Overview
	Technical Background
	The Threat
	Securing Nuclear Warheads and Materials
	Interdicting Nuclear Smuggling
	Stabilizing Employment for Nuclear Personnel
Monitoring Stockpiles   Highly Enriched Uranium Transparency   IAEA Monitoring of Excess Material   Mayak Storage Facility Transparency   Warhead Dismantlement Transparency   Nuclear Stockpile Declarations
	Ending Further Production
	Reducing Stockpiles

 

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Previous Publications
	Funding for U.S. Efforts to Improve Controls Over Nuclear Weapons, Materials, and Expertise Overseas: Recent Developments and Trends February2007 Readthe Full Report (1.5M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb 2006 The latest report in our series, from May 2006, finds that even though the gap between the threat of nuclear terrorism and the response has narrowed in recent years, there remains an unacceptable danger that terrorists might succeed in their quest to get and use a nuclear bomb, turning a modern city into a smoking ruin. Offering concrete steps to confront that danger, the report calls for world leaders to launch a fast-paced global coalition against nuclear terrorism focused on locking down all stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials worldwide as rapidly as possible. Read the Executive Summary (379K PDF) or the Full Report (1.7M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb 2005: The New Global Imperatives Our May 2005 report finds that while the United States and other countries laid important foundations for an accelerated effort to prevent nuclear terrorism in the last year, sustained presidential leadership will be needed to win the race to lock down the world’s nuclear stockpiles before terrorists and thieves can get to them. Read the Executive Summary (281 K) or the Full Report (1.9M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb: An Agenda for Action Building on the previous years' reports, this 2004 NTI-commissioned report grades current efforts and recommends new actions to more effectively prevent nuclear terrorism. It finds that programs to reduce this danger are making progress, but there remains a potentially deadly gap between the urgency of the threat and the scope and pace of efforts to address it. Download the Full Report (1.2 M PDF) Выписки из доклада по-русски (423K PDF)
	Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan 2003 report published by Harvard and NTI measures the progress made in keeping nuclear weapons and materials out of terrorist hands, and outlines a comprehensive plan to reduce the danger. Download the Full Report (2.7M PDF)
	Securing Nuclear Weapons and Materials: Seven Steps for Immediate Action 2002 report co-published by Harvard and NTI outlines seven urgent steps to reduce the threat of stolen nuclear weapons or materials falling into the hands of terrorists or hostile states. Read the Full Report (516K PDF)

Monitoring Stockpiles

Nuclear Stockpile Declarations

Status

Formal stockpile data exchange negotiations. Throughout the history of negotiated arms control, declarations by each party of its holdings of the items to be limited have been fundamental without a declaration specifying how many of what items are where, it is very difficult to verify whether a country is complying with the agreed limitations. Moreover, as discussed in Monitoring Stockpiles and Reductions, information on the size, distribution, and condition of the stockpiles is crucial to sizing the problem and managing cooperative efforts to upgrade security and accounting. Hence, for many years, a variety of analysts and officials have proposed various types of exchanges of data on stockpiles of nuclear warheads and materials.

In 1992, in ratifying the first Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START I), the U.S. Senate attached the Biden Condition, which required that "in connection with any further agreement reducing strategic offensive arms, the President shall seek" an agreement to monitor the numbers of nuclear warheads in the stockpiles of the parties, and the location and inventories of facilities with significant quantities of fissile materials, including data exchanges. Since START II was then almost complete, this condition was interpreted as applying to START III.[1] At about the same time, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev proposed a data exchange on warheads and fissile materials.[2] At the end of the following year, German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel proposed the establishment of an international "nuclear weapons register" containing declarations from each nuclear weapon state concerning their stockpiles of nuclear weapons; in some formulations, stockpiles of plutonium and HEU would be included as well. This proposal was generally rebuffed by the nuclear weapon states.[3]

