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Through the Nuclear Security Summit process initiated in 2010, countries have started securing some of the most vulnerable materials. But they have largely left plutonium untouched. As Obama warned in a later speech, this time on the margins of the 2012 Seoul Nuclear Security Summit, "We know that just the smallest amount of plutonium -- about the size of an apple -- could kill hundreds of thousands and spark a global crisis."

Of the two materials that can be used to construct nuclear weapons, it's easy to see why so much effort has been focused on highly enriched uranium (HEU), widely considered to pose the most urgent threat from terrorist use. There are about 1,440 tons of HEU in more than 32 countries, spread across a difficult-to-determine number of military sites and more than 100 research reactors and other civilian facilities. Unlike plutonium, HEU can be used to make the simplest kind of nuclear weapon -- a device that shoots one piece of HEU into another, causing a nuclear explosion.

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Security advocates outside of government have argued that initiating a comprehensive framework that would be binding across all participating nations would be a logical next step for the summit process that began in 2010 in Washington and could end next year in The Hague.

Such a system would set global security standards and universalize a regime that observers say is now a patchwork of agreements, many of which are voluntary, Togzhan Kassenova, a nuclear policy associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted during a discussion at the organization’s headquarters.

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"I'm baffled as to why they would do that," says Barry Watts, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a national-security policy think tank, said of the Obama administration. "Nonproliferation goes straight to the heart of their policy." Obama's budget proposal for 2014 would cut $400 million from nonproliferation programs compared while spending an additional $560 million on extending the life of our atomic arsenal (compared with the fiscal 2012 budget).

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The Global Threat Reduction Initiative is a "core material security program to ensure that terrorists can't their hands on nuclear weapons-usable material," explains Kingston Reif, director of nonproliferation programs at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. In 2012, the administration projected that it would spend $630 million on the GTRI in 2014. Obama's current budget proposal requests $424 million. Obama's 2013 budget proposal for GTRI was so low that Congress voted to increase funding by $35 million beyond the level that the administration requested. "We are hoping for the same thing this year," Reif says.

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The shift away from nonproliferation efforts is likely the result of austerity policies crimping the president's agenda, says Reif.

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“If enacted by Congress, these cuts will undermine global U.S. leadership to prevent nuclear terrorism,” the Partnership for Global Security said in the report. “They also threaten the foundation of threat reduction programs that have been built up over two decades to protect the public from the misuse of nuclear and radiological materials.”

Warnings from the nongovernmental organization and like-minded groups came days – or, in one case, just hours -- before two bombs detonated Monday along the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring close to 200. While post-Sept. 11 terrorist plots against the United States have focused on conventional means, issue specialists say now is not the time for leaders to let their guard down against the WMD threat.

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Partnership for Global Security President Kenneth Luongo said there is cause for worry that go beyond the numbers. For example, the Energy Department’s new budget plan affirms Washington’s intent to protect the world’s “most vulnerable nuclear materials” as of this year. That seems a step back from President Obama’s pledge in April 2009 to secure “all vulnerable nuclear material” within four years, he said.

“Changing ‘all’ to ‘most’ is moving the goal posts when no one knew where the goal line was to begin with,” Luongo asserted by e-mail. “They were let off the hook in the first term when no one pressed them to define ‘all,’ but that goodwill evaporated a long time ago. Now we are confronted with a major policy change buried in the bowels of a budget document with no explanation.”

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The Center for Public Integrity reported before last week’s federal budget rollout that reduced nonproliferation funding was proposed primarily to allow more money to flow into nuclear arms modernization projects.

“Is it true? I don’t know if anyone in the administration will admit it, but it certainly seems like it might be true,” Luongo told Global Security Newswire. “If it is it is a much bigger issue than just cuts -- it is an issue of prioritization.”

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"While the administration has achieved a great deal over the past four years ... by NNSA's own admission there is more material to remove, reactors to convert and/or shut down, and buildings with radiological and nuclear material to protect," Kingston Reif, of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, said by e-mail on Thursday. "As recently as two years ago NNSA gave no indications that it was planning to significantly reduce the scope of its work. ... It's difficult to escape the conclusion that weapons programs are being prioritized over the nuclear and radiological material security and nonproliferation budget."

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The stroke of a pen ended the lull in inspections of Russia’s nuclear stockpile and allowed the U.S. and Russia to start eliminating excess Cold War nuclear capabilities in a mutual, verifiable way.

Reflective of its name, the treaty was a new start in a much more aggressive global effort to decrease the modern risk posed by nuclear weapons: preventing terrorists from acquiring a nuclear weapon, a commitment shared by former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, as well as national security officials from both political parties. So just what more can we do to keep America and her allies safe from the modern threat posed by nuclear terrorism?

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The half-billion-dollar shift in spending priorities reflects an administration decision that nuclear explosives work the Energy Department performs for the military should be both accelerated and expanded. But Democrats on Capitol Hill and independent arms control groups predicted the decision will provoke controversy and a substantial budget fight this year.

Under the 2014 proposal, the Energy Department's nuclear weapons activities funding -- which includes modernization efforts for bomber-based and missile-based warheads -- would be increased roughly 7 percent, or around $500 million, above the current level of $7.227 billion for these activities.

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Tom Collina, research director for the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based nonprofit group, said "in a way," it seems inconsistent for the administration to promote arms control while cutting the DOE's nonproliferation budget. But he said officials may have calculated that they cannot win congressional support for further cuts in nuclear arsenals with Russia without spending billions more to refurbish America's remaining stockpile of nuclear weapons, under a bargain Obama struck during his first term.

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On April 5, 2009, Obama stood before tens of thousands of people in Prague, where he declared a series of steps his administration would take to advance the vision of a world without nuclear weapons.

Among those measures: “A new international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years.”

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“I think even the White House would admit that the four-year pledge is not going to be reached in four years, in part because they never defined what the goal of that four-year pledge was,” said Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security.

“That four years was a sprint within a marathon to get a plan in place for how we do this,” Deepti Choubey, senior director for nuclear and biosecurity at the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, told Global Security Newswire.

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"Any act of nuclear terrorism anywhere, no matter where it is, is going to have a reverberation around the world that is extremely negative," Luongo said. "I think that’s the way you have to look at this. Not what can’t be done but what needs to be done."

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“This is a never-ending process. As long as nuclear materials that are weapons usable are in use there’s always going to be a need for maintaining high security on those materials,” said Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists. “There will be new threats developing, there will be new terrorist groups or even new state-level threats.”

Washington has stepped up existing defense projects, particularly removal of fissile materials from other nations and converting foreign reactors to use proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium, but has not instituted new practices, Luongo said in an interview. Federal funding for the work has also remained largely frozen from Bush-era levels.

Luongo said he suspects the White House believes it cannot persuade nations to accept more aggressive measures or greater transparency about what actions are already being taken. Anticipating that some nations would not join a stepped-up global regime is no cause for not trying, he argued.

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“There are no standards, nobody has to do anything, nobody has to report to anybody, nobody has to provide any transparency,” Luongo said. “There’s no requirement that any country do anything.”

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“I think we’ve had some tentative success and we will see where some of these ideas have landed in the official process, whether they will make their way to the end,” Choubey said. “There’s a lot of careful tending and further development that needs to be done.”

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A new security framework does not have to be established from the start, but rather could be rolled out over a period of years as states work alone or in groups toward an accepted goal, Luongo stated. In that, it would be similar to agreements on fluorocarbons or climate change, he said.

“I understand the danger and the concern that people have about entering into a big new international negotiation, and I don’t think that’s what we’re arguing,” he said. “What we’re arguing is there needs to be a process by which you actually improve the nuclear security system in reality, over a period of time. And we’ve put that date as 2020.”

Ferguson said his discussions with officials from Nuclear Security Summit participant states suggest the process will end in 2014. He and others also played down the likelihood that leaders would agree to an overarching security framework.

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The priority should be on strengthening existing measures, including pushing for universal membership in the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism, Ferguson said.

The United States has not ratified the nuclear terror accord, and is among more than 30 nations that must still approve an amendment to the physical protection pact before it can be enacted.

Bringing the amendment into force before the 2014 summit “would be a powerful statement,” Ferguson said.

In the absence of the biannual summits, nations and international organizations will have to ensure they maintain the personnel and resources to continue safeguarding or eliminating nuclear materials and weaning more facilities off weapon-grade uranium, he added.

Each government should have one senior official who could track progress and threats and then have access to the head of state, according to Ferguson. “There has to be someone minding the ship,” he said.

Luongo warned that the issue could slip from top-level focus should the summits come to a final end next year.

“If it falls back to the technical level again, I’m not sure you’re ever going to get it back up,” he said.

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Speaking in Washington on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the U.S. can't afford to dismiss that talk as bluster.

"It only takes being wrong once, and I don't want to be the secretary of defense who was wrong once, so we will continue to take these threats seriously," he said.

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William Tobey, who worked on nonproliferation issues in the George W. Bush administration, says he's not convinced by the South Koreans' arguments — that reprocessing nuclear fuel makes sense for economic and energy reasons.

"I wouldn't question South Korean motives," he said. "On the other hand, as you go through the arguments that have been advanced in favor of reprocessing, it's really possible to knock them down one by one."

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"[T]he original Nunn-Lugar era is close to over and the question is what comes next," said Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security. "There are no Nunns or Lugars in the current Congress who are invested in the CTR program the way those two were."

Still, modernizing the program is possible by modifying the founding legislation, taking into account that most CTR projects are now focused on bio-weapons outside Russia and a more global program orientation not only at DOD but also the Energy and State departments, Luongo wrote in an email to Inside the Pentagon.

As for a new agreement with Russia -- "assuming there is one" -- the pact would no longer have that country as the major recipient, according to Luongo. In addition, "Russia will not be accepting liability for any catastrophe that occurs under the program," he added. Moscow has had longstanding concerns over what were essentially blanket liability protections for U.S. personnel working in Russia that were carried forward since the program's beginning.

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They said the divisions were in evidence during closed-door talks of the 46-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group on the sensitive issue of whether India could join and become the NSG's only member that is outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The United States, France, Britain and Russia were among those which backed membership for India - Asia's third-largest economy - while smaller European states such as Ireland, the Netherlands and Switzerland had reservations, the envoys said.

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Nuclear expert Daryl Kimball said India wanted to join the NSG because of prestige but that this would undercut the group's ability to ensure that New Delhi respects the non-proliferation commitments it made to win support for the 2008 exemption.

"Those commitments included no further nuclear weapons testing, compliance with site-specific safeguards, and support for a fissile material production moratorium," said Kimball, of the Washington-based Arms Control Association.

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The latest bill would not extend federal wiretapping authorities to specifically include investigations related to a nuclear incident and would not permit execution of a person convicted of an “act of nuclear terrorism” resulting in death, Representative John Conyers (D-Mich.) said during the bill's mark-up by the House Judiciary Committee. "These controversial provisions are not necessary in order to implement the underlying treaties," Conyers said.

Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) opposed a version of the bill in the previous Congress in part because it lacked such language. An anonymous hold by a GOP lawmaker prevented the earlier proposal from advancing through the Senate after it cleared the House of Representatives.

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“We hope that the full House will quickly follow the Judiciary Committee’s lead in approving the legislation. Then, as was the case at the end of last year, the ball will be in the Senate’s court,” Miles Pomper, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said in an e-mailed statement by the Fissile Materials Working Group.

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On the whole this was a good thing. As threats grew and evolved, governments had to keep pace. But today, amid the global economic downturn, nonproliferation budgets around the world are shrinking. Just this month, the White House announced a $57 million funding cut to the Defense Department's Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. Though some will lament the passing of the golden era of nonproliferation spending, more judicious outlays may not be all bad. One unforeseen byproduct of perpetually growing budgets was a sapping of the motivation of the governmental and nongovernmental organizations that make up the "nonproliferation complex" to adapt to changed circumstances. Nowhere has this flagging of innovation been more evident than in attempts to address the proliferation challenges emanating from the next generation of potential nuclear states in the developing world.

Despite the ebb and flow of the global economy and the countless headline-grabbing security threats that occupy popular attention, the world is a safer and more prosperous place than ever before. The past decade has witnessed fewer deaths from violent conflict than any in the previous century. And over the past 15 years alone, the lives of even the world's poorest citizens have improved more rapidly than during any other period in human history. By virtually every measure, we are living longer, healthier, and more productive lives, according to a report from the UN Development Programme PDF. Much of this success is directly attributable to an unprecedented era of globalization and innovation. Worldwide prosperity has spread along with the flow of advanced technologies from richer to poorer nations.

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The president made banning the further production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium a priority in an April 2009 speech in Prague, but progress on a treaty stalled due to opposition from Pakistan.

Administration officials and arms control activists believe they now have a new window for action. They point to increased cooperation on the UN Security Council and the beginning of John Kerry’s tenure as secretary of State as reasons for optimism.

“John Kerry comes to the position with an immense depth of experience on nuclear, non-proliferation and disarmament issues and he has long supported the risk-reduction measures that the Obama administration has committed itself to,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association.

“He is going to be a very active and creative force for advancing the president's nuclear risk reduction agenda, which remains unfinished.”

Kimball said progress on Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT) would depend on cooperation from Pakistan, which harbors fears of archrival India having more access to fissile material. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council might hold side talks with India and Pakistan in April to try and move the treaty forward, he said.

It was only last April in the casino town of Batumi, Georgia, that a cigarette-smoking man wearing a suit expressed interest in buying uranium for his Turkish boss. Fortunately, Georgian police were tapping the room and arrested him and others, halting any potential sale. This incident was the latest in a long line illustrating ongoing black-market demand for nuclear materials that could be fashioned into a “dirty” bomb or nuclear device.

Since 1993, there have been roughly 2,000 cases of illicit or unauthorized trafficking of nuclear and radioactive material logged by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Thirty illicit radioactive trafficking incidents were reported in the former Soviet region alone from 2009-11. As Obama said in December, “Make no mistake, if [terrorists] get [nuclear material], they will use it."

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Even President Ronald Reagan called for a world without nuclear weapons. But Hagel, who served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with then-Sen. Obama (D-Ill.), has taken the talking point further than others in the party. He has signed onto a report by Global Zero that would reduce the U.S. and Russian stockpiles to a maximum of 900 total nuclear weapons over 10 years, on the way to completely eliminating the world’s deadliest weapons by 2030.

Coupled with the nomination of fellow foreign relations colleague Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) as secretary of state, Obama has created “a very strong team on arms control,” says John Isaacs, executive director of the disarmament advocacy group, Council for a Livable World.

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Other advocates agree. “There is a mainstream point of view” on nuclear arms reductions, said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, which advocates for fewer nuclear weapons. A 2012 Pentagon white paper already has called specifically for a smaller nuclear force, Kimball said.

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“Hagel will be part of that equation as Washington and Moscow try to go forward to try and go beyond New START,” Kimball said.

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So how many warheads, submarines, bombers, and missiles are enough? Russia is the only other country with enough nuclear weapons to challenge the U.S. arsenal, yet arms trackers say Russia’s arsenal is likely going to shrink because of cost.  “The last I heard, the Cold War is over. We’re no longer enemies. There’s virtually no chance of a bolt from the blue,” Kimball said.

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Since the start of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad two years ago, western governments have been heavily focused on the fate of Syria’s chemical weapons and worry that those stocks might be taken over by militant groups.

But government officials and nuclear experts have also expressed fears to the Financial Times about what may be a significant stockpile of uranium inside Syria.

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Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank said: “It has always been a mystery where the fuel was coming from for Al-Kibar. There is reason to believe there is uranium in Syria and that would be of value to Iran.”

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Experts told Global Security Newswire the Kim regime is likely seeking to capitalize on the election of a new South Korean president [Park Geun-hye].

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“Park is untested right now so it is really too soon to tell” what she will do on North Korea, Sharon Squassoni, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Proliferation Prevention Program told GSN. “I think that delinking some of the humanitarian aid from the security situation, I think you could have some positive benefits there,” Squassoni said.

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The Zangger Committee was established to help signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) understand the technical issues related to transfers of nuclear materials and technology. But the committee did not include countries that were not signatories to the treaty; one such nation was France. The NSG, established as a complement to the committee, brought nations like France into the control regime. (France would accede to the treaty and also join the Zangger Committee in 1992).

In my own country of India, many people believed that the entire idea of bringing France into the nuclear control framework was to neutralize the power of Gaullism in France's economic and technology policies abroad. That is, France had often resisted the policies toward the developing world of other Western nations, and Paris's Gaullist impulses could be co-opted by bringing France into the NSG. In India, the Zangger Committee and the NSG were both understood as regimes for denying technology to the developing world -- as undesirable barricades that blocked the flow of goods and technology to countries pursuing economic development through peaceful nuclear energy programs. A segment of Indian government and civil society continues to understand the systems in this fashion.

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• Defining what is meant by best practice
• Specifying a methodology for deriving it
• Understanding the resulting characteristics of the method
• Comparing its pros and cons to other methods contributing to security, such as guidelines and regulations

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Obama officials have implemented an 85 percent funding curb they requested for the Megaports Initiative in the current budget year, capping fiscal 2013 expenditures at $19.6 million and suspending any expansion of the effort that originally aimed to place radiation detection gear at 100 foreign seaports by 2018.The number of seaports covered by the project stood at 42 as of August.

In calling for the cut, the White House Management and Budget Office said the program's impact was "diminishing" as it completed deployments at higher-priority facilities, according to a Government Accountability Office report issued last month. Management and Budget personnel cited other issues including a shortage of data for measuring the effort's success, and the possibility of overlap between Megaports activities and nonproliferation efforts such as the Homeland Security Department's Container Security Initiative.

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One independent expert said the Megaports funding reduction was "a very abrupt, precipitous and dramatic cut with no forewarning and not a very good explanation."

"This is about a bigger issue of engagement globally on the prevention of nuclear terrorism," said Kenneth Luongo, who heads the Partnership for Global Security. "If the U.S. doesn’t press this kind of cooperation, other countries are not going to."

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The Georgian seller offered cesium, a byproduct of nuclear reactors that terrorists can use to arm a dirty bomb with the power to kill. But one of the Turkish men, wearing a suit and casually smoking a cigarette, made clear he was after something even more dangerous: uranium, the material for a nuclear bomb.

The would-be buyers agreed to take a photo of the four cylinders and see if their boss in Turkey was interested. They did not know police were watching through a hidden camera. As they got up to leave, the police rushed in and arrested the men, according to Georgian officials, who were present.

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"Real buyers are rare in nuclear smuggling cases, and raise real risks," said nuclear nonproliferation specialist Matthew Bunn, who runs Harvard's Project on Managing the Atom. "They suggest someone is actively seeking to buy material for a clandestine bomb."

The request for uranium raises a particularly troubling question.

"There's no plausible reason for looking for black-market uranium other than for nuclear weapons_ or profit, by selling to people who are looking to make nuclear weapons," said Bunn.

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Speaking Nov. 5 in Arlington, Va., Laura Holgate, senior director for weapons of mass destruction terrorism and threat reduction at the National Security Council, said a main U.S. goal is to “leave behind a strengthened web of treaties, institutions, norms, and practices that will reliably secure nuclear materials.” She emphasized the roles of international organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and of national regulatory bodies.

The first nuclear security summit, which sprang from a commitment President Barack Obama made in his April 2009 Prague speech on nuclear weapons policy, took place in Washington in April 2010. The second one was in Seoul last March.

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By Fissile Materials Working Group | 7 December 2012

For more than two decades, the United States and Russia have worked together to secure Soviet stockpiles of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and materials, but now the future of this unprecedented partnership, the Cooperative Threat Reduction agreement, is in jeopardy. After several months of negotiations, Russian officials have publicly stated that they will not renew the current agreement, which forms the legal basis for cooperation between the two countries and is set to expire in July 2013. In early October, a Russian Foreign Ministry statement explained: "Our American partners know that their proposal is at odds with our ideas about the forms and basis for building further cooperation in that area. To this end, we need a more modern legal framework." And yet, the Russian vision for the future is not clear.

American officials are stressing the national security value of Cooperative Threat Reduction programs and the administration's sincere desire to continue working with Russia to reduce the vulnerability of weapons of mass destruction and related materials to theft, proliferation, and sabotage. US-Russian weapons security and dismantlement programs were created at the end of the Cold War and have been hailed as successful models of international cooperation for extremely sensitive security issues. Cooperative Threat Reduction collaborations underscore both the transnational nature of the weapons security threat and the ability of even the staunchest of adversaries to put aside other issues to address it. These are critical concepts to sustain.

The US Defense Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) spent nearly $650 million in 2012 on Russia-focused threat-reduction programs. Under the Obama administration's 2013 budget request, this figure is closer to $500 million. Most of this funding is provided through the National Nuclear Security Administration, not the original suite of Defense Department programs that were created to deal with loose nukes in the early 1990s. The amount that the Defense Department invests in the program is not trivial, but the program has significantly diversified its focus to include threats outside Russia and to secure cooperation around global biosecurity. The NNSA's International Nuclear Materials Protection and Cooperation program, which is responsible for nuclear material security in more than 40 nations, however, invested some $300 million in Russian activities in 2012 alone; this program will be devastated if the Cooperative Threat Reduction agreement lapses without a new accord in place. For 2013, the administration requested a dramatic cutback of the program's global focus that would leave the initiative almost entirely -- 70 percent -- Russia-focused. It is clear that the United States had no intention of wrapping up threat-reduction activities with Russia next year.

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While Obama did not break new ground, his remarks are an important signal to his national security team, the Congress, the American public, and the world that he intends to complete unfinished nuclear risk reduction tasks that he set out in his historic Prague address in April 2009.

In the speech which capped a day-long conference titled “Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction: Partnering for a More Secure World” at the National Defense University, Obama praised former Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) for their visionary and bipartisan leadership to conceive of and support the program.

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You can read the text of the President's remarks here.

In general, there wasn't anything earth-shatteringly new in the address (save for some good jokes from the President about traveling with Senator Lugar back when they were both Senators). The part of his comments that appears to have grabbed the most press attention was the President's clear message that the use of chemical weapons "would be totally unacceptable" that "there would be consequences." As I recall President Obama sent a similar message last August.

In his remarks the President commended the phenomenal success of CTR, reiterated that nuclear terrorism is one of the greatest threats to US national security, warned that far too much nuclear material lacks adequate protection, pledged to continue investments in nuclear material security programs, expressed a willingness to work with Russia as an equal partner to update CTR to comport with current realities, and book-ended the speech with his commitment to seek a world without nuclear weapons. Obama was lean on specifics about what he hopes to accomplish in his second term on the nuclear threat reduction front - though he said at the outset of his comments that his intent was not to give a major speech, but to honor Senators Nunn and Lugar.

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For more than a decade, U.S. defense and security leaders have warned that nuclear terrorism poses a severe threat to American security. The 9/11 Commission report stated, "The greatest danger of another catastrophic attack in the United States will materialize if the world's most dangerous terrorists acquire the world's most dangerous weapons."

During the 2004 presidential debates, the two candidates agreed that "the biggest threat facing the country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network." At the Cooperative Threat Reduction symposium in Washington, D.C., December 3, President Obama reiterated that "nuclear terrorism remains one of the greatest threats to global security."

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It's a fair question. Hopes were high in the international disarmament community after President Barack Obama's 2009 Prague speech when he pledged to move toward a nuclear weapons-free world. But those who cheered the loudest then are among the most disappointed now, frustrated over the slow progress toward this goal.

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Finally, the U.S. ability to combat the proliferation-terrorism nexus has proved limited. Although U.S. endorsement of nuclear disarmament has improved the atmospherics, little tangible progress has been achieved on the nonproliferation and nuclear security fronts. Many Non-Aligned Movement members in Asia (and beyond) continue to argue that the "baby steps" undertaken thus far do not justify more efforts from them on nonproliferation and nuclear security. This seems remarkably shortsighted since proliferation and especially acts of nuclear terrorism will have a much greater impact on their societies and economies than most seem willing to acknowledge. But the quid pro quo mentality remains nonetheless.

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Less attention, though, is being paid to what may be a more destabilizing development: next year Japan plans to bring its long-delayed Rokkasho reprocessing plant online, which could extract as much as eight tons of weapons-usable plutonium from spent reactor fuel a year, enough for nearly 1,000 warheads. That would add to Japan’s existing stockpile of 44 tons, 9 of which are stored in domestic facilities.

Japan has repeatedly vowed never to develop nuclear weapons, and there’s no reason to doubt that now. But there’s more to worry about: reprocessing not only creates a tempting target for terrorists, it also sets a precedent for countries around the world to follow suit — and pushes the world toward rampant nuclear proliferation.

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But the Obama administration did make one signature step forward: establishing a series of nuclear security summits that brought top-level political focus to efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism, a set of issues previously relegated to lower level officials and technical experts. Washington hosted the first nuclear security summit in 2010, which brought together leaders from 47 countries, the largest such gathering since the formation of the United Nations in 1945. An even larger number of countries sent representatives to a second summit hosted by South Korea in Seoul in 2012. And at that summit, governments agreed that the Netherlands would hold another summit in 2014.[26] So far, the summits have been seen as producing mixed results. While the communiqués and official documents from the summits have been cautious in tone, full of caveats and escape clauses, the summit process has been useful in leveraging commitments from individual countries and groups of countries to take concrete actions on nuclear security.

The next administration will need to determine how to approach two overriding issues. First, a growing number of governments have expressed concern that this somewhat technical issue does not merit high level summits every two years, and so it is not clear if the summit process will continue beyond 2014. Indeed, U.S officials have indicated that they would like member states to give the International Atomic Energy Agency a more central role in managing these concerns. Secondly, the administration will have to decide how ambitious an outcome it will push for at the Netherlands Summit. Some NGOs, and governments such as Australia, would like to see the summit commit to a stronger nuclear security regime. These steps, for example, might include instituting binding legal standards for nuclear security, or requirements for some outside review of a country’s nuclear security efforts (e.g., by the IAEA or other countries or organizations).

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Iowa’s Sen. Chuck Grassley, who had previously delayed passage, is now in a unique position to make this happen.

For more than a decade, U.S. defense and security leaders have warned that nuclear terrorism poses a severe threat to American security. The 9/11 Commission report stated, “The greatest danger of another catastrophic attack in the United States will materialize if the world’s most dangerous terrorists acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons.”

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The bill, which has passed the House but is being held up by an anonymous Republican in the Senate, is meant to ensure the United States meets legal standards required under the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Terrorism. The pact, which entered into force in 2007 and now has 82 state parties, requires member nations to criminalize the possession and use of nuclear weapons and related radioactive material. The deal also sets guidelines for the extradition and prosecution of individuals linked to nuclear terrorism.

The legislation would also bring the United States into line with a 2005 amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material. The change, which has yet to enter into force, would add standards for domestic storage, use and transfer to an agreement that originally focused on protecting international shipments of civilian nuclear material. To date, 59 of 97 countries needed to bring the amendment into force have taken the necessary legislative step.

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Kingston Reif, nuclear nonproliferation director at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, echoed Ford’s view on the prospects for congressional compromise before lawmakers close up shop for the year.

“It’s not looking great at this point but there is still time in the lame duck and I think it would be very helpful if senators on both sides of aisle who are supportive of robust U.S. leadership on nuclear security continue to have the conversation with Senator Grassley on the importance of this legislation and see what may be able to be worked out,” Reif said. “Even if nothing can be worked out in the lame duck, at least that could be an important down payment on ensuring swift passage in the next Congress.”

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What are the major national security threats facing the United States? How is science and
technology connected to national security? What can the next U.S. president do to prepare fora potential disaster?

Only three days after the national election, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) hosteda day-long symposium that featured distinguished speakers who provided recommendations tothe new administration on how to respond to catastrophic threats to national security.

These experts addressed the policy and technological aspects of conventional, nuclear, biological,and chemical weapons; biotechnology; nuclear safety; electricity generation, distribution,and storage; and cyber security. These policy memoranda call for a coordinated national effortto prepare for, prevent, and respond to catastrophic threats to the United States.

