Nuclear Nightmares

April 15, 2016

After the attacks on Paris in November 2015, authorities discovered video surveillance footage of what appeared to be an ordinary residence. But further investigation revealed that the house being monitored belonged to a senior official of the Belgian nuclear industry. We should all be concerned.

The official and his family were the apparent targets of a plot that never got off the ground. The idea seems to have been to kidnap members of the official’s family and use the hostages to compel him either to steal nuclear materials or to help the terrorists assemble a bomb using nuclear materials to which he had access.

The threat is as old as nuclear weaponry. Soon after the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American scientists began to warn of the need for new controls to ensure that nuclear weapons and materials not fall into the wrong hands.

In his first speech to the UN Security Council, President Obama called nuclear terrorism “the single most important national security threat that we face.” As an initial step to address that threat, he hosted the first Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) in Washington in 2010 in order to draw attention of world leaders to the need to better secure nuclear material and thus try to prevent nuclear terrorism.

In the decades since Hiroshima, instances have been rare of criminals or potential terrorists getting their hands on the Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) or Plutonium required to fabricate an actual nuclear weapon. But there is another, perhaps more likely potential threat: acquiring radioactive materials commonly used to cobble together a so-called “dirty bomb.” This seems to be what the Brussels gang had in mind.

Such nuclear materials are used in tens of thousands of research reactors or are dispersed at power plants worldwide. These low-grade nuclear materials cannot produce a Hiroshimalike nuclear bomb.

But they could be detonated in a conventional explosion, potentially spreading radioactivity over a wide area. Increasingly since the 1980s, it’s been this “dirty bomb” scenario that has motivated a number of criminal gangs and terrorist groups and has become the nightmarish fear of law enforcement and emergency response officials.

While most nuclear materials are tightly controlled, studies by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) show “a persistent problem with the illicit trafficking in nuclear and other radioactive materials, thefts, losses and other unauthorized activities.” The IAEA’s database notes 1,266 incidents reported by 99 countries over the last 12 years, including 18 incidents involving weapons-grade material.

In February 2006, a Russian criminal gang was arrested in the former Soviet republic of Georgia with 79.5 grams of 89 percent HEU —the largest attempted diversion to date of near weapons-grade bomb fuel. Criminals in the former Soviet republic of Moldova (next door to Ukraine) made four separate attempts from 2010 to 2015 to sell radioactive material to agents of the “Islamic State (ISIS)” and other Middle Eastern extremists. The last reported case occurred in February 2015 when a smuggler with a large amount of radioactive Cesium sought a buyer from ISIS. Similar attempts by Chechen terrorists have been foiled by effective Russian police and intelligence work, often in collaboration with the FBI. This is one area where cooperation makes sense, regardless of the state of U.S.-Russian relations.

The original nuclear weapons states — the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and later, China — have sophisticated systems for securing their nuclear weapons. This author drafted the 1987 Nuclear Risk Reduction Agreement used by the U.S. and Russia to notify each other about nuclear weapons movements, replacements and decommissioning. Such “confidence-building measures” help ensure that activity around known nuclear weapons facilities does not unduly alarm the other side.

But the methods of nations that have since joined “the nuclear club” are less transparent. India, Pakistan and North Korea are all known to have nuclear weapons (Israel is widely believed to have them but has never admitted to it). Despite high levels of tension between these states and their adversaries, confidence-building measures are mostly non-existent. Add the element of potential terrorism and the danger is apparent. A study by Harvard’s Belfer Center in 2010 warned that Pakistan's stockpile “faces a greater threat from Islamic extremists seeking nuclear weapons than any other nuclear stockpile on earth.”

To his credit, by convening world leaders to work on this issue, President Obama has initiated a long overdue conversation. Agreements might not have much effect on a rogue state like North Korea, but all the other nuclear weapons states seem willing, even eager, to cooperate. This year’s Nuclear Security Summit saw the adoption of new standards for domestic storage and transit of nuclear material. The summit also agreed to better secure stocks of weaponsusable nuclear material and to set standards for international shipments of such materials.

Another important area endorsed by thirty summit attendees was to join a new effort "to ensure adequate cyber security at industrial control and plant systems at nuclear facilities.” According to the IAEA, “of the 24 states with weapons-usable nuclear materials…twenty do not even have basic requirements to protect nuclear facilities from cyber attacks.”

This latest initiative comes on the heels of revelations that Iranian hackers managed to take control of a small dam in upstate New York in 2013, an event only now conclusively linked to specific Iranian hackers. We might hope that our nuclear facilities are better protected — but we thought that of our IRS records, too.

One counter-terrorism move that is gaining traction is to get the dangerous materials out of countries that want to rid themselves of the burden of securing them. Countries as varied as Uzbekistan, Jamaica, Poland and Japan have rid themselves of unwanted materials that might have become targets for nuclear terrorists.

The final step agreed to at this year’s summit was a series of measures to mitigate “insider threats.” According to the U.S. Department of Energy, “almost all known cases of theft of nuclear material involved an insider.” Summit attendees committed to work to address this obvious vulnerability. Indeed, on Mar. 26, Belgium (again) announced the arrest of two employees at a Belgian nuclear facility who had been radicalized and were linked to the Paris /Brussels bombing gang.

Not a happy topic over your morning coffee, but perhaps one that deserves our attention and one that our future leaders need to take seriously.

Jack Segal is co-chair, with his wife Karen Puschel, of the International Affairs Forum. They both served on the U.S. delegation to the START arms control delegation and in Moscow. Jack also served as the Counselor for Arms Control in Moscow and as National Security Council Director for Non-proliferation at the White House. The IAF’s next event is 6 pm, Apr. 21 at Milliken where former Canadian Ambassador David Collins will be interviewed on “Prime Minister Trudeau’s New Directions.”