NEST VETERAN Alan V. Mode believes an act of nuclear terrorism against the United States is a matter of “when, not if.” Another NEST veteran, Robert Kelley, thinks “we are in terrible trouble.” They are not alone in their pessimism. Warren Buffett, whose forecasting ability has made him a billionaire, told Fortune magazine that a nuclear terrorist attack “will happen. It’s inevitable. I don’t see any way that it won’t happen.” That view was partially seconded by Graham Allison, the political scientist best known for his 1971 book Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a 2004 book on nuclear terrorism, he offered an assessment which concluded that “on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.”1
The when might follow the theft of completed warheads that could be detonated.* Or it might involve terrorists actually constructing an atomic bomb with illicitly acquired fissile material. In early 2007, the Government Accountability Office estimated that terrorists seeking nuclear weapons could use as little as 55 pounds of highly enriched uranium or 17.6 pounds of plutonium to build one, although the office does not specify a yield associated with such an effort, which would be determined by the technical capabilities of those building the device. Private sources have suggested lower amounts of HEU and plutonium.2 A third possibility would be a dirty bomb, a weapon of “mass disruption” if not of mass destruction.
J. Carson Mark, a former Manhattan Project physicist, and several colleagues, including Ted Taylor, wrote that “schematic drawings of fission explosive devices of the earliest types showing in a qualitative way the principles used in achieving the first fission explosions are widely available.” However, “detailed design drawings that are essential before it is possible to plan the fabrication of actual parts are not available,” and preparing such drawings “requires a large number of man-hours and direct participation of individuals thoroughly informed in several quite distinct areas.” Those areas include, but are not limited to, the chemical and metallurgical properties of the materials to be employed, radiation effects, electrical circuitry, and high-explosives technology. It would be “exceedingly unlikely,” they wrote, that one individual “even after years of assiduous preparation” would be prepared to confidently proceed in each of those fields. They do conclude that a group of terrorists with sufficient funds, time, expertise, and the necessary equipment and fissile material might be able to build a device with a nuclear yield.3
The terrorist effort to build an improvised nuclear device, as described by one author, would involve
work carried out in secret and in some private shop perhaps no larger than a five-car garage. The shop would contain numerically controlled milling machines and lathes as well as other expensive manufacturing equipment, and would require a plausible explanation—a front company set up to manufacture say, industrial pumps or automotive transmission components . . . Construction of the bomb would take maybe four months. The size of the technical team would depend on the form of HEU. At minimum it would consist of a nuclear physicist or engineer, a couple of skilled machinists, preferably with operational experience in shaping uranium, an explosive expert who can design and handle the propellant, and perhaps an electronics person for the trigger.4*
Peter Zimmerman and Jeffrey Lewis provide a hypothetical example of a clandestine nuclear compound where terrorists might construct a bomb employing highly enriched uranium. The compound would be surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Inside would be a farmhouse, which the terrorists would use largely as their living quarters, although some electronics work might be conducted in the basement. A steel building on the compound’s grounds would be used to test weapon assemblies and double-check calculations. There would also be two uranium sheds on the property, where the enriched uranium could be stored a safe distance from the farmhouse. A machine shop/foundry would also be necessary and equipped with a vacuum furnace so the team could cast the uranium metal. Finally, a barn, after being cleaned and outfitted with a concrete floor, would be the site for the team’s gun tests.5
The two authors also provide a list of resources and prices needed to complete such a project. With between $4,433,000 and $6,433,000, a terrorist leader could expect to pay for the physics and computation work (performed by a senior physicist and two assistants); metallurgy and casting (three or four personnel, the vacuum furnace, crucibles, and other equipment); precision machining and construction (another three or four personnel, a precision lathe, supplies, and other tools); gun design, assembly, and testing (three or four personnel, a recoilless rifle, supplies, and expendables); electronics, safeing arming, fuzing, and firing (one or two technicians and equipment); facilities (150-acre ranch along with improvements and maintenance); fissile material (costing $3 to $5 million); and transportation (one or two personnel for procurement, transportation for the device, and travel).
In October 2000, in an exercise at Los Alamos National Laboratory, mock terrorists, with suitable technical backgrounds, in an update of the Nth Country Experiment, were able to construct an improvised nuclear device—which does not mean that such an effort would be easy or certain to succeed, although some have come close to making that claim. When testifying before Congress in 1996, Dr. Gordon Oehler, director of the director of central intelligence’s Nonproliferation Center, told his audience that “if the terrorist state acquires the nuclear materials . . . it would still be quite a technical challenge to turn that into a weapon.”6
A far less technically challenging and less threatening objective would be the construction of a dirty bomb. Terrorists might use highly enriched uranium or plutonium for a dirty bomb. Or they might seek to acquire more available nonfissionable nuclear materials such as cesium-137, strontium-90, and cobalt-60, materials that cannot be used to make a nuclear weapon but could be used to make a dirty bomb, as well as to contaminate water supplies, business centers, government facilities, and transportation networks.7
In 1994, the authors of a report for the Department of Defense asked the reader to “imagine the impact if terrorists who carried out the bombing of the World Trade Center had surrounded the bomb’s explosive core with cobalt 60, which is widely used in medical applications, or even a mass of nuclear waste left over from a power reactor.” The resulting contamination, they wrote, “might have left Manhattan’s financial district uninhabitable for decades and the ensuing panic [would] not only have shook the American populace but world financial markets.”8
If the enormous catastrophe of a terrorist nuclear detonation, or the lesser one of a dirty bomb detonation, were to take place, the perpetrators, whether Al-Qaeda or some other terrorist entity, would had to have acquired either warheads, fissile material to use in an improvised nuclear device, or radioactive material to wrap around conventional explosives. Unfortunately, there are a large number of possible answers to the questions of where and how terrorists might be able acquire such deadly material.
