This is exerpt is from Nuclear Proliferation: The Problems and Possibilities. As this is only a late draft of the manuscript, it may still contain a few minor errors which are not present in the printed book. The book was published by Franklin Watters in 1999, ISBN 0-531-11431-7.
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Contents
Worst Case Scenarios 5
The Nature of the Beast 11
The Initial Proliferation 21
Treaties and Technology 31
The Post-Soviet Nuclear Powers 49
The Status of Proliferation 57
The Rogue Regimes 69
Deadly Traffic 79
Nonproliferation Policies 93
Glossary 105
Bibliography 110
Index 112
Executive Order
Measures to Restrict the Participation by United States Persons in Weapons Proliferation Activities
...By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution...I, William J. Clinton, President of the United States of America, find that the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and the means of delivering such weapons, constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and the economy of the United States, and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat....
William J. Clinton
The White House, September 30, 1993
Chapter One
Worst Case Scenarios
The worst scenario might start on a cold morning at a navy base on the coast of the Arctic sea. A young soldier sits on a crate outside a rusty sheet metal building, his Kalashnikov rifle across his lap. As a corporal in the Russian army, he is earning the equivalent of $31 a month. He had beet soup for breakfast, beet soup for lunch. When he hears a truck coming through the front gate without stopping, he hopes it's the one that brings bread. But it doesn't go to the mess hall. It comes straight to him and stops. Several men get out. While a few take a sledge hammer over to the door of the building, another offers the young soldier a deal he can't refuse. He can have his throat cut right then and there, or he can accept a $200 tip if he'll take a little walk for a while. The boy quickly understands how the truck was able to drive onto the base so easily. He accepts the money - not worthless Russian rubles but U.S. dollars - and strolls over toward the barracks. He can hear the men smashing the lock off the door, but what can he do? If they really want a nuclear submarine fuel that bad, it's not his problem.
The worst scenario might start at the bazaar in the Nowy Targ valley in Poland. Some gentlemen with foreign accents browse around a sizable pile of Stinger surface-to-air missiles that had disappeared during the war against Iraq in 1991. A box of hand grenades looks interesting, too, as does a case of AK-47 machine guns, relics of the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. But what these men are really looking for, they tell a certain merchant, is something radioactive. Some plutonium would be nice, or something in an enriched uranium. The merchant offers a small sample, a lead box containing a pellet from a fuel rod stolen from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. The pellet is highly radioactive - not good enough for a nuclear bomb but quite adequate as a powerful poison. The shoppers look interested and ask how much more might be available and whether the seller would prefer Swiss francs or heroin.
Perhaps the worst scenario will start in Asia as a border skirmish between two traditional enemies begins to look like a full-scale invasion. The ruler of the smaller country, knowing his country cannot resist the onslaught of a quarter-million troops, orders his sole atomic bomb loaded onto a specially equipped fighter-bomber. Although his country has never tested the product of their new nuclear technology, he announces to the world that, as long suspected, his country is indeed a nuclear power. If the invitation is not curtailed and reversed, he will launch an annihilation of Biblical proportions. The minister of defense of the invading country announces that they, too, have nuclear weapons and will not hesitate to use them to reciprocate nuclear attack.
Perhaps a similar scenario in the Middle East might threaten to involve the United States. A regional power invades an oil-rich neighbor. The invader is known to have been trying to develop an atomic weapon. No one is sure whether it succeeded. The United States is called on to oust the invader and protect the oil fields of the region. Should American troops be deployed on a foreign battleground that could well turn into a nuclear target?
In a less likely but by no means impossible scenario, a helicopter hovers over the southern end of New York's borough of Manhattan. Inside, a woman holds a heavy, lead-lined box, Tossing it out the door of the helicopter, she watches it fall. Within a two seconds, it explodes with the power of a hand grenade, releasing a burst of high-level radioactive waste from a nuclear power plant in Asia. Several pounds of cesium, uranium, plutonium, strontium and assorted other radioactive isotopes swirl outwards in the downdraft below the helicopter. She flips open a cellular phone, dials a local radio station and advises them to begin evacuating the Wall Street area. It's radioactive, she tells them, and it will probably be so for the next several years.
