Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- A senior White House adviser yesterday gave a sobering assessment of the nuclear nonproliferation challenges that face the Obama administration as it works toward a world free of atomic weapons (see GSN, Oct. 6).

"The thing that keeps me up at night? Pakistan," White House Coordinator for WMD Counterterrorism and Arms Control Gary Samore. "This is a country that is facing very serious internal and external security threats, has a dysfunctional political system [and] is seeking to expand its nuclear weapons program."

Recent satellite images show Pakistan has made significant progress toward completing its third heavy-water reactor at Khushab, even while the country is racked with insurgency and recovering from devastating floods. The nation is estimated to have as many as 80 nuclear warheads in its arsenal.

Samore said the United States has been "lucky" that nuclear war has not erupted between Pakistan and its atomically armed rival India, or that the civilian government in Islamabad has not lost control of its stockpile. However, "things could go very badly in South Asia very quickly," he said during a panel discussion at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"We have extremely limited policy tools to affect that," he told the audience. "We can't occupy countries and hope to secure all of their nuclear material. That's really beyond our capacity."

Samore later admitted his nightmare scenario is a "toss-up" between Pakistan falling into political chaos and North Korea selling its nuclear material and expertise to other countries.

The United States already suspects Pyongyang of helping Syria to construct a nuclear reactor for producing weapon-grade uranium, a charge Damascus has refuted (see GSN, Oct. 14). The site was bombed by Israel in 2007. Pyongyang is also alleged to be helping Myanmar develop a potential nuclear weapons program (see GSN, July 22).

North Korea and Pakistan are among only a "handful" of nations that hold nuclear materials and face the threat of government collapse, Samore said. The challenges such states pose to the international nonproliferation regime, though, are "very, very dramatic," he argued.

Samore said the United States would continue to work with Islamabad to improve the country's nuclear security by providing additional training or equipment.

"Obviously in the case of North Korea we can't do that," Samore said. "We are at the mercy of forces we have very little control over."

The isolated Stalinist state has conducted two nuclear test blasts to date and is believed to hold sufficient plutonium for about six weapons. It withdrew from six-nation talks on its nuclear program in April 2009 and is a widely recognized proliferator.

Samore noted that North Korea and Iran have a documented history of cooperation on ballistic missile systems. Tehran could easily request assistance for its nascent nuclear reactor program, which has experienced a string of setbacks, he said.

Claims by the Middle Eastern state that its nuclear activities have no military component are "a lie," he told the audience.

Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons "would have an utterly catastrophic effect" on the region, possibly triggering war if Israel attempted to bomb any facilities and potentially driving neighboring countries to seek their own atomic arsenals, according to Samore.

In addition, it would make President Obama's vision of a nuclear weapon-free world "almost impossible" because existing nuclear powers would not want to give up or reduce their stockpiles, the WMD coordinator said.

A nuclear Iran would also "undercut" the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and other "international instruments" for managing the use of atomic materials, according to Samore.

"Trying to stop Iran is my No. 1 job," he added, touting the administration's work obtaining additional economic sanctions against the Middle East nation (see related GSN story, today).

Iran, thus far, has shrugged off four U.N. Security Council sanctions resolutions aimed at curbing its uranium enrichment effort, along with unilateral actions by the United States and other nations.

For his part, Samore said he did not know if the latest economic punishment would quell Tehran's nuclear ambitions but that such efforts, as well as U.S. import and export controls, have slowed Iran's program by years.

The Inside Threat

Alongside proliferation concerns posed by nations, a potentially greater risk is the "insider threat" posed by professionals who decide to steal, sell or use nuclear or radiological substances they work with, Samore said. He acknowledged that there are certain countries the United States is concerned about but refrained from offering names.

"You need to have good personnel reliability programs and the challenge for us internationally is to convince other governments that that's the threat they really need to put resources against," he told the audience. "Once you establish a sort of baseline for physical security, it becomes much more about the people."

However, Samore stopped short of saying there should be universal standard for physical security and personnel reliability efforts for nuclear facilities around the globe.

"In a perfect world we would like to have universal standards, we would like to have an international organization that had the authority and the competence" to check and make sure governments had put in place adequate physical protection and personnel reliability programs, he said. "But that's not possible in this world."

He said countries often regard protecting their nuclear materials as a sovereign right and would be hesitant to join an international regime that would legally bind them to certain standards akin to International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards requirements for its member nations.

Rather than creating new treaties or institutions, the United States and other nuclear powers must work toward a more "consensual" system to provide security assistance to other countries, according to Samore.

"I wish it were otherwise, but that's the reality we're dealing with," he added.

To better address the threat, Obama this spring convened a two-day summit in Washington with 47 heads of state and dignitaries to discuss ways to improve nuclear security. Participants agreed to lock down the world's loose nuclear material within four years (see GSN, April 14).

Samore described the nuclear summit as "the best thing to happen" to him in the last year.

A second summit is scheduled for 2012 in South Korea. The administration expects to have four rounds of experts meetings before then, including one by the end of the calendar year in Buenos Aires.

Samore said that over the next four years he would like to see additional countries join existing international regimes that focus on atomic materials, such as the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material. The 1980 compact establishes measures on the prevention, detection and punishment of offenses relating to nuclear material, according to an IAEA fact sheet.

He would also like to see the U.N.'s atomic watchdog strengthened in order to more actively provide security assistance and training to countries.

There is also more work that could be done to increase cooperation among the law enforcement and intelligence communities to better prevent cross-border nuclear smuggling, according to Samore. He did not elaborate or cite specific instances in which better cooperation would have helped.

Samore gave thanks that nuclear security is a far less contentious issue than others in his portfolio.

"Every government agrees that nuclear weapons and nuclear materials should be adequately protected so that terrorists or criminals can't get their hands on them," he said.

"Almost everything else I work on, whether it's nuclear disarmament or nonproliferation ... are highly contentious and there is no international consensus," Samore added.

While there might be disputes between countries over the likelihood of a nuclear security breach "everybody agrees that it's worth investing resources to make sure that nuclear weapons and materials don't fall out of government control."