Mr. Charles Blair focuses on understanding of terrorists’ ideology and of the command and
control structure of groups who may carry out nuclear and radiological threats. Dr. Sidney
Drell questions whether it’s possible for the United States to escape the nuclear deterence trap,in addition to the current nuclear policy in general. Dr. Richard L. Garwin goes one step furtherand declares that nuclear weapons are more of a threat to developed society than a usefultool. Dr. Garwin lists numerous recommendations to reduce the current threat of nuclearweapons. Mr. Hans Kristensen provides options for nuclear force reduction. Dr. Robert S.Norris writes that fundamental changes to U.S. war planning are a prerequisite to achievingsmall stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

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But while nuclear terrorism is one of the biggest threats to our security, it is also one of the most preventable. Two treaties with very complicated names but very straight-forward goals will equip our security and intelligence communities with tools they need to better prevent attacks. The Convention on the 2005 Amendment to the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM) and the 2005 International Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism (ICSANT) will increase our ability to confront nuclear terrorism by 1) protecting domestic nuclear material and 2) promoting international cooperation in investigating, extraditing and prosecuting suspected terrorists.

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The election turned on domestic issues, and even the presidential debate that was supposed to be dedicated to foreign policy pivoted back to the American economy and education system. Nevertheless, the question that I have been asked most is how Obama will use his renewed lease on the White House to address global issues. In my area of specialisation on arms control and non-proliferation, everyone agrees there is much to be done. Unfortunately, there seems little scope for Obama to do it. And, of course, Iran looms large on his agenda.

Obama aimed high in his initial foray into the nuclear subject with his speech in Prague in April 2009. The following year he struck the New START nuclear arms agreement with Russia and corralled global leaders to prioritise efforts to counter nuclear terrorism. After these signal achievements, however, the nuclear agenda stalled.

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The future of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program in Russia was thrown into question last month when officials there said publicly their government was not interested in extending the pact that has enabled the initiative to operate within the country since the early 1990s.

During the past two decades, the United States has used the program to provide Russia with more than $7 billion in funds, equipment and expertise for securing and eliminating Soviet-era nuclear arms and other unconventional weapons. The U.S. government and its contractors are shielded from virtually all liability from incidents that could occur during the course of CTR work under the enabling umbrella agreement – an issue that has long been contentious in Moscow.

The agreement expires in June. The Obama administration earlier this year proposed extending the deal but received a chilly response from Moscow.

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Moscow's stance on the CTR agreement is consistent with those it has taken on other international issues since Vladimir Putin reassumed the Russian presidency in May, suggested Andrew Semmel, a consultant to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“What the president has done now is to alert all of his emissaries around the world to take a tough position on a number of issues and I think [the CTR stance] is one of the manifestations of this,” Semmel said during the panel discussion. “I think this is something that has pervaded in a number of issues including the CTR program.”

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Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, told Global Security Newswire previously that Russia might raise objections to a Defense Department requirement that it conduct inspections to ensure that any equipment it pays for in Russia has been properly installed. He said Russian officials “balk” at this requirement.

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As states in the region work towards establishment of a Zone in the Middle East free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, they may in the meantime wish to consider cooperative measures in the field of nuclear safety and security that would be valuable in their own right and could help to establish the greater sense of trust that will be necessary for materialization of a “Zone”. With nuclear power having newly arrived in the region and with more reactors on the way, issues of nuclear safety and nuclear security take on vital importance. It will be critical for Middle East states that are pursuing nuclear power to implement effective national policies, to sign up to international instruments and to adhere to global regimes. Mutual encouragement to adopt such national policies and practices in one way that states of the region can join in common purpose. Another way, and at a higher level of political difficulty, Middle East states may find utility in coordination and cooperation on a regional basis. At the higher level of aspiration, states might seek to build a structure for regional collaboration on nuclear and radiological safety and security.

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In the two decades that it has been operating, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program — known simply as Nunn-Lugar for its Senate authors, Democrat Sam Nunn of Georgia and Republican Richard G. Lugar of Indiana — has helped destroy a huge arsenal of nuclear warheads, missiles, chemical shells and weapons-grade uranium. After Nunn retired in 1997, Lugar continued to champion the program, which — at a cost of $15 billion so far — has proven to be one of the nation’s most effective non-proliferation initiatives.

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“These are not crazy demands,” says John Isaacs, executive director for the Council for a Livable World, a group that advocates for nuclear non-proliferation. “What the Russians are demanding is perfectly reasonable and should be able to be worked out in negotiations.”

“Progress on one unlocks progress on another,” Isaacs says. “Everything is connected.”

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Romney is generally skeptical of the value of nuclear weapons reductions and other arms control measures, whereas Obama has largely embraced these as policy tools. Obama, for example, wants to seek Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, while the Republican challenger’s advisers do not see that as a possibility during a Romney administration.

The next president might be expected to grapple with Russia’s increasing reluctance to continue Cooperative Threat Reduction efforts, despite a continuing risk of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons proliferation.

The possibility of an Israeli attack against Iranian nuclear facilities could loom early in the next presidential term, as might a decision about whether the United States should use its own military to stop any potential effort by Tehran to build a nuclear weapon.

“That undoubtedly will be a concern of any administration, assuming that force has not been used prior to the new administration taking office,” said William Potter, speaking in his capacity as a professor of nonproliferation studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

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The threat to drop joint CTR efforts “is a challenge for whoever the next president is,” said Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security. “And it’s not an issue that’s totally within our control.”

“If they bring in all the Bush people, I think that you are going to see the same problems you had in the Bush administration” internationally, Luongo said. “If they bring in more moderate people, they can work with anyone.”

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Radiological security is commonly associated with the threat of terrorists detonating a "dirty bomb" -- a dispersal device consisting of conventional explosives laced with radioactive material -- as a way of using people’s natural fear of radiation to create chaos that is disproportionate to the actual health risk. However, it is important to remember that there are numerous other ways in which radioactive material could be used to wreak havoc: It could be a surreptitiously placed radiation-emitting device or -- as James Acton, Brooke Rogers, and Peter Zimmerman point out in the journal Survival -- used in an attack that causes people to inhale, ingest, or immerse themselves in a radioactive substance. The dirty bomb scare is only the tip of the iceberg with respect to radiological threats.

Moreover, because these materials are widely used in medicine, industry, and agriculture, there are literally millions of potential sources of radioactive material around the world. Also, small-but-significant amounts of radioactive material remain in thousands of orphaned containers outside regulatory control. Yet all of these radiological materials originate from a relative few supplying countries -- Argentina, Belgium, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Russia, South Africa, and the United States -- that produce and export them. Therefore, a top-down approach to security focused primarily on regulatory controls at the state level does have some intuitive appeal.

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The United States, however, hopes to extend the so-called umbrella agreement, which provides the underlying legal framework for the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program. The program is commonly known by the names of the authors of the 1991 legislation that established the effort, Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Sam Nunn (D-Ga.).

If the program, widely viewed as one of the most successful initiatives to control excess Russian weapons of mass destruction, is not renewed, “Russia’s unsecured weapons and materials [would] remain a temptation for terrorists of all varieties to buy or steal for use in future attacks,” The New York Times editorialized Oct. 17.

In comments that many interpreted as an indication the deal was dead, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Oct. 10 that “[t]he American side knows that we do not want another [Nunn-Lugar] extension,” according to Russia’s Interfax news agency.

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On Sept. 14, the Japanese government issued an energy strategy document that contemplates the phase-out of nuclear power by about 2040. A cabinet decision five days later made clear that the strategy document did not constitute a binding policy decision, and the strategy could be scrapped entirely if the current Japanese government falls from power in the upcoming elections, which are expected to take place by next summer.

The new energy strategy is part of Japan’s response to the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors on March 11, 2011.

For decades, a central part of Japan’s nuclear plans has been what energy and nonproliferation specialists call “closing the fuel cycle.” That involves reprocessing the spent fuel from power reactors to separate plutonium that is then used in making fresh fuel for reactors.

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The crisis began on October 16, 1962, when photographs taken by an American U-2 spy plane exposed the secret construction of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba. It was the ultimate trick or treat, with the emphasis on trick.

Upon learning of the secret Soviet deployment, many of President John F. Kennedy’s advisors recommended that he launch an air attack and invasion of Cuba to destroy the missile sites and overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Fearing the consequences of an attack, Kennedy instead opted for a quarantine of Cuba to allow for a diplomatic solution.

This strategy worked, but just barely. On October 28, 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw his arsenal of missiles and nuclear warheads from the island in exchange for Kennedy’s public commitment not to invade Cuba and his secret concession to withdraw US Jupiter missiles from Turkey at a later date. Had the crisis lasted much longer, Kennedy may have given the order to strike.

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Terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda, have demonstrated repeatedly that they seek to acquire nuclear weapons. Unbeknownst even to many security specialists, tons of bomb-grade uranium are trafficked legally each year for ostensibly peaceful purposes. If terrorists obtained even a tiny fraction of this bomb-grade uranium they could potentially construct a nuclear weapon like the one dropped on Hiroshima that killed tens of thousands.

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Nevertheless, good judgment prevailed over pressures. Both statesmen were wise but also, they were very lucky…

It is disappointing to say that after 50 years, the nuclear threat is still with us. The expectations of a post Cold War distension in nuclear terms gave way, perhaps too soon, to a hardening of positions, and to more nuclear armed states, from 4 to 9. Moreover, nuclear terrorism, immune to any deterrence and ready to impose its own rules is, appeared in the forefront as perhaps the more dangerous and likely XXI Century threat.

There is no doubt that the world is today more complex and uncertain than during the Cold War. There are still 20,000 nuclear weapons, many on high alert, deployed in 14 countries. Beyond good intentions, at the present time, many of nuclear disarmament commitments are still pending of accomplishment, while virtuous and successful cooperation systems, such as Cooperative Threat Reduction Agreement between USA and Russia, popularly known as Nunn-Lugar Agreement, which made possible the dismantlement of more than 7,000 nuclear warheads form the former USSR, run the risk of being deactivated.

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Although the goal of locking down all vulnerable nuclear materials in four years was agreed to by leaders at the 2010 Washington summit, the goal will not be met by 2014, and even with stepped-up efforts since the first summit, in 2010, a number of nuclear security gaps will remain. Within this context it is important to recognize that improving the nuclear security architecture cannot be confined to or defined by the summit process, but rather the NSS should be seen as a driver of a larger, long-term effort to improve nuclear security worldwide.

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What we do know about Chinese nuclear security is encouraging. As in all nations, however, room for improvement surely exists. At the 2012 nuclear security summit in Seoul, Chinese President Hu Jintao said, "In the future, China will [take further] nuclear security measures, make sure [of] the security of its own nuclear materials and facilities, [and] improve … overall nuclear security." But converting Hu's political commitment into practical, sustainable reality will require China to assess its nuclear sector's vulnerabilities along several dimensions, ranging from regulatory arrangements to physical infrastructure to the nation's security culture. Once vulnerabilities have been accurately assessed, the path will be clear to minimize China's nuclear security threats.

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• Iran's Nuclear Capabilities and "Red Lines;"
• Options for Preventing a Nuclear-Armed Iran;
• U.S. and Global Nuclear Forces;
• Further U.S.-Russian Nuclear Cuts and China;
• Nuclear Modernization and Nuclear Weapons Spending;
• Preventing Nuclear Terrorism;
• Ballistic Missile Defenses.

Iran's Nuclear Capabilities and "Red Lines"
A central issue in 2013 will be how to handle Iran's nuclear program, which could be used as the basis for building nuclear weapons in the years to come.

President Obama has said repeatedly that he will not allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons. Governor Romney has also said he will not allow a "nuclear-armed" Iran. However, in October 8 speech he said:  "I will put the leaders of Iran on notice that the United States and our friends and allies will prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability."

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The massive nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia – the most dangerous legacy of the cold war – have been reduced through successive arms control agreements. However, deployed US and Russian nuclear forces still exceed 1,500 strategic warheads each – far more than necessary to deter nuclear attack.

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The CTR Agreement was conceived and implemented in a very different time. The Soviet Union had disintegrated and Russia was financially supine. U.S. assistance was necessary to keep body and soul together for Russian nuclear weapons scientists, and to remove the temptation for them to sell their knowledge and wares to other nations or terrorists. In the absence of Soviet oppression, the Russian nuclear archipelago was a security nightmare, with fallen fences, crumbling buildings, poor procedures, and a demoralized (and all too often drunken) guard force. Championed by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, and signed by President George H. W. Bush, the Cooperative Threat Reduction legislation created programs to detect, secure, and dispose of dangerous nuclear material in Russia and the former Soviet Union, as well as to facilitate the destruction of missiles and chemical weapons.

Today, Russia is more prosperous and its nuclear weapons, materials, and facilities are much more secure. Work under the Bratislava Initiative, agreed to by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin in 2005, essentially completed physical security upgrades at nuclear weapons facilities in Russia. Fissile material production reactors at Seversk and Zheleznogorsk were shut down and replaced with coal-fired plants. Hundreds of Russian ports, airports, and border crossings are now equipped with nuclear detection equipment. Over 400 metric tons of Russian highly enriched uranium has been down-blended to fuel reactors that now provide 10 percent of American electricity. Nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus have been removed to Russia, and the former Soviet nuclear test site at Degelen Mountain in Kazakhstan has been secured from scavengers. Moscow and Washington, among others, should be proud of these signal achievements.

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The prospect of nuclear terrorism is at once one of the biggest threats to American security and one of the most preventable. But, like many foreign policy issues in 2012, nuclear terrorism has been overlooked. That is both unfortunate and unacceptable. Now, as focus turns to foreign policy issues, President Obama and Gov. Romney owe it to the American people to clearly articulate their vision to prevent these materials from falling into the wrong hands.

There is a clear consensus on the severity of the need to secure nuclear materials. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission that I chaired noted, “The greatest danger of another catastrophic attack in the United States will materialize if the world’s most dangerous terrorists acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons.”

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Speaking in London, Yukiya Amano of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said groups' efforts to build a dirty bomb were becoming "more professional".

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DARYL KIMBALL, DIRECTOR, ARMS CONTROL ASSOCIATION: This has been one of the most successful security programs in history. And it has been a vital part of really ending the Cold War.

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“We are still in talks,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said during a press briefing when asked about the future of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program in Russia.

Since the early 1990s, the United States has provided Russia with more than $7 billion in funds, equipment and expertise for securing and eliminating Soviet-era nuclear arms and other unconventional weapons through the CTR initiative. The program is enabled by an umbrella agreement that, among other things, shields the U.S. government and its contractors from virtually all liability stemming from incidents that might occur in the course of CTR work.

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Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, told GSN earlier this week that Russia could raise objections to other aspects of the program, such as a Defense Department requirement that it conduct inspections to ensure that any equipment it pays for in Russia has been properly installed. He said the Russians “balk” at this demand.

Luongo and other observers suggested it is still possible to negotiate a revised agreement, however, and the Obama administration is now also making that case.

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Later announcements by the Foreign Ministry said it did not want the program unless there were major changes made to it, but did not specify what those changes it desired might be.

What is clear is that 24 hours after the initial media reports hit the airwaves is that the Russian Foreign Ministry seems to have no unified opinion about the future of the program – except for making it tougher – while the US side seems to be reading in the tea leaves that the program is not ending so much as being demanded to change.

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“In my view, the end of the [Nunn Lugar] program […] would be a serious mistake for both sides and for the global community," Kenneth Luongo, President of the Washington-based Partnership for Global Security, one of the America’s most authoritative nonproliferation think tanks, told Bellona.

“There is little that binds the US and Russia together at this time and mutual cooperation to ensure that [weapons of mass destruction] are secured and not vulnerable to theft or proliferation is one of the strongest common links between the two countries,” he said.

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The nuclear-armed South Asian nation's atomic sites are "very well protected" and protections at installations such as the Dera Ghazi Khan site are "adequate" for responding to terrorist dangers, ex-Pakistani Nuclear Command Authority arms control and disarmament chief Naeem Salik wrote in a mid-September e-mail message.

There were reports early last month of a Pakistani Taliban plot to attack the large nuclear complex, which houses a number of uranium fuel cycle operations. Security around the Dera Ghazi Khan complex was said to have been significantly bolstered following discovery of the reported plot, but no attack emerged.

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Salik also maintained the Dera Ghazi Khan site holds "no fissile materials or weapons related facilities." Had the Taliban actually attempted to assault the complex, the result would have been "more of an embarrassment than any real damage" as the nuclear work at the isolated site is not military-related, he insisted.

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I agree with Mr. Leahy that swift implementation of those treaties is important to national security. However, the legislation passed by the House of Representatives and fast-tracked by the Senate Democratic leadership is flawed. It not only includes a drafting error that requires an amendment to ensure proper implementation, but it fails to include important provisions that were in President Obama’s proposal for implementing the treaties.

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The massive nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia—the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War—have been reduced through successive arms control agreements. Yet, deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear forces still exceed 1,500 strategic warheads each, far more than necessary to deter nuclear attack.

Five decades ago, President John Kennedy warned of the possibility of dozens of nuclear-armed nations. Since then, world leaders have built up an extensive nonproliferation regime that has slowed the spread and reduced the salience of nuclear weapons.

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As argued by Mari Amano, the Japanese ambassador to the CD, an FMCT would be an essential complement to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Once it enters into force, the test ban will act as a “quality cap” on global nuclear weapons programs while the FMCT would be a “quantity cap.” Yet problematically for those keen on advancing an FMCT, various countries, most recently Pakistan, have blocked the CD’s work by taking advantage of the body’s requirement for consensus.

The resulting frustration has fueled a growing movement to start formal FMCT negotiations in another forum. Most recently, Canada in 2011 convinced the UN General Assembly to pass Resolution 66/44, requiring the assembly to “consider options for the negotiation of a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices at its sixty-seventh session.” As expected, none of the draft programs of work proposed to the CD in 2012 was able to muster consensus support. The 67th session of the General Assembly thus opened in late September with the debate over parallel negotiating forums on its agenda.

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Many observers say they do not expect to see significant progress until next year, after the U.S. presidential election this November and South Korea’s in December.

A key point of contention is pyroprocessing, a spent fuel treatment process that South Korea is developing and says is significantly more proliferation resistant than conventional reprocessing. A U.S. official has publicly disagreed with that claim, saying that pyroprocessing is reprocessing.

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Located northwest of Islamabad in Kamra, the Minhas air base includes facilities for manufacturing various weapons systems, including the assembly plant for the Mirage and JF-17 fighter jets. According to U.S. experts, the Mirage may be nuclear capable, and nuclear weapons might be stored at the facility.

A spokesperson for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said Aug. 16 that the country’s “strategic assets are safe” and that “all measures” are in place to ensure the “safety and security of our nuclear assets.” U.S. Defense Department Spokesman George Little said during a press conference the same day that there was no indication that the attack had “endangered the Pakistani nuclear stockpile.”

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In particular, the task force wondered what standards the 1540 Committee, as it is known, would use to evaluate how well states were implementing the resolution; how much the committee would press states to comply with the legally binding obligations of the resolution; and whether the work could be done with only seven committee experts. By 2012, the answers to those questions are none, very little, and no, respectively.

The committee does not evaluate states; it uses the lightest of touches to encourage them to comply with the resolution, and it has far too few resources to do the work envisioned by the task force. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that states have taken many actions meant to meet their obligations and that Resolution 1540 and the 1540 Committee have become linchpins in the global nonproliferation regime.[2]

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Now, in an unexpected twist — just before the Senate recessed for the fall elections — Republicans tried to change anti-nuclear terrorism legislation the House embraced in June and which has the approval of the White House and former Bush administration officials.

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In a Sept. 13 op-ed in The Washington Times, Andy Semmel, a former Bush administration official, wondered what the holdup was.

“Congress hasn’t given its best effort to prevent nuclear terrorism,” he wrote. “Senate approval of the pending implementing legislation remains the last hurdle.”

Leahy fired back in a letter to the editor, saying Senate Republicans were responsible for the setback.

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the committee, did not like how the bill was moving forward — with no opportunity to add amendments.

“Given the seriousness of the topic and the differences between the House-passed bill and what the president proposed, Sen. Grassley asked for the bill to either be referred to committee, where members can offer amendments, or allow for a fair amendment process on the floor to reconcile the differences,” a Senate source said.

One of his main objections was the death penalty provision, which had been stripped from the House bill with the White House’s approval.

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“It is vital that the Senate pass the implementing legislation, which has already been approved by the GOP-led House, in this session of Congress,” said Kingston Reif, director of nuclear non-proliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “Swift congressional approval is important not only to ensure U.S. laws are sufficient but also to help prod other countries into action.”

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The proposed updates might prove unacceptable to House lawmakers, preventing approval of the legislation before the current Congress adjourns in January. Meanwhile, a secret GOP hold has prevented the House-approved language from advancing through the Senate, according to a key Democratic lawmaker in that chamber.

The amended version of the bill -- put forward on Friday by Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) -- would eliminate several alterations House lawmakers made to an earlier Obama administration draft of the legislation. Among other changes, the senator would reinstate language to the House proposal that might allow for the execution of a person convicted of an “act of nuclear terrorism” if it results in death, according to Beth Levine, Grassley’s Judiciary panel spokeswoman.

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White House intervention might be necessary to break the deadlock, said Andrew Semmel, an advocate for U.S. ratification of the nuclear security agreements and a retired veteran staffer for Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.).

“It could very well be any number of reasons why they’re dragging their feet on this,” according to Semmel, who also served under the Bush administration as deputy assistant secretary of State for nuclear nonproliferation policy and negotiations. “Oftentimes … if you follow the Senate and the House, the issue is not really the issue. It’s something else,” he told Global Security Newswire in an interview.

Washington’s formal endorsement of the 2005 nuclear materials amendment could hasten the measure’s entry into force by encouraging its ratification by other countries, a number of arms control advocates and former high-level U.S. officials have argued.

“Diplomats in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations have made a point of urging ratification of these two treaties in meetings with their counterparts,” Semmel stated in a Washington Times commentary published earlier this month.

“There is little doubt that other countries look to the U.S. for leadership to help make it easier for them to ratify the treaties and contribute their part in the global fight against nuclear terrorism,” Semmel wrote. “The immediate fate of the implementing legislation that is needed to enact and complete ratification of these two treaties rests with the Senate Judiciary Committee and the full Senate.”

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South Korean officials are interested in developing an enrichment capacity for reasons both economic and political. The political concerns that surround enrichment in South Korea can be eased by diplomats working out appropriate language. The economic issues, meanwhile, can be addressed through measures like arranging South Korean investment in US enrichment facilities -- which would provide Seoul much of what it wants from a domestic enrichment capacity without creating new proliferation risks.

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Today, the problem is how to safely get rid of it.

“We do consider this to be waste,” said David G. Huizenga, the senior administrator for environmental management at the Energy Department. “There’s no further need for it.”

Uranium 233 looked attractive because it could be made in a reactor from thorium, a cheap and abundant radioactive metal, and, almost magically, the reactor would produce more fuel than it consumed. Utilities manufactured some of it at the Indian Point I reactor in Westchester County, N.Y., which is now retired, and at reactors in Colorado, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

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“Nuclear physicists weren’t geologists and didn’t understand the supply of uranium,” said Frank N. Von Hippel, a physicist and public policy specialist at Princeton. “It turned out there was more uranium than people thought and less nuclear power than people thought there would be.”

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Because the uranium 233 is mixed in with dangerously radioactive materials, it is “self-protecting” to an extent, said Charles D. Ferguson, the president of the Federation of American Scientists and an expert on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. Over time, he said, the radiation will diminish, and some of it has died away because the uranium 233 is 50 to 60 years old.

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Cold War Years

The joint USSR-US Statement on the future negotiations on nuclear and space arms – that the two nations’ leaders signed - gave a most general definition of what constituted strategic stability during the Cold War.  According to the June 1990 statement, strategic stability should be understood as such a balance of strategic forces of the two countries where there were no incentives for a first strike. That definition effectively replaced an earlier principle of “equality and equal security” which was amorphous and non-binding.

The statement essentially declared that future agreements should ensure strategic stability through stabilizing reductions of strategic offensive arms as well as through implementing the concept of the corresponding interrelation between strategic offensive and defensive weapons.  Reductions in concentration of warheads on strategic delivery systems and preference for weapons with increased survivability were at that time identified as principles of stabilizing reductions.

However, this was not sufficient for implementation of the declared provisions. The sides needed to formalize the provisions, to reinforce them with quantitative correlations that would be both justified and illustrative.

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Mr. Semmel asserts that “the immediate fate of the implementing legislation that is needed to enact and complete ratification of these two treaties rests with the SenateJudiciary Committee and the full Senate.” I share Mr. Semmel’s sense of urgency, and he must have been unaware that as chairman of the SenateJudiciary Committee, I requested this legislation be discharged from the Judiciary Committee on Sept. 12 in order to expedite its passage by the full Senate. The bill, the Nuclear Terrorism Conventions Implementation and Safety of Maritime Navigation Act of 2012, has now been cleared by all Senate Democrats. Unfortunately an anonymous Republican hold has been placed on the bill.

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A soon-to-expire bilateral nuclear cooperation deal bars South Korea from recycling used atomic fuel or refining uranium -- activities that have both peaceful and nuclear-weapon applications. The two nations are negotiating a replacement accord that the South hopes will include the right to use developmental pyroprocessing technology, which does not remove separated plutonium from other atomic elements.

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"Given the fact that South Korea has been actively working to strengthen a global nonproliferation regime, the U.S. needs to fully change its policy on nuclear cooperation with South Korea," report author Jun Bong-geun wrote.

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The U.S. nuclear cooperation policy towards restricting South Korea's peaceful enrichment and reprocessing is contradictory to the bilateral partnership built on mutual respect under the Korea-U.S. strategic alliance," said Jun Bong-geun, a senior professor at the Korean Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, in a report.

 "Given the fact that South Korea has been actively working to strengthen a global non-proliferation regime, the U.S. needs to fully change its policy on nuclear cooperation with South Korea," Jun said in the report. The institute is affiliated with Seoul's foreign ministry.

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There is a long and commendable record of U.S. bipartisan support for policies and practices that prevent nuclear terrorism and impede nuclear proliferation. Successive administrations and both political parties have broadly agreed that combating nuclear terrorism ranks at the top of our foreign policy and national security agenda. The 9/11 Commission warned, “The greatest danger of another catastrophic attack in the United States will materialize if the world’s most dangerous terrorists acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons.” Former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates noted, “Every senior leader, when you’re asked what keeps you awake at night, it’s the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear.”

Despite these and other meritorious actions, including the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the threat of nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation is not going away. We need more tools and more legal cooperation with other states to fill gaps that enable terrorists and other rogue elements to exploit weaknesses in the international system, weaknesses that jeopardize our security and the security of our friends and allies. The 2005 Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials (CPPNM) and the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism (ICSANT) build upon past U.S. international initiatives to strengthen our hand against terrorism.

Why CBRN Security Culture?

A practical tool to achieve this goal is to develop a comprehensive vision of security culture that is applicable to the expanding, very long-term mission of UNSCR 1540. That security culture enhances and supports the security regime was unambiguously recognized by the 2010 and 2012 Nuclear Security Summits. Held in Seoul, the 2012 summit adopted not just a summit communiqué but several statements about individual components of nuclear security. These documents specifically cite the human element as key to achieving such goals as physical protection, transport, and IT security. There are at least four reasons why a common paradigm of security culture—a paradigm that applies to the chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear fields alike—is becoming a necessity.

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Accordingly, many experts argue that the Nuclear Security Summit process, which began with an April 2010 meeting hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington and continued with a second summit that took place in Seoul this past spring, urgently needs to set higher expectations and pursue more ambitious goals. For instance, Joan Rohlfing, president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, argues that “we need to develop a comprehensive, universal, and ultimately enforceable [nuclear] materials control system.”

Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security and co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group, calls for a framework agreement to unite currently disparate and loosely-defined nuclear security conventions, rules, and standards.²  Akin to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, such an agreement would be universal, but it would permit a comprehensive system to be developed over time. It would promote recognition of nuclear security as a priority and require its parties to take specific steps to gradually achieve its objectives.

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The Health and Human Services Department in July proposed to pay providers more if they conduct diagnostic procedures on their Medicare patients using isotopes derived from low-enriched uranium. The plan – part of a wide-ranging proposed rule that would make numerous adjustments to the Medicare system -- is the latest attempt by Washington to wean the United States off medical isotopes produced with highly enriched uranium.

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The disagreement over proper compensation “underlines the need to pass appropriate legislation that would provide additional incentives for LEU-based production,” Miles Pomper, a senior research associate with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told Global Security Newswire on Thursday.

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• Engage the private sector. Economy-focused organizations such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) could reach out to companies to raise awareness of proliferation risks and help them to adopt internal practices that are in compliance with governments’ export control regulations. Regional incentives for cooperation could also be established.

• Establish a clearing house for regional expertise sharing and assistance. Regional security will suffer if countries lack the resources and expertise to implement proliferation controls consistently. A regional forum could collect region-specific information so countries can benefit from each other’s expertise.

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Current operations. Before the 2002 establishment of the Office of Nuclear Security, the IAEA had minimal tools for addressing nuclear security. Trevor Findlay, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada, details current advances in his report, including the inaugural nuclear security plan, which was the agency's first comprehensive program to combat nuclear terrorism. In addition, the IAEA puts out its own guidelines PDF, which are useful for creating a common global norm, but are nonbinding. Many nations have also signed up for and received International Physical Protection Advisory Service missions, in which IAEA experts review security measures at selected sites. Further, the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material -- which compels participating states to disclose the safe transport of nuclear material -- requires members to designate a national point of contact to the IAEA in the event of a breach. In addition, more security progress was made in 2005 with an amendment to the convention that binds signatories to the protection of nuclear materials in domestic use, storage, and transport. Unfortunately, many key states, including the United States and China, still have not signed on.

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Yet, so vital has the output of the reactor been that Canada was able to earn a special exemption from a 1992 American law that compelled foreign reactors to commit to convert to low-enriched uranium (LEU) as expeditiously as possible if they wanted to access HEU fuel from the United States to use in their reactors. To that end, the US established a Reduced Enrichment for Research Test Reactors program to develop LEU for foreign reactors, which ultimately morphed into the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which has targeted 200 reactors in the US and around the world for conversion or shutdown by 2020. To date, 72 have converted or closed their doors.

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The proposed American move toward preferential procurement of isotopes made with LEU is expected to further alter the economics of production. It eliminates the prospect that a new pricing regime could be undercut by high-volume, lower-cost producers using HEU, says Alan Kuperman, associate professor of public affairs with the University of Texas at Austin. Moreover, most producers are well on their way to converting their facilities to run on LEU, he says, adding that the remainder are primarily found in Russia.

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But he also questions the wisdom of such a slow timeline for LEU conversion, in light of America’s apparent intention to slam its doors to the use of isotopes produced through the use of HEU. “To invest now a lot of money into producing isotopes with HEU is likely to be a huge waste —something Nordion shouldn’t want to do, and Nordion shareholders should-n’t want to do,” he argues. “And for the record, Canada’s government really shouldn’t be happy about Nordion encouraging increased civilian commerce in HEU. That’s counter to what the Canadian government subscribed to at the Nuclear Security Summit in 2010, a policy of HEU minimization and eventually total phase-out.”

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The so-called umbrella agreement, which allows the United States to conduct Cooperative Threat Reduction operations in Russia, is due to expire in June 2013.

The program established two decades ago by Lugar and then-Senator Sam Nunn aims to secure or deactivate nuclear and other unconventional weapons systems left over from the Soviet Union. It has provided U.S. funds and personnel support to Russia and other nations toward that end. To date, the Russian component of the program has eliminated more than 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads and over 900 ballistic missiles, among other accomplishments.

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The liability provisions in the umbrella agreement and other such pacts were “negotiated essentially when the Soviet Union had just collapsed and Russia’s lawyers weren’t really paying attention yet,” Matthew Bunn, an associate professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who served as a nuclear security adviser to the Clinton administration, previously told Global Security Newswire.

As Russia’s position in the world strengthens the likelihood that it will hold up renewal agreements over such issues increases, Bunn and other observers have said.

While many of the large-scale construction projects administered and funded by the Cooperative Threat program are mainly complete, the United States continues to administer a broad array of initiatives in Russia that could suffer a blow if umbrella agreement dissolves, Bunn warned.

In addition to maintaining the Mayak fissile material storage facility, the United States is also involved with facility security upgrades and efforts to strengthen nuclear protective regulations in Russia, Bunn said.

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We write to urge you to amend S. 99, the American Medical Isotopes Production Act of 2011, which was passed by the U.S. Senate on 17 November 2011. The amendment is necessary to achieve the bill's two stated objectives: (1) minimizing global commerce in bomb-grade, highly enriched uranium (HEU) to reduce risks of nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation; and (2) ensuring a reliable supply of medical radio-isotopes derived from molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) -- which account for 80 percent of our country's 20-million nuclear diagnostic procedures annually -- by fostering domestic production without HEU.

The coalition criticized Russia for expanding its use of HEU to produce medical isotopes so that it can dominate that particular sector of the U.S. health-care market. Their concerns were that, if successful, the Russian initiative would undermine Washington's efforts to promote domestic production of medical isotopes without HEU and to phase-out global commerce in such uranium.

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As it stands, governments in some cases could wait for years to receive expert guidance in preparing a comprehensive protection program, according to Khammar Mrabit, head of the U.N. branch’s Nuclear Security Office.

“The risk is that there will be gaps in nuclear security in some countries, in some areas, that is not acceptable,” he told Global Security Newswire. “This is the risk and we would like to speed up the process of establishing and strengthening nuclear security in these countries. … The sooner the better.”

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Operations resumed last week after being shut down over the embarrassing incident 18 days earlier. The Department of Energy has called on the contractor that runs the sensitive facility just west of Knoxville to explain why it shouldn't be replaced.

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Matthew Bunn, an associate professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, said his own tour of the facility leads him to agree that penetrating the interior of the building would be a difficult proposition.

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"We were lucky in that regard that it was the nun and her cohorts, rather than a serious terrorist outfit," Stockton said. POGO, a Washington-based independent watchdog known for exposing overpriced military parts and other government shortcomings, has been a frequent critic of security lapses at the facility.

Stockton called the July 28 intrusion the "only serious penetration of a plant" that he's aware of since becoming involved in nuclear security issues in the mid-1970s.

"It is simply (expletive) unbelievable," he said.

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After the breach, the president and general manager of the Babcock & Wilcox division that runs Y-12, Darrel Kohlhorst, retired from his job. He told The Knoxville News Sentinel that the company would emerge stronger because of the incident.

"Well, I think it did show us we had some weaknesses. We had some deficiencies," Kohlhorst told the newspaper. "The team has really attacked those things and corrected them, and I think we're actually going to be a lot stronger coming out of this thing."

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Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement provided to the Knoxville News Sentinel on Monday: “The department has no tolerance for security breaches at any of our sites, and I am committed to ensure that those responsible will be held accountable.” But there is no denying that Y-12 was a giant failure of federal oversight. Now the people being axed are lower-level employees rather than those who have allowed the security standards to fall far below acceptable levels, such as Secretary Chu, himself.

Secretary Chu should be the first on the chopping block. He has been preaching for years that government overseers should get off the back of the contractors and everything will be fine. Then, of course, he is shocked when Y-12 is successfully attacked by an 82-year-old nun.

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WASHINGTON — An 82-year-old nun and two fellow pacifists who penetrated the defenses of one of the nation’s most important nuclear weapons facilities last week are due in federal court in Knoxville, Tenn., on Thursday to face charges of trespassing and spray-painting antiwar slogans on a building that houses nuclear bomb fuel. But the incident has also put the Department of Energy’s security system on trial.

On July 25 the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee held a hearing on the appropriate size of the US nuclear weapons stockpile to maintain a credible deterrent. Former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright headlined the witness panel, which also included former US Ambassador to Russia Tom Pickering and NoH favorite Keith Payne.

Cartwright and Pickering briefed the findings and proposals of the Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission, on which they both served. The Commission's recent report (titled “Modernizing U.S. Nuclear Strategy, Forces and Posture for the 21st Century”) calls for significant changes to nuclear strategy and posture, headlined by an illustrative recommendation to reduce the size of the US arsenal to 900 total nuclear weapons by 2022, 450 of which would be deployed on an ICBM-less dyad of submarines and bombers. Cartwright and Pickering clarified that 900 total nuclear weapons should be the aim of the next round of arms control negotiations with the Russians, though they did not rule out unilateral steps or parallel reciprocal steps to help jumpstart the process.

See here for our initial summary of the Commission’s report. And check out John's excellent summary of the hearing over at the Chain Reaction.

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Low-enriched uranium (LEU) has proved acceptable for virtually all civilian applications, and there are few remaining technical barriers to the elimination of HEU use in civil and military applications. Important technical and political progress has been made through initiatives like the Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors program, the 1993 Megatons-to-Megawatts agreement between the United States and Russia and the Nuclear Security Summit process. The authors note that since 1978, “62 HEU-fueled research reactors have been converted to use LEU fuel and 17 reactors have been shut down in 36 countries.” Progress has also been made in the medical-isotope industry, where most producers have pledged to convert their reactors and targets to use LEU by 2016.

The United States’ Global Threat Reduction Initiative, in particular, has had significant impact on HEU minimization efforts, offering incentives such as new fuel, new facilities and technical upgrades to countries concerned that conversion to LEU might have negative economic consequences.

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The facility's perimeter intrusion detection and assessment system at about 4:30 a.m. indicated a breach of the nuclear-weapon handling area, prompting a reaction by security personnel.

Upon arrival, a weapon-carrying security officer encountered the three activists -- 57-year-old Greg Boertje-Obed, 82-year-old Megan Rice and 63-year-old Michael Walli -- alongside a structure that contains large amounts of nuclear weapon-usable uranium.

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The U.N. nuclear watchdog is a "veritable bargain for international peace and security" but "is significantly underfunded, considering its responsibilities and the expectations increasingly being placed on it," wrote Trevor Findlay, now a scholar with Carleton University in Canada.

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The Nuclear Terrorism Conventions Implementation and Safety of Maritime Navigation Act of 2012 brings the United States into compliance with the 2005 amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM) and the 2005 International Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism (ICSANT). President Barack Obama committed to complete ratification of the two treaties at the 2010 nuclear security summit in Washington; however, legislation stalled in Congress until now.

Once the bill makes its way through the Senate, and is signed into law by the President, the U.S. federal code will finally comply with provisions in the treaties allowing the U.S. to deposit its ratifications of the nuclear security pacts.

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The Department of Energy inspector general reported that the contractors that operate four sites that handle nuclear materials did not fully comply with the department’s explosives safety manual -– a nearly 500-page guide to handling and storing explosives. The sites in question are Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, which perform nuclear weapons missions; Idaho National Laboratory, home to nuclear energy programs, among other science missions; and the Savannah River Site, which performs nuclear waste repurposing and cleanup.

The report said that management at the sites “took immediate action” in response to the inspector general recommendations, resolving many of the issues the report details.  Among these issues were incorrect signage that misrepresented explosive hazards and the storage of combustible material in explosives bunkers.

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It reveals that, though South Africa has completed substantial security upgrades at its Pelindaba nuclear facility, and implemented regulations requiring the protection of nuclear sites against threats, these have yet to be formally enforced.

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By Fissile Materials Working Group | 12 July 2012

"What will make a focus on nuclear security a permanent feature of what we do?" asked Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit held in Seoul in late March. Experts agree that the 2014 summit must go further in securing nuclear materials from disasters and, most important, terrorist threats -- but agreement on precisely how to do this is harder to come by. In this regard, Australia has much to offer.

Though much of the world may not realize it, Australia has a superlative record in nuclear security. A recent international report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the NTI Nuclear Materials Index, placed Australia first in nuclear security and control out of 32 states with weapons-usable nuclear materials. In addition, the country fulfilled key promises it made at the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit -- such as passing the Nuclear Terrorism Amendment Act of 2011, which allows Canberra to ratify the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism.

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Efforts to implement the 2005 amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and the 2005 International Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism began in 2008, but stalled in Congress. President Barack Obama submitted a similar draft proposal in 2010 and again in 2011 to implement the nuclear security agreements following his commitment to complete U.S. ratification at the 2010 nuclear security summit in Washington. (See ACT, May 2010.)

The updated legislation submitted to Congress would bring U.S. law into line with provisions in the treaties. Congressional passage of the bill is the last substantive hurdle to U.S. ratification of the pacts.

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RAY SUAREZ: The Fukushima nuclear accident is often seen as a consequence of a rare natural disaster. But a tough new report from Japan concludes that the accident was manmade in more ways than one.

The traditional narrative of what went wrong in Japan in early 2011 had gone like this. After withstanding a powerful 9.0-magnitude earthquake on March 11, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant lost all power to three of its six units when a tsunami destroyed its emergency generators and cooling pumps. With those offline and severe flood damage to structures and equipment, meltdowns soon followed and seemed unavoidable. But a new report released today says otherwise.

KENZO OSHIMA, Fukushima Nuclear Accident Commission (through translator): In this report, we have concluded that the Fukushima nuclear accident is a manmade disaster. In our process of investigating the background of the accident, we found that there were organizational problems, systemic problems, and human-related problems, as well as crisis management and governance problems.

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Western experts doubt that Iran - which is under a U.N. arms embargo - has the capability any time soon to make the kind of sophisticated underwater vessel that only the world's most powerful states currently have.

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Officials think an announcement on the matter could be declared as soon as July.

However, in light of strong GOP opposition to further reductions in the nation's atomic stockpile and the revving up of the presidential race, the Obama administration could also choose to delay any announcement of new arms cuts until the November elections are over, according to officials.

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This bipartisan legislation would expand and strengthen U.S. efforts to prevent and combat nuclear terrorism by implementing key requirements of the 2005 International Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism (ISCANT) and the essential 2005 amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM). The House Judiciary Committee favorably reported the legislation on a voice vote to the full House on June 6.

The George W. Bush administration submitted the treaties to the Senate in September 2007 and the Senate overwhelmingly approved them in September 2008. However, prior to U.S. ratification, the agreements require the United States to pass legislation to criminalize specific offenses. There is substantial overlap between existing US anti-terrorism laws (including those implementing anti-terrorism treaties) and the crimes covered by the legislation, but some crimes are not prohibited by existing law. H.R. 5889 criminalizes certain acts relating to the possession and use of radioactive material and radiological dispersal devices and damage to nuclear facilities.

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The radiological isotope molybdenum 99 through the decay process generates technetium 99, which is used widely in medical diagnostic procedures. Historically, molybdeneum 99 has been produced using bomb-grade highly enriched uranium – of which the United States is a key supplier -- but NNSA initiatives in recent years have supported U.S. efforts to develop technology that would allow a switch to proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium.

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Madelyn Creedon, assistant Defense secretary for global strategic affairs, told a Senate panel last week that the United States is looking to extend the so-called umbrella agreement that allows the United States to do work under the Cooperative Threat Reduction initiative in Russia. The agreement, which has authorized the Russian component of a program that has eliminated 7,619 strategic nuclear warheads and 902 ballistic missiles, among other accomplishments, is due to expire in June of 2013.

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Ottawa, Monday, June 11, 2012

The Special Senate Committee on Anti-terrorism, to which was referred Bill S-9, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, met this day at 1:30 p.m. to give consideration to the bill.

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"Speedy congressional consideration is essential to helping better protect the United States and the rest of the world from nuclear terrorism," Miles Pomper, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said in the Fissile Materials Working Group press release. "I hope other members of Congress will show the same bipartisan leadership as the House Judiciary Committee and help the United States to ratify these treaties."

"Republicans and Democrats agree that nuclear terrorism is one of the greatest threats to U.S. national security, and have a long history of bipartisan cooperation on efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism," Kingston Reif, nuclear nonproliferation head for the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, added in the document. "However, the inability of the United States to ratify these two essential treaties has been counterproductive and self-defeating."

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The summit’s ultimate impact is unclear, however. Despite the summit’s incremental steps forward on nuclear security, it seems clear that participants will fall far short of their ultimate goal of securing all vulnerable fissile materials when a four-year push initiated by the United States ends next year. That has led the United States and South Korea to chart out different paths for the future of the summit process, with Seoul advocating a more ambitious course and Washington a more conservative one. And while the summit polished South Korea’s global nuclear reputation, it remains to be seen how much the effort will further Seoul’s goals to win new contracts overseas and obtain concessions in bilateral nuclear negotiations with the United States.

At the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, a number of countries announced they were establishing centers of excellence to provide technical, scientific, and educational support to assist in developing a robust “nuclear security culture,” both nationally and internationally. A number of other centers had also been established prior to the summit, including those associated with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

An assessment of the existing and planned centers indicates that much closer coordination and collaboration among the centers is needed in order to optimize their full potential and to ensure their long-term sustainability.

In this policy analysis brief, Dr. Alan Heyes, a senior visiting research fellow at the Centre for Science and Security Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, makes recommendations to realize these goals.

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It wasn’t a power plant, and carried no risk of explosion. Nothing ever leaked. Eastman Kodak Co. officials say the research device was perfectly safe.

Still, the reactor was locked down, remotely surveilled and tightly regulated — mainly because it contained 3½ pounds of highly enriched uranium.

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The last two years have delivered substantial progress in bolstering global defenses against nuclear terrorism.  This is in large part due to the successes of the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) in Washington, D.C. and last month’s NSS in Seoul, South Korea.  In particular, the Summit process has accelerated efforts to remove and consolidate stockpiles of fissile material around the globe and has succeeded in increasing awareness of a serious global security concern that has long suffered from inattention and inertia.  

Nevertheless, nuclear terrorism is still a threat that is out of sight and out of mind for the public, the media, and many governments around the globe.  This fundamental lack of attention and understanding is a major obstacle to continued progress on preventing nuclear terrorism.  As a result, it is vital that the international expert community continue to educate others on the global dangers of nuclear terrorism and push world leaders to take steps to counter this dire threat. 

The Seoul Summit highlighted the fact that media attention on efforts to enhance nuclear security is sorely lacking.  In the United States, two major storylines came out of the Seoul Summit, neither of which had to do with the steps that world leaders took to strengthen global nuclear security.  First, journalists focused on North Korea’s plans to launch a rocket, abrogating a tentative deal cut with the United States.  Second, journalists picked up on an exchange between President Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, wherein the U.S. President indicated that he would have more flexibility to negotiate an agreement on Europe’s missile defense system after the election. 

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But enforcement of the treaty's provisions has long been a major challenge -- in part because the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is empowered to enforce the Safeguards Agreements that it establishes with individual nations, is not empowered to enforce the treaty as a whole. That is, the agency has no executive force. In any case, its role as an international promoter of "Atoms for Peace" is as important as its safeguards function.

Limits on the IAEA's authority, particularly in the field of nuclear security, amount to a set of serious deficiencies in the nonproliferation regime. For example, the agency cannot require states to establish systems for nuclear security. It has no authority to verify that nuclear materials within states are accorded appropriate physical protection. Even guidance on these issues is provided by the agency only on request, and though the IAEA regularly publishes recommendations PDF on these topics, following the recommendations is not mandatory. No nuclear security mandate requires that states adequately protect their nuclear materials.

In fact, the agency lacks the authority to take action or even comment on the measures that states enact regarding physical protection of nuclear materials unless states request that the agency carry out a specific mission to do so. And even if safeguards inspectors were to note inadequacies in nuclear security, they would not have legal authority to report them.

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In an extraordinary feat of engineering and international cooperation, U.S., Russian, and Kazakh scientists, engineers, and miners recently secured enough fissile material for a dozen nuclear weapons that had been left behind vulnerable to theft in tunnels formerly used by the Soviet Union for underground nuclear weapons tests in Kazakhstan.

The formerly secret mission was launched in 2005 at the encouragement of an intrepid U.S. weapons expert, after it was discovered that metal scavengers had penetrated the abandoned tunnels. The project received attention from the highest levels of government -- both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama monitored its progress. It is an example of the quiet but essential international cooperation that is urgently needed to prevent terrorists from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.

How this extraordinary, seven-year effort came to pass deserves the long version of the story. From 1961 to 1989, the Soviet Union conducted hundreds of nuclear tests and experiments at a remote and forbidding site called Degelen Mountain. Located within Kazakhstan's Semipalatinsk test range, the site is about the size of New Jersey and located some 300 miles east of Astana, the second coldest capital cityin the world. It was chosen by the Soviets precisely because it is so desolate: Temperatures soar to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and plunge to -40 degrees in the winter. Blizzard conditions are common -- remarkably, they sometimes make the test site more accessible by filling in potholed roads, which have gone unrepaired since the Soviet era, with ice and snow.

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The outcome of the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit left a lot to be desired, and much remains to be done to minimize the nuclear and radiological terrorism risk. But the Seoul communiqué along with the "house gifts" and "gift baskets" -- financial and actionable pledges from willing nations to improve nuclear security -- are still remarkable achievements given the challenges involved in getting 53 states to take concrete steps and pass a consensus agreement.

World leaders agreed on 18 actions in 11 nuclear security priority areas on everything from increasing material security to reinforcing the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to strengthening training, security culture, and information protection. The Seoul communiqué updates the 2010 communiqué and work plan but also adds new technical and incremental agreements. Fewer voluntary commitments were made this year compared with 2010, but the 2012 moments of consensus are noteworthy nevertheless.

Important new agreements in the communiqué include a target date to bring the crucial 2005 Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material into force, specific actions to increase the security of radioactive sources, and an accord to minimize the use of bomb-suitable highly enriched uranium in civilian applications -- an agreement that proved especially tricky to reach. States will now announce voluntary actions to minimize highly enriched uranium use by 2013 -- if it is economically feasible, if the supply of medical isotope is guaranteed, and if states feel in a position to do so. A genuine commitment to put global security concerns over commercial incentives would surely look very different, but at least the expectation and some pressure to minimize highly enriched uranium use is on record. Finally, a somewhat overlooked new outcome of the summit is the affirmation PDF of the "need to maintain effective emergency preparedness, response and mitigation capabilities in a manner that addresses both nuclear security and nuclear safety." Much potential remains for sharing best practices and capacities in the areas of emergency response, risk communication, and decontamination. This affirmation is at least a good indicator.

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The Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) Nuclear Material Security Index notes that there is no global consensus about what steps matter most in achieving nuclear security. Rodrigo V. Alvarez, an international partner of the Fissile Materials Working Group (FMWG), said in a report that the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit in March will be a critical opportunity for states to improve global cooperation on nuclear terrorism prevention.

“Given that international terrorist networks move, communicate, and operate across international borders, all nations need to join together to ensure that there are no gaps in global nuclear security,” Alvarez said.

The security of nuclear materials and facilities is seen as a national reasonability. And, most countries believe that it’s the duty of each country to adopt a secure policy that strengthens security of nuclear materials and the facilities. There is, however, considerable scope for international cooperation to strengthen nuclear security objectives and standards, according to summit’s organizers. At their website, the summit’s organizers said that the main objective of the Nuclear Summit process has been to “focus high-level global attention on the threat posed by nuclear terrorism and the measures required to address the global challenge of preventing terrorists and other non-state actors from gaining access to sensitive nuclear materials, technology and information.”

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Modest Contributions 
 
The 2012 Seoul summit was the midway point for securing the world’s most vulnerable
nuclear materials in four years, with the Netherlands agreeing to host the next summit in
2014. The Seoul agenda primarily targeted nuclear material security, while stressing the
importance of other topics: security of radiological sources, information and
transportation security, combating illicit trafficking, nuclear safety in the post-Fukushima
environment, and fostering a nuclear security culture. Korean officials emphasized their
intention to focus on practical progress in nuclear security, but also to expand the
objectives of the summit to engage a wider audience.

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A quick reading of the Seoul Summit Communique highlights the problem. Virtually every significant substantive step described in the communique is preceded by the words "we encourage." So states are "encouraged" to share best practices, to safely secure and dispose of unneeded nuclear material, and to work with and support the International Atomic Energy Agency. But there is no obligation to meet the voluntary standards and no institution, not even the IAEA, with the mandate to evaluate countries' nuclear security performance. This underscores the fundamental failing of the current global approach to nuclear security: it is based on national voluntary actions that are unaccountable and inconsistent across borders.

There are a number of G-8, U.N. Security Council, U.S.-Russian and other like-minded states' nuclear-security initiatives and programs; however, none develop globally agreed standards for nuclear security. But a security system is only as strong as its weakest link. The current patchwork arrangement of largely voluntary actions is full of potential gaps and weak points that terrorists can exploit.

We know for a fact there are terrorist groups seeking nuclear material and there is a black market in such material. In 2011, police in Moldova broke up a black market smuggling operation attempting to sell highly enriched uranium. Unfortunately, one member of the smuggling group remains at large with as much as a kilogram of highly enriched uranium, as does a potential buyer from North Africa.

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Also published in the Sacramento Bee and Bradenton Herald...

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By Fissile Materials Working Group | 12 June 2012

In the past two decades, at least two terrorist groups have made serious attempts at obtaining nuclear weapons or the nuclear material needed to make them. They won't be the last. Foiling terrorists willing to inflict unlimited damage requires the international community to prioritize the nuclear stocks that pose the greatest risks and take immediate steps to eliminate or secure them. The stocks of nuclear weapons or weapons-usable nuclear material that are most likely to fall into terrorist hands today exist in Russia, Pakistan, and countries with research reactors that use large quantities of highly enriched uranium (HEU) -- like Belarus, South Africa, and Japan. The 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul made some progress toward eliminating dangerous HEU stocks, but it did not alter the security trajectory in either Russia or Pakistan. Preventing terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons or weapons-usable nuclear material in all countries remains the world's most urgent security challenge.

Russia. With the help of billions of US dollars, Russia has dramatically improved security and accounting measures for its nuclear weapons and materials since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But significant weaknesses remain. Russia's main challenge is that it must secure an immense and sprawling nuclear complex. Russia has almost 200 buildings with weapons-usable nuclear material, almost 50 permanent nuclear weapons storage sites, and dozens more temporary nuclear weapons storage sites. The country's fleet of some 60 research reactors that use HEU now represents almost half of all the research reactors using HEU in the world, including two-thirds of the most dangerous types -- critical assemblies and pulse reactors -- which contain large amounts of weapons-grade HEU. Each cache presents an opportunity for theft; there is simply no scientific or military justification for such a vast number of facilities.

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Experts said modest progress had been made in Seoul but cautioned many of the tough issues to fully solve the problem had not been addressed, with countries unwilling to make binding and transparent agreements. “The current nuclear material security regime is a patchwork of unaccountable voluntary arrangements that are inconsistent across borders,” said Ken Luongo, co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group, a group of non-proliferation experts.

“Consistent standards, transparency to promote international confidence, and national accountability are additions to the regime that are urgently needed.”

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In theory, the agreement will make the world a safer place. This assumes, of course, that the gains made in Seoul aren’t undercut by cheaper HEU-produced isotopes due to a joint Russian-Canadian agreement. Neither of those countries has agreed to the shift embraced by the Europeans.

Some isotopes are used in are scans for life-threatening conditions. About 50 percent of the scans are related to cardiac disease and 20 percent relate to cancer. When there have been isotope shortages, often caused by interference in the supply chain that travels the globe, doctors have shown a reluctance to perform tests or surgeries that might otherwise be routine.

Right now, America provides isotope producers with much of the HEU — a key component of a nuclear weapon — that they need to make the diagnostic tools used in numerous medical procedures around the globe. Nonproliferation experts have long pushed the major isotope generating facilities (located in South Africa, Australia, Canada, France, Belgium and the Netherlands) to use LEU — which is not suitable for nuclear bombs — instead. They argue that the technology is there for LEU-developed isotopes, and say that by limiting the movement of HEU around the globe they are minimizing the security risk it represents.