At their September 1994 summit, however, President Clinton and President Yeltsin agreed that for the first time ever, the two sides would exchange "detailed information" on "aggregate stockpiles of nuclear warheads, on stocks of fissile materials and on their safety and security."[4] This commitment became part of the negotiations in what was called the "Safeguards, Transparency, and Irreversibility" (STI) talks,[5] and was reiterated in a more elaborate statement on transparency and irreversibility at the next Clinton-Yeltsin summit in May 1995.[6] The focus of these discussions was on a confidential exchange between the two governments, not on data that would be made available to the public. The United States tabled a draft data exchange agreement in the summer of 1995, including a proposed list of the data to be exchanged.[7] The U.S. proposal called for exchanging data on the total number of warheads in the stockpiles; the numbers of warheads in each major category (e.g., ICBM warheads vs. bomber weapons vs. cruise missile warheads); the number produced and dismantled each year, going back to 1980; the total quantities of separated plutonium and HEU; and the amounts of plutonium and HEU produced each year since 1970.[8]

Russian negotiators cut off the STI talks in late 1995, and there was never a formal discussion of the U.S. data exchange draft but discussions with Russian experts made clear that the U.S. draft called for an exchange far more detailed than the Russian government had been envisioning. Some Russian experts concluded that the United States "wanted everything," and that its data exchange proposals represented a thinly veiled intelligence fishing expedition.[9]

With the end of the STI talks in late 1995, the issue of formally negotiated nuclear stockpile data exchanges lay dormant for a time. At their Helsinki summit in March, 1997, Clinton and Yeltsin agreed that a third Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START III) should include "measures relating to the transparency of strategic nuclear warhead inventories," as well as transparency measures for the dismantlement of such warheads and they agreed that, as a separate issue, negotiators should "consider the issues related to transparency in nuclear materials."[10] It took several years for formal negotiations on this agenda to begin, however, because of disputes over the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. The draft U.S. START III agreement proposed in January-February 2000 included a Memorandum of Understanding that proposed exchanging data on: nuclear warhead storage site locations, with the number of warheads at each; the location and number of all containers of plutonium and HEU from dismantled nuclear warheads; the number of warheads that each facility had recently assembled or disassembled; the location of nuclear material warhead cores ("primaries," or "pits") outside of warheads; and data on nuclear material that had been used as fuel or disposed of in accordance with international agreements.[11]

These proposals, like their predecessors, were never discussed in detail before the talks came to an end at the end of the Clinton administration to be replaced by the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) of May 2002, which includes no verification or data exchange provisions at all. As of early 2003, there was some discussion within the U.S. government of the possibility of pursuing some form of data exchanges perhaps related to tactical nuclear warheads through the bilateral implementation commission established by SORT, or the joint commission on strategic security established at the May 2002 summit, but no formal negotiations on nuclear stockpile data exchanges were underway.[12]

In essence, the tale of these formal negotiations on stockpile declarations is one of the United States making sweeping proposals some not supported by significant parts of its own weapons bureaucracy and offering no strong incentive (strategic or financial) for the Russian side to accept them. Predictably, Russian officials were not motivated to do the hard political work of overcoming decades of Communist secrecy when there appeared to be little payoff for doing so. This, indeed, is the tale of U.S.-Russian transparency negotiations more generally.

