E-Notes

Rethinking Nuclear Security Strategy

by Rensselaer Lee

September 2, 2005

Dr. Lee is an FPRI Senior Fellow and the author of Smuggling Armageddon: The Nuclear Black Market in the Former Soviet Union and Europe (St. Martin’s-Palgrave, 1999). This essay is based on a talk delivered at the CATO Institute on June 29, 2005.

Nonproliferation is the pre-eminent national security issue of our time, and there is probably no more important U.S. foreign policy goal than keeping nuclear weapons and the ingredients and know-how to make them out of the hands of those who would do us harm. But our current policies appear inadequate to this formidable task. A more comprehensive, proactive, and intelligence-based approach is required.

The current U.S. nonproliferation strategy consists of three main components. One is to secure nuclear materials and warheads at the sites where they are stored. Many consider protecting materials at the source the first line of defense in containing the nuclear smuggling threat. The second line of defense aims at improving border and cargo monitoring at the frontier crossings and embarkation points most likely to be used by smugglers. The idea is to intercept target materials that have broken loose from authorized storage— that is, filtered through the first line of defense. The third strategy component is to contain the spread of nuclear intelligence. The intent here is to create jobs and financial security for displaced nuclear workers so that they won’t sell their expertise to Al Qaeda, Iran, or some other hostile entity. While still focused mainly on former Soviet countries, U.S. programs are now expanding farther afield. The Department of Energy’s (DOE) installation of radiation detectors at several high-volume shipping hubs, or megaports, is one case in point.

Considerable dedication, ingenuity, and scientific expertise have gone into designing these programs, but whether the programs can prevent nuclear terrorism is doubtful. It’s a lot easier to identify measures of performance—number of tons of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium secured, number of customs posts outfitted with radiation monitors, number of weapons scientists employed in civilian jobs—than it is to find measures of effectiveness.

One encouraging sign is that no plutonium or HEU has surfaced in international smuggling channels in recent years, at least none that was officially reported. But this hopeful trend can be interpreted several different ways. It could mean that our nuclear containment policies in Russia and the new states are working; that improving economic conditions in Russia generally and in the nuclear complex have diminished incentives to steal and sell nuclear goods; that Russia’s security services are exercising tighter control over the country’s far-flung nuclear complex than they did in the past; or that observed data on trafficking incidents is not representative of the wider universe of nuclear smuggling, including sophisticated schemes that have escaped detection in the West.

Limitations

More likely the various components of U.S. nonproliferation strategy add up to just a partial defense against nuclear terrorism. Our programs suffer from technical and physical limitations that clever adversaries can easily exploit. Our simplistic models of human motivation compound the risk of failure. Finally, the proliferation window in Russia has been open for some time, raising the ominous possibility that our adversaries may already have obtained some of what they want.

Lets start by looking at the first line of defense, securing nuclear materials, which equates mostly to the Material Protection, Control and Accounting Program funded by the DOE and in which the DOD is also involved. Analysts such as Harvard University’s Graham Allison believe it is possible to lock up 100 percent of Russia’s nuclear stockpile, according a Fort Knox “gold standard” of impermeability, so that no leakage or disappearances of significance can possibly occur.[1] But the main impediment here is the complexity and unpredictability of the human element. The new sensors and protective barriers that the U.S. is installing are only as good as the diligence, competence, and integrity of the persons tending them. The new safeguards probably can defeat snatch-and-grab type theft attempts by solitary employees, such as we saw in Russia in the early to mid 1990s, but this isn’t the principal threat today. Today’s threat comes from organized conspiracies of well-placed insiders. The Russians will tell you that the cooperation of just four or five employees is required to pull off a successful theft, even at enterprises that have received substantial infusions of MPC&A assistance from the U.S.