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Alan J. Kuperman, an expert who heads the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project, told the Center that the Seoul agreement is “a great accomplishment.” But he warns that without unless Congress intercedes, the Canadian-Russian deal could undo the gains the nonproliferation committee has achieved.

There is a bill to encourage the use of LEU sitting in Congress right now, but as reported by the Center in January, Kuperman and other experts have raised concerns that it does not contain “preferential procurement” language allowing U.S. purchases only from companies that go along.

That’s a loophole Kuperman and others think needs to be fixed. If Congress agreed, it would essentially force the Canadian producer to follow the rest of the world in switching to LEU, or lose out on the U.S. market entirely. The U.S. consumes around sixty percent the world’s supply of isotopes from Molybdenum-99 each year — around 16 million procedures. Without that language, buyers within the U.S. are free to choose between the cheaper HEU and more costly LEU produced isotopes. 

“Preferential procurement would be very helpful,” says Miles Pomper, a Senior Research Associate with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “It would help if the Canadians were just reasonable and the Russians were reasonable, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

But despite the concerns about the Russians and Canadians, Pomper sees the Seoul deal as a step in the right direction. “It’s a good deal. The big picture is, leaving aside details, this is a real step forward by the Europeans. It’ll have an impact.”

“They’re doing the right thing,” he said.

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Late in 2012, Dominion Resources, Inc. announced it would shutter the Kewaunee Power Station in Carlton, Wisconsin. Kewaunee had just received a license extension to operate until 2033 (Wald, 2012). “The situation Dominion faces at Kewaunee is the result of circumstances unique to the station and do not reflect the nuclear industry in general,” said Thomas Farrell, Dominion’s chief executive and chairman. “The nation will be hard pressed to meet its energy needs, let alone do so in a secure and affordable manner, without a robust and growing nuclear energy program” (Dominion Resources, 2012).

Actually, Kewaunee may not be unique; it could be the first in a series of early retirements of aging US nuclear power plants. The fact that Dominion, with a $30 billion market capitalization, prefers to pay $281 million in decommissioning fees and other closing costs rather than operate the plant for another 20 years signals a generally grim economic outlook for nuclear energy in the United States.

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That's too bad. The 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul could have been a watershed moment for nuclear security. After all, the Obama administration's first global Nuclear Security Summit in Washington two years ago that conceptualized nuclear security led to some unprecedented outcomes: Participating nations fulfilled over 90 percent of their voluntary summit commitments -- resulting in the reduction of vast amounts of highly enriched uranium, numerous reactor conversions, and a series of anti-smuggling initiatives. The Seoul conclave was primed to build on these successes by reenergizing the international community on security issues, collecting more commitments to reduce nuclear materials, implementing nuclear security procedures and innovating global governance. Instead, it seemed everyone was buzzing over just about everything other than nuclear security. And what few accomplishments were achieved ended up more toothless than most analysts had hoped.

Undoubtedly, world leaders will take advantage of a major international assembly to discuss other key issues on the sidelines. But it was all too clear in Seoul that many were downright preoccupied -- 2012 is simply too crowded with domestic issues and election races for most leaders or media to concentrate on the task at hand. This was perhaps best epitomized by President Obama's open-mic gaffe, when he was overheard telling President Medvedev, "This is my last election. … After my election, I have more flexibility." And of course, it doesn't help that nuclear security is a tough sell to a global public more focused on the economy and other kitchen-table issues than on the global stockpile of nuclear materials; that is, nuclear security is a wonky concept that doesn't ring a bell for most people. Timing, naturally, is everything.

But, for some, it was difficult to focus entirely on the summit. From the start, North Korea was the talk of the town among everyone from journalists, diplomats, heads of state, and passersby. Though the summit was a useful and necessary opportunity to send Pyongyang a strong message, the fact is North Korea and the Nuclear Security Summit are two completely distinct topics. The Nuclear Security Summit targets terrorists and vulnerable nuclear materials while North Korea is a state that may provide nuclear parts to non-state actors but is a diplomatic and political chasm that goes far beyond the activities in Yongbyon.

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This uninspiring picture is not a surprise: the real world of preventing nuclear terrorism is a far cry from movie thrillers or spy novels. It involves the drudgery of locking up or removing dangerous materials from sites scattered around the globe, haggling with bureaucrats, sitting through tortuous international negotiations, and convincing reluctant lawmakers to pass the right legislation and provide appropriate funding.

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At the meeting, a follow-on to the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit held in Washington by President Obama, several countries agreed to concrete steps to limit the use of highly enriched uranium in civilian nuclear reactors. Major breakthroughs, however, were in short supply. In a Q&A, Mark Hibbs explains that this incremental approach of small steps by like-minded countries is expected to continue in the years ahead. There’s little political will for setting up a binding and comprehensive global nuclear security framework.

What was the purpose of the security summit?

The meeting was held to build on the understandings and commitments of the 47 countries that participated in the 2010 summit to secure nuclear materials against loss, theft, and misuse.

Like the first meeting, the Seoul summit had two main components. The first was a communiqué, agreed to by all participants, which identified a dozen specific target areas needing attention. The second was a set of specific commitments made by states to improve the security of their nuclear materials and installations.

The communiqué, for example, aspired to minimize the use of highly enriched uranium; to bring into force in 2014 an amended international convention to protect nuclear materials against loss or theft during transport and use; and to protect sensitive information, vital to the defense of nuclear installations and materials, against theft and cyber attacks.

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World leaders made modest progress in efforts to combat the threat of nuclear terrorism during a summit in South Korea that ended Tuesday, but more vision and commitment is needed, experts said.

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“What we really needed from this summit was a little bit more vision on how to move beyond where we are today,” said Ken Luongo, co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group (FMWG), a grouping of non-proliferation experts.

Luongo said the blueprint going forward had been watered down because of the varying commitment levels of countries around the world.

“The problem with this process is that it has devolved to a lowest common denominator through the negotiation process,” he said.

“The challenge of this summit process going into Netherlands (the next summit in 2014) is to open up the vision so that there is a big picture perspective on what we need to do to prevent nuclear terrorism.”

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Duyeon Kim, a deputy director at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, said setting the target of the end of 2013 to minimise the civilian use of HEU, such as in the medical sector, was a “positive step.”

“But so far it’s an ‘encouragement’ to do so and the key is in the details, which are unclear,” Kim said.

Experts highlighted much progress since the Washington summit, such as removing enough HEU to make 19 nuclear weapons from eight countries.

But experts described the measures taken since 2010 as low hanging fruit, and that momentum would be difficult to sustain without binding and transparent agreements among all countries.

“The current nuclear material security regime is a patchwork of unaccountable voluntary arrangements that are inconsistent across borders,” Luongo said.

“Consistent standards, transparency to promote international confidence, and national accountability are additions to the regime that are urgently needed.”

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Entre otros motivos porque afloraron las diferencias entre Estados Unidos y Rusia a cuenta del escudo antimisiles que la Casa Blanca planea levantar en Europa. Aunque el presidente norteamericano, Barack Obama, abogó por seguir reduciendo el arsenal atómico global, no consiguió arrancarle a su homólogo ruso, Dmitri Medvédev, un compromiso como el de Washington en 2010. Entonces, ambos países acordaron eliminar 37 toneladas de plutonio, con las que se podrían fabricar 17.000 bombas atómicas.

Pero el miedo del Kremlin a que el Pentágono despliegue sus misiles cerca de sus fronteras de Europa del Este ha impedido nuevos recortes armamentísticos y de material nuclear. En la actualidad, las reservas mundiales de uranio enriquecido ascienden a 1.600 toneladas y las de plutonio a 500. En total, dan para fabricar 100.000 armas nucleares, que se añadirían a las más de 20.000 que, oficialmente, ya poseen Rusia (11.000) EE.UU. (8.500), Francia (300), Reino Unido (225), China (240), Pakistán (90-110), India (80-100) e Israel (60).

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«Aunque la cumbre es un paso adelante, aún queda mucho por hacer y es una pena que países como Rusia no hayan anunciado nuevas reducciones de sus reservas radiactivas, algunas de las cuales son las más susceptibles de caer en las redes de contrabando y tráfico de armas», explicó a ABC Duyeon Kim, subdirectora del Centro para el Control de Armas y la No Proliferación. A su juicio, otro de los fallos de esta cumbre es «la falta de financiación para implementar en algunas naciones en vías de desarrollo las medidas de seguridad necesarias para proteger sus materiales nucleares».

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«No se puede hablar de fracaso, pero los mandatarios deberían comprender que la seguridad nuclear es un problema global e imponer requisitos de seguridad internacionales para proteger los arsenales atómicos y las cada vez más numerosas instalaciones nucleares de uso civil», alerta Kenneth Luongo, copresidente del Grupo de Trabajo de Materiales Fisibles.

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Radiological dispersal devices (RDD) or ‘dirty bombs’ combine a conventional explosive device, such as TNT, with radioactive material. Compared with a nuclear explosive device (any nuclear weapon or other explosive device capable of releasing nuclear energy) RDDs generally require limited technical knowledge to develop and the radiological isotopes can be obtained from a wide variety of sources, including nuclear weapon arsenals, nuclear research reactors, nuclear power plants and orphan sources – discarded and abandoned redundant industrial products and waste from medical facilities – as well as uranium mines and other mines that produce uranium as a by-product.

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“Nuclear power is going to grow in dangerous parts of the world, in particular in the Middle East where there is not a safety or security culture,” he said, adding that every individual nation currently dealt with nuclear security its own way. ?“There is nothing that requires countries to adhere to a uniform standard across borders and there is nothing that requires them to take specific actions that the International Atomic Energy Agency or any other body tells them to take.”?And Miles Pomper, research associate at the James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute, said: “The communique itself, I am not really expecting much out of.”

Also speaking on the summit sidelines Monday, Pomper blamed the summit document’s generic language for not binding countries to many commitments beyond what they had promised already.

While he praised some pledges such as the Belgian, Dutch, French and U.S. joint move to minimize their use of highly enriched uranium for medical isotopes, he said that other states were likely to disappoint.

“On the other hand, we are not going to see a commitment from Russia on any of the highly enriched uranium issues and Russia is really where a lot of the problem is. That is where there are a lot of facilities where the highly enriched uranium is in the world.

“They have been pretty good at taking material from other countries but they have done next to nothing about their own highly enriched uranium.”

The U.S., too, failed to ratify key international treaties ahead of the Seoul summit in spite of being the initiator of the series of three nuclear security summits, the final of which is expected to be held in the Netherlands in 2014.

Duyeon Kim, deputy director of nuclear non-proliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation, said this summit’s success could be judged on progress made since the first summit in Washington in 2010, new actions pledged by state leaders, and how much money governments bring to the table to implement their commitments.

“Our understanding is that 90 percent of the national commitments (made in Washington) may have been completed but there is far more work that needs to be done,” she said.

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"Today we have set a new milestone in making the world a safer and more peaceful place," South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak, who hosted the summit, said at the end of the two-day event.

The leaders from 53 nations, including China's Hu Jintao and Pakistan's prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, called in a communique for steps to minimise civilian use of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which can be used to make bombs.

They also called for safeguarding world stockpiles of HEU and plutonium, and tightening security of radioactive material that could be used to create a "dirty" bomb.

"Nuclear terrorism continues to be one of the most challenging threats to international security," the leaders said in the communique. "Defeating this threat requires strong national measures and international cooperation."

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"What we really needed from this summit was a little bit more vision on how to move beyond where we are today," said Ken Luongo, co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group (FMWG), a grouping of non-proliferation experts.

Luongo said the blueprint going forward had been watered down because of the varying commitment levels of countries around the world.

"The problem with this process is that it has devolved to a lowest common denominator through the negotiation process," he said.

"The challenge of this summit process going into Netherlands (the next summit in 2014) is to open up the vision so that there is a big picture perspective on what we need to do to prevent nuclear terrorism."

...

Duyeon Kim, a deputy director at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, said setting the target of the end of 2013 to minimise the civilian use of HEU, such as in the medical sector, was a "positive step".

"But so far it's an 'encouragement' to do so and the key is in the details, which are unclear," Kim said.

...

"The current nuclear material security regime is a patchwork of unaccountable voluntary arrangements that are inconsistent across borders," Luongo said.

"Consistent standards, transparency to promote international confidence, and national accountability are additions to the regime that are urgently needed."

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That was only one of the glaring security oversights inspectors found at medical facilities that store radioactive equipment across the United States, according to a US Government Accountability Office report. The US stockpile of radioactive material, it would seem, is far from secure.

When world leaders gathered in Washington for the inaugural Nuclear Security Summit in 2010, US President Barack Obama led talks on how to reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism. This is again the main focus as leaders gather in Seoul this week for another nuclear summit that concludes today.

Unlike in 2010, leaders have another, equally challenging item on the agenda: how to secure radiological sources that could be used in a "dirty bomb". And as the examples discovered by the GAO make clear, not even Washington - a leading advocate for radiological safety - has a foolproof strategy.

Part of the reason is the sheer quantity of radioactive material. Unlike weapons-grade fissile material, which is possessed by only a few countries and stored under tight military controls, devices that use radioactive isotopes have civilian applications ranging from medical research to food sterilisation in every country around the globe. Despite regulations present in every country, there are countless opportunities for devices to go missing.

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Togzhan Kassenova, an associate in the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, says it is this threat that faces smaller countries with developing economies and a limited ability to police, monitor and control radiological material. "It is the developing countries that are especially keen to discuss radiological security at the summit," she says, "because in their view a threat of radiological terrorism is more immediate than a threat of nuclear terrorism."

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"The huge amount of existing nuclear weapons and nuclear materials capable of producing nuclear warheads is posing threats to global peace and nuclear security," said Li, who was a member of the Chinese delegation at the Nuclear Security Symposium last week in Seoul.

Li said that currently there are about 10,000 nuclear bombs as well as 2,100 tons of nuclear fission materials, enough to make another 100,000 nuclear bombs, in the world.

Terrorists have sought to buy, steal or directly manufacture nuclear warheads, and global smuggling and illicit transactions of nuclear technologies and material "have been rampant", Li said.

Around 2,100 cases of theft, sabotage or unauthorized access of nuclear materials were reported, according to International Atomic Energy Agency.

Nuclear facilities around the globe should reduce their reliance on reactors using high-enriched (90 percent enriched) uranium, which can be used in nuclear weapons.

"Nuclear facilities should use more low-enriched uranium reactors with minor potential hazards to minimize security risks," Li said.

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Les dirigeants de 53 pays et des organisations internationales, dont pour la première fois Interpol, ont rappelé le risque représenté par le terrorisme nucléaire, considéré comme "l'une des menaces les plus inquiétantes sur la sécurité internationale".

Après avoir réaffirmé les "objectifs communs de désarmement nucléaire, de non-prolifération nucléaire et d'usages pacifiques de l'énergie nucléaire" formulés lors du premier sommet, en 2010 à Washington, ils ont émis une série de recommandations dans différents domaines allant de la consolidation de "l'architecture de la sécurité nucléaire globale" au travers de textes telle la convention de 2005 sur la répression des actes de terrorisme nucléaire et l'amendement à la Convention sur la protection physique des matières nucléaires (CPPNM), à la lutte contre le trafic nucléaire illicite ou encore la coopération internationale.

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Réagissant au communiqué, Duyeon Kim, du Centre pour le contrôle des armements et la non-prolifération, a salué la prise de conscience du lien entre sécurité et sûreté nucléaires, un point important "tant que l'on se fie à l'énergie nucléaire pour répondre à nos besoins énergétiques".

Cela dit, l'impression est que les quelques engagements exprimés restent trop limités, même s'ils représentent des avancées utiles. Ken Luongo, de FMWG, une coalition d'ONG et de groupes de réflexion spécialisés dans la sécurité, estime que "le régime actuel de sécurité reste inadapté au risque représenté par le terrorisme nucléaire et à ses conséquences".

M. Luongo juge urgent d'y ajouter des "normes consistantes et contraignantes, une vraie transparence afin de promouvoir la confiance à l'échelle internationale, et l'affirmation des responsabilités nationales". Des points qui seront peut-être discutés au prochain sommet, à La Haye en 2014.

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"There are still too many bad actors in search of these dangerous materials, and these dangerous materials are still vulnerable in too many places," Obama said in an address before the Nuclear Security Summit. "It would not take much -- just a handful or so of these materials -- to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people. And that's not an exaggeration; that's the reality that we face."

The summit, which included more than 50 world leaders, was a follow up to the 2010 summit where Obama and other leaders pledged to secure the world's nuclear material within four years. On Tuesday, Obama ticked off several accomplishments — including improving security at nuclear sites and removing tons of nuclear material — since the last summit. But Obama said it remains "undeniable" that the threat remains.

Nuclear security and non-proliferation are issues Obama has spoken passionately about since his days in the Senate. Shortly after moving to the White House, he spoke in Prague about his vision for a nuclear-free world as well as his deep worries about terrorists obtaining nuclear material.

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"These pledges represent the most concrete results from the summit and represent some useful steps forward," said Miles Pomper, a senior research associate the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "If they are to be realized, however, the White House will have to be more active than it has been in winning congressional support for appropriate legislation and sufficient funding."

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Ken Luongo, a former Clinton-era Energy Department official and president of the Partnership for Global Security, argued that nations desperately need to institutionalize standards for security.

"The current nuclear material security regime is a patchwork of unaccountable voluntary arrangements that are inconsistent across borders," Luongo said. "This system is not commensurate with either the risk or consequences of nuclear terrorism. Consistent standards, transparency to promote international confidence, and national accountability are additions to the regime that are urgently needed."

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Politics, diplomats like to say, stops at the water’s edge. But this week, the politics of the presidential election crashed into a nuclear security summit half a world away.

On Tuesday, President Obama declared that the United States and Russia could not realistically work out their dispute over an American missile defense system this year because politics during the presidential campaign would make it impossible to win support for any compromise.

“The only way I get this stuff done is if I’m consulting with the Pentagon, if I’m consulting with Congress, if I’ve got bipartisan support,” Mr. Obama said to reporters here. “Frankly, the current environment is not conducive to those kinds of thoughtful consultations.”

The tempest began on Monday, when Mr. Obama was caught by a microphone in a moment of candor, telling President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia that he would have more flexibility to deal with the thorny issue of missile defense after the election in November.

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The accomplishments being announced today are very concrete, but there’s really not that much new that wasn’t already in the pipeline,” said Kenneth N. Luongo, co-chairman of the Fissile Materials Working Group, a consortium of 60 nuclear experts.

To fully address the threat of nuclear terrorism, Mr. Luongo said, countries need to accept uniform security standards. Citing sovereignty concerns, however, many countries here resist such measures.

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“We have to get away from this small ball,” Mr. Luongo said, “and start looking at the big picture.”

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U.S. President Barack Obama, his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev and leaders from more than 40 nations set out the goals in a communiqué at the conclusion of a two-day nuclear security summit in Seoul.

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“I would have liked to hear an overall plan for improving nuclear-material security worldwide in a uniform way,” said Kenneth Luongo, who with the Department of Energy helped secure atomic material in Russia after the Soviet Union disintegrated. “We need something that’s a lot better across the board.”

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“The downside of multilateral negotiation is that you’re always going to devolve to the lowest common denominator,” said Miles Pomper, a senior researcher at the Center for Non- Proliferation Studies, in an interview today in Seoul. “The countries with the least incentive to make progress have an effective veto.”

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“These dangerous materials are still vulnerable in too many places,” Obama said today at the opening session of the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, which has drawn more than 40 world leaders. “It would not take much, just a handful or so of these materials, to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people and that’s not an exaggeration, that’s the reality that we face.”

Obama, who inaugurated the first nuclear security summit in Washington DC in 2010, warned against “complacency” in preventing loose nuclear material from getting into the hands of terrorist groups. The legacy of the Soviet Union’s breakup, inadequate atomic stockpile controls and the proliferation of nuclear-fuel technology mean the world has lost precise count of atomic material, which could be used to make a weapon.

There are at least 2 million kilograms (4.4 million pounds) of stockpiled weapons-grade nuclear material left over from decommissioned bombs and atomic-fuel plants, according to the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a nonprofit Princeton, New Jersey research institute that tracks nuclear material. That’s enough to make at least 100,000 new nuclear weapons on top of the 20,000 bombs already in weapon-state stockpiles.

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Even a low-level radiological or dirty-bomb attack on Washington, while causing a limited number of deaths, would lead to damages of $100 billion, according to Igor Khripunov, the Soviet Union’s former arms-control envoy to the U.S. He is now at the Athens, Georgia-based Center for International Trade and Security.

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"Several key steps should be taken prior to the next Nuclear Security Summit in the Netherlands in 2014. States should institutionalize binding, comprehensive standards for security that emphasize performance and accountability," Ken Luongo, co-chairman of the FMWG, said in an emailed news release.

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“These pledges represent the most concrete results from the summit and represent some useful steps forward,” said Miles Pomper, senior researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.“If they are to be realized, however, the White House will have to be more active than it has been in winning congressional support for appropriate legislation and sufficient funding."

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Barack Obama, the US president, used the opening day of the nuclear security summit to set out a series of wide-ranging goals on nuclear policy. He praised achievements made so far, and promised more would emerge from these discussions.

The summit represents the half way point of a four-year process set out by Obama with the goal of locking down nuclear materials worldwide and preventing their use in a terrorist attack.

But this year’s summit takes place against a backdrop of growing tensions over the nuclear standoff with Iran and concerns about North Korea's plans to launch a satellite next month - a launch that the US, South Korea and others believe is a missile test.

So, how big a threat is nuclear terrorism? Who sets the criteria for acquiring nuclear weapons? Are there grounds for accusing Western governments of double standards? And can a problem of such magnitude be tackled by voluntary agreements made at the summit?

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"We have to question whether the rules we have today are adequate, and my view is that they're totally inadequate.  There's no uniformity, no requirement to control materials a certain way." -Kenneth Luongo, Fissile Materials Working Group
 

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The conference, overshadowed by concerns about North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile activities, shied away from expanding its mandate to call for concrete steps toward ridding the world of atomic weapons.

But host South Korea defended the summit, saying it did “yield practical outcomes to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism.”  Analysts, however, describe the actual results modest and note that nothing binding was adopted.

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Un comunicado difundido al final de los dos días de reuniones entre más de 50 líderes mundiales en Seúl arrojó luz sobre cuestiones específicas, por ejemplo cómo reducir el riesgo de que material atómico caiga en las manos equivocadas, a la vez que se pedía que todo el material vulnerable se asegure en cuatro años.

Las mayores preocupaciones nucleares del momento, aquellas que rodean los programas de armas de Corea del Norte e Irán, no estaban en la agenda de la cumbre, y ninguno de los dos países fue invitado.

La reservada Corea del Norte ha sido muy criticada en los márgenes de la reunión, incluyendo a su principal aliado, China, pero la anfitriona, Seúl, ha declarado explícitamente que el programa de armas de destrucción masiva de Pyongyang estaba fuera de los temas a tratar en la cumbre.

El foro está destinado a tratar sólo la protección de los materiales nucleares y la prevención del tráfico.

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Miles Pomper, del Centro de Estudios de No Proliferación, con sede en Washington, dijo que la agenda de Seúl fue "decepcionante por no decir algo peor". "Había un montón de cosas que ya estaban encaminadas, pero ahora estamos perdiendo el impulso... necesitamos empezar a ser más ambiciosos", dijo.

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"Several key steps should be taken prior to the next Nuclear Security Summit in the Netherlands in 2014," said Ken Luongo, co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group, an international coalition of nuclear security experts.

"States should institutionalize binding, comprehensive standards for security that emphasize performance and accountability," Luongo said.

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"These pledges represent the most concrete results from the summit and represent some useful steps forward," said Miles Pomper, a senior researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

"If they are to be realized, however, the White House will have to be more active than it has been in winning congressional support for appropriate legislation and sufficient funding," Pomper said.

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Kim Du-yeon, senior analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, hailed the inclusion of nuclear safety and security in the communique.

"It's an extremely significant first step, but the key is implementing and sustaining measures that strengthen the nuclear safety-security nexus beyond 2014 as long as we opt for nuclear power to meet our energy needs," Kim said.

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Belgium, France and the Netherlands promised to stop making medical isotopes from reactors that irradiate bomb-grade uranium by 2015 in exchange for a U.S. pledge to supply nuclear material until then, the countries announced late yesterday at a nuclear- security summit in Seoul. The reactors produce Molybdenum-99, or Moly-99, that hospitals use to diagnose and treat cancer and heart disease.

“This is a very important stride forward and really reduces the chances of this material falling into the wrong hands,” U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said at a press briefing. “We feel it is very important for all countries to recognize this as an important step forward.”

Some 100,000 patients are treated daily worldwide with Moly-99 isotopes. Reactors use highly enriched uranium, also the key ingredient in atomic bombs, to produce isotopes. World leaders attending the summit want nations and companies to invest in new facilities that can make medical isotopes with low-enriched uranium that can’t be used for weapons.

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Companies are raising nuclear-security concern by not pledging to convert to low-enriched production, said Miles Pomper, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Center for Non-Proliferation Studies.

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Nearly 60 world leaders who gathered Tuesday in Seoul for a nuclear security summit agreed to work on securing and accounting for all nuclear material by 2014. But widespread fear lingers about the safety of nuclear material in countries including former Soviet states, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and India.

While the threat of nuclear terrorism is considered lower now than a decade ago, especially after the death of Osama bin Laden, the nightmare scenario of a terrorist exploding a nuclear bomb in a major city isn't necessarily the far-fetched stuff of movies.

"It would not take much, just a handful or so of these materials, to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people and that's not an exaggeration, that's the reality that we face," President Barack Obama told world leaders at the meeting, a follow-up to a summit he hosted in Washington in 2010.

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Building a nuclear weapon isn't easy, but a bomb similar to the one that obliterated Hiroshima is "very plausibly within the capabilities of a sophisticated terrorist group," according to Matthew Bunn, an associate professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

There's an "immense difference between the difficulty of making safe, reliable weapons for use in a missile or combat aircraft and making crude, unsafe, unreliable weapons for delivery by truck," Bunn said.

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Russia has dramatically improved its nuclear security over the last 15 years, Bunn said, but it has the "world's largest stockpiles in the world's largest number of buildings and bunkers" as well as corruption and a weak security culture and regulations.

North Korea and Iran are viewed with worry because of fears of nuclear proliferation.

But Bunn said both are "likely small parts of the nuclear terrorism problem."

"North Korea has only a few bombs' worth of plutonium in a tightly controlled garrison state," he said. "Iran has not begun to produce weapons-usable material."

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At least four terror groups, including al-Qaida and Japan's Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, have expressed a determination to obtain a nuclear weapon, said Kenneth Luongo, co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group, a Washington-based coalition of nuclear security experts.

Nuclear materials stored at research facilities are generally considered less secure than weapons at military installations, Luongo said. Last year's meltdown at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant also shows how terrorists could launch a radiation hazard simply by sabotaging a facility's functions.

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"There needs to be more political leadership from the top, and countries need to stop talking about what they're doing individually and acknowledge that this is a cross-border international issue," Luongo said.

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Kenneth Luongo, president of the Washington-based non-profit group Partnership for Global Security, pointed to weak international confidence in nuclear security as a key challenge that needs to be countered at the third nuclear security summit to be held in the Netherlands.

“What the summit needs to do going forward is really focus on the issue of how we are going to raise the level of international confidence in nuclear security in every country,” he told The Korea Times.

“One of the ways to do this is to make sure that there is some uniformity in the standards by which nuclear materials are protected because we are running out of countries that are willing to give up them.”

Luongo said these materials are going to be around for a long time.

The expert assessed the outcome of the Seoul summit positively. “Some of the commitments which have been made with relation to removing weapons-usable nuclear materials from different countries will take them out of a state of vulnerability and make them more secure,” he said. “That’s very positive.”

Duyeon Kim, deputy director of Nuclear Non-Proliferation of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, said one of the notable accomplishments of the Seoul summit was that world leaders began paying attention to improving nuclear safety.

