Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- Two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the threat of a terrorist or criminal organization acquiring and smuggling nuclear or radioactive materials out of Russia or its former states persists, nonproliferation experts familiar with the issue say (see GSN, Sept. 29).

"If we think back to the early 1990s, that was a pretty damn scary time in which we realized the world's largest, WMD-armed empire was collapsing in upon itself ... The threat of terrorist acquisition was at its greatest then," said Brian Finlay, a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. Today, "we don't have one giant problem, but we have many, many little problems," he said.

"It's clear that the work is far from complete," Finlay added.

The most recent instance of attempted smuggling of fissile material was detailed in a report from the office of U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.). Law enforcement officials in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, detained six suspected traffickers and confiscated 4.4 grams of uranium in a sting operation (see GSN, Sept. 27).

"We're a lot better off now than we were 20 years ago, I don't think there's any question about that. The security at the facilities is a lot better than it used to be," said Ken Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security. "The problem is there's a huge number of these facilities and in Russia in particular, there's a huge amount of material, the largest amount of fissile material in the world."

"The protection that we put in place there is very good physical protection ... but the much more difficult aspect of this is on the accounting and control of how much material is actually out there," he told Global Security Newswire in a Monday phone interview.

According to the most recent estimate by the International Panel on Fissile Materials, Russia alone is believed to possess more than 10,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, while several neighboring nations that once made up the Eastern bloc hold anywhere from 100 to 1,000 kilograms of the material.

Diplomatic cables made public this year by the transparency organization WikiLeaks showed that U.S. embassies in Africa, Asia and Europe reported cases of possible smuggling of sensitive materials between 2007 and 2009 (see GSN, Feb. 9).

Perhaps the most widely cited example to date has been a string of incidents in Georgia that involved trafficking of highly enriched uranium.

In 2010, Georgian officials said that a pair of Armenian nationals had pleaded guilty to attempting to sell to undercover agents in Tbilisi two-thirds of an ounce of bomb-grade uranium (see GSN, Nov. 22, 2010). It marked the third time the movement of illicit nuclear materials had been uncovered in that country, a former Soviet republic.

"It's not just about trafficking in nuclear or radiological materials," said Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists. "Often what we'll see is that these traffickers may be involved in criminal networks, other sorts of illicit activities, trafficking in drugs, counterfeiting ... They're interested in any kind of activity that can earn them money."

The best known catalog of nuclear smuggling incidents is the International Atomic Energy Agency's Illicit Trafficking Database, which documents member-confirmed occurrences. The database recorded a total of 1,773 incidents between January 1993 and December 2009 that involved the illegal movement of nuclear or radioactive materials. Of those, 351 concerned unauthorized possession of materials or criminal activities.

From July 2009 to June 2010, 222 incidents were reported, according to a database fact sheet. Recorded incidents included 21 cases of possession or criminal activities, 61 of theft or loss and 140 of other unauthorized activities.

There were also five episodes during that period that involved highly enriched uranium or plutonium; one was related to illegal possession, while the other four were linked to other unauthorized activities.

Meanwhile, the Database on Nuclear Smuggling, Theft and Orphan Radiation Sources culls information from government cases, as well as unconfirmed, open-source reports, and includes incidents without criminal intent.

The list, run out of the University of Salzburg in Austria, covers years from 1991 to 2009 and contains more than 2,440 cases, including 1,674 incidents of theft, illegal movement, and border detection of radioactive materials, according to Friedrich Steinhäusler and Lyudmila Zaitseva, who oversee the database.

There were also 736 cases of "orphan sources," which had either been lost, accidentally found or misrouted on their way to a recipient; and 35 "malevolent acts," such as intentional irradiation of people and contamination of their homes and belongings, the two researchers found.

"It's one of those events where you may think the risk is not that high but you've got to pay a lot of attention simply because the consequence is so huge," said Steven Pifer, director of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

Efforts to Date

After the collapse of the Soviet regime, lawmakers in Washington labored to develop initiatives to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, most notably Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction. Its aim has been to lock down and eliminate such unconventional arms.

The "initial focus there was on securing nuclear weapons in the post-Soviet space," Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said in a recent phone interview.

Since it was established in 1991, the CTR program has helped deactivate 7,601 strategic nuclear warheads and destruction of 791 ICBMs, 498 ICBM silos, 182 mobile ICBM launchers, 670 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, 492 SLBM launchers, 33 ballistic missile-capable submarines, 155 strategic bombers, 906 nuclear air-to-surface missiles and 194 nuclear test tunnels, according to an October scorecard from Lugar's office.

The United States government and other world capitals also stood up a variety of nonproliferation efforts designed to prevent terrorists from acquiring fissile material that could be used in a nuclear device.

