “You do not spread your resources thin, especially on areas where you have always been far behind and will stay this way forever.”

“All our limited resources should be focused on that single component which is really organic to Russia, in which Russia is ahead of everyone, and which suits Russia most of all, and that is, of course, our land-based missiles,” Arbatov said.

The two remaining legs of the Russian nuclear triad—bombers and submarines—should be maintained until their service lives are over, Arbatov said.  “These triads and diads are relics of the Cold War,” he said.

All of Russia’s strategic forces should be incorporated under the command of the armed services to conserve resources and maximize coordination, Arbatov said, suggesting that the forces to be incorporated include offensive strategic weapons, the Moscow missile defense system (see related GSN story, today), early-warning systems and space-based military systems.

Russian Deterrence in Doubt

Arbatov was concerned that the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty would affect Russian security (see GSN, Dec. 13), contrary to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public statements (see GSN, Dec. 17).

After the recently announced nuclear reductions are completed, Russia would have about 1,500 strategic nuclear warheads, Arbatov said, plenty to overcome a limited U.S. missile defense.  Russian deterrence, however, needs to be considered from the perspective of Russia’s ability to retaliate after suffering an enemy’s first strike.

From that perspective, “I very much doubt that we will be able to penetrate [a U.S. national missile defense] under any and all circumstances,” Arbatov said.

“This is the hitch because in the first strike there may be 1,500 warheads in their silos.  In a retaliatory strike, depending on circumstances, there may be 15,” Arbatov said.

The Need for a Treaty

The U.S.-Russian nuclear reductions need to be codified by a treaty, Arbatov said (see related GSN story, today).  It could be a treaty with minimal verification provisions, but an agreement based on unilateral declarations “does not suit us,” he said.

“We have some unpleasant experience in terms of unilateral declarations connected with tactical nuclear weapons,” Arbatov said.  “[Former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev and [former U.S. President George] Bush Sr., then [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin and Bush Sr. made declarations and nobody can sort out what is happening—that’s unilateral declarations for you.”

“It’s a complete mess, nobody knows who has destroyed what and who has withdrawn what and from where.  So, we don’t want the same to be repeated in the field of strategic weapons,” Arbatov said.

Chinese Implications

China would probably respond to the U.S. ABM Treaty withdrawal by expanding its strategic nuclear forces, Arbatov said.  “China has more than enough money for that,” he said.  “If we speak about strategic missiles, they [currently] have 20 missiles.  In ten years they may have 500 or perhaps 1,000.”

“To Russia, this is entirely bad news,” he said.

“Considering the cuts of Russian strategic forces which will continue anyway, the growth of Chinese forces creates additional problems for Russia because the Chinese nuclear potential has always been targeted on Russia,” Arbatov said.

In addition, “a Chinese buildup will prompt India to start building up its potential.  And that in turn will prompt Pakistan to start a buildup.  It may spur on the process of nuclear proliferation in threshold countries.  All these countries are close to Russia and all of them will be able to reach Russia with their carriers at an early stage.  So, to us it is bad news all round,” Arbatov said (Federal News Service transcript, Dec. 17.)

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U.S. Testing:  Officials Conduct Subcritical Nuclear Test

The United States conducted a successful subcritical nuclear experiment last week at its Nevada test site, according to the U.S. Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration.  The test, called Oboe 7, involved small amounts of nuclear material and was subcritical, meaning “no self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction occurred,” an administration statement said.  Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California set off the experiment at 1 p.m. on Thursday.

The Oboe 7 was the 15^th such experiment the United States conducted since July 1997.  The experiments are designed to provide information about the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal without conducting full nuclear tests, which the United States froze indefinitely in 1992.  U.S. officials said they planned to conduct more experiments like the Oboe 7 in the future (Las Vegas Review-Journal, Dec. 14).

Anti-nuclear organizations have said the subcritical tests violate the spirit of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (Japan Economic Newswire, Dec. 13).  The United States signed the CTBT in 1996 but has not ratified it (Federation of American Scientists release, Dec. 18).

The Energy Department said the tests did not violate the treaty because no critical mass of fissile material was formed and no self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction took place during the experiments.

The test was originally scheduled for Wednesday but was delayed until Thursday due to operational support problems, the Energy Department said (Japan Economic Newswire).  A two-day strike by security guards was responsible for delaying the Oboe 7 test, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported last week (Keith Rogers, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Dec. 14).

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North Korea:  Nuclear Weapons Years Away, Says Report

North Korea has extracted sufficient plutonium to build one or two nuclear bombs but would need several years to build them, according to a South Korean Defense Ministry report published today. North Korea extracted 22 to 26 pounds of weapon-grade plutonium from its Soviet-designed nuclear reactors before 1994, the report said.  That year, North Korea struck a deal to freeze its nuclear weapons program in exchange for newly designed nuclear reactors from a U.S.-led consortium (see GSN, Nov. 9).

According to the South Korean report, North Korea faced significant obstacles obtaining components to produce dependable nuclear devices.  Between 1983 and 1993, however, the country conducted at least 70 nuclear-related high-explosive tests, and it continued such tests until 1998.

“North Korea may have a capability of putting together a crude nuclear explosion device … but its technology is believed to be still in a rudimentary stage,” the report said.  “Even if it has manufactured an explosion device, it will be still low in dependability and it will take the North at least several years to turn the system into a weapon.”

North Korea Sunday repeated its refusal (see GSN, Dec. 10) to allow nuclear inspections (Sang-Hun Choe, Associated Press/Yahoo.com, Dec. 18).

