Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) - The Trafficking Of Nuclear And Fissile Material

The illicit trafficking of nuclear and fissile material was a grave U.S. national security threat in the early and mid-1990s. In the aftermath of the Soviet breakup, the amount of this trafficking increased dramatically. Major factors contributing to this problem were political and economic crises in the newly independent states and inadequate security and inventory systems at former Soviet nuclear facilities, especially the civilian ones used for energy production. Budget cuts severely reduced salaries for many scientific and security personnel, which increased incentives for such "insiders" to trade matériel for money.

From 1992 to 1994 seven cases were reported involving weapons-usable fissile materials, which are often referred to as "the seven significant cases." These cases are considered significant because of the quantity and/or quality of the materials involved. The last of the cases involved the seizure of 2.7 kilograms (six pounds) of highly enriched uranium in Prague on December 14, 1994. The uranium confiscated in Prague can be traced to a large criminal network, members of which are also linked to a seizure of highly enriched uranium in Landshut, Germany, in July 1994 and a seizure of plutonium-239 in Munich, Germany, in August 1994. Evidence suggests that the materials in all three of these cases originated at the Institute for Physics and Power Engineering (IPPE) in Obninsk, Russia, although Russian authorities continue to deny that the material came from Obninsk.

Although many gaps and uncertainties remain, certain conclusions may be drawn from the events that followed the seizure of the uranium in Prague. All the suspects indicted were middlemen—no buyer or supplier was ever arrested or even identified. The IPPE is an important research facility in the Russian Federation, and it is hard to imagine that such a sizable amount of uranium was diverted or stolen by a novice, or even by a single person. If the uranium did come from IPPE, it suggests the presence of an elaborate network of smugglers.

Cases such as this focused the world's attention on the urgent need to improve security inventory procedures in Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union. According to the Russian-language newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti, at the time of the Prague incident, IPPE desperately lacked adequate security and systems of registering, controlling, and physically protecting nuclear materials.

The U.S. and Russian governments jointly initiated the Materials Protection, Control, and Accounting Program (MPCA) with nuclear facilities of the former Soviet Union in 1995. The IPPE was one of the first pilot facilities for the program. Under the auspices of the MPCA, U.S. laboratories cooperated with Russian facilities to introduce advanced material protection and accounting systems. These included developing computerized materials inventory and accounting databases, training Russian specialists, and implementing video monitoring systems and portal monitors. To guard against nuclear theft, portal monitors are placed in such facilities as uranium enrichment plants, weapons manufacturing and storage plants, nuclear laboratories, and nuclear waste disposal sites. They scan vehicular or human traffic and sound an alarm if they detect radioactivity. The project was successful in securing tons of fissile materials, and by March 1996 the program had received more funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and a new computerized MPCA system was established at IPPE. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration pushed to accelerate the MCPA timeline, moving forward the date for securing all weapons-usable nuclear material to 2008 from a projected 2010 (Nuclear Threat Initiative Web site, www.nti.org). The 2004 budget for the MCPA was $227 million.

Since 1995 no thefts or diversions of significant quantities of weapons-grade fissile material have been confirmed. Less clear, however, is whether this change is permanent, or merely a hiatus. Some nonproliferation experts believe that lack of demand, increased awareness, and international assistance to the newly independent states have all contributed to this ebb in the flow of smuggled nuclear substances. On the other hand, the international intelligence community's failure to share information and the increasing sophistication of nuclear smugglers may have merely created the false impression that nuclear thefts and diversions no longer occur.