Informal or unilateral stockpile declarations. While no significant progress has been made in formal stockpile declarations negotiations, there has been considerable informal and unilateral progress. The United States has released very detailed information on its inventory of plutonium; for HEU, it has released information on the total produced during the Cold War, but not information on the current inventory that remains in stockpile. All told, the United States declared that as of 1994, it had a government stockpile of 99.5 metric tons of plutonium (weapon-grade, fuel-grade, and reactor-grade), of which 52.5 tons (53% of the total) have been declared excess to U.S. military needs. The U.S. declared that it had produced 994 tons of HEU; the remaining inventory, after use as naval fuel, in nuclear weapon tests, and for other purposes, was estimated to be in the range of 750 tons in the early 1990s, of which 174 tons (23% of the total) have been declared excess.[13] Since then, more than 30 tons of the excess HEU has been blended down, reducing the total stockpile to something in the range of 720 tons.[14] A detailed report on the HEU inventory was promised when the plutonium report was issued, and has been completed, but given the Bush administration's emphasis on secrecy the prospects for its release appear slim. The United States has also released a large number of historical details on its weapons stockpile including the total number of warheads in the stockpile for each year from 1945-1961 but has so far declined to release current data on the warhead stockpile. Retired General Eugene Habiger, the former commander of U.S. strategic nuclear forces, when serving as the security czar at the Department of Energy, proposed "declassification of total nuclear weapon stockpile quantities (past, present, and future) and subcategorization of those quantities by purpose, delivery system, and active/inactive status, but not by location, or specific weapon type," but was rebuffed by the Department of Defense, which jointly controls classification of this information with the Department of Energy.[15]

Part of the purpose of the U.S. declarations was to encourage other nuclear weapon states to follow the U.S. example. To date, only the United Kingdom has done so, releasing data on its total stockpiles of weapons plutonium and HEU; a detailed study of its production, consumption, and current stockpile of plutonium, in some ways comparable to the U.S. plutonium report;and a statement that in the future it will maintain only 200 "operationally available" nuclear warheads.[16] The British declaration indicated that Britain possessed 7.6 tons of plutonium, 21.9 tons of HEU, and 15,000 tons of natural and low-enriched uranium outside of safeguards, of which 4.4 tons of plutonium (58% of the total), none of the HEU, and over 9,000 tons of the natural and low-enriched uranium were excess to its military needs.[17] (All British HEU is being reserved for use in nuclear weapons or as naval fuel, as is most of the U.S. HEU stockpile.)

In 1998, nine of the countries with the largest stockpiles of civilian plutonium agreed to a set of "Guidelines for the Management of Plutonium" that included a requirement for annual declarations of their stockpiles of civilian plutonium, which these countries have been making ever since.[18] While the guidelines did not include comparable requirements for declaring civilian HEU stockpiles, some countries, such as France, have provided voluntary declarations of these stocks.

An important informal initiative now underway is U.S.-Russian lab-to-lab cooperation to put together data on Russia's current stockpile and historic production of weapons plutonium, comparable to the data the United States has already released. The American and British plutonium reports represented, in effect, self-audits attempting to match records on how much plutonium had been produced, and how much had been consumed, to how much plutonium was now on hand. Given that this plutonium was produced over a period of several decades, in absolute secrecy, in an environment in which building as many nuclear weapons as possible, rather than detailed record-keeping, was the paramount goal, matching historical production to current holdings turned out to be a quite difficult project. In the U.S. case, 2.8 metric tons of plutonium (out of 111.4 tons produced or acquired) were effectively written off as "inventory differences"; these almost certainly are not the result of plutonium thefts, but rather are caused by such factors as uncertainties in how much plutonium is "held up" in process at different sites, uncertainties in measurement of the plutonium on hand and the plutonium lost to waste, and uncertainties in how much plutonium the plutonium production reactors produced in the first place.

With U.S. funding, U.S. and Russian experts have held two workshops to discuss the U.S. experience in performing its self-audit, and the possibility of Russia performing a similar report, referred to in Russia as a "plutonium registry." Russian experts have developed a methodology for the task, and are beginning by preparing an audit of Russia's civilian plutonium stockpile. Once the method has been demonstrated on the civilian plutonium stockpile, a political decision will be needed on whether Russia will prepare such data on its military plutonium stockpiles as well, and whether it will provide that data to the United States or others.[19]

If Russia does decide to prepare a full inventory, and to provide the resulting data to the United States, this would be a significant transparency breakthrough. Moreover, by forcing Russian experts to go back through their own records and attempt to reconcile current plutonium holdings with the paper records stretching back to the 1940s, it would create a new focus on accurate accounting and keeping the books up to date; in all likelihood, the process of shifting from paper records to computerized ones updated in near-real-time and reported to a central national database would be significantly accelerated. If successful, such an informal lab-to-lab approach could then be applied to HEU stockpiles as well. This would provide a means to accomplish a substantial part of the stockpile data exchange agreed to by Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin in 1994 without requiring high-level formal negotiations.