In another scenario, authorities in Los Angeles have detected abnormally high levels of radiation at many points throughout the city and its suburbs. It is especially heavy along freeways and in certain neighborhoods. Over the course of several days, they track down several sources - gas stations that have been selling gasoline contaminated with radioactive materials. Further investigations trace it to an oil tanker that arrived from the Middle East with several hundred thousand gallons of contaminated oil. The important question is not which country it came from but what to do about a city that is slightly, and perhaps dangerously, radioactive.
* * *
These scenarios are products of the imagination, but events quite like them have either taken place or might well take place someday. Pakistan is believed to have prepared a nuclear attack against India. North Korea is believed to have refined enough plutonium for at least one atomic bomb. Until the Gulf War of 1990, Iraq was within a few years of building a bomb. A religious sect in Japan was looking for ways to use chemicals and radioactive materials as weapons and succeeded in an attack in the Tokyo subway. Criminals in Russia, perhaps linked to international organized crime, have found access to radioactive materials, some of it pure enough to make nuclear bombs, some of it so toxic it could render a city uninhabitable. No one can rule out the possibility that atomic bombs have been stolen as well. Several smugglers have been caught with plutonium, uranium, cesium, and other dangerous isotopes. Presumably other smugglers have not been caught.
Nuclear proliferation is the spread of nuclear weapons and radioactive materials that could be used as weapons of contamination. The danger of nuclear proliferation has become so serious that President Clinton declared a national emergency, allowing the government to put special restrictions on certain products and exports. U.S. Representative Tom Llantos, chairman of the House Subcommittee on International Security, International Organizations and Human Rights, said, "No danger to our national security is greater than the continuing spread of nuclear weapons to undeclared nuclear states..." FBI Director Louis Freeh said to the Russian Police College, "one criminal threat looms larger than the others: the theft or diversion of radioactive materials in Russia and Eastern Europe." In a nationally televised speech, Presidential candidate Senator Richard Lugar said that nuclear terrorism is "but one small step" away because of "grossly inadequate" control of radioactive materials in the former Soviet Union.
These American leaders have recognized a growing and very serious problem. The power of nuclear holocaust that was once the privilege of a handful of major nations is now within the reach of relatively undeveloped countries. Nuclear weapons may soon be available to terrorist groups that are not controlled by any government. The potential for destruction defies the imagination, and the solution is still beyond anybody's guess.
Since 1970, most countries have adhered to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), an agreement that countries without nuclear weapons will not try to acquire them. The terms of the treaty, however, make it easier for countries without nuclear weapons to buy equipment that is needed to make them. Countries that have chosen to ignore the treaty have been making rapid progress toward developing an nuclear force.
Meanwhile, nuclear technology has advanced and become more readily available. The amount of fuel needed for a bomb has dropped to only a few kilos. At the same time, the nuclear energy programs have increased the world's supply of the radioactive resources from which weapons-grade nuclear fuel can be separated. As if the availability of recipe and ingredients weren't enough, the situation has been aggravated by the break-up of the Soviet Union. As post-Soviet society tumbles toward bankruptcy and anarchy, its nuclear materials, equipment, technology and personnel are finding their way into other countries.
The situation bodes ill for the twenty-first century. It will follow
a century of terrible wars, exploding populations, breath-taking progress,
religious strife, soaring technologies, devastated environments, booming
economies, and a global communication system that has knit the world's countries
into a virtual community. What will it all add up to if weapons of mass
destruction are in the hands of tyrants and terrorists? The next few years
will determine, to a great extent, how well the world will deal with the
proliferation of nuclear weapons. The decisions and solutions of the immediate
future will have repercussions for many years to come. Now, therefore, is
the time to understand what is happening and what needs to be done.
Chapter Three
The Initial Proliferation
World War II ended when the United States detonated atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Hiroshima bomb yielded about 13 kilotons, that is, it had the explosive power of 13,000 tons of TNT. It killed 45,000 people immediately. (Some estimates put the toll much higher.) Another 19,000 died within the next four months. Deaths due to cancer and leukemia have continued since then, bringing the total to an estimated 136,000. The 23-kiloton bomb that destroyed Nagasaki killed 22,000 on the first day. Another 17,000 died soon thereafter, and a total of 64,000 have died in all.
