>>Nuclear terrorism a 'near-term threat'- Experts: U.S. must act now
By BOB PORT
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
One year after the attacks on New York and Washington, a growing chorus of experts warns that the U.S. should not underestimate the threat of nuclear terrorism.
A partly classified report by the National Academy of Sciences declared last month that "clandestine production of special nuclear material by states or terrorist groups ... for use against the United States represents a significant near-term threat to homeland security."
The nation's top scientists warned that "theft or diversion of smaller, man-portable weapons" also may be a significant risk.
But they stopped short of agreeing with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's prediction in May that terrorists will "inevitably get their hands on" a weapon of mass destruction.
"Inevitably" is the wrong word, says Lewis Branscomb, the Harvard University physicist who served as chairman of the study.
"But the consequences of a fission weapon - even a crude one - are so severe that Americans... should act as though it might happen," he said.
"I really hate to use the word 'inevitable,'" said Laura Holgate, former chief of a Pentagon program to secure Soviet nuclear stockpiles in the Clinton administration. "But if we proceed without treating this threat as one that holds the future of the planet, then, yes, you do start to say it may be inevitable."
Holgate now works for Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonproliferation charity set up by media tycoon Ted Turner and former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn.
A dangerous state
The world is awash, say experts, in nuclear material - much of it loosely monitored by governments, international agencies or growing numbers of private concerns that oversee nuclear reactors.
And that is a dangerous state of affairs.
Outside the U.S. and Western Europe, by far the largest stockpiles of weapons-grade nuclear material are in the former Soviet Union, a focus of U.S. security policy for the past decade.
Holgate, who often visits Russia, finds some nuclear sites as hardened as the U.S. military's best. Others, she says, invite burglary.
The Bush administration is not putting enough resources into securing Soviet nuclear material, Holgate said.
Washington spends about $1 billion a year on nuclear security in former Soviet states. Holgate believes $6 billion a year is needed to do the job right.
"I'm certain that we could do more," said Paul Bremer, a counterterrorist official under Ronald Reagan and longtime Republican adviser, "but that's a question for Congress."
"We think we have a strong program," said National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. "There are times when merely throwing money at a program isn't the answer."
Experts cite a number of other disturbing realities:
More than 22 tons of highly enriched uranium are controlled by civilians in some 345 aging nuclear power plants and research reactors in as many as 58 countries, presenting countless opportunities for theft.
Plutonium is being extracted from spent reactor fuel by Britain, France, Russia, Japan and India for future use, creating colossal stockpiles of bomb-capable, toxic material that cannot be accurately inventoried.
Disarmament treaties or agreements have never addressed small tactical nuclear weapons in the arsenals of both Russia and the United States - weapons far more suited to terrorism than missiles.
Nuclear security within the borders of sovereign nations is voluntary. Despite the efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency, there is no international law for safeguarding nuclear weapons stockpiles or fuel.
Besides "dirty" bombs - crude devices of radioactive material packed with explosives - the nuclear bomb of choice for terrorists is probably a gun-style device like Little Boy, the 1945 Hiroshima bomb. These weapons require 110 pounds of 90% pure radioactive uranium 235, or highly enriched uranium.
Little Boy was considered so reliable that it was never tested before it was dropped on Japan. The Manhattan Project adapted an Army-surplus cannon barrel to fire one glob of uranium into another, triggering an atomic blast.
Less likely for terrorists are more complex implosion bombs, such as Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, a ball of plutonium jacketed by explosives that was first tested at the Trinity site near Alamagordo, N.M.
An implosion nuke is so tricky to build that terrorists are unlikely to try. But it requires small amounts of weapons-grade plutonium - 9 pounds, about the size of a baseball - or 25 pounds of highly enriched uranium.
What is plutonium?
Plutonium is a by-product of the uranium widely used to fuel nuclear power or research reactors. Once separated from spent fuel, plutonium does not require enrichment to be bomb-grade.
And lots of plutonium is being processed for fuel in so-called breeder reactors.