Confirming the information declared. An obvious question, when a country makes a declaration of its holdings of nuclear warheads or materials, is: is it accurate? If the number of warheads or the amounts of materials were declared along with their locations and the amount at each location, confirming that these items really were present at those locations would be relatively straightforward. The United States proposed limited "spot checks" at declared fissile material sites to help confirm the fissile material declarations in the STI talks, and such "baseline inspections" have been a part of many arms control agreements. The more difficult problem is confirming that there are no other hidden stockpiles that is, that the declaration is not only accurate but complete. Nuclear warheads and containers of nuclear material have no tell-tale signatures strong enough to make it possible to find them if they are hidden in a cave somewhere, for example.

But by exchanging data from a wide range of different points in the warhead life-cycle (including historical production, consumption, and destruction records), and comparing this data with what is known from other sources (including inspections and intelligence), substantial confidence can be built that declarations are generally accurate.[20] If inspections are to make a substantial contribution to building such confidence, then the declarations must be detailed enough for inspectors to check the holdings at a particular site against what was declared, and the declarations must include information on locations. This is the approach that was taken in confirming the dismantlement of South Africa's nuclear weapons program (during which South Africa provided hundreds of historical documents, and allowed inspectors unfettered opportunities to interview participants in the program), the approach that revealed that North Korea's declarations of past plutonium production were not accurate, and the approach that inspectors in Iraq were taking in the 1990s and took again in the latest round of inspections there.[21] As the Bush administration has made clear, if the state making the declaration cooperates sincerely, such an approach can provide acceptable confidence that the declaration is accurate[22] though in the case of huge and complex nuclear programs such as those of the United States and Russia, the possibility of a small number of hidden weapons or a small mount of hidden nuclear material could never be entirely ruled out. Many of the other items that have been limited by negotiated agreement from chemical weapons to cruise missiles are also potentially easily hidden. In the end, the overall benefits of an agreement must be weighed against the possibility of such clandestine stockpiles in an overall determination of whether the agreement serves national security.

In the case of plutonium in particular, as a reactor produces plutonium parts of the reactor structure are struck by neutrons and become radioactive; from the characteristics of this radioactivity, the amount of plutonium produced in that reactor can be estimated reasonably accurately.[23] Exchanging records of production and electricity supply to enrichment plants can help build confidence that HEU declarations are accurate,[24] and exchanging assembly, disassembly, and maintenance records can similarly back up declarations of warhead stockpiles. Pursuing a cooperative approach with experts from all parties working to match the historical data to the stocks currently on hand, as is proposed for plutonium, can boost confidence tremendously. If such measures are to be pursued, it is important not to wait too long, as many of the key people who understand how the production was done and how the records were kept thirty and forty years ago (and where those records now are) are retiring or dying, and in many cases information will be irrevocably lost.[25] By combining stockpile declarations with cooperative measures to build confidence in their accuracy, much of what is needed for an overall regime to control nuclear warheads and materials could be put in place.

Budget

See budget table

While additional administrative funds and time have certainly been spent on investigations and negotiations by U.S. personnel, the only amount allocated in a separate line item by DOE for activities related to stockpile declarations was $500,000 in fiscal year (FY) 2001 for the creation of a registry of Russia's plutonium production and stockpile, as discussed above.[26] Other funding for support of work related to stockpile declarations has come from the budget for DOE's Warhead and Fissile Material Transparency assistance.

Key Issues and Recommendations

Lack of progress toward full U.S.-Russian warhead and fissile material stockpile declarations. As noted in the text, despite the importance of such exchanges of data, no further U.S.-Russian negotiations toward a stockpile data exchange are planned, and informal approaches are so far focusing only on civilian plutonium data as a first step.