Pakistan might be the source. The country’s nuclear complex includes several facilities that produce highly enriched uranium and therefore would be expected to have stocks of highly enriched and low-enriched uranium. The main enrichment facilities are at the Dr. A.Q. Khan Research Laboratories at Kahuta. There is also a newer enrichment facility at the Wah Cantonment Ordnance Complex, which the United States refers to as the Gadwal Uranium Enrichment Plant, as well as the smaller Sihala and Golra ultracentrifuge plants just southwest of Kahuta and about six miles west of Islamabad, respectively.9
There is also a reactor at Khushab, which is estimated to generate enough power each year to produce enough plutonium for a few nuclear weapons. Located near Islamabad are the New Labs at Rawalpindi, adjacent to the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology, which are capable of handling all the irradiated fuel produced at the Khushab reactor. How the separated plutonium is stored is not clear, but probably includes vaults and other security arrangements.10
Fissile material in several forms—liquid, powder, and solid—can also be found at sites involved in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, including the one at Wah. The facilities produce metallic fissile material and shape the metal into nuclear weapons components. Other installations, some located near Wah, work to produce non-nuclear components and assemble, at least partially, the nuclear weapons.11
It is possible that Pakistan has not deployed its weapons with military units that would be able to quickly mate them to missiles or aircraft in the event of war or crisis—just as, during the early days of the Cold War, the U.S. nuclear weapons were in the hands of the Atomic Energy Commission rather than the Air Force or Navy. In any case, Pakistan’s warheads are kept in several storage facilities whose location the government goes to great lengths to keep secret. According to reports, some are believed to be kept at six military missile and air bases, where then-president Pervez Musharraf ordered them moved after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But others may be hidden in tunnels or mines. It has also been reported that the weapons are implosion-type devices and are stored with their fissile cores separated from the non-nuclear components.12
According to government officials and outside analysts, Pakistan does not have a sufficient number of troops to quickly and simultaneously “lock down” all of the nation’s nuclear weapons sites in the event of a civil conflict, an attempted coup, or a terrorist attack. In the aftermath of 9/11, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that “some of the government’s most experienced South Asia experts have doubts about Musharraf’s ability to maintain control over the military and its nuclear arsenal in the event of a coup; there are also fears that a dissident group of fundamentalist officers might try to seize a warhead.” The basis for that concern were long-standing religious and personal ties between Army and Inter-Service Intelligence officers and the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, as well as sympathy for Osama bin Laden’s cause.13
Such ties also create concern that a nuclear device might be smuggled out of its storage facility and into the arms of members of Al-Qaeda. But, according to Ashley J. Tellis, who served as White House director of strategic planning for South Asia and senior advisor to the U.S. ambassador to India, Pakistan’s armed forces have tight control over the country’s nuclear weapons, and it is “highly unlikely” that anything would undermine that control.14
But there is always a risk, and some believe that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are not “one-point” safe or equipped with permissive action links as defined by the United States, which require the entry of a code before the weapon can be armed and fired. Other forms of protection, such as boxes with a lock or control mechanisms over the electronic firing systems, can be circumvented without a great deal of trouble.15
Clearly, both fissile material and weapons need to be transported between installations. How weapons are stored during transit, what means of transportation are used, and what security precautions are taken to protect the nuclear cargo is information that is not on the public record in Pakistan or elsewhere.16 Possibly a sympathetic insider might provide Al-Qaeda with information on the transportation and protective measures, to help the group in any hijacking attempt.
But if radioactive or fissile material or nuclear weapons prove to be impossible to obtain from Pakistan, there are other possibilities.
There is the specter of Iran. It already operates a nuclear reactor at Bushehr, as well as uranium enrichment facilities at Isfahan and Natanz and a plutonium reactor at Arak. As noted earlier, its government has a long history of supporting terrorism, particularly the terrorist actions of the Lebanese-based Hezbollah. In addition, the apocalyptic vision of its current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and possibly of a future one, or other officials creates a fear that if Iran were to develop nuclear weapons, one or more might eventually be transferred to Hezbollah and detonated in New York or Tel Aviv. Such a transfer might be sanctioned by the highest levels of the Iranian regime or be an independent act by military officials who control the nation’s nuclear weapons. It has been argued that the expected consequences of being caught providing such weaponry to a terrorist group would deter such a risky act. But regimes, on occasion, have undertaken what have proved to be suicidal actions with respect to the United States—from Japan’s attack in December 1941 to the Taliban’s refusal to turn over Osama bin Laden in 2001. One Middle East expert has argued that, for several reasons, “Iran is not likely to provide chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons to a terrorist group.” But an expert on Iran argues, “While the threat that Iran might give nuclear weapons to terrorists tends to receive far too much attention . . . it cannot be dismissed.”17
Another possible source is North Korea, where the motivation would be money rather than ideology. The regime has shown a willingness to engage in a variety of terrorist and aggressive acts over its lifetime, acts that a seemingly rational regime would be deterred from undertaking. It has also shown a desire to accumulate revenue to finance the lavish lifestyles of its leadership, particularly Kim Jong Il, by any means necessary, including the counterfeiting of U.S. currency and the sale of illegal drugs. Based on North Korea’s past failures to keep its end of agreements, it would be far from shocking if, despite its 2007 nuclear disarmament pledge, the country were to squirrel away some of its nuclear arsenal, estimated to be between eight and thirteen bombs in 2006. At some future date, one or more of those weapons might be put up for sale, when the cash flow reached a crisis stage. Former NSC counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke has argued that given “North Korea’s well-known reputation for sponsoring organized crime and selling missile technology to anyone with hard currency, and Kim Jong-Il’s hatred for the United States, the possibility that the country would provide terrorists with a nuclear capability is not unrealistic.” Indeed, in April 2005 a North Korean official told a U.S. academic that it could transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists if driven into a corner.18
While the U.S. invasion of Iraq ended any chance that Saddam Hussein’s regime would produce nuclear weapons, it opened the door for looting of nuclear sites whose material could, at least, provide radioactive material for a dirty bomb. At one after another site associated with Iraq’s nuclear activities, U.S. troops and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Direct Support Team (DST), a special Pentagon unit of special operations soldiers and nuclear specialists responsible for identifying weapons of mass destruction at Iraqi facilities, found signs of extensive looting. Not surprisingly, the Government Accountability Office would conclude that the Defense Department “was not ready to collect and secure radiological sources when the war began in March 2003 and for about 6 months thereafter.”19