The sudden appearance of nuclear weapons in the world, and the demonstration of their power, ended an era of relative simplicity and opened the way to war of unimaginable horror. Shortly after the end of World War II, the United States proposed a plan to prevent the proliferation of these weapons to other countries. The Baruch plan, named after one of its developer, U.S. Representative to the United Nations Bernard Baruch, proposed gradually reducing the U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons and sharing nuclear technology, for peaceful purposes, with the whole world. The newly formed United Nations would oversee all production of nuclear materials, beginning with the mining of uranium. Addressing the U.N. agency, Baruch warned that "...terror is not enough to inhibit the use of the atomic bomb. The terror created by weapons has never stopped man from employing them." He went on to say that "for each new weapon a defense has been produced in time. But now we face a condition in which adequate defense does not exist." The plan, however, was never put into action.
The Cold War
The Soviet premier at that time, the tyrannical Josef Stalin, refused to let American technology and military power dominate the world. World War II had cost his country 20 million lives. Justifiably, he felt compelled to build an army powerful enough to repel any invasion. The Soviet Union launched an all-out effort to build an atomic arsenal. Predictions of how long it would take the Soviets years to build their first bomb ranged from five to 20 years,. Americans hoped something would stop them before then.
In early 1946, Stalin renounced the World War II alliance between his country and the United States. He also stated that war between his communist country and the capitalist countries was inevitable. Later that year, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said that the Soviet Union had lowered an "iron curtain" between itself and the rest of the world. In effect, the "Soviet Bloc," which included several satellite countries along the Soviet border, and the "Free World" of western Europe and North America, had, in effect, declared themselves enemies. Thus began the Cold War.
-- Note to Editor: A map on this page would be very useful.
In August, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military and economic alliance of several non-communist countries, was established to prevent Soviet military expansion. Five days later, to the surprise of the whole world, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb.
Within a year, the war in Korea broke out. The United States and other western countries helped defend South Korea. The communist People's Republic of China helped defend North Korea. Although relatively short, the line that divided North and South Korea, the 38th parallel, was perceived to be the battlefront between the communist powers and the Free World. The fighting was fierce. When the U.S. forces had trouble holding back waves of Chinese soldiers, the American military considered the use of atomic weapons. President Dwight Eisenhower hinted, through diplomatic channels, that the United States was considering using nuclear weapons to repel the Chinese invasion. China took note, of course, and dedicated itself to the development of its own bomb.
In October, 1952, England, with the help of the United States, tested its first atomic bomb. On November 1 of that year, the United States exploded the first hydrogen bomb. Three days later, Dwight Eisenhower was elected president. Seven months later, the Soviet Union exploded its own hydrogen bomb. Two weeks later, the war in Korea ended.
The Cold War was being waged with the loudest saber-rattling the world had ever known. As if vying to show the world who could build the biggest bomb, the two "superpowers" flaunted their megatonnage. Average-sized bomb had a megaton of power - the equivalent of a million tons of TNT. The most powerful H-bombs yielded over 15 megatons. The news media commonly referred to the power of the bombs in multiples of the 13 kiloton Hiroshima bomb. The more powerful bombs were hundreds of times more powerful than the one that had killed over 125,000 people in Japan.
During the 1950s, the United States produced warheads as if there were no tomorrow. By the end of the decade, almost 20,000 warheads were produced in a three-year period, a rate of 75 per day, building the national arsenal to 22,000 warheads in 1961. By 1965 the total stockpile reached 32,400, a total yield of 15,152 megatons.
The Soviet arsenal developed more slowly but reached higher totals. In 1987, the Soviet Union had an estimated 45,000 warheads, though apparently many of them were old, antiquated weapons in semi-retirement.