• Recommendation: The United States should continue the cooperation with Russia to prepare a Russian civilian plutonium registry, and work to convince Russia to expand this effort to a complete plutonium registry, and to make data available to the United States, or even publish it, at least at the level of detail published by the United States.
  
  
• Recommendation: Should the plutonium registry effort succeed, the United States should work with Russia on a similar approach to preparing an HEU report, outlining historical production, consumption, and current inventories. In that context, the United States should update and publish its own HEU report, which is currently based on 1996 data.
  
  
• Recommendation: In forums such as the Bilateral Implementation Commission established by the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or the U.S.-Russian strategic stability group, the United States should again propose a stockpile data exchange with Russia. This time, the United States should propose a step-by-step approach, beginning with simple numbers on the total numbers of warheads (perhaps divided into strategic and tactical, deployed and not deployed), the total number of tons of separated plutonium, and the total number of tons of HEU each side has, along with the number of warheads assembled and the number disassembled over the past year (and perhaps the total assembled and disassembled since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991). The United States should seek to provide incentives for Russian agreement to such a data exchange by offering flexibility on other matters of concern to Russia, or by offering financial incentives (such as, for example, an offer to buy 5% of whatever stockpile of HEU Russia declares, above and beyond currently planned purchases). If such an exchange of basic data is successful, it can be built on and made more detailed in the future.

Lack of participation by most other weapon states. While the United Kingdom has independently made declarations concerning its plutonium and HEU stockpiles (and a vaguer statement on its warhead stockpile), neither France nor China (the other nuclear weapon states acknowledged by the NPT) have done so. Nor have the other states that have nuclear weapons, India, Pakistan, and Israel.

• Recommendation: The United States, Russia, and Britain should work with France and China to attempt to convince them to make full declarations of their plutonium, HEU, and warhead stockpiles, and future plans. It may make sense to establish a common framework for reporting these data, comparable to the common framework for reporting civilian plutonium in the plutonium management guidelines.
  
  
• Recommendation: For the foreseeable future, it would probably be counterproductive for India, Pakistan, and Israel to declare openly how many nuclear weapons they had, especially as part of a declarations regime with the other nuclear weapon states that might seem to give formal legitimacy to their weapon stockpiles. Declarations of how much plutonium and HEU each country had outside of safeguards could be useful, but there are arguments on both sides as to whether such declarations would be desirable.[27]

Lack of provisions for confirming information declared. With little progress toward negotiated data exchanges on nuclear weapons and material stockpiles, there has necessarily been essentially no progress on inspections and other measures to confirm such data once exchanged.

• Recommendation: As recommended above, the United States should pursue with Russia a cooperative, informal approach to pulling together data on plutonium stockpiles, and eventually on HEU stockpiles as well. For any data that Russia is willing to provide, the United States should be willing to provide comparable data, if it has not already. While this approach must be pursued step-by-step to build the needed confidence and cooperation, at the same time it should not be unduly delayed, to avoid the potentially irrevocable losses resulting from deaths, retirements, and the loss or destruction of old records.
  
  
• Recommendation: The United States should work with Russia (ideally also on an informal, lab-to-lab level) to begin joint experiments on the technology of using examination of the radioactive properties of reactor structures to confirm how much plutonium was produced in those reactors.[28] 

Open vs. confidential exchanges. The formal data exchanges the United States and Russia discussed in the 1990s were to be confidential. The U.S. and British declarations that have been made to date have been openly published. Confidential exchanges can help build confidence among the parties to the exchange and some states, including Russia, may be more willing to agree to provide stockpile information if it will be kept confidential[29] but confidential exchanges do little to build confidence among the public or the international community.

• Recommendation: The United States should carefully consider the best approaches to publishing or exchanging nuclear stockpile information. In general, the best approach will often be to provide assurances of confidentiality to partners in data exchanges, while working to convince them of the virtues of agreement to make at least aggregate data public.

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