Among the seven sites where looters had been busy were the Tuwaitha Yellowcake Storage Facility, also known as Tuwaitha Location C, and the Baghdad Nuclear Research Center. Location C consisted of three buildings and a wall of concrete barriers about twelve feet tall on three sides. Its holdings included approximately five hundred metric tons of uranium and nonfissile radioisotope sources. The five hundred tons included mostly yellowcake, along with some low-enriched uranium and depleted uranium.20
U.S. forces secured Location C by April 7, 2003. But the rest of the facility was apparently wide open. When Navy Commander David Beckett and his master sergeant arrived on May 3, they discovered that for two weeks scores of Tuwaitha employees had been roaming the facility, while up to four hundred looters had been scavenging each day. Daoud Awad, the head of the electrical design department at Tuwaitha, said, “[I] saw with my own eyes people carrying the containers we used to put radioactive materials in” but those people “didn’t know what was inside.” How much, if any, nuclear material had been removed was not clear because of a dispute between the United States and the IAEA as well as a dispute within the Bush administration about the extent of IAEA involvement in Iraq. The conflict kept U.S. forces out of Tuwaitha’s nuclear storage areas, but a short outdoor inspection on April 10 by a small survey team revealed that the door to one of them had been penetrated.21
Less than a mile down the road was another potential source of nuclear material, the Baghdad Nuclear Research Center, a major Iraqi radioactive waste depository. In addition to the remains of the reactors bombed by Israel in 1981 and by the United States in 1991, the facility stored industrial and medical waste as well as spent reactor fuel that could be used in a radioactive dispersal device. There were also significant quantities of partially enriched uranium, cesium, strontium, and cobalt. Its sensitivity was highlighted by the sand berm, sixteen feet high and four miles around, surrounding the facility. On May 3, a U.S. Special Forces detachment and eight nuclear experts from the DST arrived, only to find the site badly looted and unable to determine if nuclear materials were missing.22
The Baghdad New Nuclear Design Center, a conspicuous yellow building, housed the personnel who managed the crash program designed to produce a nuclear bomb for Iraq in 1991. After the war, many of the key scientists involved in the nuclear program moved to the center to conduct electrical, mechanical, and chemical engineering research, all potentially valuable areas of research for a country wanting to develop nuclear weapons. When the DST showed up to examine the site in April, it found it had been looted and was able to gather little information that would reveal exactly what had been removed.23
Also among the looted facilities were the Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility and the Tahadi Nuclear Establishment. Ash Shaykhili, located ten miles southeast of Baghdad, was the authorized storage site for the heavy equipment used in Iraq’s pre-1991 nuclear weapons program. It held centrifuges used to enrich uranium, disks and machinery employed in the electromagnetic isotope separation method of enrichment, key parts of bomb-damaged reactors, vacuum pumps and valves, and small radiation sources. Army Lt. Col. Charles Allison, who led the Ash Shaykhili survey team, said the “warehouses were completely destroyed” by ransacking and fire and that all the enrichment processing equipment was stored there “but it was all gone or badly burned.”24
The Tahadi facility was the headquarters for magnetic research and development of high-voltage power supplies, which could be employed as parts of an enrichment program. Once again, when members of the DST arrived, they found very little besides damage. What might have been missing were some small radiation sources, but not in significant quantity.25
While some of the looting at those and other sites was spontaneous and unorganized, a highly organized operation focused on specific facilities in order to steal valuable equipment, including high-precision equipment that could be used to make parts for a nuclear device. In 2005 the Iraqi deputy minister of industry, Sami al-Araji, said the organized looters “came in with the cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites.” Dr. Araji said he had no information on where the looted material went, but according to two New York Times reporters, “his account raises the possibility that the specialized machinery . . . had made its way to the black market or was in the hands of foreign governments.”26
There was also the matter of radioactive sources. All together, reported in 2003, about 1,100 sources spread across the country were a cause for concern. Melissa Flemming, a spokeswoman for the IAEA, noted, “There are some large and dangerous sources among them” and “We are deeply concerned about the possibility that some of this material has been broken into.” Some of those sources were used in radiotherapy, X-rays, welding, and oil surveying. One concern was the threat to the health of ordinary Iraqis who weren’t aware of what they were taking, believing it was just scrap metal. But there was another concern. Joseph Cirincione, head of the nonproliferation project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was “less worried about the uranium that seems to have disappeared than the highly radioactive elements that would be perfect for enhancing an al-Qaeda truck bomb.”27
Of course, Russia, now-independent countries that were formerly Soviet republics, and Eastern European countries, virtually from the moment of the Soviet Union’s demise, have been of great concern, given the Soviet Union’s immense arsenal, its stocks of fissile material, its nuclear reactors, and the rapid decline in living conditions for the military officers, scientists, and technicians, which led to a corresponding decline in morale.28
If Osama bin Laden and his closest advisors were being briefed on the nuclear weapons and nuclear material distributed across Russia, the former Soviet republics, and Eastern Europe, they might be told of the four distinct parts of that nuclear complex that were potential sources of material. One would be Russia’s stockpile of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, controlled by the Ministry of Defense. Another would be the vast amount of weapons-grade fissile material in the possession of the Federal Agency for Atomic Energy (formerly MINATOM)—material that it produces as well as extracts from dismantled warheads—or in reactors in Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. The Russian atomic energy ministry also controls an enormous stock of fissile material produced by Russian nuclear power-producing reactors. In addition, it shares custody, with the defense ministry and several other government agencies and ministries, of fissile material held by research institutes and facilities throughout Russia for use in nonstandard nuclear fuel cycles, such as the naval propulsion and space reactor programs.29
When the Soviet Union disappeared in late December 1991, it left behind its huge nuclear arsenal of over 11,000 strategic nuclear weapons and more than 15,000 tactical nuclear weapons—artillery shells, short-range missiles, nuclear air-defense and ballistic missile interceptors, nuclear torpedoes, sea-launched cruise missiles, and nuclear weapons for shorter-range aircraft. By early 2003, Russia still had approximately 5,500 strategic warheads and between 7,000 and 12,000 tactical warheads.30
It has generally been accepted that the strategic nuclear weapons in Russia’s possession (which includes all the strategic warheads that had been on the territory of former Soviet republics) were well protected and safe not only from outside assault but also from insider theft—at least as long as they were emplaced on delivery systems or in storage. In 1995 or 1996, Gen. Evgeny Maslin, of the Ministry of Defense’s 12th Main Directorate, responsible for the storage and security of Russian nuclear weapons, told staff members from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that while he believed it was impossible to steal warheads from the ministry’s storage, he did not have the same confidence when they were in transit on railway cars. In December 2004, the National Intelligence Council reported that two Chechen sabotage and reconnaissance groups “showed a suspicious amount of interest in the transportation of nuclear munitions,” having been spotted at several major railroad stations in the Moscow region, apparently observing a special train used for transporting nuclear warheads.31