France joined the "nuclear club" in 1960 with a device detonated in the Algerian Sahara. Critics believed that France developed its bomb only so that it would never be considered a second-rate country. It was a bomb of status more than defense. Still, the advantage of a nuclear arsenal, however small, is that just a few bombs can inflict more damage than an enemy is willing to accept. Though France might never win a nuclear war against the Soviet Union, it developed enough of an arsenal to prevent one. Also, France was not sure that the United States would come to its rescue if it were engaged in a nuclear war.
Never forgetting that its forces had almost been the target of an American nuclear attack in Korea, China finally exploded its first bomb in 1964. Just as England had used American technology to develop a bomb, China used Soviet technology. The Soviets soon regretted their nuclear aid. Soviet-Chinese relations soon deteriorated. When China tested its first bomb, the two countries became the first nuclear powers to share a border.
For the next ten years, the United States, the Soviet Union, England, France and China would remain the only declared members of the nuclear club. During that time, the two superpowers raced to maintain superiority in bombs, missiles, bombers and submarines. The word "overkill" was introduced to the English language. Overkill is the destructive nuclear capacity exceeding the amount needed to destroy an enemy. By cynical definition, it is the ability to kill a given population more than once. The leader in the arms race was whichever country could kill the other country's people the most times. Between the two of them, the Soviet Union and the United States eventually had the equivalent of 6,000 pounds of TNT for every human being in the world.
In 1962, the U.S. spy planes discovered the Soviet Union installing missiles, possibly with nuclear warheads, in its communist ally, Cuba. In a show-down of strength, the United States prevented further delivery of missiles and negotiated the withdrawal of all such weaponry from Cuba. Apparently Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev perceived his loss of strategic position, not to mention loss of face, as a result of inferior atomic firepower. He increased his country's weapons production, and the United States responded in kind.
With tremendous intercontinental atomic arsenals aimed at each other, the two countries were locked in a standoff known as MAD: mutually assured destruction . If either side started a nuclear war, the other side would retaliate in kind, and massively. Both sides, and perhaps the whole world, would surely be destroyed. As mad as the strategy sounded, however, it did provide a good reason not to launch the first missile. In fact, it may have helped the two superpowers refrain from directly facing each other on a battlefield. A war with convention weapons could easily have "gone nuclear." The battles between the superpowers, it turned out, would be fought indirectly in countries such as Vietnam, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Angola. In these countries, communist forces backed by the Soviet Union fought against forces backed by the United States.
In the mid-1980s, the MAD balance of power reached its peak at a total of about 70,000 nuclear warheads between the two superpowers. The warheads were deployed on intercontinental missiles, long-range bombers and nuclear submarines. Some of the missiles carried several Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs), which could separate from the missile and hit different targets. As an example of the power in these weapons, one U.S. Poseidon submarine could destroy more cities than the Allied forces destroyed in all of World War II. Its 16 missiles carried more explosive power than a million World War II B-17 bombers. The explosive power of that one submarine represented less than one percent of the megatonnage in the U.S. arsenal. The Poseidon submarines have since been replaced by the more powerful Trident and Seawolf submarines.
Mutually assured destruction may have tended to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. At the same time, however, the overkill capacity of the opposing nuclear force made retaliation difficult if not impossible. A massive attack with tens of thousands of warheads could destroy the enemy once and for all. Since missiles could fly north from either country, cross the polar region and reach the other's territory in under an hour, even quick notification of an attack would give the other country too little time to decide to counterattack. If a political or military situation became too tense, therefore, both countries would be tempted to go ahead and launch rather than wait to see if the other side launched. Their nuclear forces were on a hair trigger. Both sides had a "launch-on-warning" strategy. If they saw an attack coming, they would retaliate before the first bombs exploded.
Needless to say, that disaster never came to pass. The two superpowers were able to maintain control over their nuclear forces. Their governments were stable enough for each side to know who was in power on the other side and what their international policies were. They found non-nuclear ways to confront each other and to share power.