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U.S.-Russia:  Putin Announces Nuclear Reductions

Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to cut the Russian nuclear arsenal to a range of 1,500 to 2,200 warheads in response to a similar U.S. offer, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday.

“President Putin has now responded to [U.S. President George W. Bush’s] Washington-Crawford statement of reducing our strategic offensive inventory down to a range of 1,700 to 2,200 operationally deployed warheads,” Powell said (Elaine Monaghan, Reuters/Yahoo.com, Dec. 13).

The announced U.S. reduction (see GSN, Nov. 14) is a “pretty firm number,” Powell said, but the United States welcomed discussion on the issue.  “We want to hear why [Russia] feels that particular number is appropriate,” Powell said.  “Obviously our range fits within their range.  So there’s a way to square this circle.  I don’t know that it’s a problem” (Federal News Service transcript, Dec. 13).

The United States and Russia will continue work on a new arms control framework in order to bring everything into “some legal form” that the two presidents could sign when Bush travels to Moscow next year, Powell said (see GSN, Dec. 11). 

Powell said that the recent U.S. decision to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty had not triggered a new arms race with Russia (see related GSN story, today).

“Quite the contrary,” he said.  “The Russians have said they don’t see this as a threat to their national security and secondly they are going to go ahead with very deep cuts in their strategic offensive forces” (Monaghan, Reuters/Yahoo.com).

Putin Wants Cuts Codified

Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed Russia’s support for a legally binding treaty to codify the strategic nuclear reductions.

“I believe these agreements should have legal treaty form,” Putin said in an interview Thursday.  “I think without that, it could so happen that partners would have suspicions and misgivings about what was happening with the other party’s weapons—whether they had actually been reduced, what were the actual numbers, where the weapons were, had they been destroyed or had they just been dismantled and put in storage somewhere.  If they are stored they constitute so-called ‘reconstitution potential.’  In other words, the possibility would remain that those weapons could be put back on missiles,” Putin said.

“In other words, if we do have such a legal treaty, legal agreement, a transparent one with proper verification measures, the entire world could be safer and feel calmer,” Putin said.

Russian Nuclear Plans

Although Russia reserved the right to deploy more multiple-warhead ICBMs, Putin said Russia had no reason to do so at this time.  Russia’s deterrence capability would be secure even if the United States deployed a limited missile defense system, he said (Financial Times, Dec. 14).

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U.S.-China: High-Level Talks Will Not Be Negotiations

U.S.-Chinese discussions about strategic nuclear weapons would differ from U.S.-Russian discussions, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday.  U.S. President George W. Bush had offered new, high-level talks to China (see GSN, Dec. 14) when he telephoned Chinese President Jiang Zemin to inform him of the U.S. decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (see GSN, Dec. 13).

Boucher said the new talks will not be “a formal negotiation with the Chinese on missiles.  It’s not the same, say, as the kind of discussions we will have with the Russians about offensive cuts and bringing forward provisions of arms control.”

“Our discussions with the Chinese have been ongoing consultations and discussions about strategic issues, about our missile defense plans, seeking to gain their understanding, seeking to make sure that they knew what we were thinking, where we were going, and to hear back their views from them.  So that is a process that has been ongoing that we will continue,” Boucher said (U.S. State Department release, Dec. 14).

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North Korea:  Officials Visit South Korean Nuclear Facilities

A delegation of 20 North Korean officials arrived in South Korea yesterday to begin a two-week visit to observe South Korean nuclear power plants, South Korean officials said.  The group included officials involved in the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea (see GSN, Dec. 11).

“The North Koreans are scheduled to look at nuclear power stations which have light-water reactors and plants that are producing parts to be used in the North Korean reactor construction,” said an official for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization.  KEDO is an international consortium that helps build the reactors in exchange for freezing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program (Korea Herald, Dec. 17).

The North Korean delegation is scheduled to visit nuclear power plants in Ulchin on the east coast and Kori on the southeast coast, and Doosan Heavy Industries Company on the south coast, where reactors for the North Korean plants are under construction, according to the Associated Press.

KEDO is responsible for training hundreds of North Koreans to operate the two reactors once they are installed in North Korea.  In addition to this month’s delegates, the organization expects to train 290 more North Koreans in South Korea by the end of next year (Associated Press/South China Morning Post, Dec. 17).

“It is the first time for North Korea to get access to the facilities,” said a senior KEDO official, according to Agence France-Presse (Jun Kwan-Woo, Agence France-Presse, Dec. 17).

North Korean officials visited nuclear power plants in Spain and Sweden last month (Korea Herald, Dec. 18).

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IAEA:  U.N. Urges Compliance With Agency Activities

The U.N. General Assembly Friday urged all member states to support International Atomic Energy Agency efforts to prevent terrorist attacks involving nuclear and other radioactive materials.  Assembly members adopted a resolution calling on states to strengthen the safety of their nuclear installations, to implement and enhance safeguard agreements on nuclear materials and to assist the IAEA’s work.  The resolution also urged states to work with the IAEA to strengthen technical assistance for developing countries.

The assembly called on North Korea to comply with its safeguard agreements and to allow the IAEA to verify the country's compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (see GSN, Dec. 3).  The assembly said it could not conclude whether nuclear material had been diverted from North Korea.

The resolution also addressed nuclear issues in Middle Eastern states.  It requested that those states comply with IAEA safeguards on all nuclear activities, adhere to international nonproliferation regimes and establish a nuclear weapon-free zone.

The resolution received 150 votes in favor with only North Korea voting against it.  Cote d'Ivoire and Laos abstained (U.N. release, Dec. 14).

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