Thefts organized by senior managers are probably the most serious threat. Managers know precisely the sequence of steps required to remove the desired material while minimizing the risk of detection. They have the means to order electronic surveillance systems to be disengaged. They have the legal authority to create appropriate documentation to conceal a diversion—for example, writing up a shipment of HEU as some relatively innocuous substance such as natural uranium or cesium.

To be fair, the MPC&A program don’t exclude consideration of the human factor in the nuclear workplace. Indeed, the new nonproliferation buzzword is “nuclear security culture,” and DOE now has a National Program and Sustainability Initiative that tries to incorporate this concept. But training nuclear workers to obey norms and follow established procedures is not quite the same as deterring corrupt acts by criminally inclined insiders, although some overlap of course exists.

The DOE-supported second line of defense program, which deploys technological monitoring equipment at key border crossings for people and cargo, faces even more daunting challenges. Russia has 12,500 miles of border with its neighbors, far too many to monitor effectively. Smugglers won’t necessarily opt to move their wares through customs posts equipped with radiation detectors, and detectors themselves are subject to all the vulnerabilities associated with corruption: they can be turned off, bypassed, or simply ignored. A further significant problem is that most of the equipment being installed at borders is not sensitive enough to detect well-shielded HEU, which is the material most likely to be used in a terrorist bomb.

Finally, programs such as DOE’s Global Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, designed to prevent brain-drain and leakage of nuclear secrets, are unlikely to achieve the desired results. The military’s scientific knowledge is difficult to contain under the best of circumstances: America could not keep its own closely guarded nuclear secrets from gravitating to the Soviet Union in the 1940s and probably to China in the 1990s. These days, information can easily be transmitted through the Internet.

The motives to sell nuclear intelligence are complex. Economic uncertainty and the need to make ends meet are factors, but so are greed, resentment, and ideological conviction. British nuclear physicist and Soviet master spy Klaus Fuchs, who worked at the Manhattan Project and later at Los Alamos, hardly fit the profile of an unemployed or economically desperate scientist.

Our nuclear security programs are absolutely not designed to prevent state-sponsored proliferation, in which high-ranking officials deliberately arrange the sale of nuclear goods to client states or groups. The underground network organized by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan, which peddled centrifuges and nuclear bomb designs to states such as Libya and Iran, is a latter-day model for this. According to the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an exile group, the network also transferred an undetermined quantity of HEU to Iran in 2001.[2] The Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission in July 2000 took out a full-page ad in a Pakistani newspaper offering for export plutonium, enriched uranium, and other nuclear materials. (The offer was rescinded under U.S. pressure) [3]. Finally, U.S. officials have speculated that Russia’s technical cooperation agreements with Iran might provide a convenient cover for clandestine transfers of nuclear materials, components, and weapons-building intelligence to that country. High-level diplomacy and concerted political action are probably the only effective means of dealing with this issue.

The goals of our nonproliferation programs are necessarily long-term: lock down all nuclear weapons and materials by 2008, equip 330 border crossings and 24 megaports by 2012, create 15,000 civilian jobs for weapons scientists by 2030.[4] But the threat from terrorists and outlaw nations is immediate. So the more time our programs require, the more problematic their strategic justification. We may be locking the proverbial barn door after some of the horses have already escaped. Looking back to the 1990s, the Russian nuclear complex was then going through a period of deep malaise. The loss of orders for nuclear goods, a deteriorating security climate, unpaid wages, a fraying social safety net, and spreading corruption put much of the nuclear stockpile at risk. Former senator Sam Nunn, now the CEO of Nuclear Threat Initiative, told a Senate hearing in 1995 that the collapse of the USSR had “let loose a vast potential supermarket for nuclear weapons, weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, and equally deadly chemical or biological weapons.”[5] Even allowing for some hyperbole, it would be a miracle indeed if no leakage of significance had taken place during this period.