The arms race, the Cold War and worldwide fears of nuclear holocaust reached a peak in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. Leonid Brezhnev was premier of the Soviet Union. Despite some treaties that limited the numbers of certain types of warheads and delivery systems (see chapter 4), tensions were high. President Reagan began a massive military build-up in hopes of driving the Soviet Union bankrupt as it tried to keep up. He began plans for building a missile defense system that would be based in outer space. The Soviets, balking at a technology they could never match, threatened to destroy any such system before it could be completed.
The tension and seeming insanity began to ease in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev became president of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev recognized that the Soviet Union would never prosper under its regime of suppressed freedom, controlled economy and ongoing conflict with the Western countries. His solutions were policies called perestroika (economic and political reforms) and glasnost (more freedom of expression by individuals and the press). He also made sweeping proposals for arms reductions.
The Soviet Union had not known such freedom since its birth in 1917 or, for that matter, in the pre-Soviet centuries of rule under czars. The country quickly broke down into something close to economic and political chaos. As the country tried to shift from the centrally controlled economy of communism into a system more like free enterprise, the economy went into a situation worse than the Depression that hit the western world in the 1930s.
For many years the Soviet Union had controlled several formerly independent republics, such as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, and Kazakhstan. None of them liked Soviet control. As political domination loosened and the economy provided less of anyone's needs, these republics began declaring their independence. During the course of 1991, the Soviet Union came untied, and by the end of the year, by vote of the Soviet parliament, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned on December 25 of that year.
Of the 15 new countries that came out of the Soviet Union, four were nuclear powers. Russia held the most weapons by far. Ukraine, with 1,256 nuclear weapons systems, became the world's third largest nuclear power. Kazakhstan had 1,410 and Belarus had 72.
Among them, only Russia remained a nuclear power. Belarus quickly gave up its weapons, but Ukraine and Kazakhstan held out. After long negotiations, they agreed to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and to surrender the weapons in exchange for promises of foreign aid and the security of their borders. The process of destroying or transferring the weapons to Russia, however, would take several years.
The new governments were very weak, disorganized, inexperienced at democracy and quite corrupt. Boris Yeltsin succeeded Gorbachev as president of Russia. His struggles with the Russian parliament demonstrated how Russian government was barely able to govern itself, let along the vast reaches of the world's largest country. The other post-Soviet republics had similar problems adjusting to the liberties of democracy.
A New Nuclear Threat
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cold war was over. Soviet troops - now Russian troops - began pulling out of East Germany, which had been dominated by the Soviet Union. The United States took its bomber fleet and intercontinental missiles off alert. The two superpowers - if Russia might still be included as one - agreed that they were no longer enemies. For a short while, it looked as if the world might soon become free of the nuclear threat that had hung over civilization for almost half a century.
Almost at the same time, however, new nuclear threats emerged. Smugglers in Europe were caught with small amounts of very deadly radioactive materials. In 1991, Iraq was found to have been close to developing an atomic weapon. In 1993, North Korea was suspected of purifying enough plutonium for one or two bombs. In 1994 a journalist published an article revealing that Pakistan had almost sent a jet fighter to drop an atomic bomb on New Delhi, India, though Pakistan was still claiming not to have a bomb. Iran was suspected of working on an "Islamic Bomb," and Libya was in the market for nuclear fuel. By late 1994, nuclear technology had reached a point where as little as one kilo of plutonium might suffice to fuel a high-tech one-kiloton bomb.
The nuclear monster had not been caged. It was still loose, and in fact it seemed its deadly seeds had been scattered around the world and were sprouting one by one.
Chapter Five
The Post-Soviet Nuclear Powers
When the Soviet Union collapsed and broke up in 1991, it's economy was near chaos, its government was hopelessly corrupt, and various republics of the Union were declaring their independence.
Economically, Soviet Union was virtually bankrupt. The communist economy, tightly controlled by the central Soviet government, had barely worked. When Mikhail Gorbachev started loosening government controls, The Soviet Union had no other economic system to replace it. Boris Yeltsin further reduced government control, and the economy spun out of control into deep depression.