There was even greater concern over the tactical nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union left behind, which were often described as being strewn across the length and breadth of Russia in poorly protected facilities. These are “the nuclear weapons most attractive to terrorists—even more valuable to them than fissile material and much more portable than strategic warheads,” according to former U.S. senator Sam Nunn, whose post-political career has included spearheading programs designed to keep nuclear weapons and material out of the hands of terrorists and rogue nations. But according to Amy Woolf of the Congressional Research Service, in the early 1990s Russia withdrew most of its tactical warheads from deployment, placing them in secure storage areas. In addition, the number of storage facilities were reduced from several hundred to fewer than one hundred.32
In the late 1990s one weapons storage site was described as being about thirty-seven square miles, surrounded by physical barriers with a limited number of entrances. The whole area had a technical alarm system along with active and passive defense systems. The weapons were located in a concrete installation with armored doors. No one individual could unlock the storage facility. Every nuclear device was under continuous automated observation, and any attempt to remove it would immediately produce an alarm.33
But not all storage sites have been so invulnerable. There were the disquieting comments of a “knowledgeable Russian,” who, according to CIA chief John Deutch, told the CIA in the mid-1990s that “accounting procedures are so inadequate that an officer with access could remove a warhead, replace it with a readily available training dummy, and authorities might not discover the switch for as long as six months.” Indeed, one Russian nuclear policy expert reported that in November 1993, two employees of the Zlatoust-36 Instrument Building in the Urals, west of Chelyabinsk, which is where nuclear weapons are assembled, removed two nuclear warheads from one of the facility’s industrial sites. The warheads were recovered from a garage in a residential site in the neighborhood, and the thieves arrested.34
While no other actual thefts of Russian warheads are known, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a multitude of incidents have occurred involving theft and smuggling of nuclear material from Russian facilities, made easy by the erosion of the Soviet-era security system, the failure to replace the system’s methods with alternatives suitable to Russia, and inadequate material control. In 1992, chemical engineer Leonid Smirnov pilfered 3.7 pounds of highly enriched uranium (90 percent U-235) from the Luch Scientific Production Association at Podolsk, an effort that took over twenty visits and was inspired by an account he read in a Moscow newspaper about a group of people who stole 1,200 grams of uranium. Smirnov was arrested on October 9, 1992 and would serve two years in prison. In late November 1993 Russian naval captain Alexei Tikhomirov entered the Sevmorput shipyard, near Murmansk, through an unmanned gate, broke into the building housing unused nuclear submarine fuel, and stole three pieces of a reactor core. Those pieces contained about ten pounds of HEU, enriched to approximately 20 percent. While Tikhomirov was able to put the fuel in a bag and walk out, he had more problems selling it—being arrested in June 1994 while attempting to exchange the fuel for $500,000.35
In 1994 there were a number of examples of apparent leakage from Russia’s nuclear complex. In May 1994 German police seized 5.6 grams of plutonium, which was 99.78 percent pure plutonium-239, from the garage of one Adolf Jackle in Tengen, Germany. The material was believed to have come from Arzamas-16 (now the Russian Federal Nuclear Center) at Sarov or perhaps from a centrifuge facility in ex-Soviet central Asia. The next month, Bavarian police in Landshut seized 0.8 gram of 87.5 percent enriched uranium—believed to have come from a Russian reactor or naval fuel assembly—as a result of a sting operation. Another, complex sting operation orchestrated by the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and Bavarian police yielded almost a pound of near-weapons-grade plutonium (87 percent plutonium-239). That August ten Bavarian criminal police officers seized it at Munich airport after it arrived in a black suitcase on a Lufthansa flight from Moscow. In December almost six pounds of highly enriched uranium (87.5 percent enriched) was seized in Prague, where it was found in two plastic metal-wrapped containers in the back seat of a car. Those arrested included a Czech nuclear scientist, a Russian, and a Belorussian. The uranium appeared to have come from the same cache as the HEU that had been seized in June.36
Incidents of nuclear smuggling continued throughout the decade and into the current one. In 1998 Russian Federal Security Bureau agents arrested nuclear workers who they claimed were planning to steal forty pounds of HEU from one of the formerly secret nuclear cities near Chelyabinsk, just east of the Urals. The National Intelligence Council reported that in 1999 approximately four grams of weapons-usable material, which probably had originated in Russia, was seized in Bulgaria. It also reported that in 2003 a Russian/Armenian citizen was arrested on Georgian territory in possession of approximately 160 grams of HEU, although it was not certain where the material originated. In August 2003, Russian authorities arrested Alexander Tyulyakov, the deputy director of Atomflot, a state-owned company that maintained the nation’s nuclear-powered icebreakers. Tyulyakov had kept over six pounds of enriched uranium in his car, his garage, and his summer cottage in Murmansk. (He was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months in November 2003.) In January 2006, Georgian authorities seized approximately one hundred grams of HEU from a Russian national who was attempting to sell it on the black market. That August they also intercepted an illegal shipment of two pounds of yellowcake.37
Despite the repeated arrests, the National Intelligence Council, in April 2006, was still worried. It wrote, “Undetected smuggling of weapons-usable nuclear material has likely occurred, and we are concerned about the total amount of material that could have been diverted or stolen in the last 15 years. We find it highly unlikely that Russian or other authorities would have been able to recover all the material likely stolen.”38
Material that could be used in a dirty bomb, specifically the warheads attached to almost forty Alazan rockets, also appears to have gone missing. Originally built for weather experiments, thirty-eight of the small, thin missiles had warheads loaded with radioactive material, “effectively creating the world’s first surface-to-surface dirty bomb.”39
Apparently missing too are a number of radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), simple electric generators powered by radioactive decay, with the heat released by the decay being converted into electric energy. The Soviets used RTGs to power navigational beacons and communications equipment at military bases and along shipping lanes on its arctic coast. In 2006, the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency reported that the 651 RTGs at various sites in the federation needed to be either shut down or replaced with alternative energy sources. The devices contain up to 40,000 curies of highly radioactive strontium or cesium, material that “can be just ghastly to clean up” if used in a dirty bomb, according to Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists. The IAEA classified the RTGs as “orphaned” nuclear sources and called for a major international effort to locate them and lock them up.40