“Fukushima taught us that nuclear energy is not 100 percent safe,” she said.

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Working-level discussions have bogged down over issues of national sovereignty, competing corporate interests, trade priorities and differing perceptions about the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Even with the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan last year serving to focus world attention on the danger nuclear materials can present, the negotiations on nuclear security have become as complicated as ...

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"This is a summit that is going to have a lot of bureaucratic successes but not a lot of vision successes," said Ken Luongo, co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group, a U.S.-based consortium of about 60 think tanks and activist groups world-wide that concentrate on nuclear issues. "We need all the things that are being announced over the next two days, but it's not sufficient. We need a bigger vision of where we need to go."

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Mr. Luongo's group in recent months has urged nations to design a new level of international governance over nuclear-related matters and set hard deadlines for change, in part because a nuclear accident or terrorist act won't simply affect one country.

"This summit and the last summit have almost exclusively focused on the sovereign nature of nuclear security," he said. "What Fukushima proved is that radiation crises do not respect borders."

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Weapons-grade nuclear material is stored at an estimated one hundred sites worldwide. Many of these sites are unsecured, leaving them vulnerable to terrorists. Leaders of 54 nations are meeting in South Korea on the second of a two-day summit on keeping nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists. But the world’s biggest nuclear concerns remain focused on North Korea and Iran, who did not attend the Summit but whose actions loom large over its participants. Diane and guests discuss the global nuclear summit and what it means for the future of worldwide security.

Listen to interview...

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Obama and more than 50 other world leaders will kick off the second Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul later today. The summit is a followup to the 2010 summit that Obama hosted in Washington, where he set the lofty goal of securing all loose nuclear material by 2014.

Obama said that the international community has made great strides in the last two years toward securing nuclear material. He applauded Georgia and Moldova for seizing highly enriched uranium from smugglers and noted the killing of Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaeda terrorist network has sought a nuclear weapon.

About 80% of the commitments made at the first Nuclear Security Summit have been achieved, according to a report by the Fissile Materials Working Group, a coalition of leading U.S. non-proliferation and nuclear security experts.

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Khammar Mrabit, a director of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, said much had been achieved in the last decade to help make it harder for militants to carry out "malicious acts" involving potentially dangerous nuclear substances.

But, Mrabit told reporters ahead of next week's Nuclear Security Summit in South Korea: "Nuclear security is work in progress. Continuous improvement is a must. Complacency is bad."

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The 2010 summit focused attention and galvanized action to better secure nuclear materials," said Kelsey Davenport, co-author of a report published this month by the U.S.-based Arms Control Association.

"It would be a huge missed opportunity if states do not make significant new commitments and adopt higher nuclear security standards in Seoul to better safeguard vulnerable nuclear material," she said.

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An independent Arms Control Association study this month found overall that global leaders have kept about 80 percent of 67 voluntary commitments made at the 2010 summit to reduce or better secure stocks of nuclear materials. The study cautioned that "the nuclear material security challenge will not be solved even after all the national commitments made ... are completed."

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Another independent report earlier this year, from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, gave poor grades to many of the 32 nations believed to possess such material. It concluded there is not yet a global consensus about what the priorities should be or how materials should be tracked and protected. Radioactive components of civilian nuclear power plants count as nuclear material, as do nuclear weapons.

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However, the summit is already being overshadowed by North Korea’s planned satellite launch next month. Furthermore, while the agenda will include measures to better protect nuclear weapons-grade materials and nuclear facilities – as well as to prevent the illicit trafficking of nuclear materials – a weak international governance framework makes it virtually impossible for summits like these to effectively eliminate the nuclear-security threat.

When not trying to galvanise action against his northern neighbour’s proposed satellite launch, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has pledged that the summit will produce ‘more advanced and concrete’ results than the 2010 summit in Washington (pictured). These are likely to include a consensus pledge to minimise the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) in civilian research reactors (although the time frame might not be finalised), and a promise on the part of more than ten countries to remove or eliminate their own weapons-grade materials. However, it could be six to ten years before these commitments are fulfilled.

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As Mike Shuster said a moment ago, the main subject of the summit in South Korea is the problem of potentially insecure nuclear materials around the world. For short, loose nukes. In April 2009, President Obama called for a global effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world in four years.

Well, on the eve of the Seoul Summit, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School has released a progress report on that four-year effort. And joining us is one of the authors, Matthew Bunn, a former White House staffer who's now at Harvard and is a specialist on this issue. Welcome to the program once again.

DR. MATTHEW BUNN: Good to be here.

SIEGEL: And first, what's encouraging in your progress report is that you have there has been some progress. How do you measure that progress?

BUNN: Well, it's a hard thing to measure, the progress. But we look at those stocks of nuclear material or nuclear weapons that seemed to us to pose some of the highest risks. And we say, is something being done to reduce that risk and is it significant? And we find that for most of the highest risk stocks, the answer is yes.

For example, Ukraine just got rid of all of the weapons usable nuclear material on its soil. The one area where we said, you know, there is progress on nuclear security but the things that threaten that nuclear security are growing even faster, and so the risk is getting worse and not better, was Pakistan.

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President Obama and other world leaders are meeting in South Korea to discuss the problem of insecure nuclear material. Matthew Bunn, co-author of a new report on loose nukes and an associate professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, offers his insight.

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"El terrorismo nuclear sigue siendo un peligro real", advierte Matthew Bunn, de la Harvard Kennedy School, al margen de los debates previos a la cumbre. Según Bunn, ya se han registrado intentos terroristas de acceder a armas y material nuclear.

El especialista explica que existen tres tipos de terrorismo nuclear: la explosión atómica, el sabotaje de instalaciones nucleares y las bombas sucias.

Bunn señala que es mucho más sencillo fabricar una bomba sucia que lograr una explosión atómica. En ambos casos, un explosivo convencional libera sustancias radiactivas.

Entre los aspectos positivos de la primera cumbre, Partnership for Global Security destaca en un informe que casi un 80% de los 67 puntos fijados fueron cumplidos. Esas pautas incluyen garantizar la seguridad de más de 13 toneladas de uranio enriquecido y plutonio en Kazajstán y la eliminación de Chile de su uranio altamente enriquecido.

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Mr. Obama told a university audience in South Korea that the U.S. possesses more nuclear arms than it needs, and can reduce that arsenal without damaging America's security.

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It appears the summit countries will not achieve their reduction targets any time soon. Sharon Squassoni, a nuclear security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says, despite some progress, "we're still quite a ways away from the original goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear material in four years."

"I don't think you'll get a lot of sexy headlines out of this summit," Squassoni tells CBS Radio News. "What you will get is the kind of boring diplomatic, 'gee, there's continued commitment.'"

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Billed as a trip about securing dangerous nuclear material, Obama's mission here has morphed into a concentrated and calculated opportunity to warn, cajole and shame North Korea to change course. He has stared down North Korea from an observation post, lectured its leaders, pleaded for them to choose peace and belittled them as living 50 years in the past.

Some of this was bound to happen. By holding a nuclear security summit in South Korea, the world was inviting the shadow of the uninvited neighbor to the north, whose nuclear weapons program, missile testing and murky intentions tend to seize attention. Then the North's plan for a long-range rocket launch unnerved the leaders gathered here.

Obama took it deeper, inviting a showdown rather than dismissing North Korea as distraction. In an imagery-filled visit to the demilitarized no-man's land between North and South, in his comments with the South Korean president, in his appearance before reporters and in his lobbying with China, Obama pounded on North Korea's behavior.

Politically, Obama had little to lose by getting tough on North Korea, but plenty if he didn't. Up for election at home, and promising friends in Asia they are a new focal point of America's strategic interest, Obama's leadership surely would have been scrutinized had he passed up the chance to take a stand while here.

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"It's hard enough to keep attention on nuclear security, because there is disagreement on the threat and what to do about it," said Sharon Squassoni, director of the proliferation prevention program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And then throw in the distracting effect of North Korea.

"A summit is a completely inappropriate venue for dealing with the North Korean threat," she added. "A summit of 54 leaders is not a negotiating forum."

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“One of the virtues of the nuclear security summit process is that all countries can agree that it is worthwhile to prevent nuclear terrorism, even if they cannot agree on proliferation, disarmament, and nuclear energy issues,” Matthew Bunn, a Harvard University professor and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, wrote today in an e-mailed response to questions.

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“The summit participants include countries who want the nuclear weapon states to commit to rapid nuclear disarmament and states with nuclear weapons that absolutely oppose going to zero any time soon,” Bunn said.

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“We’re at the beginning of a much different nuclear era,” Kenneth Luongo, President of the Partnership for Global Security and a former arms-control adviser at the Department of Energy, said in an interview in Seoul. “Nuclear power will begin growing in much more dangerous neighborhoods as the world population grows and energy demands increase.”

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The summit will discuss measures to protect nuclear material and facilities from terrorist groups. Leaders from more than 50 countries and four international organizations will attend the summit on March 26-27. A joint declaration stressing security measures is expected at its conclusion.

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Matthew Bunn, an associate professor at Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government, told China Daily that there remains a "very real danger" that terrorists could get a nuclear bomb and use it to destroy a major city.

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«Der Nuklearterrorismus bleibt eine reale Gefahr», warnte Matthew Bunn von der Harvard Kennedy School am Rande von Vorbereitungsdiskussionen über den Gipfel in Seoul. Es gebe Versuche von Terroristen, an Atomwaffen und -materialien zu gelangen.

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Truckers caught in the traffic on the bustling highway from Multan to Rawalpindi swear at the heat and mull over the convoy of seemingly unconnected trucks traveling the other way from the garrison town where the Pakistan army has its headquarters to the bustling city in the Punjab.

'They don't look like truckwallahs,' one driver tells the cleaner, sitting alongside, digging his nose. 'They look fauji.'

Suddenly, out of almost nowhere it seems, a gaggle of pick-up trucks and SUVs block either end of the 'fauji' convoy.

Shooting breaks out between the men in the trucks and the men in the pick-up vehicles.

The exchange of fire continues for several minutes. Traffic halts instantaneously. People take cover. Even in Pakistan where gunfire is a daily occurrence these days, the vehemence of the encounter is startling.

When the firing stops, men from the pick-up trucks emerge, wearing radioactive- protective uniforms. They seem to know what they are looking for, quickly entering one of the trucks and taking away what appears to be a small canister.

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The Nuclear Security Summit is not country specific. It did not discuss the many threats to Pakistan's nuclear weapons in Washington and it is unlikely the meeting in Seoul will do so, at least externally -- even though as Matthew Bunn, Eben Harrell and Martin B Mallin noted in their eve-of the second-NSS report released on Friday, 'Pakistan's nuclear assets face a greater threat from extremists seeking nuclear weapons than any other stockpile on earth.'

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This article originally appeared in Clarin, a newspaper in Argentina.

The Nuclear Threat has not diminished

Under the motto “Beyond security, towards peace” fifty-three heads of state and leaders of international organizations will gather next Monday in Seoul to agree on further steps to strengthen nuclear security. A meeting of this magnitude shows the importance that is given to nuclear terrorism as a real and tangible threat.

The theft of highly sensitive materials – either highly enriched uranium or plutonium - and the subsequent explosion of a crude nuclear bomb in any overpopulated city constitutes the most frightening scenario. The dispersion of radioactive material would lead, not only to contamination of people but also to a high disruption of the social functioning. And an attack on a nuclear facility would entail a new “Fukushima.”

Although this subject constitutes for some people a priority artificially imposed by the Western powers, evidences show the opposite. Besides the tragic loss of human lives, it is clear that, should an attack of these characteristics occur anywhere in the world, no country would be exempt of its catastrophic consequences.  The economic downturn caused by a nuclear terrorism event would, for example, drag tens of millions under the poverty line due to the collapse of countless productive activities. These impacts would generate a very different world for the worse, than the one we today know.

On the other side, many events show the existence of a real risk and the need for global actions. It is well known that terrorist organizations are committed to acquire weapons of mass destruction and their technology. Besides, the nuclear material stockpiles worldwide suitable for these ends are so vast, that they would allow the building of over one hundred thousand nuclear weapons.

In this scenario, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, summoned the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, in 2010, to deal with this subject. During that meeting, measures were agreed by world leaders to achieve greater security for nuclear materials and prevent their illicit trafficking. Almost 30 countries, including Argentina, undertook voluntary commitments to reduce their vulnerabilities, from the reduction of their sensitive material stockpiles to the strengthening of their international obligations through the signature and ratification of treaties and initiatives on the matter.

To the success of the 2010 Summit –80% of acquired voluntary commitments have been met so far– comes now the challenge of the Seoul Summit, organized this time by the government of the Republic of Korea. Argentina, as a country with state of the art nuclear technology, will once again be present in this extremely high level forum. During the presidential debates there will be opportunity to go into more detail on what has already been accomplished on the matter of prevention with the conviction that there still remains much to do.

From the standpoint of Latin America our moral obligation goes beyond preventing a possible event of nuclear terrorism. The greatest challenge to avoid is that none of our countries, whether it be by direct action or because of their own vulnerabilities –corruption, poor institutional quality, tolerance to organized crime –  may contribute in any form to the occurrence of a terrorist attack, anywhere in the world.

The tenor of decisions at the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit will point to reinforcing, without a doubt, the sovereign rights of nations regarding the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Certainly, responsibility of countries in combating nuclear terrorism will benefit in many aspects their peaceful nuclear development, as it will increase their credibility, reliability and international support.

Irma Argüello, NPSGlobal Foundation Chair

For centuries this outpost in Central Asia was a stop along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route from the Far East to Arabia. At dusk on a recent Tuesday, it was one point in a vast monitoring network being set up across the former Soviet Union and beyond to detect illicit nuclear materials that could fall into the hands of terrorists.

Yet, this interdiction effort, a major part of President Obama’s ambitious plan to prevent nuclear terrorism, is in jeopardy. Administration officials, citing fiscal restraints and a need to reassess the campaign, want to cut funding for the project by 65 percent.

Nonproliferation specialists are denouncing the proposed cuts, contending the need for protection is as urgent as ever.

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“It just doesn’t make any sense to be whittling that number down,’’ said Ken Luongo, the former director of the office of arms control and nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Energy group that oversees the effort. “The justification for why they are cutting the budget is zero.’’

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The threat posed by nuclear terrorism is "very real" in the view of US nuclear safety expert Alexandra Toma, who spoke to reporters in the South Korean capital.

"There is intelligence that confirms that terror organizations are seeking weapons of mass destruction," says Toma, co-chair of the steering committee of the Fissile Materials Working Group (FMWG).

It is generally accepted that al-Qaeda has tried to get its hands on a nuclear weapon, although it has not yet managed to do so, Toma says.

There have been 20 known cases of smuggling highly enriched uranium or plutonium - the raw materials for a bomb - according to data obtained by the FMWG, an umbrella body of more than 60 international organizations dedicated to improving nuclear safety, and providing recommendations to the US adminstration.

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Since when have we ever seen a nuclear terrorist incident?

True, nuclear terrorism is an extremely low probability scenario but its consequences are unimaginable.

Still, the threat is certainly real because terrorist groups including al-Qaeda are believed to pursue weapons of mass destruction. And an international consensus exists on the threat. More sobering is that there’s enough nuclear materials in the world to make 100,000 additional nuclear bombs.

Who really cares except a select group of policy wonks?

By agreeing to chair this summit, the largest Seoul has ever hosted, Korea has entered tough waters. It would, and still, puzzle many: nuclear terrorism is still a foreign concept for Koreans, they don’t have nuclear weapons or fissile materials, and security is always framed in the context of their number one threat, North Korea, which does not even make it on the Summit agenda, though for good reason. So the lack of initial interest and awareness is natural. The other problem is the lack of public outreach and education on the issue ahead of the Summit and amid this increasingly globalized and interconnect world – but this is true for all countries, not just Korea.

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Nations have achieved large strides since 2010 in securing potential nuclear-weapon fuel against extremists, the U.S. leader said prior to the start of this week's Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea.

"But we're under no illusions. We know that nuclear material -- enough for many weapons -- is still being stored without adequate protection," Obama said. "We know that terrorists and criminal gangs are still trying to get their hands on it, as well as the radioactive material for a dirty bomb ... the danger of nuclear terrorism remains one of the greatest threats to global security."

State participants in the summit must "keep at it" and pursue substantive actions to lock down atomic substances, he said in remarks to heads of government or senior delegates for 53 countries.

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“At the end of four years, the global risks of nuclear theft will be significantly lower than they were before,” said Matthew Bunn, a Harvard University nuclear weapons expert who co-wrote the assessment. “But there will still be a great deal left to do to make sure that all the world’s stocks of nuclear weapons and the materials needed to make them are protected from the full range of plausible terrorist and criminal threats -- in a way that will last.”

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“Recent events make it necessary to take almost inconceivably evil acts seriously,” he told members of the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.

In a calm, determined voice he described the threat posed by nuclear terrorism — a risk so grave it looms over a two-day summit of 53 world leaders that opens in Seoul, South Korea, Monday.

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“We believe the potential for nuclear terrorism remains high,” said Page Stoutland, vice-president for nuclear security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based think-tank.

“There are currently thousands of tons of nuclear materials in the world and those materials today are stored at hundreds of sites in over 30 countries.” he said. “Some of those sites are well secured. Many are not, leaving weapons-usable nuclear materials vulnerable to theft or sale on the black market to terrorist organizations.

“The elements of a perfect storm are in place: an ample supply of weapons-usable nuclear materials, an expansion of the knowledge and technical know-how to build a crude nuclear bomb accessible by the Internet or through rogue scientists and the determination of terrorists organizations to do it.”

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“There is an immense difference between the difficulty of making safe, reliable weapons for use in a missile or combat aircraft and making crude, unsafe, unreliable weapons for delivery by truck,” said Matthew Bunn, a professor at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

“With highly enriched uranium, a gun-type bomb — like the one that obliterated Hiroshima — is very plausibly within the capabilities of a sophisticated terrorist group,” he said.

With weapons-usable nuclear material stored in hundreds of buildings in dozens of countries, under security situations that range from very stringent to virtually non-existent, the risk of terrorists acquiring bomb-making materials remains great.

“Theft of only 0.01% of the world stockpile could cause a global catastrophe,” Mr. Bunn said.

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For centuries this outpost in Central Asia was a stop along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route from the Far East to Arabia. At dusk on a recent Tuesday, it was one point in a vast monitoring network being set up across the former Soviet Union and beyond to detect illicit nuclear materials that could fall into the hands of terrorists.

Yet, this interdiction effort, a major part of President Obama’s ambitious plan to prevent nuclear terrorism, is in jeopardy. Administration officials, citing fiscal restraints and a need to reassess the campaign, want to cut funding for the project by 65 percent.

...

“It just doesn’t make any sense to be whittling that number down,’’ said Ken Luongo, the former director of the office of arms control and nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Energy group that oversees the effort. “The justification for why they are cutting the budget is zero.’’

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“It was a mistake to cut the budget as much as they did,’’ said Matthew Bunn of the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

In a report published Friday ahead of the nuclear security summit, Bunn stressed that “a multilayered effort to block the terrorist pathway to the bomb is needed.’’

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“There are 6,000 detectors in New York City,’’ said Luongo, who is now president of the Partnership for Global Security, “but only 2,000 in the rest of the world.’’

“There are 6,000 detectors in New York City,’’ said Luongo, who is now president of the Partnership for Global Security, “but only 2,000 in the rest of the world.’’

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Officials from 53 countries and international organizations are scheduled to attend the summit, which will be held on Monday and Tuesday in the capital of South Korea.

Nuclear generation itself is not on the formal agenda, but it will feature heavily at the summit because a great deal of trust in atomic energy was lost as a result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan last March.

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The impact of Fukushima has been far-reaching globally, but it varies from country to country, said Matthew Bunn, an associate professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

"The countries that are the largest markets for new nuclear reactors - China, India, Russia, South Korea - are moving ahead. Some countries, such as Germany and Switzerland, have decided to phase out nuclear energy," he said.

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Almost all countries using nuclear energy have undertaken in-depth reviews of their nuclear safety rules and practices, and many introduced substantial new measures to ensure that reactors are better protected against events such as flooding and loss of power, Bunn said.

"Unfortunately, few countries are drawing similar lessons about improving security - despite the possibility of terrorist attacks, for example, that might destroy both off-site power and back-up power for a reactor," he added.

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"The No 1 topic on the agenda of the nuclear security summit in Seoul is how to protect nuclear material that can be used in a nuclear weapon - highly enriched uranium and plutonium - from falling into the hands of terrorists," said Togzhan Kassenova, an associate in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.

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Terrorists have also considered sabotage of reactors to cause a Fukushima-scale disaster, or spreading radioactive materials over an area in a so-called "dirty bomb", Bunn said.

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Garantizar su seguridad es crucial para todo el planeta, ya que cada vez hay más material radiactivo que puede caer en malas manos y ser utilizado por grupos terroristas. «Tenemos un problema global que exige una solución global, pero no hay requisitos de seguridad internacionales, sino solo recomendaciones, para proteger los arsenales atómicos y las cada vez más numerosas instalaciones nucleares de uso civil», alerta Kenneth Luongo, copresidente del Grupo de Trabajo de Materiales Fisibles. A su juicio, la falta de estos estándares de seguridad obligatorios es una de las principales carencias de esta cumbre porque «se debería garantizar que todos los países con aspiraciones nucleares están preparados para controlar dicha energía».

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Obama has been particularly worried about the ‘loose-nuke’ scenario, in which a terrorist procures some nuclear material and fashions it into a crude weapon. One source would be research reactors, many of which were built during the height of the cold war and run on highly enriched uranium-235 (HEU) — the same material used in basic nuclear weapons.

In 2010, I accompanied a group of American advisers as they spirited uranium out of the Polish Institute of Atomic Energy in Otwock-?wierk, 30 kilometres southeast of Warsaw. It was a big undertaking, and you can watch a shaky bit of video from my trip below.

The US National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversaw the operation, continues to work at converting research reactors and removing nuclear material. Today the agency announced the successful conversion of Mexico’s lone research reactor to the less dangerous low-enriched fuel.

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It’s a positive step, but to really get the research-reactor problem under control, the US needs to work on Russia, which has dozens of HEU-fuelled research reactors (see diagram). After years of negotiation, Russia has agreed to do “feasibility studies” on the possibility of converting a handful of its reactors, according to Matthew Bunn, a non-proliferation expert at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But Russia, Bunn says, could do much more. The former superpower “has not yet committed even to do a study of which ones are still needed, and which could be converted or shut down.” Bunn has a new report out this month with a lot more detail on the research-reactor problem.

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The leaders at that summit also agreed that South Korea would host another nuclear-security summit in 2012. On the face of it, South Korea was a strange choice, given that it neither possessed nuclear weapons nor the materials to make them--highly enriched uranium or separated plutonium. But Obama's first choice, Russia, turned down the opportunity, and South Korea's president Lee Myung-bak was eager to raise Seoul's standing on the global stage and give the country's burgeoning nuclear-energy industry a global seal of approval.

So, today, 50 or so leaders descend on Seoul to track progress since the last summit and make a batch of fresh commitments. While their presence is sure to be heralded by the U.S. government, Korean citizens are likely to be less welcoming. Many in Korea find it strange that their government should be putting so much effort into an event on nuclear terrorism when nuclear threats from North Korea and the effects of the Fukushima accident in Japan appear to be more pressing issues for the peninsula. Other countries share similar concerns, believing that the United States has devoted too much attention to the threat of nuclear terrorism at the expense of nonproliferation, safety, and disarmament issues.

These concerns are likely to limit the ambitions of those who would like to see governments make significantly deeper nuclear-security commitments at Seoul. They are also likely to hamper efforts to make the current biannual security-summit process an ongoing fixture of international relations--particularly if attempts are made to stretch the current process beyond Obama's four-year time frame. States face a choice: they can move forward with a wider process that takes in more issues in order to justify continued high-level attention; they can continue discussing a relatively narrow set of issues at a lower level; or they can maintain these high-level meetings but on a less frequent basis.

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“Nuclear power is going to grow in dangerous parts of the world, in particular in the Middle East where there is not a safety or security culture,” he said, adding that every individual nation currently dealt with nuclear security its own way. ?“There is nothing that requires countries to adhere to a uniform standard across borders and there is nothing that requires them to take specific actions that the International Atomic Energy Agency or any other body tells them to take.”?And Miles Pomper, research associate at the James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute, said: “The communique itself, I am not really expecting much out of.”

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Duyeon Kim, deputy director of nuclear non-proliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation, said this summit’s success could be judged on progress made since the first summit in Washington in 2010, new actions pledged by state leaders, and how much money governments bring to the table to implement their commitments.

“Our understanding is that 80 percent of the national commitments (made in Washington) may have been completed but there is far more work that needs to be done,” she said.

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Le dossier nord-coréen a dominé les discussions entre Hu et un président américain offensif qui a demandé à Pékin de changer de stratégie vis-à-vis de son turbulent petit frère communiste. L'approche suivie jusqu'ici par la Chine «ne fonctionne pas», avait déclaré la veille Obama, lors d'une rencontre avec son allié sud-coréen Lee Myung-bak. Devant les étudiants de l'Université Hankuk, à Séoul, le président démocrate a mis en garde Pyongyang: «Il n'y aura pas de récompense pour les provocations, cette époque est révolue.»

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«Ils ont évoqué une possible réduction des importations de pétrole. Mais tout dépendra de l'attitude de la Russie, car Pékin s'alignera sur Moscou pour éviter l'isolement», prédit Miles Pomper, expert au Monterey Institute of International Studies.

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For the second time in two years, leaders and their delegations are meeting to discuss actions aimed at preventing nuclear terror scenarios portrayed for years in popular fiction and movies — from Frederick Forsyth’s 1984 book The Fourth Protocol to the 1997 thriller The Peacemaker, starring Nicole Kidman and George Clooney.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrived here tonight to combine an official visit to South Korea with the Nuclear Security Summit amid expectations that this mega diplomatic event will nudge the world towards fresh actions to bolster nuclear security.

The Seoul summit follows the first such event in Washington DC in 2010 that was widely interpreted as a personal initiative by President Barack Obama. But nuclear security analysts say a global consensus on what should be the highest priority — the most effective — actions to prevent terrorists from gaining access to nuclear materials does not exist.

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“There remains a very real danger that terrorists could get a nuclear weapon and use it to destroy the heart of a major city,” said Matthew Bunn, associate professor at Harvard University, an authority in research on nuclear theft and terrorism.

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Over the past two decades, Bunn said, authorities have seized stolen, highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium — raw materials for nuclear weapons — in at least 20 cases in Bulgaria, Georgia, Lithuania and Russia. The last seizure was in Moldova last year where officials arrested six smugglers who claimed they had access to 9-kg HEU.

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“Some sites are well-secured, many are not,” said Deepti Choubey, director for nuclear and bio-security with the UK-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-government think tank. Unsecured materials leave them vulnerable to theft, sale on the black market to terrorist organisations, she told The Telegraph.

The security of nuclear materials in Pakistan is a concern to many analysts. “We have very little confidence that the (Pakistan) nuclear programme is absolutely secure or will remain secure,” a senior Indian source said. “This is a big worry for us.”

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A report analysing the threat of nuclear terror and released on the eve of a nuclear security summit that opens here tomorrow has said the nuclear materials at the highest risk are in Pakistan, Russia and in research reactors fuelled by highly-enriched-uranium.

Several factors in Pakistan — the threat of sympathetic insiders, the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal and a weak government — expose its nuclear assets to a greater threat from extremists seeking nuclear weapons than any other stockpile on Earth, the report by researchers at Harvard Kennedy Centre in the US said.

But Pakistan’s ambassador in Seoul said today that all of his country’s nuclear installations are well guarded. “There should not be any fear of any type. All our (nuclear) installations are well guarded,” ambassador Shaukat Mukkadam said.