The Soviet Union was also morally bankrupt. The government was hopelessly corrupt. Almost all social aspects of Soviet life were controlled by a megalithic bureaucracy. It was too cumbersome to work, and the bureaucrats often worked only for bribes. Beneath the appearance of a centrally controlled communist economy, a corrupt and uncontrolled form of free, albeit criminal, enterprise was working. As the communist system collapsed, this underground economy, which soon became an all-pervasive organized crime syndicate, replaced it.
The Soviet Union was also politically fractured. As the largest country in the world, it was actually a shaky union of many different republics and cultures. Several had been overrun by Russia before the Russian Revolution in 1917. Many were overrun later. Most of them disliked Soviet rule. When the central government weakened its control over them, they began to declare independence. At the same time, the Soviet "satellite" countries of eastern Europe, which had been under Soviet domination since World War II, began to exercise independence.
By the end of 1991, the Soviet government was too weak to control its member republics. It was failing to control the economy and provide its citizens with basic necessities. The bureaucracy had simply stopped working. In December of that year, the Soviet government voted itself and the Soviet Union out of existence.
Fifteen countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet empire. Four of them - Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan - inherited parts of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. They also inherited large stockpiles of radioactive materials.
Under ideal circumstances, these weapons and warhead fuels would have been put under tight security and dealt with in some organized manner. Unfortunately, the post-Soviet situation was far less than ideal. The new republics had come into existence over the course of a few months or weeks. They had no experience at government. They had never owned nuclear arsenals before. Now they owned not only nuclear weapons, delivery systems, fuels and parts, but also the Soviet Union's most difficult endowments - bankruptcy, bureaucracy, corruption and chaos. They had no money for food, medicine or energy, and no system for exercising government control over virtually anything, including weaponry. Government officials, from presidents to police, were hopelessly corrupt, and sub-cultures within some republics were already beginning to demand independence.
It's hard to imagine a worse place to leave 30,000 nuclear weapons, 174 tons of plutonium and 1,000 tons of weapons-grade uranium. Since Russia was the dominant country coming out of the Soviet Union, it quickly pulled in all - or at least the world hopes all - the tactical nuclear weapons from Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. These were the warheads which could have been used or transported relatively easily. The larger strategic weapons were protected by secret codes that would make them hard, but not impossible, to launch or detonate. Russia has been very secretive about the numbers, locations and security devices of its nuclear weapons.
Belarus quickly decided that it did not want to be a nuclear power. It agreed to the provisions of START I and signed the NPT. All its strategic weapons were due to be shipped to Russia by the middle of 1996. Kazakhstan followed suit, transferring all its nuclear weapons to Russia by mid-1995.
Ukraine decided more slowly. It wanted to remain completely free of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. Radioactive contamination from the accident at its Chernobyl atomic power plant in 1986 had left Ukrainians with a loathing of all things nuclear. Ukraine continued to operate the Chernobyl plant, however, because the country lacked other sources of energy. For three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union it held onto its 650 nuclear weapons systems, using them as a bargaining chip. It wanted guarantees that Russia, Britain and the United States would respect its territory and borders and would not use economic pressure against it. The real concern was with Russia. That giant neighbor had supplied Ukraine with oil and had been wanting to annex the part of Ukraine called Crimea. The foreign powers agreed to respect Ukraine as a country, and in late 1994 the Ukrainian parliament voted to give up the weapons. They ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The transfer of weapons, however, would take several years.
A Perfect Place for Proliferation
Authorities are concerned about several situations in the post-Soviet world. The most troublesome situation is that the Soviet government was never very accurate in its accounting for nuclear materials. It registered how much plutonium and HEU was produced and distributed to its many research institutes, weapons laboratories and assembly plants, power plants, nuclear waste storage facilities and naval fuel depots. After that original registration, however, each site was responsible for keeping track of its nuclear materials. There is no way of knowing whether they kept accurate records of plutonium that was lost in the course of processes, production and transport. They had no systematized method of measuring stocks. There was no national record-keeping. Central authorities no way to know how much radioactive material exists, where it is, how much is missing or where it may have gone.