All the concern about the security of the Russian nuclear complex has not prevented either the U.S. government or outside analysts from focusing attention on vulnerabilities in U.S. nuclear facilities. In a 1997 exercise at Los Alamos Technical Area 18 (TA-18), a U.S. Army Special Forces unit revealed that hijacking nuclear material from the site where America’s nuclear capability originated was not all that difficult. Members of the unit entered the area, located multiple canisters of “HEU,” and used a Home Depot garden cart to move enough weapons-grade material for several nuclear weapons out of Los Alamos and into the Santa Fe woods. Guards who rushed to stop the intruders were mowed down, although, since it was only an exercise, they were hit by lasers rather than actual bullets.41
Richard Levernier, who led war games on behalf of the U.S. government, recalled, “In more than 50 percent of our tests at the Los Alamos facility, we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and in some cases didn’t fire a shot because we didn’t encounter any guards.” In 1998, at Rocky Flats, Colorado, a team of Navy SEALs successfully penetrated the site through the perimeter fence, entered a nearby building, “stole” a significant quantity of plutonium, left the building, and escaped through a fence.42
Ten years later, in the spring of 2008, a commando team undertook a mock attack on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in search of weapons-grade material. Their specific target was Building 332, where approximately 2,000 pounds of plutonium and weapons-grade uranium were stored. Despite the obstacles of multistory mesh fencing, a no-man’s-land, electronic security equipment, and armed guards and cables to prevent a helicopter from landing on the roof, the “terrorists” quickly overcame those obstacles to reach its objective—a mock payload of fissile material. A National Nuclear Security Administration press release reported that while NNSA inspectors “noted several very positive areas, there were other areas requiring corrective action.”43
There is also concern that nuclear materials might leave the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, an 811-acre compound where the Department of Energy produces HEU components and maintains a repository of 400 metric tons of metallic HEU, the easiest material with which to make an improvised nuclear device. Public officials have complained that the plant has too many structures and too small a buffer zone to secure it properly, and tests conducted by security teams have demonstrated that in the midst of an attack, intruders could get through the plant’s outside fence and penetrate one of the six HEU storage buildings “in the time it takes to microwave a cup of coffee.”44
The vulnerability of U.S. nuclear weapons in transit is also an issue. The Energy Department’s Transportation Division moves nuclear weapons as well as weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from site to site along the nation’s public highways. According to one report, sources familiar with the testing program stated that in several mock attacks the division’s security guards were “literally annihilated” within seconds after the attacks started.45
Sources of weapons-grade or radioactive material may be found in a variety of other locations around the world. In December 2002, in Quininde, Ecuador, a criminal gang stole five iridium-powered industrial devices from a private company. That same month, in Port Hartcourt, Nigeria, a powerful radioactive device used in oil field surveys was stolen. In June 2003, a sting by Thai police resulted in the arrest of a man seeking to sell radioactive cesium for $240,000. Then, in September, Warsaw police arrested six people involved in an alleged plot to exchange over a pound of radioactive cesium for $153,000. In October 2004, in the United States, a radioactive measuring device was stolen from a truck when its driver went shopping. It eventually turned up in a Virginia Beach pawn shop, whose owner, Mitchell Dunbar, told the Associated Press, “The last thing I expected coming through these doors was a radioactive measuring device. I’m more concerned about people bringing loaded guns into the store.” It is far from the only stray piece of equipment containing radioactive isotopes that has gone missing in the United States. In 1998 nineteen vials of cesium-137 disappeared from a Greensboro, North Carolina, hospital, while from 1996 to September 2001, U.S. business and medical facilities lost track of nearly fifteen hundred items of equipment with radioactive parts, over 50 percent of which had not been recovered as of mid-2002. And there are over 130 operating research reactors, fueled by weapons-grade uranium, in over forty countries ranging from the United States to Ghana.46
While Al-Qaeda and possibly other terrorist groups have undoubtedly surveyed the field of potential targets—looking for points of vulnerability, for individuals who can be bought, or for those who are already offering material for sale—the United States has been actively seeking to close the gaps through which nuclear material might slip into the hands of terrorists. The U.S. government has employed direct action, diplomatic pressure, as well as financial and technical assistance, even before Al-Qaeda became a major concern in the late 1990s. Success would mean that NEST would never be faced with the unenviable task of frantically searching an American city for a nuclear device that could rip it apart.
After the seizure of plutonium in Munich in August 1994, Western nations exerted strong diplomatic pressure on Moscow to be “more cooperative” in countering nuclear smuggling. In late 2001, Russian police arrested seven men accused of trying to sell more than two pounds of HEU. The men were arrested in the town of Balashikha, just south of Moscow, and accused of trying to sell a capsule containing uranium-235 for $30,000. About two years later, in November 2003, a Czech police sting operation resulted in the arrest of two men who attempted to sell them almost seven pounds of radioactive material, including thorium and uranium. Police seized the suspects in a hotel in Brno, 125 miles southeast of Prague. They were arrested as they were counting the $700,000 they believed they had received for the sale.47
Less critical than recovering weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, but important in shutting down possible sources of radioactive material for a dirty bomb, is the recovery of a plethora of industrial and medical devices, known as “Greater than Class C sealed sources,” containing radioactive material, typically americium-241, cesium-137, plutonium-238, plutonium-239, and strontium-90. These sealed sources include portable and fixed gauges used in commercial manufacturing, gauges used by the construction industry for testing the moisture content of soil, medical pacemakers, medical diagnostics and treatment equipment, as well as gauges used for petroleum exploration and government and private research and development.48
There are currently between 250,000 and 500,000 such sources in the United States. To recover such sources when they are no longer of use to an organization, the Department of Energy runs the Off-Site Source Recovery Project, which goes into action when the holder of a source alerts the project that it has no further use for it or when the NRC or state regulators notify the project that a source needs to be recovered because it might present a potential health or safety problem. The Energy Department has estimated that the project will recover about 14,300 unwanted Greater than Class C sealed sources by the end of September 2010.49
Recovered items have included 1,632 gauges that had been used by the construction industry for testing the moisture content of soil, 1,500 gauges used for petroleum exploration, 588 medical pacemakers from a manufacturer in Minnesota, 483 from a manufacturer in Pennsylvania, 233 from a manufacturer in Florida, and 219 from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge research facility in Tennessee.50
In the fall of 1993 the U.S. government learned that approximately 1,320 pounds of highly enriched uranium, almost pure U-235, was sitting in a poorly protected facility in Kazakhstan. Kazakh officials had discovered the situation at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant in Ust’-Kamenogorsk in 1992, during an evaluation of the nuclear legacy that the Soviet regime had left behind.51
The Ulba facility was located in one of the many Soviet “closed cities” where sensitive nuclear work was carried out. After entering the plant, the officials found about 2,000 tons of radioactive material, including the 1,320 pounds of weapons-grade uranium, which was contained in a beryllium alloy. Soviet scientists had planned to use the material in a research reactor dedicated to a project that was abandoned when the Soviet Union dissolved: the development of new Soviet naval nuclear propulsion systems.52