One of the flagship programs in that work has been the National Nuclear Security Administration's Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which aims to reduce and remove "high-priority" vulnerable nuclear material, such as highly enriched uranium, from overseas sites and convert HEU-fueled research reactors to use proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium fuel.

Ferguson said the threat reduction initiative built upon previously established efforts, such as the Megatons to Megawatts program that helped show the Cold War opponents that "they faced a common threat in terrorists looking to get their hands on highly enriched uranium."

By the end of the 1990s, Pifer said, "there was a sense we had really accomplished what needed to be accomplished" in terms of securing Russia's warheads.

By that time, most of nuclear weapons that had once been deployed outside the country had been relocated back within its borders, he noted. In addition, high-level American observers had the opportunity to visit revamped Russian nuclear facilities and found they were "pretty secure."

Since then, the international community has gradually shifted its focus away from securing the former Stalinist state's nuclear weapons to locking down loose nuclear material worldwide, the nonproliferation analysts said.

Loose nuclear material is generally defined as actual weapons, fissile material or atomic know-how from the former Soviet Union and beyond that could fall into the hands of rogue nations or nonstate actors.

The containment of such material received a significant boost when it became a cornerstone of the nonproliferation agenda that President Obama laid out shortly after taking office. Last year, he convened in the first-ever Global Nuclear Security Summit. World leaders and dignitaries from 47 countries and three international organizations unanimously pledged to secure global stocks of nuclear material within four years.

The White House also released a work plan that spelled out additional steps that nations would undertake to achieve nuclear security. The roadmap emphasized augmenting existing nonproliferation measures such as U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540 (see GSN, April 14, 2010). Attendees also agreed to hold a second summit next year in Seoul.

The two-day conference in April 2010 was important to heading off possible future smuggling efforts because it showed some countries in the developing world that they "lack a security culture," Finlay told GSN last week. He declined to offer specific examples.

"In truth, they've got 40 other issues that are much higher security priorities to them and they have nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction," he said. Finlay added that Russian leaders understood that their Cold War nuclear materials posed a security challenge.

U.S. government officials have credited the summit with bringing attention and a sense of renewed energy to the topics of nuclear security and smuggling. In that vein, U.S. and Slovakian officials recently met under the auspices of the State Department's Nuclear Smuggling Outreach Initiative to hammer out ways to boost bilateral efforts against nuclear material trafficking.

Observers predict that the meeting would prove to be just one of many as Washington works to help establish dedicated efforts with other governments allied against such illicit trafficking through local law enforcement.

The Future

Though the chances of terrorist or criminal groups obtaining and trafficking nuclear materials has waned over the last 20 years, experts warn that it is a problem that will exist for the foreseeable future.

"I think this is something that needs to be monitored vigilantly forever," Luongo said.

While the exact amount of Russian nuclear material remaining from the Cold War period is unknown, additional radioactive sources are being produced by other atomic powers such as Pakistan and India, said Luongo, adding that the nuclear-armed rivals are engaged in a "miniature fissile material production race."

"It's impossible to get a grip on the problem unless you can bound it," Luongo told GSN.

Pifer said that while security officials around the globe must remain alert about potential smuggling attempts, "the actual risk of this stuff moving in the way people fear is probably less than we may think."

One reason why an illicit organization might decide not to deal with such materials is that the risk is simply too great, he said.

"I'm not sure if criminal groups want to get involved in this," Pifer said. "If you're a criminal group and all of a sudden you decide to get into the business of smuggling highly enriched uranium or plutonium, I think you have to make the calculation that, 'OK, right now police authorities are out to get me. If I get involved in that, though, I've got large country intelligence networks coming after me.' It's a whole different game."

He also said the tendency to label Russia as the source of loose nuclear material is "unfair" to Moscow. Russian security services have a "huge interest in stopping this because they cannot assume that if a significant amount of highly enriched uranium got out to the bad guys somewhere ... that that would not be detonated somewhere in Russia," Pifer said.

Luongo said, though, that the region as a whole continues to contend with serious smuggling problems.

"It's got to be coming from that region because it keeps getting caught in that region," he argued.

Ferguson pointed out that most of the alleged smuggling networks are broken up by local law enforcement officials and sting operations, a trend he sees continuing well into the future.

"This is not something where we need any kind of heavy military response," he said in a phone interview last week. "We need smart law enforcement and matching that up with intelligence assessments" in order to create a "promising nexus on the good guys' side."

Finlay stressed the importance of investing in a host of programs that ultimately could help offset the chances of material being moved illegally, such as counter-trafficking operations, scientific community engagement and increased intelligence gathering.

"It's not simply a matter of locking down the material we know about and the problem goes away," he said. "We'll never get to that world."