Nuclear security lapses aid terrorists, experts say

While discounting the latest reports of Osama bin Laden’s nuclear capability, weapons experts warn that the United States is doing far too little to safeguard bombmaking materials around the world, heightening the risk of a nuclear terrorist attack against America.

Security gaps, poor inventory records and excess plutonium production are not being fully addressed, they say, particularly in Russia and other republics that were once part of the Soviet Union.

For years government reports have warned of such deficiencies. But concerns have intensified since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, well-planned suicide missions that have many experts rethinking whether terrorists have the money, technical expertise and willingness to die to carry out a nuclear strike.

“The U.S. has been complacent,” said Matthew Bunn, an expert on nuclear theft and a White House adviser in the mid-1990s. “We need to be moving as rapidly as humanly possible to make sure that all the nuclear material worldwide is secure and accounted for.”

In recent days, there has been considerable speculation over whether bin Laden, the alleged mastermind in the terrorist attacks, has a nuclear bomb. He told a Pakistani reporter that he possesses nuclear weapons, according to an account of the interview in Pakistan’s English-language paper Dawn. And a Times of London journalist reported finding papers in an abandoned house in Kabul, Afghanistan, said to contain instructions on how to build a nuclear device.

U.S. experts and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body that monitors nuclear programs, said they have long believed it is highly unlikely bin Laden or other terrorists have nuclear arms.

What is more likely, they said, is that terrorists could make a “dirty bomb”--a conventional explosive packaged with radioactive material to contaminate a portion of a city and cause wide panic.

Officials also believe that bin Laden wants to acquire nuclear bombs and that there is an active black market for the materials needed to make the weapons. In January, an Energy Department task force said the most urgent unmet national security threat was the risk of nuclear weapons or material in Russia falling into the wrong hands.

`An unacceptable risk’

While the U.S. has spent millions of dollars on the problem, resulting in significant improvements, the effort has not been enough, leaving “an unacceptable risk of failure and the potential for catastrophic consequences,” the task force said.

The General Accounting Office, Congress’s investigative arm, has come to similar conclusions. In February, it reported that hundreds of tons of nuclear material in Russia was inadequately protected.

“At one nuclear facility that we visited, an entrance gate to a building containing nuclear material was left open and unattended by guards,” the report stated.

Experts expressed doubt, however, that terrorists have nuclear bombs for several reasons. Despite some security concerns, ready-to-launch warheads are well-secured by the nations that own them, they said. The materials needed to make nuclear weapons are easier to obtain, but building a bomb from scratch is expensive and extremely difficult.

“Saddam Hussein couldn’t succeed with almost unlimited resources in a 10-year effort, so we don’t see how in the caves of Afghanistan you would be able to do that,” said David Kyd, a spokesman for the atomic energy agency.

If terrorists did possess a nuclear weapon, they would have to find a way to deliver it and detonate it--again, no easy matter.

Making a nuclear bomb requires about 50 pounds of highly enriched uranium or 16 pounds of plutonium. To date, authorities have never caught smugglers with that amount of material, Kyd said. “What we have been seeing is typically just a few ounces,” he said.

Since 1993, 175 cases of trafficking in highly enriched uranium and plutonium and 201 cases of trafficking in medical and industrial radioactive materials, such as cobalt, have been reported to the agency. “That may be only the tip of an iceberg,” Kyd said.

Rose Gottemoeller, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for non-proliferation and national security in the Clinton administration, cautioned that the nuclear trade is not like the huge drug trade, where only a fraction of the contraband is intercepted.

“We are looking at a kind of boutique market with very few interested customers and a relatively small amount of material moving illicitly,” she said.

Accurate inventories not kept

Most seizures have been in the former Soviet Union, where the breakup of the superpower in 1991 and the subsequent economic troubles have left independent republics with vulnerable nuclear material. One result, experts said, is that the countries do not have accurate inventories of their nuclear material.

Moreover, the countries have been slow to modernize their security systems.

Gottemoeller said that when she was in the Clinton administration she visited several nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union and witnessed the lack of basic security, such as bars on the windows.

“We need to first concentrate on what I call quick fixes, getting to all the sites in the complex and making sure we have bars on the windows [and] blast-proof doors,” she said.

The Energy Department task force, headed by Republican Howard Baker, a former senator and White House chief of staff, and Democrat Lloyd Cutler, a former White House counsel, visited nuclear sites in Russia last year and found them to be in a “dire state.” The task force report cited delays in payments to guards, breakdowns in command structures and the lack of money to protect stockpiles and laboratories.

The officials cited several close calls. In 1998, conspirators at an energy facility in Chelyabinsk were caught trying to steal material “just short of that needed for one nuclear device.” That same year, a worker at a nuclear laboratory in Sarov was arrested for trying to sell documents on nuclear weapons designs to agents of Iraq and Afghanistan for $3 million. In January 2000, authorities arrested four sailors at a submarine base on the Kamchatka Peninsula for stealing radioactive material.

Experts, however, doubt reports that Russia is missing any of its “suitcase bombs,” or small nuclear weapons.

In the mid-1990s, Gen. Alexander Lebed, former secretary of the Russian Security Council, said that dozens of the weapons were unaccounted for. He later retracted his statement, and Russia now says the bombs are not missing, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which said it has no evidence to the contrary.

Russia upgrades security

The agency also noted that a suitcase bomb is a misnomer. The weapons are about the size of a foot locker and weigh between 240 and 300 pounds.

With U.S. help and money, progress has been made in Russia. Security has been upgraded at many nuclear sites, new jobs have been found for nuclear scientists, and uranium has been blended down to concentrations too low to be used in nuclear weapons.

Perhaps the greatest immediate concern is that terrorists might obtain a small amount of radioactive material and create a dirty bomb. The weapon probably wouldn’t kill many people, but it might contaminate a section of a city and sow fear for many years.

“Even if you decontaminated the area,” said Kyd, the atomic energy agency spokesman, “you would have one heck of a time persuading people they could go back to live or work there.”