The visible machinations of the nuclear black market provide little clue as to what might have happened. All the fissile material seized internationally since the early 1990s put together is not enough to make a nuclear bomb. But consider that sophisticated thieves and smugglers are a lot less likely to get caught than the amateurs and solo opportunists who dominate the known smuggling incidents. Indeed, nuclear smugglers captured in Western Europe in the early to mid 1990s told authorities that significant quantities of HEU and plutonium had already escaped government control and was available for sale. Where this material is today is anybody’s guess. It could be buried somewhere in a birch forest, stashed in someone’s refrigerator, circling the globe looking for potential buyers, or hidden in a cave in remote eastern Afghanistan. And reports persist of extremely corrupt practices by certain nuclear facilities, including off-the-books processing of uranium for private commercial clients and altered paperwork to conceal substitution of dangerous substances in legal radioactive shipments.

Intelligence-based Security

Certainly we should continue on the path of trying to make nuclear materials as technically secure as possible as quickly as possible. But we need in addition a proactive, intelligence-based nuclear security policy that will enable us and our allies to anticipate nuclear deals in the making and to reduce the risk of consequential proliferation episodes.

One is to construct a vulnerability profile of each nuclear energy enterprise. This could be based on such factors as economic conditions and wage scales, presence of organized crime or terrorist groups in the neighborhood, past histories of thefts or theft attempts, accessibility to foreign visitors, and frequency of travel abroad by enterprise scientists. It should also be possible to gauge susceptibility of the nuclear workforce to bribes or blackmail, and employees’ propensity to engage in corrupt or disloyal conduct.

Illicit drug use, gambling habits, major medical expenses, and conspicuous consumption unrelated to income are obvious warning signs. Post-employment screening techniques— polygraphs, psychological testing, investigating of bank records—can be powerful predictive tools. They also can yield information on prior thefts, possibly leading to recovery of stolen material that perpetrators have not yet had the chance to export. Moreover, remote monitoring of nuclear storage areas and guard posts from vantage points inside and outside the facility could provide an additional measure of security against insider thefts. Some of these ideas are now being implemented in Russian enterprises, but on nowhere near the scale contemplated here.

A second recommendation is to focus more international intelligence and law enforcement resources on the demand side of the proliferation equation. Not enough is known about adversaries’ procurement chains inside and outside the former Soviet Union, how these are organized and financed, what front companies and other intermediaries are used, who their inside collaborators are, etc. Law enforcement sting operations in which operatives pose as purveyors of HEU or plutonium could play a big role in fleshing out buyer and end-user networks and in shutting some of them down.

Third, and related to this, collaboration with Russia and other former Soviet security organizations needs to be strengthened, since these organizations do much of the heavy lifting in containing nuclear theft and smuggling. In 1998 Russia’s Federal Security Service foiled a plot to divert 18.5kg of radioactive materials from one of the nuclear facilities of the Chelyabinsk region, probably the Snezhinsk facility, almost enough for a bomb. Mechanisms for formal and informal information sharing on smuggling incidents, actors, and trends would be of great value in configuring U.S. nonproliferation programs in the newly independent states.

As should be obvious, the requirements of the United States’ nuclear security policy are ultimately inseparable from the requirements of its global war against terrorism. Al Qaeda’s attempts to obtain nuclear materials and weapons have gone on for well over a decade. A large penumbra of uncertainty surrounds the extent of nuclear leakages from Russia and other supplier states. We do not know how far Al Qaeda and its affiliates may have proceeded toward building a bomb. Hence, our very real progress toward closing the proliferation window in Russia and elsewhere must be combined with unremitting vigilance against threats that may already be out there.

Notes

You may forward this email as you like provided that you send it in its entirety, attribute it to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and include our web address (www.fpri.org). If you post it on a mailing list, please contact FPRI with the name, location, purpose, and number of recipients of the mailing list.

If you receive this as a forward and would like to be placed directly on our mailing lists, send email to FPRI@fpri.org. Include your name, address, and affiliation. For further information, contact Alan Luxenberg at (215) 732-3774 x105.