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The Indian sources as well as the co-authors of the Harvard report — Matthew Bunn, Eben Harrel and Martin Malin — have expressed concern at the threat that nuclear materials face from “insiders”.

Their report, relying on unclassified information, said the threat of insiders within Pakistan’s military, security and nuclear establishments is “very real — and may be growing”.

...

“Will Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which controls (the country’s) nuclear weapons, always be able to exclude all personnel with extremist sympathies?” Bunn, Harrel and Malin have asked in their report.

Pakistan’s growing nuclear arsenal is another source of worry, they wrote. “The country has two plutonium reactors now operating and two under construction, which will increase bulk processing of fissile material — the stage in which the life cycle of nuclear material that historically has proven the most vulnerable to insider theft.”

View full article...

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"What we have seen is increasing evidence of intentions... it is not just Al-Qaeda, it is other organisations as well," said Sharon Squassoni, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"It is pretty shocking how much material is out there. 1440 tonnes of highly enriched uranium, 500 tonnes of separated plutonium (which is) weapons ready."

...

"I think America is absolutely safer now than it was three years ago," said Kingston Reif of the Center for Arms Control and Non Proliferation.

"Seven countries have removed all their highly enriched uranium. That is material that is no longer capable of being used by terrorists in some kind of nuclear explosive device."

View full article...

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According to the Global Fissile Material Report 2011 by the International Panel on Fissile Materials, global stocks of highly-enriched uranium for military and civilian purposes are estimated to have reached 1,600 tons. The stock of plutonium, is estimated to be 500 tons ? enough for about 100,000 nuclear weapons.

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After the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, the U.S. signed an agreement with Russia to eliminate at least 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium, said Miles Pomper, senior research associate of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Pomper said, however, there are “missing commitments” in HEU minimization.

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“More ambitious goals are needed for the communique and work plan for 2012 and especially 2014,” Pomper said.

View full article...

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Miles Pomper, senior research associate of James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said there had been some progress in the last two years in securing, eliminating and consolidating vulnerable nuclear materials.

“States completed 80 percent of their individual commitments,” Pomper said.

However, he added that such progress was not enough, and the Washington Communiqu, which seeks to secure all vulnerable materials by 2014, was not likely to be implemented on schedule.

He called on countries at the Seoul summit to set more ambitious goals in minimizing highly enriched uranium and ratifying the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material.

He also urged the states to develop a system that can “bundle together the disparate pieces of nuclear security conventions, rules and standards.”

View full article...

Though never successfully pulled off, the threat of nuclear terrorist attacks is on the rise and more than 50 heads of state attending the summit are increasingly aware of the need to strengthen the global nuclear security regime.

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"It is important to recognize that even small amounts of (nuclear) material in any country, if not adequately protected, are a danger," Kenneth Luongo, head of the US-based Partnership for Global Security, said at a recent symposium in Seoul.

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"A single act of nuclear terrorism can potentially kill a countless number of people and cause irrevocable damage," Professor Jun Bong-geun at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy said in a recent interview. "There is a need for international efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism, and the Nuclear Security Summit is part of the efforts."

...

"Most of the pledges required minimal action on the part of the state and often reaffirmed initiatives already underway," Miles Pomper, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said at a symposium earlier this week. "States were able to set their own standards as to what constituted progress."

View full article...

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SHUSTER: Despite success like this though, there is still much dangerous material floating around the globe. How much?

KENNETH LUONGO: It's a lot, and in some parts of the world, particularly in South Asia, it's continuing to grow.

SHUSTER: Kenneth Luongo is president of the Partnership for Global Security. He says there are still nations in the world, like Pakistan and India, where little is known about how they secure these materials.

LUONGO: The problem with terrorism is that they exploit gaps in the security system. So small amounts of material, material in countries that don't have a culture of security or safety, those are the kinds of places we worry about.

SHUSTER: And that will be the heart of the discussion here over the next three days. Mike Shuster, NPR News, Seoul.

Read or Listen to Full Interview...

So this week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will join over 50 world leaders and UN, International Atomic Energy Agency and European Union representatives in Seoul, South Korea, for the second Nuclear Security Summit aimed at tackling that very murky threat.

It's not just about securing the stockpiles of weapons in nuclear states - the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, Israel, China, Pakistan and India - against terrorists. It's also about facing and fixing the myriad security gaps in the nuclear power industry at large.

...

"There is more (weapons grade) material on civilian sites than all weapons stockpiles put together," says Matthew Bunn, a nuclear security expert with Harvard University.

Bunn says progress has been made since the inaugural nuclear summit in Washington in 2010, when states committed to securing all vulnerable nuclear material by 2014.

"The bad news is we really have a long way to go," Bunn said.

View full article...

Un encuentro de esta magnitud muestra la relevancia que se le otorga al terrorismo nuclear como amenaza real y tangible.

El robo de material de alto riesgo (uranio altamente enriquecido o plutonio) para fabricar una bomba atómica rudimentaria y detonarla en una ciudad superpoblada es el escenario más aterrador. La dispersión de material radioactivo llevaría no sólo a la contaminación de personas, sino a una alta disrupción del funcionamiento social.

Y un atentado en una central nuclear provocaría un nuevo “Fukushima”.

Aunque este tema es para algunos una prioridad artificialmente impuesta por las potencias occidentales, las evidencias parecen mostrar lo contrario. Además de la pérdida de vidas humanas, si un acto de terrorismo nuclear ocurriera en algún lugar ningún país estaría exento de sus consecuencias políticas, económicas y sociales. Por ejemplo, el colapso global de muchas actividades productivas llevaría a millones de personas bajo la línea de pobreza.

Estos impactos generarían un mundo muy diferente al actual.

Por otra parte, varios hechos muestran la existencia de un riesgo real y la necesidad de tomar acciones globales. Varios grupos terroristas expresaron su intención de obtener tecnología de armas de destrucción masiva, particularmente la nuclear. Además, los inventarios mundiales de materiales nucleares son tan grandes que permitirían construir más de 100.000 bombas atómicas.

En este escenario, el presidente estadounidense, Barack Obama, convocó a la Cumbre de Seguridad Nuclear de Washington en 2010 para ocuparse del tema. Allí, 50 líderes mundiales dieron los primeros pasos para, coordinadamente, aumentar la seguridad de los materiales nucleares y prevenir su tráfico ilícito.

Cerca de 30 países, entre ellos Argentina, asumieron compromisos para reducir sus debilidades ante el terrorismo nuclear, ya sea reduciendo materiales sensitivos como adhiriendo y ratificando los tratados e iniciativas en el tema.

A los logros de esta primera Cumbre (se cumplieron el 80% de los compromisos) se suma el desafío de la Cumbre de Seúl, donde Argentina estará presente.

Allí se dará un paso más en materia de prevención y podrían sentarse las bases para cambiar el actual régimen internacional de seguridad nuclear por otro mejor para enfrentar los riesgos futuros.

Con respecto a Latinoamérica, la responsabilidad excede el evitar un incidente nuclear.

El mayor desafío es que ningún país de la región, por acción o sus propias vulnerabilidades (corrupción, baja calidad institucional o tolerancia al crimen organizado), contribuya a que un eventual atentado ocurra en cualquier lugar del mundo.

Un aspecto importante es que estos foros apuntan a reforzar el derecho soberano de las naciones al uso pacífico de la energía nuclear . En efecto, la responsabilidad con que un país combata el terrorismo nuclear beneficiará de muchas formas a su desarrollo nuclear pacífico, ya que ganará en credibilidad, confiabilidad y apoyo internacional.

View full article in Diario Clarín...

(Translation forthcoming)

Monday's nuclear security summit, a sequel to a forum Obama held in Washington in 2010, is a step toward the White House goal of securing "all vulnerable nuclear material around the world" by the middle of 2014.

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"It's patchwork," said Kenneth Luongo, a nuclear security expert and the founder of the Partnership for Global Security, whose organization counts 18 confirmed cases of theft or loss of nuclear material in the last 20 years. "The requirements at the national level don't meet up with the international requirements, and so we have gaps. And what terrorists do, much like they did on9/11, is exploit gaps in security."

Roughly 80% of the commitments made at the 2010 summit — which vary from playing host to a conference to removing all highly enriched uranium from a country's border — have been completed, according to a review conducted by the Arms Control Assn. and the Partnership for Global Security.

The White House says it is proud of that record, although it does not mention that the U.S. is among those countries that hasn't finished its homework. Ratification of two nuclear security treaties remains tied up in Congress.

Experts also note that Obama's 2013 budget proposal seeks to trim funds for two agencies considered crucial to the international effort.

Obama sought a 6% cut to the agency that helps convert highly enriched uranium to a less dangerous form or removes it altogether from sites deemed unsafe. The budget seeks a 45% cut to the program that seeks to improve security at sites and governments' ability to track smugglers.

"Cuts to those programs will slow down the progress for securing nuclear material. There's just no way around that," said William Tobey, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center.

View full article...

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"Much of the low-hanging fruit was picked by countries at the 2010 summit," says Michelle Cann, a senior budget and policy analyst at the independent Partnership for Global Security.

the push to ratify the treaties.

One pact, which has 77 member states, calls for criminalizing the possession or use of sensitive materials and creates guidelines for extradition and prosecution of those linked to a nuclear plot. The second deals with protecting non-military nuclear material. There is concern among some Democratic lawmakers about a provision in U.S. legislation tied to the pacts that would make an act of nuclear terrorism a capital offense subject to the death penalty, says Miles Pomper, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington.

Ken Luongo, an Energy Department official in the Clinton administration, laments proposed cuts to nuclear security programs — including the slashing of $293 million from the National Nuclear Security Administration — in the Obama 2013 budget. He calls the cuts "an assault on common sense and a threat to American and international security.

...

William Tobey, senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, says Obama's first summit was successful in developing a consensus among world leaders on the threat of nuclear terrorism and elevating the importance of the issue on the world stage.

But it failed to create baseline standards for securing nuclear material, and no leader was willing to acknowledge that security deficiencies exist despite 20 confirmed cases of lost or stolen fissile material over the past 20 years, he says.

"With respect to overcoming the flaws of the Washington summit, there isn't cause for a great deal of optimism," Tobey says. "There may even be some regression."

View full article...

In the absence of an official definition of the specific goals to be accomplished, we offer our own
definition here. The officially stated goal is to “secure” all “vulnerable” stocks of nuclear material
worldwide. We believe that to accomplish this objective, effective nuclear security measures must be
provided for all the stocks that do not currently have them, so that when the goal is fully met, all
stocks of nuclear weapons, separated plutonium, and highly enriched uranium (HEU) worldwide
will be effectively and lastingly protected against the kinds of threats terrorists have demonstrated they can pose.

All stocks means any nuclear material that could be used to make a nuclear bomb, whether it is in
a military or a civilian stockpile. It means the effort must ensure security not just for materials in
developing or transitioning countries such as Russia, Pakistan, or South Africa, but also in wealthy
countries such as Belgium and Japan—and the United States.

Effectively protecting this material is a matter of reducing risk—another way of stating the goal is that at the end of four years, all nuclear stocks should have a low risk of being stolen. Facilities containing nuclear weapons or weapons-useable materials must be reliably protected against the kinds of adversary capabilities (both outsider and insider) that they are most likely to face. Hence, how much security is enough will vary from country to country (or even between regions within countries), depending on the spectrum of plausible adversary capabilities in each country: a security system that was perfectly adequate in Canada might still be considered “vulnerable” or “high risk” in Pakistan.

But in a world with terrorists with global reach, even in the safest countries, nuclear weapons, HEU,
or plutonium must at least be protected against one well-placed insider, a modest group of well-
armed and well-trained outsiders (capable of operating as more than one team), and both outsiders
and an insider working together. In countries facing severe terrorist threats, such as Pakistan, such
stocks must be protected against more capable adversaries.

View full report...

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there have been a total of 2,164 incidents involving the loss, theft or unauthorized possession of nuclear and radioactive materials from 1993 to 2011, and the Fukuyama nuclear crisis in Japan has demonstrated that an attack on the diesel-driven emergency power supply system, fuel rods and other key parts of a nuclear power plant could trigger a nuclear disaster.

The international community has made great efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism. The United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 1540 in 2004 to prohibit any non-state actor acquiring or manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. Resolution 1887 was adopted at a summit in 2009 on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament aimed at strengthening the implementation of resolution 1540. It urged all countries to ensure the security of especially vulnerable nuclear weapons materials to prevent nuclear terrorism.

View full article in China Daily...

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"The bottom line is that the goal has been set by the leaders but that was not enough," said Miles Pomper, researcher for the James Martin Centre for Non-Proliferation Studies in California.

Many agreements at the first summit were non-binding and were sometimes later scrapped after diplomatic disputes with the US, he said.

"There is no definition of what 'security' meant... what 'vulnerable' meant and no way of verifying whether those goals were met," Pomper said, calling for a more ambitious goal of legally-binding initiatives.

Page Stoutland, vice president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington, said that despite the 2010 pledges, stockpiles of weapons-usable atomic material had increased in nations including India and Pakistan.

"At the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit... leaders should seize the opportunity to improve stewardship of the world's most dangerous materials," he said.

View full article...

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Miles Pomper, Sr. Research Associate, James Martin Center For Nonproliferation Studies: "I think we'll get some good individual commitments from countries but unfortunately, I don't think we'll get the kind of global commitment that we need for a regime that will protect us and secure us from nuclear terrorism."

View full article...

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Alexandra Toma, Co-Chair, Fissile Materials Working Group: "Businesses can also share information on their websites about nuclear security. They can put people in touch with, expert groups like the Fissile Materials Working Group for one, for example. They can do panels and share information on TV."

Toma then called on the world leaders to come up with more innovative ideas to expand national commitments to reduce nuclear weapons and materials.

Looking ahead, Thursday's panelists said they hope to see the Seoul Summit provide building blocks to establish a global governance on nuclear security.

...

Nuclear nonproliferation expert Matthew Bunn at Harvard University said he would not rule out some kind of settlement of the U.S. dispute with Belarus during the Seoul summit, adding that a number of nations with small stockpiles of weapons-grade material may also announce they have cleaned them out.

Meanwhile, he said, several countries could commit themselves to ratifying relevant treaties, hosting International Atomic Energy Agency reviews of their security arrangements or creating law enforcement teams to indict nuclear smugglers. But Bunn said he expects that much more will remain to be done.

“It will, I believe, be possible to say at the end of four years that for most or all of the highest-risk stocks, some significant progress has been made and the risks have been reduced,’’ said Bunn, who advised the Clinton administration on efforts to lock up the former Soviet Union’s vast stores of nuclear materials. “What it will not be possible to say at the end of four years is that all the nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material is secured and accounted for.’’

See full article...

Nuclear terrorism is both one of the greatest threats to national security and one of the most preventable. There have been 20 cases of theft or loss of fissile material … and that’s only what we know about. According to credible American intelligence assessments, al Qaeda has been after a nuclear weapon for more than a decade. It was only last fall that Moldovan police broke up a smuggling ring attempting to sell nuclear bomb-making materials. The North African buyer and a suspect thought to possess a kilogram of weapons-grade uranium remain at large. Preventing nuclear terrorism requires marshaling the resources of our international allies to close nuclear security gaps.

View full article...

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In his assessment of the threat, Matthew Bunn, associate professor at the Belfer Center at Harvard, called the possibility of a group making a weapon using highly enriched uranium “very plausibly within capabilities of a sophisticated terrorist group.”

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Experts have been monitoring the follow-through closely. One report, released in the run-up to the Seoul sequel, found that 80% of the commitments have been completed. White House officials say they’re happy with that record.

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Still, the U.S. fared pretty well in a study by the Nuclear Threat Initiative ranking countries on how well they secure nuclear material. The U.S. landed 13^thon the list of 32 countries that store weapons-usable material. The countries were graded on many factors, including the amount of material, political stability and regulatory climate. Deepti Choubey, a senior director at NTI, noted that the U.S. standing was largely a result of the large amount of material within its borders. If that factor had been eliminated, the U.S. score would have shot to second place, she said.

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“I think it is deeply problematic,” Bunn said. “The governance of nuclear security is weak, and much weaker than the world is willing to accept.”

View full article...

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"And what Fukushima has highlighted for everybody, besides the fact that you can have a major nuclear accident in a highly developed country, is that we do not have an adequate system for dealing with radioactive dangers that cross border," Luongo said.

View full article...

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Some experts say, though, that it is difficult to assess how much the security pledges have achieved. Partnership for Global Security President Kenneth Luongo said earlier this month that despite the finding that most 2010 commitments had been completed, assessing the value of those commitments can be difficult.

For example, in his 2009 speech in Prague that led to the first security summit two years ago, President Obama called for an international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years.

However, “nobody ever defined what the four-year goal was,” in terms of exactly what “securing” means, said Luongo, calling it a “free ride.”

...

Stockpiles of weapons-usable nuclear materials have actually increased in nations such as India and Pakistan, despite the 2010 commitments, Agence France-Presse reported Page Stoutland of the Nuclear Threat Initiative as saying at a pre-summit Nuclear Security Symposium in the South Korean capital.

“At the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit … leaders should seize the opportunity to improve stewardship of the world’s most dangerous materials,” Stoutland said.

...

View full article...

Their goal will be to review the measures countries have put in place to secure high-risk nuclear materials, to prevent them from falling into the hands of criminal gangs and terrorists.

New Zealand is participating in the summit, having earned a place at the table due to its regional nuclear security leadership.

Over the past few years, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been funding work under the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism to secure radioactive materials in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

In 2011, senior scientists from the National Radiation Laboratory in Christchurch completed a project in Cambodia, which permanently rendered safe a high risk radioactive source in the grounds of a hospital in Phnom Penh.

The same scientists have been running MFAT-funded workshops for their counterparts in other parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, focusing on improving the security of medical and industrial radiography sources.

Much of this work has been taking place in close collaboration with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and the Vienna- based World Institute for Nuclear Security, and is part of a much bigger global effort to prevent nuclear and radiological terrorism.

When they arrive in Seoul, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key will be able to hold their heads high and refer to these activities as evidence their governments have been taking their nuclear security commitments seriously. But Gillard may be able to hold her head a little higher than Key.

The reason is that on February 28 of this year Australia's parliament passed the Nuclear Terrorism Legislation Amendment Act, which imposes penalties of up to 20 years' imprisonment for the misuse of radioactive material and nuclear facilities.

This legislative step will allow Australia to ratify the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism (ICSANT), building on its earlier ratification of the Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials (CPPNM Amendment).

These two instruments are two of the lynchpins of the global nuclear security infrastructure, and ratifying and implementing them reinforces Australia's already strong reputation as a leader in the area.

View full article in The Press (New Zealand)...

View full article in Hurriyet Daily News...

The 2012 Summit comes just over a year after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, though many countries still continue to opt for nuclear power to meet their energy demands.

President Barack Obama vowed to secure all nuclear materials within four years and work toward a nuclear-free world in his famous April 2009 Prague speech. He hosted the first Nuclear Security Summit in 2010 attended by 47 states and three international organizations that produced a Communiqué and "Work Plan, which included National Commitments (also called “house gifts”). At the end of the 2010 Summit, Obama asked South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to host the second summit.

So far, about 80% of the national commitments pledged at the 2010 Summit have been achieved.

View full article...

Next week, leaders from around the world will meet in Seoul, South Korea, for the second Nuclear Security Summit. Their goal will be to review the measures that countries have put in place to prevent nuclear terrorism.

New Zealand is taking part in the summit, having earned a place at the table thanks to its regional nuclear security leadership.

Over the past few years, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been funding work under the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism to secure radioactive materials in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

Last year, senior scientists from the National Radiation Laboratory in Christchurch completed a project in Cambodia, which rendered safe a high-risk radioactive source in the grounds of a hospital in Phnom Penh.

View full article in The New Zeland Herald...

The discovery of radioactive tissue boxes at Bed, Bath & Beyond Inc. (BBBY) stores in January raised alarms among nuclear security officials and company executives over the growing global threat of contaminated scrap metal.

...

Industry and regulators are working to define an allowable limit for radiation in products that isn’t hazardous to customers’ health, according to the draft copy of the new IAEA rules for scrap handlers. This month’s Seoul nuclear-security summit will deal for the first time with the threats posed by uncontrolled radioactive sources, said Elena Sokova, executive director of the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non- Proliferation.

Forty-five heads of state including Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao will attend the nuclear summit, South Korea’s foreign ministry said in a statement on its website today.

View full article...

Meanwhile, anti-proliferation groups, which credit Obama with raising the global profile of nuclear security, are also voicing complaints. They are unhappy that the fiscal squeeze in Washington has translated into reduced spending on several nuclear security programs in his budget plan for fiscal 2013.

Ken Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, a non-governmental research organization, called cuts in Obama's budget request to secure weapons of mass destruction "an assault on common sense."

Two programs at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration were pinched hard. Funding for the Global Threat Reduction initiative, designed to secure nuclear material at civilian sites around the world, was cut by $32 million to $466 million, and will be down $500 million over the next four years compared with the levels envisaged a year ago.

A senior administration official insisted, however, that part of the drop reflected completion of an upgrade of Russian nuclear infrastructure and removal of Russian nuclear material.

A bigger hit was taken by the International Nuclear Materials Protection and Cooperation program, designed to improve security at vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear weapons in countries deemed to be of special concern. Its funding request was trimmed by $259 million in 2013 to $311 million.

Despite that, arms-control experts sees signs of progress on nuclear security efforts and caution against complacency when Obama and more than 50 other leaders meet on Monday.

Amid skepticism about the chances for meeting the Washington summit's headline pledge to safeguard all of the world's nuclear materials within four years, they are now pushing for voluntary arrangements to be turned into enforceable standards.

U.S. officials expect new commitments from several countries but are playing down the chances of any breakthroughs in Seoul. "It's (going to be) a bit of a report card and also figuring out what has to be prioritized," a senior official said.

View full article in Reuters...

Also published in the Orlando Sentinel...

The 2012 Summit comes just over a year after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, though many countries still continue to opt for nuclear power to meet their energy demands.

President Barack Obama vowed to secure all nuclear materials within four years and work toward a nuclear-free world in his famous April 2009 Prague speech. He hosted the first Nuclear Security Summit in 2010 attended by 47 states and three international organizations that produced a Communiqué and "Work Plan, which included National Commitments (also called “house gifts”). At the end of the 2010 Summit, Obama asked South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to host the second summit.

So far, about 80% of the national commitments pledged at the 2010 Summit have been achieved.

View full article...

A1: In 2010, President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea proposed to President Obama to host a second nuclear security summit in Seoul in 2012. This is the mid-way point of the commitment made at the 2010 summit: to secure the world’s most vulnerable nuclear materials from terrorists over four years. Most bets are on the Netherlands to host one more summit in 2014.

South Korea is no stranger to nuclear threats, mostly emanating from its neighbor to the North. South Korea, which does not possess nuclear weapons or any of the most sensitive nuclear materials like highly enriched uranium or separated plutonium (which can be used for reactor fuel or for nuclear weapons), has a sophisticated nuclear power program and a huge stake in ensuring the all nuclear endeavors are safe, secure, and reduce proliferation risks.

View full article...

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The management of radioactive material is not just a safety issue but also a security issue. Even more importantly, it is not only a national security issue but an international one.

To prevent radioactive material from falling into the hands of terrorist groups is one of the most pressing international security issues, one to which the whole global security community is paying close attention. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the terrible possibility of nuclear terrorism has been considered a major threat to every nation state.

The cold reality is that the global stockpile of nuclear materials is large enough to build more than 100,000 nuclear bombs. An apple-sized amount of plutonium fashioned into a weapon detonated in a highly populated urban area could instantly kill and injure hundreds of thousands of people. This material continues to accumulate in unstable regions of the world.

A nuclear terror attack would have a devastating impact far beyond the immediate tragedy. The country impacted would experience severe and lasting economic trauma. No single country acting alone can address this threat to their national security.

View full article...

Nuclear Terrorism: A Clear Danger

By KENNETH C. BRILL and KENNETH N. LUONGO

Published: March 15, 2012   

Terrorists exploit gaps in security. The current global regime for protecting the nuclear materials that terrorists desire for their ultimate weapon is far from seamless. It is based largely on unaccountable, voluntary arrangements that are inconsistent across borders. Its weak links make it dangerous and inadequate to prevent nuclear terrorism.       

Later this month in Seoul, the more than 50 world leaders who will gather for the second Nuclear Security Summit need to seize the opportunity to start developing an accountable regime to prevent nuclear terrorism.

There is a consensus among international leaders that the threat of nuclear terrorism is real, not a Hollywood confection. President Obama, the leaders of 46 other nations, the heads of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations, and numerous experts have called nuclear terrorism one of the most serious threats to global security and stability. It is also preventable with more aggressive action.       

View full article...

During a press briefing on Tuesday, Clinton-era Energy Department official Kenneth Luongo said that last year’s meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan highlighted the fact that the international community does not “have an adequate system for dealing with radiation that crosses borders.”

...

In the report released Tuesday, the Partnership for Global Security found that approximately 80 percent of the 67 national commitments made by 30 global leaders at the 2010 summit in Washington have been completed.

Assessing the value of some commitments, including those made by Washington, can be difficult, Luongo said.

For example, in the 2009 speech in Prague that led to the first security summit two years ago, President Obama called for an international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years.

However, “nobody ever defined what the four year goal was,” Luongo said, calling it a “free ride.”

View full article...

The Senate endorsed both pacts four years ago without opposition. However, Congress has yet to sign off on legislation that would force the United States to come into line with the mandates.

The administration is still wrangling with Congress over legal specifics for implementing the international agreements, according to representatives of the State Department and involved congressional committees...

“The White House needs to call Democrats who are on the Hill and tell them to make it happen,” said Miles Pomper, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington...

Pomper, though, said implementing the two nuclear agreements “is not a high priority item for Congress...”

“The question is if the U.S. doesn’t get this done after the summit, and there’s not necessarily pressure to do it until the next summit or if there’s not really a time line at all, I don’t know how that’s going to … encourage Congress to act on this,” Reif said. “The time is now.”

“Congress has oversight responsibility on this and they should do their due diligence … but this has been going on for months and months and months now, and the time has since passed to move this process forward,” he said.

View full article...

Quotes from FMWG Members:

 "States have made significant progress on their 2010 summit national commitments, but that is only half of the story," said Michelle Cann, senior budget and policy analyst at the Partnership for Global Security (PGS), as the institute issued a report on the Nuclear Security Summit, together with the Arms Control Association. "The commitments on the books will not get the job done. To prevent nuclear terrorism in the years ahead, the global nuclear security system must grow and adapt to new threats."

"Substantial work remains if the summit process is to meet its goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear materials," said Kelsey Davenport, an analyst at the Arms Control Association.

Kenneth Luongo, president of the PGS, said that is why the Seoul session is important.

"The 2012 summit provides a window of opportunity to being the process of reframing the nuclear material security debate and initiating some key changes in strategy," he said.

He pointed out Seoul is a good venue to hold the second round of the summit, given South Korea's role as a "global bridge" between advanced and developing nations, namely G-8 and G-20, the geopolitical situation regarding North Korea's nuclear threats, and the South's leading technology.

Regarding the level of discussion on North Korea in the Seoul summit, meanwhile, William Tobey, senior researcher at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, said South Korean officials will likely seek strong international support for the denuclearization of the peninsula.

View full article...

Originally published in Yonhap News on March 13, 2012 and picked up by The Korea Times, Bernama, Asia Pulse, and The Philippines News Agency.

In his 2009 Prague speech, President Obama warned that nuclear terrorism was “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” This warning was echoed in the 2010 Washington Communiqué, when it stated that “nuclear terrorism is one of the most challenging threats to international security, and strong nuclear security measures are the most effective means.”

President Obama was not the first to highlight the danger of nuclear terrorism. After the 9/11 terrorist
attacks in 2001, there had been repeated warnings. The UNSC Resolution 1540 in 2004 stated that it was “gravely concerned by the threat of terrorism and the risk that non-State actors...may acquire, develop, traffic in or use nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and their means of delivery.” IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei also warned in his speech at the 2008 IAEA Annual Conference that “nuclear terrorism is the Number One security threat right now. If they get it, they will use it.”