Following their discovery, the Kazakhs did what they could to improve security at Ulba, using locks, gates, and militiamen with guard dogs. “But they knew it wasn’t enough,” Jeffrey M. Starr, the Pentagon’s principal director for threat reduction policy, recalled in 1995. Such measures would not prevent an attack from a modern terrorist team or even well-armed members of organized crime. And the Kazakhs could not afford to do more.53
Making the situation even more troublesome were reports suggesting that Iran was aware of the Ulba plant. Some reports indicated that Iranian representatives tried to contact Kazakh officials about possibly purchasing some of the material. And, according to Starr, the Kazakhs “knew that the interest was not limited to just the Iranians.” An urgent request for help in either protecting it or getting rid of it was made, quietly, to the U.S. ambassador, William H. Courtney, who transmitted the request to Washington.54
In response, a specialist from the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge, Tennessee, nuclear storage and processing facility arrived on a covert mission, to examine the material and determine the precise situation. He returned to the United States in two weeks, along with protected samples of the HEU, carried in a diplomatic pouch to avoid detection by U.S. Customs officers and others without a “need to know.”55
Based on his report, the National Security Council concluded that the Defense Department should lead a joint effort, with the departments of State and Energy, to secure the fissile material and, if required, move it to a safe storage site in the United States. The Pentagon first designated the effort Project Phoenix, but it was the State Department’s code name, Sapphire, that stuck.56
The team that arrived at Ulba, headed by Starr, first considered keeping the material at the site and upgrading security, an option that was soon rejected because of the enormous cost that would be involved in both the initial upgrades and the upkeep activities. In addition, there would always be some uncertainty about the facility’s actual security. Further, the storage facility at Oak Ridge could easily accommodate the Ulba uranium. As a result, the NSC decided the material should be removed from Kazakhstan, a judgment concurred in by Kazakhstan. There was also agreement to maintain secrecy about what was being planned, so no negotiating teams would travel between Washington and the Kazakh capital of Almaty.57
The project had advanced by February 1994 to the next step: consulting Russia, a necessity because Russia might claim that as the Soviet successor state, it owned the fissile material. In addition, any airlift to transfer the material would have to cross Russian airspace. According to Starr, trying to keep Russia in the dark “was out of the question,” although there was a risk that corrupt elements in the government might sell information about the planned operation to Iran or some other organization that the United States wanted to keep in the dark.58
The resulting plan for the transfer required first putting the uranium in a transportable form. It was still in a “corrosive” wet form, stored in a thousand canisters and six thousand sample bottles. In order to be able to work with it, technicians needed to remove the uranium from the containers and bake and dry it to eliminate water and oils. The material then needed to be placed in special metal containers, about the size of spray-paint cans, and put into canisters the size of a fifty-gallon drum. Then the drums were to be transported to the local airport.59
To carry out the operation, the United States recruited thirty-two volunteers for the processing and repackaging effort: twenty-seven technicians from Oak Ridge, four Russian linguists from the On-Site Inspection Agency, and one physician. The team was led by Oak Ridge’s Alex Riedy, who put together a transportable, collapsible processing facility the size of a three-car garage. In August, an assessment team arrived in Ust’-Kamenogorsk to determine if the local airfield could handle the Air Force C-5 Galaxy transports that would be used to move the necessary people to and from Kazakhstan.60
In September, U.S. national security officials drafted a top-secret presidential decision directive authorizing the commencement of Project Sapphire and entrance into Kazakhstan to bring out the half ton of highly enriched uranium. Clinton signed PDD 32 on October 7, 1994, and the project began in earnest. Three C-5Bs took off from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on October 8. They carried support crews, off-loading equipment, and Air Force Security Police personnel, the Department of Energy processing plant, the Oak Ridge team, ovens for baking the uranium, and the 1,400 containers that would be needed to hold it.61
The runway at Ust’-Kamenogorsk, eight thousand feet long, was “like a bucking bronco,” according to Lt. Mike Foster, the operations officer for the 9th Airlift Squadron, but it did not prevent the planes from landing without incident. What proved a problem was the slippage in the expected departure date from November 1 to late November, a result of the time it took technicians to process and pack the uranium. As a result, the C-5 group coming to pick up the personnel, equipment, and uranium had to turn back because of blizzard conditions. On another try, only one of the four aircraft made it to Kazakhstan, with the other three diverting to other bases.62
At 4:00 a.m., when the first plane landed, a convoy of trucks departed the Ulba facility for the eighteen-mile trip to the airport. The trucks carried the uranium-filled canisters, the Energy Department team, militiamen, police, and Kazakh Army special forces troops. All roads were closed along the route while all lights were turned on to light the way. Because the second plane had not been able to make it, the convoy of trucks was only half the size planned.63
Despite an airfield bombarded by sleet, ice, and rain, the C-5 managed to lift off, on what would be a twenty-hour, five-aerial-refueling flight. Foster recalled, “We were sitting there in the cockpit writing Tom Clancy novels in our head about what would happen if we had to go down.” When the flight did arrive at the Dover air base, the material was placed on unmarked Department of Energy tractor-trailers and sent by varying routes to the Oak Ridge Y-12 facility, where it would be transformed into low-enriched uranium for use in commercial nuclear power plants.64
In the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the United States also sought to transport radioactive material from that country back to the states. In July 2004, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced that almost two tons of low-enriched uranium and about a thousand radioactive samples used for research had been removed from Iraq’s Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center and airlifted to the United States for security reasons, an operation that had been completed in late June. The radioactive samples included isotopes of cobalt, cesium, and strontium.65
More problematic is the recovery of devices with radioactive material located in former Soviet territory. In February 2002, an international team of experts arrived in the former Soviet republic of Georgia hoping to retrieve two radio thermal generators that were discovered in early December 2001 near Abkhazia, a mountainous province in western Georgia controlled by Muslim rebels. Three men who claimed to be woodsmen noticed the objects because the snow around them was melting, and lugged the surprisingly heavy cylinders, which were not much bigger than cans of string beans, to their campsite for warmth. But they soon became dizzy and nauseated. A week later they were suffering from radiation burns. What they had discovered were two cores of the radiothermal generators, filled with strontium-90, used to provide power in remote regions.66