The amount of weapons-grade plutonium - perfect material for dirty bombs - controlled by civilian interests has outstripped military plutonium stores in the past decade.
"Plutonium is still seen as the ideal fuel within the nuclear fraternity," said Paul Leventhal, former president of the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute. "And it's the fuel that will bring down civilization if it falls into the wrong hands."
"If we can make sure that doesn't happen, we'll have an excellent chance," said Matthew Bunn, a White House adviser under former President Bill Clinton who is now a senior researcher for Harvard's Managing the Atom project.
"There is some material that's been stolen that we don't know about," Bunn said. "We have no evidence yet that any nuclear materials are yet in the hands of terrorists."
The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed 14 thefts over the past decade, all originating in the former Soviet Union.
None involved enough material, alone or taken together, to make a bomb - until the Chelyabinsk affair.
In December 1998, Russian authorities announced they had foiled a plot to steal 41 pounds of "nuclear material" at a weapons plant about 1,000 miles east of Moscow in the Chelyabinsk region of the Ural Mountains.
Watchdogs at Harvard eventually learned it included enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb.
Records recovered in Afghanistan show Al Qaeda leaders have studied how to build nuclear devices. "Those were pretty unsophisticated documents, from discussion with those who have looked at the translations," said Harvard's Bunn.
"No evidence of traces of nuclear material were found" in Al Qaeda hideouts, he said.
But the Taliban's pre-9/11 hiring of two Russian nuclear scientists and the bellicose statements of an Islamic Pakistani nuclear physicist showed that terrorists can gain access to bombmaking expertise.
The greatest threat to the U.S. and its allies is the availability of highly enriched uranium, which is now the focus of U.S. and European nuclear monitoring efforts.
Last month, U.S. and Russian forces, in a secret predawn operation with 1,200 Serbian troops, descended on the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences in Belgrade. Soldiers brandished rifles on rooftops as nearly 6,000 ingots of 90% enriched uranium - 100 pounds - were hauled off.
Three trucks sped away on different routes. Two were decoys. The uranium, stockpiled for the former Yugoslavia's A-bomb effort, was flown to Russia.
But the raid might not have happened if Turner's Nuclear Threat Initiative hadn't put up $5 million to ensure Serbian support. Washington kicked in only $2 million.
Two dozen similar raids are in the works.
Harvard's Bunn has reported that more than 165 pounds of highly enriched uranium - even more than was secured in Belgrade - is stored at an impoverished research reactor in Ukraine.
In Belarus, another ex-Soviet state, an outmoded facility with little security has 660 pounds of enriched uranium - enough to make a half-dozen gun-type atom bombs.
Formally, the job of monitoring nuclear material around the globe falls to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, an independent arm of the United Nations.
The agency confronts a daunting task. Its budget has remained flat for a decade as the number of sites it must watch - some 900 today - has steadily grown.
The agency now has six experts to offer security advice worldwide - thanks to another gift of $1.2 million from Turner. But member nations cannot agree on security rules - armed guards, fencing, locks or employee background checks - for nuclear material inside their borders.
Even if the IAEA adopted security requirements, India, Israel and Pakistan have refused to sign the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which is the basis of the agency's powers. Iran and North Korea have evaded full disclosure. Iraq refuses to cooperate altogether.
Lengthy process
In 1992, the U.S. began paying Russia to dilute its weapons uranium to less than 20% enrichment - good enough to sell as fuel. That process could take 25 years.
Holgate, of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, is trying to speed up the effort. "I do know people, and I'm one of them, who are up at night worrying about the security of the Russian arsenal," she said.
Holgate believes a stolen tactical nuke is as great a risk as an improvised or dirty bomb. Yet, both U.S. and Russian arms negotiators have kept these small nukes off the table.
"There is a lot that can be done to improve the situation," Holgate said. "It needs to be done faster. It needs to be done smarter. It needs to be done with a lot more cooperation from both sides."<<
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