Chernobyl Proves Risk to Nations That Renounced Nuclear Weapons

Amonth after the Chernobyl accident, public anxiety in Western Europe has largely subsided and people ponder the lessons to be drawn from this costly disaster.

In the long run, questions must be asked about the validity of a world nuclear order shaped 30 years ago by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. The imbalance created by the treaty--between the nations that were allowed to keep their nuclear arsenals and those that renounced the nuclear military option--was based on at least one tacit assumption: Both the civilian and military facilities of the military nuclear states would in no way constitute a danger for third parties.

The Chernobyl disaster has proved this not to be the case. The third parties, particularly in Europe, are properly worried. Most of them have adhered to the treaty and have submitted their nuclear activities to the safety controls and inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

The Chernobyl reactor is a civilian nuclear plant, but the disaster has affected the Soviet nuclear image more broadly, including its military image. The Soviets’ early response was to divulge as little information as possible in the Chernobyl case. What if a similar accident took place in a military plant, in a reactor producing plutonium for weapons, where characteristics, operation and safety measures are kept strictly secret? And what about nuclear military plants in the United States, Britain, France and China, the so-called nuclear-weapons states?

There is no reciprocity of information among the military nuclear states. Some of those states have opened a number of their civilian installations to the agency’s inspections, but the plutonium-producing plants for weapons and all other military facilities are excluded.

The Chernobyl accident, affecting the health and the economy of so many countries, constitutes a powerful incentive to rethink the current international nuclear order, an arrangement in which the powers of supervision and control are so unequally distributed between the nuclear and the non-nuclear states. The need for world enforcement of nuclear safety, more equally exercised, is further strengthened by the growing threat of nuclear terrorism.

The European Common Market countries 25 years ago adopted a set of common nuclear-safety rules. At the time, I was the director of the European Economic Community Protection Department, and recall the debates on the definition of the “maximum credible accident” (an accident that has now happened in Chernobyl). The worst possible scenario we wrote then was an almost unthinkable one: a kamikaze pilot crashing his plane into a nuclear plant, or a terrorist attack severely damaging that installation. Today, Libya’s Col. Moammar Kadafi threatens kamikaze attacks on his foes. State-sponsored terrorists are reputedly trained to penetrate a civilian nuclear facility. The threat becomes less and less imaginary.

In West Germany, the small town of Hanau is becoming the world’s biggest civilian storage area for special nuclear materials. Nukem, a fuel-elements fabrication plant, is allowed to store nearly 4,000 tons of highly enriched uranium. Alkem, a nearby plant, stores in its bunker nearly 9,000 tons of plutonium (the Nagasaki bomb contained about 11 pounds). The protection force at Alkem numbers nine to 15 guards--not police officers but private individuals, armed only with pistols. The consequence of a successful terrorist attack would be felt far beyond the boundaries of the federal republic.

In 1983, the most recent figures available, there were 65 shipments of plutonium and 27 of uranium-235 in West Germany alone. Several times a year, loads of irradiated fuel elements containing plutonium are sent from the Latina nuclear reactor near Rome to England for reprocessing. How safe are these and many other shipments? Last month the cargo ship Shearwater, carrying a shipment from Latina, was boarded near Gibraltar by ecological activists of the Greenpeace movement. Imagine if the same operation were carried out by a gang of terrorists--like the Achille Lauro commandos--determined to get the nuclear materials.

The demand for more safety in the nuclear field is increasing enormously. It will affect the civilian and the military sector; ultimately it will affect the instrument that shaped the current nuclear international order, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. The treaty was the result of the combined effort of the United States and the Soviet Union to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. Perhaps Washington and Moscow will find a way to work together again, to keep that structure from collapsing.