The remoteness of the region and the danger involved in recovering the cylinders made it less likely that terrorists could successfully obtain them. But the IAEA was not taking any chances. “The good news is that the place is so remote, so difficult to reach, even for us. So I believe it is not so easy to reach for terrorists,” Abel J. Gonzalez, director of the IAEA division of radiation and waste safety, remarked at the time. If terrorists tried to carry the radioactive cylinders away, he added, “they will probably kill themselves.”67
The search for abandoned RTGs continued. Another two abandoned devices were secured during the opening days of a summer 2006 effort to trace lost radioactive sources in Georgia. A team from the Georgian government and IAEA found a powerful one in a pile of dirt on the floor of an abandoned factory in the village of Iri. Another, smaller source was discovered inside a house, in a can of nuts and bolts above a workbench.68
In 2002, the IAEA was trying to locate radioactive devices that had been shipped to an assortment of locations in the Soviet countryside in the 1970s as part of a project code-named Gamma Kolos or Gamma Ears. The devices were used to expose plants to radiation and measure the effects. Some of the tests were intended to simulate farming conditions after a nuclear war. In eastern Georgia, Soviet researchers bombarded wheat seed with radiation to determine if the plants would grow better. The experiments used a lead-shielded canister packed with enough radioactive cesium-137 to contaminate a small city.69
In the aftermath of 9/11 and reports that Al-Qaeda was interested in developing a dirty bomb, there was a particular urgency to the recovery effort. With assistance from the Department of Energy the IAEA conducted a ten-month sweep of Georgia, which turned up five Gamma Kolos devices. One had drawn the interest of a local businessman who was hoping he would be able to sell it on the black market. Four more devices were located in Moldova. There was no information to indicate that any of the cesium devices had been stolen, but some Central Asian states had no records showing how many of the devices existed or where they were located. Nor was there any solid estimate of the number of devices, which according to one account, could be “anywhere from 100 to 1,000.”70
One means of keeping terrorists from building a nuclear or radiological dispersion device is to keep them from acquiring highly enriched uranium from civilian nuclear reactors around the world. Some of it had been provided, along with nuclear technology, by the U.S. government under President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program. Originally, in return, the recipients were required to pledge to forego the development of nuclear weapons and send spent fuel to the United States for treatment and disposal. In 1964, the U.S. government dropped the requirement that recipients return the material.71
In May 1996, in an attempt to reduce the chance of nuclear weapons proliferation, the Energy Department initiated the Foreign Research Reactor Spent Nuclear Fuel Acceptance Program to recover spent fuel containing highly enriched uranium that had been produced in the United States and that met certain criteria. It represented about 30 percent of the HEU the United States had provided to foreign reactors. In August 2003, the program was expected to take back only about half of the approximately 11,440 pounds of HEU it covered, a consequence of twelve countries not fully participating in the effort.72
In September 1996, the United States retrieved seven pounds of bomb-grade uranium, which it had originally supplied, that was sitting unprotected in a reactor in Bogota, Colombia, a situation that caused Assistant Secretary of Energy Thomas Grumbly to become “extremely concerned that it was essentially unprotected,” that “anybody could walk out the door with it.”73
One option for getting that uranium to the United States was to put it on a truck and drive it five hundred miles over rugged roads, roads threatened by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), to the port of Cartagena. Once there, it would be loaded onto a ship chartered by the Energy Department. But rather than risk the journey by land, Grumbly, after reading press reports of resurgent guerilla activity, had his department charter a giant Antonov-24 cargo plane. The plane’s entire nose section can be opened up, permitting a truck with its cargo to drive right up into the cargo hold without the need for transferring the containers. Operated by a private Russian cargo company, the plane happened to be in Argentina. The Russian crew flew the plane without incident from Bogota to Cartagena.74
Its cargo was placed on a ship, along with a similar load of enriched uranium from Chile. That ship then joined up with a similar ship carrying fuel from reactors in Sweden, France, and Switzerland. Together they arrived at the Navy Yard in Charleston, South Carolina. After being unloaded, their cargos, which together Grumbly said could be used to build “two crude bombs,” were trucked to the Savannah River, South Carolina, nuclear fuel plant.75
In other cases, the United States has played a key role by financing transfer of weapons-grade uranium from reactors in Eastern Europe to Russia, where the material was diluted so that it could not be used to produce a nuclear yield. Before daybreak on August 22, 2002, the U.S. and Russian governments executed an operation that had been planned in secrecy for over a year. Spirited away was a hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough for two or three nuclear bombs, from Belgrade’s Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences, which had been built in 1958 as the foundation of an ambitious program whose ultimate goal was the production of nuclear weapons.76
Concern over the nuclear material at Vinca, estimated to be about 4.4 pounds of HEU and 22 pounds of spent fuel from a research reactor, dated back to at least 1999, when NATO forces were conducting bombing missions against Belgrade targets. Part of the concern stemmed from the fact that satellite photographs showed the facility to be poorly protected, with only a single guard booth. The first stage of the operation, the removal of nearly six thousand ingots or highly enriched uranium “slugs,” was carried out over seventeen hours by hundreds of people, predominantly Yugoslav scientists and government officials, who received technical support from the State and Energy departments, the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy, and the IAEA.77
Just as U.S. officials feared that the uranium from the Bogota reactor could be hijacked, they also feared that the Vinca material was an attractive target. Thus, late on August 21, 2002, the reactor was locked down while the uranium was loaded onto a truck. Then, early the following morning, three trucks—two of them decoys—left the facility. As the trucks headed toward the city’s international airport, they were escorted by Yugoslav army helicopters and twelve hundred heavily armed troops. Security measures did not stop there. Police sealed off several of the city’s major highways for hours and placed sharpshooters on rooftops to guard against a possible assault.78
After the cargo arrived at the airport safely, Energy Department and Russian officials supervised the loading of the uranium onto a Russian plane. At 8:04 a.m. the aircraft took off for Dimitrovgrad, about 520 miles southeast of Moscow and home of a reprocessing facility that specializes in converting weapons-grade uranium into a less threatening blend that can be used in civilian nuclear power plants.79
The following September, in an operation financed by the United States, Russia retrieved thirty pounds of weapons-grade uranium from the Pitesti Institute for Nuclear Research, west of Bucharest, Romania, a poorly secured Soviet-era nuclear reactor facility. The 80 percent enriched uranium, contained in eight canisters, was of particular concern because of its amount and the ease with which it could be transported by terrorists. “You could throw it in the back of a truck and drive away with it,” Paul Longsworth, the Energy Department’s deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation, said at the time. Instead, it was driven to the Bucharest airport and loaded on a Russian IL-76 cargo plane while technical experts from the United States observed.80