As the economic woes of Russia and the other former Soviet republics increased, scientists and military personnel often went months without pay. Due to inflation, the value of their paychecks dropped by 70 percent or more. As much as a third of the staff at the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering, which stored enough uranium and plutonium for dozens of bombs, left their jobs, weakening security substantially. Those who remained there and at other nuclear facilities could be easily tempted by anyone offering money for the ingredients of an atomic bomb. In a country where a few pennies bought a loaf of bread and monthly salaries were often under $100, the price of plutonium - thousands of dollars per gram - could be all but irresistible. As a director at the Institute told a New York Times reporter, "There are dishonest men in various levels, including in the bureaucracy. It's possible to buy anything in our country, including [nuclear] weapons and [radioactive] samples."
According to the editor of Nuclear Fuel magazine, in 1995 there were 950 sites in the former Soviet Union that had enriched uranium or plutonium. These sites were research institutes, weapons laboratories, assembly plants, power plants, and storage sites.
With the general breakdown in the legal and police systems, the governments of the post-Soviet republics found it hard or even impossible to detect theft or sale or to track down anyone who came to possess nuclear materials. In 1994, several individuals were caught with plutonium and other radioactive materials in Europe, Russia and elsewhere (see Chapter 8). Although Russia denied the possibility that the materials had come from its facilities, analysis indicated that they had. American intelligence agencies have also reported agents from Middle Eastern nations operating in post-Soviet republics in search of such materials. Americans professionals who have visited Russian nuclear plants have been asked, quite openly, whether they would like to buy radioactive materials.
Authorities are also concerned with the very shaky political situation. Civil war threatens several post-Soviet republics, including Russia. Nuclear weapons and materials are by no means secure from attack by even a small army. They are very tempting targets to any rebel group that might wish to quickly acquire a very deadly weapon or something that could be exchanged on the black market for conventional weapons.
As discussed in Chapter 8, the breakdown of law and order in these countries has also allowed powerful crime organizations to develop. Some fear that it is more powerful than the governments themselves. With incredibly huge financial power, horrendously cruel threats and connections with other international crime organizations, this "Russian Mafia" is feared to have access to anything it wants, including atomic weapons, components and fuel.
The United States Tries to Help
Concerned for the safety of the world and especially itself, the United States has been offering considerable financial and technical aid to the post-Soviet republics. As of the end of 1994, $1.2 billion had been allocated to help arms reduction efforts in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Most of that money is dedicated to helping transport and store warheads. Only $133 million was earmarked for the security of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, and little of that was actually used to upgrade the physical protection or accountability of the materials.
The Russian bureaucracy foiled at least one attempt at improvement. American officials tried to set up a $10 million system to monitor weapons-grade fuel, but the system ended up being installed at a low-enriched uranium plant which had no weapons fuel capability.
The corruption of the bureaucracies has made it hard to spend the allocated funds. These bureaucracies have a reputation for swallowing foreign aid without producing anything. The necessary accounting and safeguards have hindered progress.
In November of 1994, in a move that surprised the world, the United States airlifted 1,300 pounds of highly enriched uranium out of Kazakhstan. Much of the uranium was usable for weapons. The airlift was arranged after months of negotiations. American officials said that the fuel was very poorly protected and open to theft. Kazakhstan denied the poor security and said it was never in danger. Fearing protest over the decision to bring such dangerous materials to U.S. soil, the U.S. government made no announcement of the operation until after it was over. The fuel was shipped to the federal government's Oak Ridge nuclear facility in Tennessee with the intent of later diluting it with low-enriched uranium for use in nuclear energy plants. Kazakhstan received a payment reportedly in the "low tens of millions of dollars" plus specialized nuclear equipment.
In a move unthinkable just a few years in the past, the U.S. F.B.I opened an office in Moscow. Its two agents were given the task of dealing with the underground traffic in nuclear materials.
Russia insists that all of its nuclear weapons and nuclear materials
are secure, but repeated reports indicate that much radioactive material
has already disappeared from stockpiles and laboratory supplies. With Russia
and many of its post-Soviet neighbors in chaos, and with many years yet
to go before thousands of weapons have been destroyed and tons of radioactive
materials are put under strong security, the situation can be called, at
best, unpredictable. Unfortunately, there are many predictions, and few
of them are good.
End of exerpt