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CANBERRA – Last month, the Doomsday Clock’s hands were moved a minute closer to midnight by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the respected global organization that for decades has tracked the risk of a nuclear-weapons catastrophe, whether caused by accident or design, state or terrorist, fission bomb or dirty radiological bomb.

Few around the world seemed to be listening. The story – as others like it since the end of the Cold War ­– came and went within a half-day’s news cycle. But the Scientists’ argument was sobering, and demands attention. Progress since 2007 – when the Clock’s hands were last set at five minutes to midnight – has stalled, and political leadership has gone missing on all of the critical issues: disarmament, non-proliferation, and key building blocks needed for both.

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The only half-way good news is that progress continues on a third building block: ensuring that weapons-usable materials, and weapons themselves, currently stored in multiple locations in 32 countries, do not fall into the hands of rogue states or terrorists. At the end of March, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak will host a follow-up meeting to Obama’s successful Nuclear Security Summit in 2010, which brought together 47 government leaders to agree on a comprehensive program aimed at securing all such materials within four years. High on the agenda will be the security implications of nuclear safety: the Fukushima catastrophe showed that nuclear-power plants may be vulnerable not only to natural disaster, but also to terrorist sabotage.

But nuclear security is only one small part of what must be done to eliminate nuclear threats once and for all, and summit fatigue will make it difficult to sustain key world leaders’ commitment to meeting for so narrow a purpose. New thinking is urgently needed on how to recover the momentum of just two years ago.

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President Goodluck Jonathan is expected to attend the second Nuclear Security Summit, (NSS 2012) in Seoul in March and cooperate with other world leaders on how best to address the threat of nuclear terrorism. Some may argue that Nigeria, a non-nuclear weapons state without a large-scale nuclear industry, does not have a major role to play in preventing nuclear terrorism.

However, as the Fukushima crisis has demonstrated, nuclear crises do not respect borders. Therefore, nuclear threats must be addressed by all nations. Furthermore, to set the groundwork for the safe, peaceful and stable use of nuclear energy, efforts must be made to enhance nuclear safety and security. Soon after the first nuclear reactor was operated by Enrico Fermi and others in 1942 at the University of Chicago, nuclear energy activities were dominated by the quest for military applications. Today, peaceful uses of nuclear energy are the primary goals of responsible nations...

...The first NSS called by US President, Barack Obama, was held in Washington DC in 2010. As a participant, Nigeria supports the Summit process and initiative with regards to the philosophy of voluntarism. In my view, the following policy recommendations should be pursued: expanding the mission of nuclear security beyond four years; eliminating the use of fissile materials, provision of adequate funding for nuclear security; as well as supporting training and education initiatives.

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Lessons Learned from Fukushima: Don’t Forget Steps Against Nuclear Terrorism

The following op-ed was published by the Kyodo News Wire service in Japan on February 21, 2012.  This translation was provided by the author.

As we investigate the exact cause of the Fukushima nuclear accident and take steps to strengthen nuclear safety measures, we should not forget the measures against nuclear terrorism. Some tend to think that terrorists may come to New York or Washington to detonate a nuclear bomb or disperse radioactive material with a dirty bomb, but will not bother to come as far as to Japan. But intelligence information showed that Japan was among the targets of radical terrorists.

If the nuclear reactors remain in operation up to 40 years as the Japanese government now proposes, they will be around for some time and we don’t know what change of course the international situation around Japan may take during that period. Natural disasters can cause havoc as we have witnessed but the terrorist attack with clear intention to destroy nuclear power plants is a greater threat. The US, in that sense, took the risk seriously and applied a number of measures to cope with the threat. If Japan had prepared itself in a similar manner, it could have avoided some of the damages at Fukushima.

The Government’s Nuclear Energy Commission is drafting a new policy on nuclear terrorism. I look forward to a robust policy that should be implemented together with measures to strengthen nuclear safety. Practically, this means strengthening the security measures around nuclear power stations and other facilities. Against the major threat of armed attacks from the sea or the air, the use of the Maritime and Air Self-Defense Forces should be considered. Screening the personnel reliability of those who work at nuclear facilities is a necessity. This is because we cannot totally rule out insider act or assistance of nuclear terrorism.

Some of the numerous volunteers who have been going around with radiation monitors after the Fukushima accident have uncovered radiation sources so far unknown in the urban neighborhood such as at a supermarket in Tokyo. We need to be aware of these hidden sources of nuclear terrorism. Radioactive material is not only at nuclear facilities but it is also stored and used for a variety of purposes at many factories, hospitals, research labs around the country. In order to avoid such radioactive material from being used for a dirty bomb we have to reduce the amount of these radioactive materials and tighten their security.

The second Nuclear Security Summit is going to be held in Seoul from March 26-27 for the purpose of strengthening the measures to prevent nuclear terrorism. The summit will address the issues of reducing and tightening the control of high enriched uranium and plutonium that are held for medical and research purposes but can also be used to make nuclear bombs. On the occasion of the first Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in the spring of 2010, Japan announced the establishment of a center to support the efforts of developing countries to strengthen nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear security. It has started its activities at Tokai-mura.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda should clearly state at the coming Seoul Nuclear Security Summit that Japan will not only take strong nuclear safety measures but also nuclear security measures seriously and discuss with the other heads of government concrete measures to strengthen international cooperation towards these ends. The lessons of Fukushima tell that there is no time to be wasted in meeting the danger of nuclear terrorism.

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Nobuyasu Abe, former Foreign Service officer born in Akita 1945, Director- General for Arms Control and Science in the Foreign Ministry, Ambassador in Vienna for the IAEA and other organizations, UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs (2003-06), currently, Director, Center for the Promotion of Disarmament and Non-proliferation, an FMWG International Partner.
 

View the article on the Center for the Promotion of Disarmament and Non-Proliferation's website. 

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But President Obama’s proposed budget reduces funding that is intended to prevent such acts, says the Fissile Materials Working Group, a non-governmental international coalition that proposes policies for nuclear security. In a recent statement, the group called Obama’s budget “a major step backwards in the fight against nuclear terrorism.” The group cites a $293 million cut to the National Nuclear Security Administration and reductions to nuclear security programs at the Pentagon and State Department.

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Big rigs with bombs are secretly cruising the interstate near you. But how safe are they from terrorists or accidents?

"Is that it?" My wife leans forward in the passenger seat of our sensible hatchback and points ahead to an 18-wheeler that's hauling ass toward us on a low-country stretch of South Carolina's Highway 125. We've been heading west from I-95 toward the Savannah River Site nuclear facility on the Georgia-South Carolina border, in search of nuke truckers. At first the mysterious big rig resembles a commercial gas tanker, but the cab is pristine-looking and there's a simple blue-on-white license plate: US GOVERNMENT. It blows by too quickly to determine whether it's part of the little-known US fleet tasked with transporting some of the most sensitive cargo in existence.

As you weave through interstate traffic, you're unlikely to notice another plain-looking Peterbilt tractor-trailer rolling along in the right-hand lane. The government plates and array of antennas jutting from the cab's roof would hardly register. You'd have no idea that inside the cab an armed federal agent operates a host of electronic countermeasures to keep outsiders from accessing his heavily armored cargo: a nuclear warhead with enough destructive power to level downtown San Francisco.

That's the way the Office of Secure Transportation (OST) wants it. At a cost of $250 million a year, nearly 600 couriers employed by this secretive agency within the US Department of Energy use some of the nation's busiest roads to move America's radioactive material wherever it needs to go—from a variety of labs, reactors and military bases, to the nation's Pantex bomb-assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, to the Savannah River facility. Most of the shipments are bombs or weapon components; some are radioactive metals for research or fuel for Navy ships and submarines. The shipments are on the move about once a week.

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The Obama Administration’s fiscal year 2013 (FY13) budget request dramatically reduces funding for international weapons of mass destruction (WMD) security programs from the FY12 appropriated level.  Funding for National Nuclear Security Administration programs are nearly a quarter (23.3 percent) below the FY12 appropriation.  While the Department of Defense’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program is increased slightly overall, CTR’s Global Nuclear Security program is targeted for a 17 percent cut.  Funding within the Department of State is also reduced with cuts to WMD Terrorism, Global Threat Reduction, and Export Control and Related Border Security Assistance programs.  

Click here for details...
 

Click here to view the FMWG Press Release...

A pesar de los logros obtenidos desde entonces, Obama ha vuelto a insistir en esa misma línea en un encuentro con estudiantes de la Universidad de Hankuk previo a la inauguración de la cumbre. «El peligro de un atentado nuclear es una de las mayores amenazas para la seguridad global porque grupos terroristas y bandas criminales intentan apoderarse de material radiactivo para fabricar una “bomba sucia” y del arsenal atómico que no está debidamente protegido, suficiente para muchas armas», advirtió el inquilino de la Casa Blanca. Quizás por su condición de Nobel de la Paz o con la vista puesta en las elecciones de noviembre, Obama confesó sentirse con la «obligación moral» de liderar este recorte armamentístico. «Con más de 1.500 misiles atómicos desplegados y 5.000 cabezas nucleares, tenemos más armas de las que necesitamos», señaló antes de entrevistarse con su homólogo ruso, Dmitry Medvedev, para convencerle de que su país siga el mismo camino bajo la nueva presidencia de Vladimir Putin.

Además, ambos discutieron la tensión creciente en Irán y Corea del Norte, que ha eclipsado esta cumbre con su intención de lanzar a mediados de abril un satélite espacial que, en realidad, podría ser la prueba encubierta de un misil de largo alcance con capacidad para golpear las costas de Alaska con una ojiva nuclear.

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Garantizar su seguridad es crucial para todo el planeta, ya que cada vez hay más material radiactivo que puede caer en malas manos y ser utilizado por grupos terroristas. «Tenemos un problema global que exige una solución global, pero no hay requisitos de seguridad internacionales, sino solo recomendaciones, para proteger los arsenales atómicos y las cada vez más numerosas instalaciones nucleares de uso civil», alerta Kenneth Luongo, copresidente del Grupo de Trabajo de Materiales Fisibles. A su juicio, la falta de estos estándares de seguridad obligatorios es una de las principales carencias de esta cumbre porque «se debería garantizar que todos los países con aspiraciones nucleares están preparados para controlar dicha energía».

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Massive amounts of HEU continue to be set aside for nuclear weapons and for powering nuclear vessels such as submarines and aircraft carriers. The primary civilian use of HEU has been in research reactors and other test facilities. It has also been used in the process of producing medical isotopes and in civilian propulsion reactors. A half century ago, the Soviet Union and the United States started shipping HEU abroad as part of their peaceful nuclear cooperation programs, but by the late 1970s, India’s “peaceful nuclear explosion” and the rise of international terrorism had convinced the two superpowers to launch efforts to phase out research reactor use of HEU (particularly overseas) and replace it with LEU. These efforts were accelerated following the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States and have made significant gains.

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Signed by over a dozen experts in the medical and nuclear non-proliferation fields, the letter raises concerns about the American Medical Isotopes Production Act of 2011, passed by the Senate in November. The bill, currently awaiting a House vote, is aimed at reducing the use of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) in developing the medical isotope Molybdenum-99 — a key ingredient in the medical diagnosis of millions of American patients a year.

Highly-enriched uranium is also a key ingredient in nuclear weapons, and experts say its continuing production for civilian use poses many security risks. The letter, submitted by the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project (NPPP), argues that the bill might unintentionally promote the heightened production of HEU by Russia, in particular.

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In April 2010, 47 heads of state met in Washington, DC, for the first Nuclear Security Summit in order to find ways to address the largely overlooked threat of nuclear terrorism. The summit was the largest meeting of heads of state called by an American president since 1945, when leaders gathered in San Francisco in the effort that launched the United Nations. Major obstacles confronted planners for the first Nuclear Security Summit, including a lack of consensus on the dangers of nuclear terrorism and how best to enhance global nuclear security (problems that still persist). By gathering world leaders -- rather than bureaucrats -- to address the issue head on, the first summit made some important steps in helping to raise global awareness about the threat of nuclear terrorism. The 47 heads of state, representing countries from all corners of the globe, concluded in a nonbinding communiqué that "nuclear terrorism is one of the greatest threats to global security" and that "strong nuclear security measures" are the best means to prevent the threat from becoming reality. Additionally, the leaders joined President Obama's goal to secure all vulnerable nuclear material within four years.

In addition to the strong normative support generated for preventing nuclear terrorism, the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit resulted in approximately 50 concrete national commitments to strengthen global nuclear security -- many of which have already been fulfilled heading into the second summit this March in Seoul, South Korea. Of particular note are the pledges to eliminate nuclear bombmaking materials.

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On January 16-17, 2012, India is also holding the 3rd Sherpa meeting for the Seoul NSS. This is the first time that India will be holding a Sherpa meeting as part of the NSS. India did not hold any Sherpa meetings in the run-up to the 2010 NSS. Does the holding of the Sherpa meeting demonstrate that India has started playing a proactive role in the NSS process? India has been an active participant in the summit process, but is proceeding it cautiously. Organizing the Sherpa meeting should not mean a major departure from India’s nuclear security policy, which has been marked by cautious activism.

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India's export controls are entering a new phase of maturity. The country has, in recent years,
gradually adopted internationally recognised 'best practices' for controlling the export of
sensitive goods with potential military or weapons of mass destruction (WMD) ramifications.
India has also built a legal framework that provides statutory authority to the regulatory and
institutional structures that implement and enforce its export regulations.

Although India has engaged with major multilateral export control bodies, it continues to
seek accommodation from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG, nuclear supplier countries that
seek to contribute to the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons through the implementation of
guidelines for nuclear exports and nuclear-related exports) as New Delhi looks to expand its
nuclear power generation without joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

View article at Jane's Intelligence Review...

The leaders at that summit also agreed that South Korea would host another nuclear-security summit in 2012. On the face of it, South Korea was a strange choice, given that it neither possessed nuclear weapons nor the materials to make them—highly enriched uranium or separated plutonium. But Obama’s first choice, Russia, turned down the opportunity, and South Korea’s president Lee Myung-bak was eager to raise Seoul’s standing on the global stage and give the country’s burgeoning nuclear-energy industry a global seal of approval.

So late this March, fifty or so leaders will descend on Seoul to track progress since the last summit and make a batch of fresh commitments. While their presence is sure to be heralded by the U.S. government, Korean citizens are likely to be less welcoming. Many in Korea find it strange that their government should be putting so much effort into an event on nuclear terrorism when nuclear threats from North Korea and the effects of the Fukushima accident in Japan appear to be more pressing issues for the peninsula. Other countries share similar concerns, believing that the United States has devoted too much attention to the threat of nuclear terrorism at the expense of nonproliferation, safety and disarmament issues.

These concerns are likely to limit the ambitions of those who would like to see governments make significantly deeper nuclear-security commitments at Seoul. They are also likely to hamper efforts to make the current biannual security-summit process an ongoing fixture of international relations—particularly if attempts are made to stretch the current process beyond Obama’s four-year time frame. States face a choice: they can move forward with a wider process that takes in more issues in order to justify continued high-level attention; they can continue discussing a relatively narrow set of issues at a lower level; or they can maintain these high-level meetings but on a less frequent basis.

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Communiqué

§ “We will work with the industry to ensure the necessary priority of physical protection, material accountancy and security culture.”

Work Plan

§ “Participating States will work … to promote and sustain strong nuclear security culture and corporate commitments to implement robust security practices.”

§ “Participating States encourage nuclear operators and architect/engineering firms to take into account and incorporate, where appropriate, effective measures of physical protection and security culture into the planning, construction, and operation of civilian nuclear facilities.”

§ “Emphasizing the importance of the human dimension of nuclear security, the need to enhance security culture, and the need to maintain a well-trained cadre of technical experts.”

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When leaders meet for the next nuclear security summit in Seoul in March 2012, they will continue this core focus on nuclear material security, but they will likely also address the implications and lessons of the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident.  The severe damage to the reactor cores at Fukushima and local radiation  exposure has highlighted the importance of protecting the
global population from all unintended releases of radiation – including from accidents and intentional acts.

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The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program has deactivated 7,527 strategic nuclear warheads and destroyed 774 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 651 submarine launched ballistic missiles, and 906 nuclear air-to-surface missiles. It has upgraded security at 24 nuclear weapons storage sites in Russia and downblended 400 metric tons of highly enriched uranium, which now supplies 10 percent of US electricity. To date, the Nunn-Lugar program has reduced nuclear arsenals in Russia from 30,000 in 1991 to about 12,000 warheads today. To match the effort in Russia, the United States has dismantled more than 13,000 warheads since 1990 and destroyed 90 percent of its nonstrategic nuclear weapons, going from 7,600 to 760 warheads. It took nearly 50 years to build the most dangerous arsenals in history; it has taken less than 20 years to dismantle and store more than 75 percent of the world's nuclear weapons. This is a moment for celebration.

Yet, there will likely be little fanfare to recognize these accomplishments, nor much praise for those far-sighted and generous leaders who created the organizations to carry out the most complex weapons dismantlement in history. Why?

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By Fissile Materials Working Group | 26 October 2011

Dealing with thuggish dictators reluctant to relinquish their stockpiles of highly enriched uranium (HEU) is a necessary component in the global effort to secure vulnerable fissile materials by 2013. Unfortunately, nuclear deals are often tentative and prone to collapse if a dictator's whims change. The successful nuclear deal with Libya and the stalled deal with Belarus are indicative of this dynamic, but it should not stop the United States and other nations from seeking deals to secure fissile materials that might otherwise be exploited by would-be nuclear terrorists.

The civil war that has raged for months between loyalists to Libya's former dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, and rebel forces supported by NATO has led to a rebel victory and the violent demise of Qaddafi. While many lessons will be drawn from the Libyan conflict, we should not forget the danger that fissile materials pose, particularly in unstable regions. Had Qaddafi maintained Libya's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, there is no telling what might have occurred. It is easy to imagine the unstable dictator transferring dangerous nuclear materials to terrorist groups or unleashing his most dangerous weapons on the Libyan people themselves. Even if Qaddafi abstained from these activities, Libya's nuclear security system could have broken down amidst the ongoing power vacuum. This in turn could have enabled fissile material to slip from Libyan control onto the black market and potentially into the hands of a terrorist group. Lastly, if Libya still had a nuclear infrastructure when the country fell into revolt, NATO forces might have been more cautious in their desire to support the rebels, which could have left Qaddafi in power and allowed him to crush the rebellion in Benghazi. Alternately, NATO might have felt pressured to put boots on the ground, which could have stolen ownership of the rebellion and resulted in any number of negative outcomes.

Fortunately, Libya's WMD program was abandoned in a 2003 deal between Libya, Britain, and the United States in the hopes of loosening sanctions and improving relations with the West. Libya shipped its nuclear weapon designs, documents, and enrichment technology to the United States. In 2004, 16 kilograms of HEU fuel was removed from a Libyan nuclear research reactor and sent to Russia for downblending. The research reactor was converted to run on low enriched uranium (LEU) by the United States two years later. Also as part of the bargain, Libya destroyed thousands of shells filled with chemical weapons.

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The second Nuclear Security Summit will be held in Seoul in March 2012, and negotiations on the agenda and the formal outcome are well under way. The outcome of the 2012 summit will matter just as much as the communiqué and work plan that emerged from the 2010 summit, because it will help determine how international efforts to prevent nuclear and radiological terrorism – the latter issue having been added to the summit’s scope – will unfold in the years beyond 2012.

Notwithstanding all the progress made in securing fissile materials, a major shortcoming of international nuclear and radiological counter-terrorism efforts is their almost exclusive focus on prevention. The GICNT June 2011 Plenary Meeting decided to add response and mitigation as a new priority functional area to the initiative, but this is an exception. Barely any consideration has so far been given to improving measures that can be taken after a terrorist attack in order to minimise the consequences.

Preventive measures can never guarantee absolute protection. No matter how much fissile and radiological material is secured in the former Soviet Union or how much money is invested in sophisticated nuclear-detection systems for international border crossings, terrorists may still succeed in acquiring material that had been unaccounted for, and subsequently overcome all defences. This is especially true for the threat of radiological terrorism, because it is far more likely that terrorists could acquire and weaponise radiological material than they could launch a nuclear attack.

Improving national response and mitigation capacities could significantly decrease the risks to the public. If emergency services are able to swiftly identify and respond to a radiological attack; if officials can issue appropriate messages to the public in a timely and consistent manner; and if affected areas can be efficiently decontaminated in the weeks after an event, then lives can be saved and much of the economic, social and psychological disruption that was the aim of the terrorists can be reduced.

Many states lack these capacities. There is a belief that investing in measures to prevent an incident is sufficient and that in the worst case one could count on the specialist assistance provided by the United States and others to minimise the adverse impact. Yet response and consequence-mitigation measures need to be developed, tested and incorporated into national counter-terrorism strategies well before terrorists strike. Their execution after …

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To this end, Seoul would have an interest in an expanded agenda to include nuclear safety-security. Prior to Fukushima, active discussions on nuclear safety were becoming a thing of the past owing to strong safety precautions put in place since the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents...   Click to view full article.

This article original appeared here:  http://www.eenews.net/Greenwire/2011/09/22/14

Published: Thursday, September 22, 2011

Nuclear watchdogs say an independent audit that found the federal government hasn't accounted for American nuclear material that has been shipped abroad highlights the need for increased oversight.

The Government Accountability Office released a report on Sept. 8 that found the Energy Department, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and State Department have failed to fully account for nuclear material exported from the United States under nuclear cooperation, or "123," agreements.

The federal government has forged 27 such agreements that establish a framework with other countries for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Under such partnerships, countries are required to guarantee the physical protection of material that originated in the United States.

The GAO found that the "123" agreements do not require information about the whereabouts and safety of the nuclear material to be reported, and there is no policy in the United States for pursuing or obtaining such data.

"U.S. nuclear cooperation agreements generally require that partners report inventory information upon request, however, DOE and NRC have not systematically sought such data," the report says. "DOE and NRC do not have a comprehensive, detailed, current inventory of U.S. nuclear material -- including weapon-usable material such as highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium -- overseas that includes the country, facility, and quantity of material."

The agencies cannot account for material such as highly enriched uranium that has been shipped abroad, mainly because the nuclear cooperation agreements do not contain specific access rights that enable DOE, NRC or the State Department to monitor and evaluate the physical security of U.S. nuclear material overseas, and the American government relies on its partners to maintain adequate security, GAO said.

Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the federal government should strengthen its authority under the 123 agreements, which would allow federal agencies to verify the security of U.S.-origin materials in other countries. Currently, the United States doesn't have enough authority and doesn't use what power it does have, he said.

"Of course, other countries would oppose this as a violation of their sovereignty, ignoring the fact that it is a privilege for them, not a right, to have access to U.S.-origin technologies and materials," Lyman said.

The GAO audit also found that DOE, NRC and the State Department have not systematically visited countries believed to be holding the "highest proliferation risk quantities of U.S. nuclear material" or facilities that failed to meet international physical security guidelines in a timely manner. Notably, federal officials found only half of the 55 countries visited from 1994 through 2010 met international security guidelines, GAO said.

The GAO recommended that Congress consider directing DOE and NRC to compile an inventory of U.S. nuclear material overseas, but the agencies disagreed and said conducting annual inventory reconciliations with all partners was unnecessary, according to the report. "GAO continues to believe that its recommendations could help improve the accountability of U.S. nuclear material in foreign countries," the audit says.

Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security -- a non-governmental research organization dedicated to securing weapons of mass destruction -- said part of the problem is that the United States has been selling nuclear material and technology around the world since the 1950s. The government has exported highly enriched equipment for enriching uranium and technology for reprocessing spent fuel. Luongo is also a member of the Fissile Materials Working Group, and worked as senior advisory to the Secretary of Energy for Nonproliferation.

The government is attempting to secure large amounts of material and equipment despite budget constraints, limited staff and more than half a decade's worth of technology that has been globally distributed, he said.

"If Congress is really worried about this, they ought to give money to conduct the inspections" instead of cutting federal funding for such initiatives, he said.

Most recently, lawmakers have cut funding for the DOE's Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), a program that removes U.S. nuclear material from vulnerable facilities overseas and brings back material that meets certain eligibility criteria.

The Fissile Materials Working Group, a coalition of more than 60 nuclear experts, criticized the House in July for not fully funding the president's request of more than $500 million for the GTRI program (E&E Daily, July 22). The group argued that the GTRI would reduce the threat of nuclear terrorists by converting nuclear reactors to run on nonweapon-grade low-enriched uranium rather than highly enriched uranium.

The action also reflected shifts in Minsk's perception of the need to improve ties with the West since last December, when Belarusian Foreign Minister Sergei Martynov signed a joint statement with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In that statement, Minsk said it "has decided to eliminate all of its stocks" of HEU before the March 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul. At the time, US officials anticipated that the shipments of the remaining HEU would take place in early 2012, shortly before the summit. In return, the United States promised to "provide technical and financial assistance to support the completion of this effort as expeditiously as possible," and South Korea indicated that it would be willing to invite Belarus to the summit if Minsk met its commitment.

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Of the summit commitments that remain unresolved, one stands out: the Obama administration's pledge to accelerate efforts to complete US ratification procedures on both the 2005 Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM) and the 2005 International Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism (ICSANT), which would each expand and strengthen US efforts to prevent and combat nuclear terrorism. George W. Bush's administration submitted the Conventions to the Senate in September 2007 -- demonstrating the strong bipartisan support for the treaties -- and the Senate overwhelmingly approved them in September 2008. However, prior to US ratification, both conventions require the United States to pass legislation to criminalize certain offenses, such as the possession of radioactive material other than nuclear material.

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The freedom from nuclear terrorism that the world has enjoyed is due, no doubt, to some combination of the competence of concerned governments and the incompetence of those who seek to inflict mass harm. Luck has also played a role. In light of the potential demand for nuclear materials by terrorists and the black market supply, the odds of terrorist nuclear attack occurring somewhere in the world are still far too high. 

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And you can’t solve a problem unless you agree that there is a problem; unless you put your money where your mouth is; and unless you commit to getting rid of the vulnerable nuclear materials that are the source of the problem.

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The nation's security depends on it.

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Simply put, no. The current nuclear security regime urgently needs to evolve into a high-functioning nuclear security architecture. While the current regime attempts to manage nuclear security threats with disparate tools and varied legislative efforts, the nuclear security architecture would be the result of a systemic strategic exercise to integrate all the current security measures while allowing for future needs. The new design would close gaps, weed out weaknesses, and prioritize efficiency.

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In the trunk, the smugglers carried a silver case filled with iridium-192. They nurtured vague grand plans to sell the radioactive material to a Muslim buyer for $5 million.

Such a black-market sale could have but one likely purpose - construction of a so-called dirty bomb.

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The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster gave terrorists and other malefactors a tip. By targeting nuclear plants, they can wreak havoc comparable to that wrought by an earthquake and tsunami, crippling a great economic and military power.  A terrorist version of Fukushima is plausible ? with all the human suffering, economic dislocation and national humiliation the March 2011 cataclysm entailed. Both safety and security must be enhanced at nuclear installations around the world.

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Direct links to the articles follow:

Strange Bedfellows: North Korean WMD Trading Relationships, by Jonas Vaicikonis - published on April 26, 2011

Briefing: Nuclear Meltdowns, by Ryan Costello - published on April 19, 2011

Briefing: The Pros and Cons of Nuclear Power, by Ryan Costello - published on March 29, 2011

Threat Convergence in Pakistan: Countering Terrorist Aspirations & Improving Nuclear Security, by Ryan Costello - published on February 1, 2011

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Sharon Squassoni discusses a fire at the Fukushima nuclear plant on CBS News on March 16, 2011

Jim Walsh talks about the IAEA's role in Japan crisis on CNN's American Morning on March 16, 2011

Sharon Squassoni discusses the likelihood of a meltdown at Japan nuclear plant on March 14, 2011

Sharon Squassoni talks to NPR about the disaster in Japan on All Things Considered on March 14, 2011

"South Korea is an "inspired choice" to host the next summit, Kenneth Luongo president of the Partnership for Global Security, said during the same panel discussion.