Then on the day before Christmas 2003, according to an account in the Washington Post, an “international team of nuclear specialists backed by armed security units swooped into a shuttered Bulgarian reactor and recovered thirty-seven pounds of HEU in a secretive operation intended to forestall nuclear terrorism.” A team from the IAEA, accompanied by nuclear engineers from the United States and Russia, removed the seals from the containers storing the 36 percent enriched uranium and verified the contents before the material was loaded into four special canisters provided by Russia. The $400,000 operation, financed by the United States, took forty-eight hours and ended with the uranium arriving in Russia on an AN-12 cargo plane and being transported to the Dimitrovgrad facility.81
Such recovery operations continued into 2005 and 2006. In September 2005, in another covert predawn operation, financed by $2 million of American taxpayers’ money, a truck and its armed escorts transported thirty-one pounds of highly enriched uranium from the KV-2 Sparrow reactor at a Czech Technical University campus on the outskirts of Prague. The convoy traveled through deserted streets, coming to a halt near a runway at the city’s airport. Not long afterward, a Russian cargo plane landed and took off, carrying the uranium to a more secure storage site in Russia.82
In April 2006, the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that it had completed the removal of about 139 pounds of weapons-grade nuclear fuel from a small reactor in Uzbekistan and the transfer of the material to a secure storage site in Chelyabinsk, Russia. Four months later, the Energy Department transferred ninety pounds of HEU from a laboratory in Otwock-Swierk, Poland, to the Warsaw airport in a convoy guarded by Polish special forces. Once there, it was loaded onto a Russian plane, one step closer to its final destination.83
In September 2007, ten pounds of highly enriched uranium was moved from a reactor in Vietnam, at Dalat, about 150 miles northeast of Ho Chi Minh City, to Russia to be blended down into commercial reactor fuel. Vietnam surrendered thirty-five unused fuel rods containing the uranium in exchange for Russian-made low-enriched uranium fuel rods that would allow the reactor to continue to operate without bomb-grade material. The reactor, which had been built under the Eisenhower administration’s Atoms for Peace program, began operating in 1963, using U.S. weapons-grade uranium. It was shut down during the final days of the Vietnam War, and the U.S. government removed its fuel in a secret two-aircraft operation carried out only hours before the city fell to North Vietnamese forces. In the mid-1980s, thanks to Russian assistance and a new supply of HEU, the reactor was operating again.84
The Dalat operation followed an agreement between President Bush and Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet in November 2006. For the two individuals who managed the effort—Andrew Bieniawski, an immigrant from South Africa who works for the NNSA, and Igor Bolshinsky, a Ukrainian immigrant who works at the Idaho National Laboratory, it is only one of many spots they have traveled to to convince nations to give up their stocks of weapons-grade uranium so it can be transformed into something safer. The two are part of the NNSA’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which has been credited with locking down more than 80 percent of bomb-grade uranium at former Soviet Union sites outside Russia and converting fifty civilian research reactors in twenty-eight countries to operate on the low-enriched uranium not used in nuclear weapons.85
While Russia has proved willing to reprocess HEU into a less threatening form, both its nuclear weapons sites and a variety of military and civilian sites still contain weapons-usable material. In 1995, the Energy Department established the Materials Protection, Control, and Accounting (MPC&A) program, administered by the NNSA. Under the program, the Energy Department provided Russian nuclear facilities with a variety of modern nuclear security systems intended to enhance the Russian ability to keep track of and control its nuclear materials.
Those security systems have included physical protection systems, such as fences around buildings containing nuclear materials; metal doors protecting rooms where nuclear materials are stored; and video surveillance systems to monitor storage rooms. Other security systems include electronic sensors, motion detectors, and central alarm stations. In addition, the United States has provided material control systems, including seals attached to nuclear material containers that reveal whether material has been stolen from the containers, as well as badge systems that are intended to permit only authorized personnel to enter areas containing nuclear material. Russia has also received material accounting systems, such as nuclear measurement equipment and computerized databases to inventory the amount and type of nuclear material contained in specific buildings and to monitor their location.86
In early 2007, the Government Accountability Office reported that while the Energy Department claimed it had “secured” 175 buildings containing three hundred metric tons of weapons-usable nuclear material, 51 of the buildings did not have complete MPC&A upgrades. In addition, 35 buildings, including 32 that were part of the weapons complex, had not been upgraded. Security upgrades were still planned for another 210 buildings. In early November 2007, the United States finished a security upgrade at a Russian nuclear missile base in the Ural Mountains, completing a program of improvements at twelve Russian bases, including the installation of alarm and motion detection systems, modern gates, guardhouses and fighting positions, and metal and radiation detectors.87
In 1995, the Defense Department began assisting the Russian Ministry of Defense with improving its transportation security for nuclear warheads and security at nuclear warhead sites. Together, since 1995, the Defense and Energy departments have spent about $920 million to upgrade security at sixty-two sites, and plan to help secure a total of ninety-seven nuclear warhead sites by the end of 2008. But the plan excluded two key locations involved in manufacturing Russian nuclear warheads, which contain buildings with hundreds of metric tons of weapons-usable nuclear material.88
By the late 1990s, in an effort to detect nuclear material after it has been stolen, the U.S. Customs Service, with assistance from the Energy Department, was training personnel in Belarus and Eastern Europe to detect nuclear-related material, equipment, and technology. In addition, the Customs Service was overseeing the transfer of radioactive monitoring devices to former Soviet republics. By late 1996, nuclear-capable X-ray vans were on patrol in Belarus, the Ukraine, and the Baltic states. A year earlier, the United States had given one hundred handheld radiation detectors, along with $700,000 worth of laboratory equipment, to Kazakhstan to help analyze nuclear material samples.89
When the United States began its efforts, subsequent to the demise of the Soviet Union, to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states, Al-Qaeda was not yet a major concern. And while the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa and on the USS Cole moved Al-Qaeda and bin Laden up the list of troublemakers whose activities the U.S. government needed to address, 9/11 put them at the top of the list—and had a significant impact on NEST’s operations.
*Even if the device came with protection that made its immediate, or even eventual, use unlikely, the “unauthorized possession of a military nuclear device would be a matter of grave concern. No matter that the group possessing the device may not be able to make it function.” And the theft would certainly produce an all-out deployment of NEST personnel. See Robert Mullen, “Nuclear Violence,” in Paul Leventhal and Yonah Alexander, Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: The Report and Papers of the International Task Force on Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington, 1987), pp. 231–47.
*As a Pugwash Council chairman suggested, such a device might not only be built in a garage but also be detonated there, if it was near the center of the target city. A timer would allow plenty of opportunity for the perpetrators to make their escape. It would also solve the problem of transporting the device—eliminating both the chance of a mishap as well as of detection and apprehension. See Francesco Calogero, “Letter to the Editor: Nuclear Terrorism,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 2002, p. 5.