Experts Troubled by Russia’s Lax Nuclear Security

When curiosity got the better of three train station workers in the Georgian port of Kutaisi last month, they broke open airtight containers that had lain untended for years at their depot to discover what unclaimed riches lay inside.

Two days later, they were rushed to a hospital with severe radiation poisoning, having exposed themselves to nuclear waste and once more reminded the world that hazardous substances are under dubious control in the former Soviet Union.

Another radiation-emitting container was found in a manhole that same week in the southern Russian town of Izobilny. Officials insisted that it had posed no danger to the swarms of pedestrians who passed it. But the mysterious incident rekindled worries in the nervous region neighboring the Caucasus that Chechen terrorists might try to retaliate for the war waged by Russia against their separatist republic.

Reactor fuel rods have been stolen from nuclear submarines of Russia’s Northern Fleet at least twice since the Cold War ended. Police seizures of plutonium and enriched uranium around Europe suggest that those sensitive substances go missing from Russian facilities at an alarming rate.

Nuclear watchdog agencies say Russia and its neighbors are less at risk of an organized attempt by terrorists or outlaw governments to obtain nuclear weapons than they are vulnerable to misguided acts of pilferage by underpaid workers.

In a country where the military-industrial complex has been thrown into crisis by nuclear disarmament and economic collapse, atomic energy experts warn that their colleagues now have the opportunity and incentive to become technocratic soldiers of fortune and cash in on what some believe is an international market for the building blocks of nuclear bombs.

The persistent security woes emanating from Russia’s nuclear weapons and reactors are likely to be a key subject for discussion at this month’s gathering in Moscow of the leaders of the world’s leading economies, the Group of Seven, including President Clinton.

But those involved in preparing for the April 19-20 summit on global nuclear security are already expressing disappointment that the meeting is shaping up to be long on ceremony and short on substance, less directed at enhancing security than at the reelection chances of Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

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With too little money in Moscow’s coffers and the U.S. Congress increasingly reluctant to help foot the bill to make Russia safer, this country’s poorly guarded plants and institutes are likely to remain attractive targets for amateur thieves and potential sources of nuclear technology for terrorists and outlaw states.

“There are 900 kilograms [1,980 pounds] of plutonium at the Obninsk institute. In theory, this would be enough to produce 200 atomic weapons,” says Igor V. Sutyagin, a nuclear security analyst at the USA-Canada Institute here. He describes Russia’s civilian atomic energy research centers, like Obninsk’s Institute of Atomic Energy, as “the most dangerous part of the system.”

But like most analysts of the post-Soviet nuclear industry, Sutyagin insists that the hazards are so far only theoretical. Most cases of theft involve uranium of a quality too low for weapons production, and those instances in which more dangerous materials have been intercepted showed the thieves were unable to find a buyer.

“I don’t know of any cases where a chain could be traced from the smugglers to a black market,” says Yuri G. Volodin, head of the safeguards department of Russia’s Federal Nuclear and Radiation Safety Authority, Gosatomnadzor.

Nonetheless, Volodin concedes that Russia must develop a reliable system for control and accounting of its huge stockpiles of plutonium and highly enriched uranium and must beef up security at nuclear power stations and civilian research centers. Electronic detection devices have been installed with the help of U.S. aid money at Moscow’s prestigious Kurchatov Institute and are planned at other facilities where nuclear materials are at the disposal of scientists and research personnel.

But Volodin acknowledges that many civilian facilities have no serious protections against “diversion” and that funding for the security improvements is unlikely to be found soon.

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Even Russia’s strengthening environmental and antinuclear groups credit the government with attempting improvements but conclude that the current economic constraints torpedo those intentions.

“As usual, any act of goodwill in this country is met with a lack of money,” says Lidia V. Popova, a nuclear security analyst with the grass-roots Social-Ecological Union.

Like the experts at Gosatomnadzor and the Ministry for Atomic Energy, known as Minatom, she rates the risk of a terrorist raid against a civilian or military nuclear facility as minute.

“The main danger is from human error, from mishandling of technology,” Popova says, adding that Russians have all but forgotten the devastating 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in neighboring Ukraine. “The general attitude toward nuclear power in this country is the same as toward any other technology. People are indifferent, apathetic. The work is sloppy.”

Sutyagin, of the USA-Canada Institute, also worries that his fellow Russians shrug off security problems and that they risk becoming tolerant of theft and diversion.

“I’m not saying you can go to Obninsk today and leave with a kilogram of plutonium tomorrow. But the possibility exists,” he says. “An environment can be created where theft is commonplace, acceptable.”

To deter such a calamity, the United States pledged to spend as much as $330 million to improve security at Russian nuclear sites. The 1991 legislation sponsored by Sens. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) also provides funds to deal with the plutonium and uranium removed from dismantled nuclear weapons.

Russia’s huge nuclear material stockpile is scattered across its vast territory in both defense and civilian compounds, but experts can only guess at the size of the problem.

A report last month by the U.S. General Accounting Office estimated that 1,400 metric tons of the bomb-making substances are stored in the former Soviet Union, but officials here concede that the lack of a computerized tracking system makes it impossible to know for certain.

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That stockpile is growing because two plutonium-producing plants in the Siberian city of Tomsk continue to churn out superfluous amounts.

“This is economically ruinous for the country, not just because no one needs more plutonium but because it is expensive to store,” says physicist Yuri I. Yershov of Obninsk’s Institute of Atomic Energy. “But to shut down the main source of employment in a city of 100,000 is a tall order. For social reasons, the plants keep producing.”

Like most analysts, Yershov insists that Russia’s nuclear weapons are impregnable to thieves or terrorists because they are kept at high-security military bases. But he is critical of a presidential decree in August transferring responsibility for military nuclear objects to the Defense Ministry, which is outside the purview of Gosatomnadzor.

The Defense Ministry and the Federal Security Service that inherited intelligence duties from the old KGB decline to discuss nuclear security; they say that doing so would risk disclosure of state secrets.

“It is a very delicate matter, and in the interest of state security we cannot comment,” Federal Security Service spokesman Sergei F. Vasiliev said.

Military and intelligence authorities have reacted with equal defensiveness to cases of whistle-blowing involving security and environmental hazards.

Intelligence agents in February arrested Alexander Nikitin, a retired Northern Fleet submarine officer, and charged him with treason for assisting the Norwegian environmental group Bellona with a report on ecological hazards caused by the navy on the Kola Peninsula, which is heavily contaminated by nuclear waste from the submarine fleet. Obsolete vessels laden with spent fuel and old reactors were sunk in surrounding waters and are now deteriorating and leaking their wastes.

Minatom spokesman Georgy A. Kaurov categorizes the Nikitin case and all intercepted shipments of fissionable materials as provocations waged by foreign intelligence operatives trying to discredit Russia.

“This is why at the summit President Yeltsin will raise the issue of criminal liability in such cases, not just for those who steal [sensitive substances] but for those who provoke such criminal acts,” says Kaurov, disclosing the tack Moscow is likely to take at the G-7 meeting.

The Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council and other nuclear watchdog forces have appealed to the G-7 to address Russia’s lack of material controls and accountability.

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But one council activist complained that the summit is unlikely to spotlight the host country’s shortcomings or spur Minatom to halt its resistance to free access to Russian facilities for international monitoring teams.

The meeting of leaders from the world’s most powerful nations will merely trumpet the few cooperative ventures financed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nunn-Lugar legislation, says council scientist Thomas Cochran, “because this is all they’ve got to show for their efforts.”