"He noted that while the country has no nuclear weapons, it shares a border with would-be nuclear power North Korea. In addition, South Korea attended the 2010 summit; is a contributor to the Group of Eight industrialized nations' Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction; is a member to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Group of 20 states; is a significant consumer of domestic nuclear power; and home to an established nuclear energy export industry.

"They are at the confluence of a lot of different currents, including the developing world, the developed world and nuclear technology," Luongo told the embassy audience.

"He suggested the 2012 summit adopt a six-point "Seoul Declaration" that would, among other measures, assess nations' implementation of the 2010 commitments; seek to strengthen the fissile material security regime; establish an international standard for nuclear security; and endorse the idea that all high intensity radiological sources in public buildings will be secured..."
 
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"I think she's absolutely correct in saying that it will live on," said Brian Finlay, a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. However, he said, the initiative "may not live on in the same form that we have understood in its current iteration."

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...Panelist Matthew Bunn, the co-principal investigator for the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, considered how global powers could prevent further attacks while upholding order following a nuclear crisis..."

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Alexandra Toma, a co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group, a coalition of nonproliferation organizations, said that one of those programs, run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, has secured enough nuclear material to make more than 120 weapons. "Cutting this program would mean we secure less material," Toma told The Lookout.

And Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, noted that Ukraine and Belarus--two former Soviet republics that are hotspots for unsecured nukes--recently agreed to voluntarily give up their bomb-grade uranium. But amazingly, because of funding constraints imposed by Congress--some of which pre-date last week's House budget--the United States can't yet take them up on the offer.

"So, nuclear material that countries are willing to give up is going to sit in those countries," Luongo told The Lookout, "because Congress is essentially playing politics with national security."

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"I think we need to get off the four-year objective and recognize what its importance was," Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, said during the same conference. "Its importance was a driver ... it focused attention and it drove actions and I think all of those things are extremely important but it is a long-term effort and I think we need to now start thinking about what are we going to do over the long-term."

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The resolution, the third passed by Congress and signed by the president, eliminates a $320 million increase the administration requested in fiscal 2011 for an array of nonproliferation programs within the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Defense Department's Cooperative Threat Reduction program, the Partnership for Global Security said..."

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"Howard Hall, who holds the Governor's Chair in global nuclear security at the University of Tennessee, said the Obama administration is making good strides in the area of nuclear nonproliferation. But he doesn't think the pace is sufficient to meet President Obama's goal of securing vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years..."

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The bright side, say experts, is that nuclear terrorism is quite difficult to accomplish. “It’s hard to get enough materials to make an improvised nuclear device. And even if they can, there are a number of technical things that can trip them up along the way. Terrorists tend to prefer well-proven techniques” that involve conventional bombs and assault rifles, Ferguson says. “They want to make sure they have a chance of doing it right,” which has so far dissuaded groups from going down the path of nuclear terrorism, he says."

"However, the first Continuing Resolution passed at the end of September to fund the government through December 3 funded most government programs at FY 2010 levels, including programs to secure and safeguard nuclear weapons and materials.

"In response, the Fissile Materials Working Group (FMWG) put together a letter to members urging them to fully fun these crucial programs at FY-2011 levels..."

"It's a sitting duck for al-Qaida because these facilities are not guarded like military facilities, but they have bomb-grade uranium," says Alan Kuperman, an expert in nuclear proliferation at the University of Texas.

"I was really fascinated by the fact they want a seat at the [2012] Nuclear Security Summit. That proves to me this process is working," said Ken Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, a group promoting nuclear security..."

"People are focused on the big bang. They're not focused on what it means to have radiation dispersed all around an urban area," he told Global Security Newswire.

The extent of contamination would depend on a number of factors, including the size of the conventional explosive, the amount of radioactive material used, the means of dispersal and weather. Luongo said the cost of reclamation could run into the billions of dollars, depending on where the device is set off...

Unfortunately, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) is single-handedly blocking legislation, already passed overwhelmingly by the House, which could make such terrorist-proof production of medical isotopes the norm – both in the United States and abroad.

"I'm cautiously pessimistic," said Alexandra Toma, program director for the nongovernmental Connect U.S. Fund. "I hope I'm proven wrong."

...

"It's a shock," Toma told Global Security Newswire. "Maybe we were just too hopeful. Maybe we were hoping to ride this nuclear spring wave into the summer and thought that, of course, it's only a billion dollars, it's only a few billion compared to the shock that the global economy would endure [following a major WMD event]. It's just shocking that they wouldn't put that money up."

...

"I think it's been very successful in dealing with the nuclear problem in Russia. I don't think there's much doubt security has improved significantly," said Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security. The G-8 plan "has as its mandate nuclear, biological, chemical and scientists, and it's touched on all of those issues."

...

Moscow had a "choke hold" on funding, directing the lion's share of money toward its own priorities -- particularly submarine dismantlement and chemical disarmament -- while biosecurity and other projects favored in other capitals sometimes received short-shrift, according to Luongo.

...

"For some countries this was never a high priority. And then some bureaucracies are more dysfunctional than others," Luongo said.

...

"I think that there's a general sense by people who follow this that $10 billion by the non-U.S. G-8 has not been spent and probably will not be spent by 2012. But maybe half of that will be," Luongo said.

...

Luongo said he believes the program's credibility suffered due to its financing issues. That might have also reduced the willingness of nations that had met their funding commitments to pursue an extension to the Global Partnership, Finlay said.

...

Germany, in particular, was said to be averse to "committing additional sums of money for international activities when they just contributed to the bailout of the Greek economy," Luongo said.

...

Toma and other experts acknowledged the thinking behind nations' reluctance to funnel additional money into the program at this point. However, they argued that the G-8 states failed to consider the economic ramifications of a WMD strike.

"I think it was a huge lost opportunity," Luongo said. "I don't think the issue will be ready for consideration in 2011 and it may be ready for consideration in the U.S. when it chairs in 2012. But that's going to be in the middle of an election."

...

Another $20 billion would maintain the momentum set over the last eight years, according to Toma.

"The leaders have agreed that nuclear terrorism is the No. 1 global security issue. Great, let's do something about it. Let's continue to work together, let's expand from Russia, let's get some more of the materials that are out there, outside of the Eurasian corridor," she said.

The G-8 states could turn their attention to Pakistan, which is possessed of nuclear weapons and is fighting an increasingly virulent insurgency. Potentially vulnerable fissile materials, though, are found all over the world, Toma noted.

Ensuring security for the growing number of nuclear power plants in Asia and the Middle East would be a worthy effort, as would protecting disease research materials in Asia from diversion for illicit purposes, Luongo said.

Money could be directed to help developing nations eyeing biotechnology as a means of growth to bring their biological security standards up to levels established by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, he said. The International Atomic Energy Agency might also receive additional funds to augment its capability to safeguard the increasing number of nuclear power plants to ensure they are not used to produce weapons material.

...

Toma and others said they would press their case for maintaining the program, with a planned study on the financial impact of nuclear terrorism as one tool to prove the Global Partnership's value. Much will depend on the state of the world economy as the program heads toward expiration.

"There's an opportunity here to regroup and start to address the challenges of the 21st century or there's an opportunity to do business as usual," Luongo said.

For more on the threat, see Rep. Harman's op-ed with Senator Susan Collins on the published the same day in the Wall Street Journal.

Should a dirty bomb or multiple dirty bombs be detonated in any American city, port complex, airport or train station, the result could be loss of life and widespread panic. Billions of dollars would be spent in clean-up and medical costs, not to mention lost wages and serious interruptions in the flow of commerce and everyday life.

We know that terror groups remain highly interested in such devices. Al Qaeda's senior leadership has publicly expressed a desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including radiological weapons, with which to attack the United States. Since September 11, U.S. officials have recovered many documents detailing al Qaeda's pursuit of these weapons.

In 2006, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, then the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, called for nuclear scientists and explosive experts to help his organization in making biological and radioactive weapons.

That same year, British citizen Dhiren Barot pleaded guilty to conspiring to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb. He planned to target underground parking garages in the U.K. and U.S. institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the New York Stock Exchange, and offices belonging to Citigroup and Prudential Financial.

Just two weeks ago, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, an American citizen on the FBI's most-wanted list, was named as an accomplice in the New York subway bomb plot with Najibullah Zazi. Currently at-large, Shukrijumah—a trained nuclear technician allegedly tasked by al Qaeda with carrying off an "American Hiroshima"—once sought radioactive material from a university in Ontario, Canada. News reports allege that this was an attempt to construct a dirty bomb.

President Obama has rightly focused on the threat of nuclear terrorism by pledging to locate and safeguard loose nuclear material in the world within four years. This critical goal served as the theme of an April Nuclear Security Summit convened by the president in Washington with over 40 countries in attendance.

But an exclusive focus on "loose nukes" could mean missing the threat we face in our own backyard: the dirty bomb, which is far easier to assemble from ingredients that are widely available in this country. Highly dispersible radiological materials like cesium-137 or cobalt-40 are used every day in medical procedures at hospitals and in universities. These components of modern medicine are underprotected.

Many hospitals are eager to upgrade security for these radiological elements—provided they receive the resources to do so. But the clock is ticking. Entry to most hospitals is easy. Radiology departments usually control access, but a basic tool kit can be used to break into a blood irradiator and seize a substantial amount of radiological material. Once combined with a simple explosive device, you've got a crude radiological weapon. While there have been a handful of successful pilot projects to secure these ingredients, they simply don't go far enough.

Despite those chilling facts, the White House has slashed the domestic radiological protection budget over the past few years. The current budget proposal would cut these domestic resources by half. At the same time, it would more than double the funding for "loose nuke" programs.

This policy is pennywise and pound foolish. We cannot allow a dirty bomb to become America's Achilles' heel because we've lost sight of that threat.

Ms. Harman is a Democratic congresswoman from California and chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence & Terrorism Risk Assessment. Ms. Collins is a Republican senator from Maine and ranking member on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

"That move was not good enough, observers said in a statement issued by the Fissile Materials Working Group, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations focused on nonproliferation.

“The G-8 Global Partnership is a vital multilateral mechanism for securing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Its geographic expansion and renewed funding commitment are essential for international security,” said Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security.

“It is very disappointing, and extremely short-sighted, for the G-8 to have not extended the Global Partnership program -- an effort specifically designed to lock down or eliminate weapons of mass destruction that threaten every corner of the globe," he added. "With the U.S. already picking up about $1.5 billion of the $2 billion per year for that program the rest of the G-8 nations would have only had to contribute a half a billion per year collectively, or $ 5 billion over 10 years. With the G-8 nations representing 44 percent of global [gross domestic product], that is more than an affordable investment in preventing a WMD terrorist incident. If a nuclear or biological terrorist event occurs, it will significantly impact the economy of every nation.”

Added Connect U.S. Fund Program Director Alexandra Toma, who co-chairs the working group with Luongo: “The G-8 Global Partnership is a crucial part of combating that threat. So, we are very disappointed that world leaders did not agree to extend this vital multilateral effort to prevent WMD proliferation.”

Their comments were echoed by Matthew Bunn, co-principal investigator at Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom.

“We must avoid repeating the delays and funding shortfalls of the early days of the Global Partnership, if nuclear security improvements are to get to these stockpiles before terrorists and thieves do," he said ."

The effects of a nuclear detonation would be catastrophic. According to Bunn, a 10-kiloton bomb (equivalent explosive power to 10,000 tons of TNT and modestly smaller than the Hiroshima bomb) detonated in midtown Manhattan in the middle of workday could kill half a million people and cause $1 trillion in direct economic damage.

The 20-kiloton nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki required 6 kilograms of plutonium, which could fit into a can of soda, Bunn said. Three soda cans full of highly-enriched uranium would provide enough nuclear material to produce a bomb of similar destructive power. The Department of Energy has determined that a nuclear weapon could be fashioned from just 4 kilograms of plutonium...

...Those who paid attention however, recognize that both the Fissile Materials Working Group Next Generation Nuclear Security Summit and Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit –including the bilateral meetings that took place under this forum –took important steps to start the vital mission to reduce the global threat of nuclear terrorism on state and organizational levels, including concrete commitments from the countries in attendance..

Bunn added: "I hope this puts the fear of God into other leaders and convince them that this a real problem and an ongoing problem."US officials pointed to some concrete successes from the summit. Ukraine and Canada said they would no longer use HEU in research reactors, and switch to low enriched uranium (LEU) – which is much harder to turn into a bomb. Canada's HEU will be shipped to the US, from where it originally came, for safekeeping. The Ukrainian HEU originally came from the Soviet Union and will be returned to Russia.. Malaysia announced it had enforced tougher controls on the shipment of nuclear equipment.

And some experts raised doubts about whether the IAEA is up to the task of helping ensure nuclear security. The agency's main job is making sure that countries aren't building atomic bombs, and it has a budget of less than $10 million for the safeguarding of nuclear material worldwide, Luongo said.

"It's pretty thin soup," said Ivan Oelrich, vice president of the Federation of American Scientists and a member of the Fissile Materials Working Group, a nongovernmental group promoting nuclear security...

Sixty-eight metric tons is a drop in the bucket, Mr. Luongo said. The world holds some 500 metric tons of plutonium; 92 of it in the U.S. and 190 in Russia.

But he lauded the week's efforts, especially the setting of a new conference in two years.

"It's a little like being in school," he said. "The only thing that makes people nervous is having to deliver your homework, and that's what South Korea is all about."

Luongo's group and others urged vigilance amid the growing threat from al-Qaeda and other terrorists that Obama says are determined to buy or steal nuclear weapons. Much of the material that could be used to build a crude bomb that could kill hundreds of thousands of people is housed at civilian power plants and research reactors that are poorly secured.

In a detailed report on the challenge of securing nuclear materials, Bunn said no one really knows the likelihood of nuclear terrorism.

"But the consequences of a terrorist nuclear blast would be so catastrophic that even a small chance is enough to justify urgent action to reduce the risk," he wrote. "The heart of a major city could be reduced to a smoldering radioactive ruin, leaving tens to hundreds of thousands of people dead."

The greatest threat is in Pakistan, according to Mr. Bunn, which has almost 1 ton of plutonium plus a smaller amount of HEU. Pakistan's stockpile is well-guarded, but it confronts "immense threats from both insider theft and outsider attack," according to Bunn.

"We are also worried about these non-state actors as part of an improvised nuclear device that can take out a piece of a foreign city," he said...

Mr. Luongo said it was significant that the Ukraine made its pledge.

"I think the Ukraine pledge is a major accomplishment. It's not like it is coming out of the blue, we have been talking to them about this for a while."

He added, however, that the announcement "is not going to solve the entire nuclear security problem around the globe, it will solve one piece of it. ... I want to make sure that the commitments made on Tuesday are followed up on Wednesday."

..."HEU is globally more plentiful, it’s more dispersed, easier to handle, harder to detect, easier to fabricate into a nuclear device," Thomas Cochran, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Washington conference. "The only thing going for the plutonium is that it has a smaller critical mass. But when you weigh all of these factors -- it says HEU is by far the higher risk."

Cochran added, though, that plutonium proliferation was an issue that would have to be addressed....

Miles Pomper, a senior research associate with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told Global Security Newswire he was surprised that Evans raised the topic considering how politically sensitive the issue is for Washington right now.

The Obama administration is thought to want to avoid alienating its key allies that produce or use separated plutonium as it seeks to build as broad a consensus as possible on the threat posed by nuclear terrorism.

"HEU is more politically practical and it’s also the more urgent," Pomper said.

He said highlighting plutonium security concerns was "tricky given the Japanese and the French."

...Despite recent progress, the international community is not likely to meet Obama’s four-year-goal for securing all loose nuclear materials if it continues along the present course, Matthew Bunn, a principal investigator at Harvard University’s Project on Managing the Atom, said yesterday in the latest "Securing the Bomb" report.

...Yet, said Matthew Bunn of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and Technology: "Pretty much every country where there are nuclear weapons, HEU (high-enriched uranium) or plutonium has more to do to protect them against the kinds of capabilities that thieves or terrorists have shown they can put together."

The process would involve taking plutonium that is "ready to be put right into a weapon" and "putting it in a much more secure form for decades to come," Bunn said on Friday.

He said U.S. critics question the deal because reactors used for the Russian plutonium could potentially be remodified to produce new weapons-grade plutonium.

One year ago, President Barack Obama made a bold pledge to "secure all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world within four years." His immediate follow-through, however, has been wanting...

He said the main goal of the conference was to persuade nations with nuclear infrastructure to "reduce the vulnerability of those facilities and nuclear-weapons-usable materials that they have. The overall goal, I believe, needs to ex-pand support for measures that better secure the materials that exist and to expand technical and financial support for nuclear security and safeguards programs."

...Most of Pakistan's nuclear facilities are located in the north and west of the country and around the capital, Islama-bad. The Taliban and al Qaeda forces in tribal areas straddling Pakistan's western border have placed these facilities in the terrorists' back yard. "Pakistan's military has a 10,000-person force specifically designed to protect nuclear facilities. The problem is that Pakistan is in a bad neighborhood," said Ken Luongo, a former Energy Department arms control and nonproliferation director.

Recent reports have shown that several terrorist groups, including Al-Qaida, have been trying to get nuclear weapons for more than a decade, Toma said...

There is enough weapons-grade nuclear material spread across the globe to build more than 120,000 nuclear bombs. In some countries and regions, significant stockpiles are not adequately protected, and securing them is essential to prevent terrorists from acquiring or building nuclear weapons, according to the Fissile Materials Working Group, a collection of more than 40 leading experts in nuclear security and nonproliferation....

A successful summit would be marked by commitments from more than 40 world leaders, and by a broad consensus that nuclear terrorism is a threat to all nations, according to Matthew Bunn, associate professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and co-principal investigator for the Project on Managing the Atom.

"Nuclear material anywhere is a threat to everyone, everywhere," Bunn said. "Securing these stocks is a big job, a complicated job, but a do-able job."...

"Because the goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear materials is extremely ambitious, it could face significant opposition from some of the summit attendees and other countries," said Kenneth Luongo, president and founder of the Partnership for Global Security and co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group.

Luongo said some countries do not believe terrorists want to obtain nuclear materials to build a bomb.

"A lot of countries are not buying the fact that nuclear terrorism is a high priority and there's a big divide between the view of the United States and some of its key allies and the rest of the world, in particular in the developing world," he said.

“Recycling in the proper manner in good conditions can be a support to non-proliferation efforts,” Caroline Jorant, who is leaving Areva to become a consultant, told the meeting organized by the Fissile Materials Working Group, which is supporting Obama’s efforts. “I think we should focus on the security of fissile material.”

The process would involve taking plutonium that is "ready to be put right into a weapon" and "putting it in a much more secure form for decades to come," Mr Bunn said.
 

...Al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the Sept. 11 attack on New York and the Pentagon, has tried repeatedly to obtain stolen nuclear materials, said Matthew Bunn, an associate professor at Harvard University who once worked as an adviser on U.S. nuclear controls.

“In 2003, they were negotiating to buy what they believed were three nuclear devices,” Bunn told reporters at a briefing last week by the Fissile Materials Working Group, independent experts backing Obama’s effort. “The United States has never managed to identify” a Pakistani expert referenced in a message as helping al-Qaeda, Bunn said....

“The global stockpile of nuclear weapons materials is large enough to build more than 120,000 nuclear bombs,” said Alexandra Toma, co-chairwoman of the Fissile Materials Working Group.

"This material, unfortunately, is easy to smuggle and hard to detect. The nuclear material needed for a nuclear bomb would fit easily in a suitcase. Hence, insecure nuclear material anywhere is really a threat to everyone, everywhere," Bunn says.

Over the past 15 years, many programs have been established and billions of dollars have been spent to secure some of the world's plutonium and highly enriched uranium. But the effort still has fallen short, says Ken Luongo, a former Department of Energy official, now president of the Partnership for Global Security.

"As important as this event is — because no one has ever convened this kind of an event before, and the president and his administration deserve credit for that — if it just focuses on ratifying the status quo, I think that's going to be inadequate," says Luongo. "Because the status quo for preventing nuclear terrorism is inadequate."

"It is possible, plausible and, over time, probable" that a "determined and well-financed" terrorist group will set off a nuclear blast somewhere, said U.S. nonproliferation expert and ex-ambassador Robert Gallucci...

"It's a remarkable fact that the host of this nuclear security summit hasn't gotten around to ratifying this amendment," said Harvard University's Matthew Bunn. "It's a little embarrassing."
 

"It is possible, plausible and, over time, probable" that a "determined and well-financed" terrorist group will set off a nuclear blast somewhere, said U.S. nonproliferation expert and ex-ambassador Robert Gallucci.

"It's a remarkable fact that the host of this nuclear security summit hasn't gotten around to ratifying this amendment," said Harvard University's Matthew Bunn. "It's a little embarrassing."

But many of the NGO and academic experts meeting at the parallel summit felt there was a connection to be made between securing vulnerable nuclear materials and reducing the existence of those materials...

"Securing 'loose nukes' is one part of a nuclear security agenda," said Alexandra Toma, co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group, told IPS. "The second part is the strengthening the nonproliferation regime and that's going to be happening next month. The third part is disarmament which is what we're seeing in the new START treaty and hopefully the CTBT if that happens next year."

"It's a very, very heavy agenda. When you look at the Obama administration four years from now, changing the debate on nuclear nonproliferation will be one of its major accomplishments," contended Nancy Soderberg, president of the Connect U.S. Fund.

She said the Obama administration's approach has been welcome. "It's a huge shift from the Bush administration which pretty much objected to these types of international efforts and felt they could go their own way," she told IPS. "There's a growing recognition that you need American leadership to drive the debate and that it's hard and so it's not going to happen overnight and it's all linked in together." ...

"Obama has really breathed a breath of fresh air into multilateral participation and he's raised the bar for all countries. By having a summit here in Washington DC he's forcing many countries all over the world to really focus on this issue and make a personal commitment on behalf of their country to follow through," Paul F. Walker, director of Global Green USA's security & sustainability programme, told IPS.

"This will be a big feather in Obama's cap and a big feather in other countries' caps as they begin to renew their commitment to article six [of the NPT], in which all the nuclear countries commit to full nuclear disarmament," he said.

"In the nuclear posture review last week we saw not a huge shift but a good solid step in changing U.S. nuclear policy towards the rest of the world. We saw the START signing and this week we're seeing the nuclear security summit. So I think this is all part of the momentum going into the NPT review conference," said Toma.

...Harvard University professor Matthew Bunn said wealthy Western countries like the United States and European Union members needed to do more to improve security at their atomic sites. He said US research reactors that yield plutonium are exempt from US security rules.

Luongo said a positive result for Obama will ride in large part on the degree of detail in the commitments that come out of the summit.

“Will it be one of the greatest achievements of the president’s foreign policy? I think that depends on whether or not we have gauziness and unclarity or whether we have … a working plan that is going to be very specific,” Luongo said.
 

But despite dramatic improvements in the protection of Russia's nuclear materials, funded in large part by billions of dollars in U.S. assistance, experts say threats remain....

“The Obama administration got off to an unimpressive start,” Mr. Bunn wrote in his most recent update of “Securing the Bomb,” a survey to be published Monday by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit advocacy group that Mr. Nunn helped found in Washington. But he added that its proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year calls for a 31 percent increase.

The Fissile Materials Working Group, an umbrella organization for nongovernmental groups working on nuclear issues, estimated that there is enough "weapons-usable nuclear material" in the world to build more than 120,000 nuclear bombs...

"Unfortunately, there's been a sense in some countries, especially in developing countries, that they are not the target of such threats -- that nuclear terrorism is not a realistic worry," said Corey Hinderstein, an expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonpartisan group working on the problem...

 Miles Pomper, a nuclear expert at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, said that "it's a big engineering process" to switch reactors to low-enriched uranium, which is harder to weaponize...

"There's a lot that has been done. There's a lot more to do. And the key will be to convince policymakers and nuclear managers around the world that this is a threat," said Matthew Bunn, a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government who has written on the subject.

...Thomas Cochran, senior staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Friday that the top security priority should be highly enriched uranium, which is easier than plutonium to engineer into a weapon.

''A crude but potentially devastating nuclear device can be made with as much of this material as would fit in a six-pack of soda cans,'' Cochran said.

Recognizing the importance of this goal, the Fissile Materials Working Group is holding a parallel Next Generation Nuclear Security Summit alongside the official event, to enhance the transparency and accountability necessary if efforts to secure nuclear materials are to succeed. These summits come on the heels of other landmark accomplishments by the Obama administration to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons...

But experts also worry about the security of plutonium because only a small amount, roughly the size of a grapefruit, would be needed to build a nuclear bomb...

Recognizing the importance of this goal, the Fissile Materials Working Group is holding a parallel Next Generation Nuclear Security Summit alongside the official event, to enhance the transparency and accountability necessary if efforts to secure nuclear materials are to succeed. These summits come on the heels of other landmark accomplishments by the Obama administration to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons. [Arms Control Association, September 2004. Arms Control Association, January/February 2010. Secretary Clinton, 4/8/10]

If the conference "just focuses on ratifying the status quo that's going to be inadequate because the status quo for preventing nuclear terrorism is inadequate," Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, said during the discussion at the National Press Club.

Next week, the FMWG is hosting over 200 experts from around the world to discuss policy recommendations for how to achive this four-year goal. We invite you to watch our "Next Generation Nuclear Security" summit on Monday, April 12, via live webcast.

"The reason is that 9/11 is seared into the American psyche and we are obviously not as well protected as we could be and we are target number one," he said.

The two types of nuclear materials used in nuclear weapons are highly enriched uranium and plutonium. Nearly 40 countries have stockpiles of these materials, the largest being in Russia and the United States.

Establishing a consensus of the threat posed by nuclear materials is the No. 1 goal of the summit, said Kenneth Luongo, co-chair of FMWG and president of the Partnership for Global Security.

• Matthew Bunn, Associate Professor of Public Policy; Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom; Co-Principal Investigator, Energy Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment (ERD3) Policy Project, Harvard University
• Kenneth N. Luongo, President, Partnership for Global Security
• Alexandra Toma, Program Director, Connect U.S. Fund
• Elizabeth (Libby) Turpen, Associate, Booz Allen Hamilton

...

“The larger meaning [of the treaty] is the delegitimization of nuclear weapons,” Partnership for Global Security head Kenneth Luongo told the Times. “Obama will be able to go [to upcoming nuclear security meetings], and Medvedev as well, and say, ‘Here’s what we did on disarmament. Now we need to get serious about nuclear terrorism and nuclear materials.’ ”

...

If President Obama signs the treaty with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia in Prague on April 8 as expected, it will give Mr. Obama a stronger hand heading into two back-to-back nuclear summit meetings where he wants to push toward the nuclear weapons-free world he envisions. At the two meetings, Mr. Obama hopes to forge international consensus to limit the spread of weapons and secure materials that could be vulnerable to terrorists, efforts that could be accelerated by the new treaty.

“The larger meaning is the delegitimization of nuclear weapons,” said Kenneth N. Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, a nonprofit group pushing for aggressive efforts at the approaching meetings. “Obama will be able to go, and Medvedev as well, and say, ‘Here’s what we did on disarmament. Now we need to get serious about nuclear terrorism and nuclear materials.’ ”

"In order to get this job done in four years we are going to have to do more and we're going to have to do it faster and that's going to take more money," said Matthew Bunn, a principal investigator at Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom.

The White House must play a role in overcoming obstacles to international cooperation -- such as complacency about the threat of nuclear terrorism, national sovereignty concerns over nuclear security and bureaucratic entanglements -- in order for the worldwide effort to succeed, according to Bunn.

The president's fiscal 2010 budget for programs related to nuclear security "was totally inadequate to the mission that he laid out both in the [presidential] campaign" and his nonproliferation speech in Prague last year, said Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security.