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The Nation
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SUNDAY, APRIL 11, 2010
Obama leads summit’s nuclear security efforts
‘THIS IS TRULY A GLOBAL ISSUE’
Challenge is in persuading others
by Scott Wilson and Mary Beth Sheridan
As the junior senator from Illi- nois in August 2005, Barack Oba- ma traveled to Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan with his more senior colleague, Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, for a tour of some of the Cold War’s most fear- some weapons sites. It was Obama’s first trip abroad
as a U.S. senator. Lugar, the Re- publican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was taking along its newest mem- ber for a crash course in nuclear security.
By then, Lugar had spent more than a dozen years helping to se- cure and dismantle Soviet-era nu- clear stockpiles and weapons sys- tems. Obama, a Democrat, spent much of the trip watching and learning.
Five years later, Obama is no
longer the understudy. On Mon- day and Tuesday, he will be lead- ing one of the largest gatherings of world leaders in Washington history in the first summit to fo- cus exclusively on the threat posed by the world’s unsecured stocks of weapons-grade nuclear materials. “This is truly a global issue,”
said Chuck Hagel, the former Re- publican senator from Nebraska who met Obama and Lugar in Moscow during the trip and later co-authored nuclear security leg- islation with the future president. “It’s not a front-burner, where’s- my-job kind of issue, and many people in America and the world see it as an abstraction. But there is no margin for error here, and I think Obama intuitively under- stood that as soon as he got to the Senate.”
Obama has identified nuclear terrorism as “the most immediate and extreme threat to global secu- rity.” His aides note that al-Qaeda has sought unsuccessfully to ac- quire an atomic bomb. But Obama’s central challenge will be to persuade the 46 foreign leaders or their representatives arriving in Washington to care as much as he does about securing the material that could be used to create a bomb — highly enriched uranium and plutonium tucked away in government laboratories, research universities, military warehouses and other sites around the world. It will not be easy. “The ‘Made in the USA’ label does not necessarily guarantee buy-in from others regarding this threat,” said Elizabeth Turpen, an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton and an expert on nonprolifera- tion.
Obama pledged during his presidential campaign to “secure all loose nuclear materials around
The agenda and the players
What is the summit about?
The summit will focus on the security of nuclear materials, leaving other broad topics such as nonproliferation, disarmament and peaceful nuclear energy to different forums. The countries will commit to a series of international pacts to safeguard nuclear material from terrorists. In addition, each nation will present a plan of action for securing its domestic material. U.S. officials are hoping for new and concrete projects, which they are referring to as “house gifts” that countries will bring to the summit.
Who’s coming?
Forty-seven government delegations, 38 of them led by heads of state or government.
Who was invited?
Eight of the nine nuclear states: U.S., Britain,
France, China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Israel.
Also countries that have nuclear material in civilian research reactors, government labs, power plants or elsewhere. That includes such countries as Argentina, Brazil, Kazakhstan,
Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Japan and South Africa.
Examples of “house gifts”:
UNITED STATES
BRITAIN: The British government has said it will invite the International Atomic Energy Agency to carry out a security inspection at the Sellafield nuclear processing site.
CHILE: The Chilean government will announce that it recently got rid of its last store of highly enriched uranium, which was used at civilian research reactors. The material is a key ingredient in nuclear bombs.
Nuclear material at risk
NON-WEAPONS USE
Non-weapons use of highly enriched uranium: 4,000 kilograms a year
used for non-weapons purposes. Three-quarters of the uranium is used to power naval warships; one-quarter is for research reactors and facilities making medical isotopes. Only 25 kilograms, or 55 pounds, are needed for a crude nuclear bomb.
SOURCES: Federation of American Scientists
the world in my first term,” a goal experts in the field say he is not on pace to achieve. The summit will test Obama’s approach to di- plomacy, which often requires countries to set aside important national interests to achieve shared international ones.
Test of diplomacy
Obama will be staging the Nu- clear Security Summit, as the event is known, during a period of intensive nuclear diplomacy that includes a new strategic arms- reduction treaty with Russia, a re- thinking of when the United States would use nuclear weap- ons, and an effort to strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the global pact aimed at stopping the spread of the bomb.
But it also comes amid global
currents that make securing nu- clear material more urgent and more difficult. Rich and devel- oping countries increasingly are turning to nuclear power to meet clean-energy goals and to support growing economies, meaning
that more nuclear fuel, some of which would have to be further enriched for weapons use, will be available and vulnerable to theft. Just 55 pounds of highly en- riched uranium — about the size of a grapefruit — is needed to make a small nuclear device. There are an estimated 3.5 mil- lion pounds of the material in 40 countries and 1.1million pounds of plutonium. The Fissile Materials Working Group, an umbrella organization for nongovernmental groups working on nuclear issues, esti- mated that there is enough “weapons-usable nuclear materi- al” in the world to build more than 120,000 nuclear bombs. “Unfortunately, there’s been a sense in some countries, espe- cially in developing countries, that they are not the target of such threats — that nuclear ter- rorism is not a realistic worry,” said Corey Hinderstein, an expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonpartisan group working on the problem.
Several countries — primarily France, Britain, Russia and Japan — produce separated plutonium, which can be
used in nuclear weapons, by reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants. Most of this plutonium goes into storage, increasing stockpiles of material that is vulnerable to theft. Global stocks exceed about 250 tons of civil plutonium — enough for tens of thousands of nuclear bombs. Each year, enough plutonium to make at least 1,000 nuclear bombs is separated at civilian reprocessing facilities.
WEAPONS
Estimated stockpiles of
nuclear warheads that are deployed or in storage.
60- <10 80
70- 90
80 185 240 300
N. Korea Pakistan India
Israel
Britain France China
Russia U.S.
BY MARY BETH SHERIDAN AND LAURA STANTON/THE WASHINGTON POST
At the end of two days, the sum- mit is scheduled to produce a communique calling for a crack- down on smuggling, support for past U.N. resolutions on the sub- ject, and standards for securing highly enriched uranium and plu- tonium stocks. In addition, the
folksy term U.S. officials are using to describe the pledges, will be as important as the summit commu- nique. Chile, for example, will an- nounce that it has given up all of its highly enriched uranium. The last 40 pounds of its material
“The ‘Made in the USA’ label does not necessarily guarantee buy-in from others regarding this threat.”
— Elizabeth Turpen,
Booz Allen Hamilton
participants will endorse a de- tailed “work plan” to accomplish the task of locking down all loose nuclear materials in four years. But the Obama administration has also asked the countries par- ticipating in the summit to make specific national pledges to help secure loose nuclear materials in- side their borders or to ensure that the countries are not used as smuggling routes. Outside ex- perts say those “house gifts,” the
were removed from two research reactors last month and secretly whisked to the United States with the assistance of the National Nu- clear Security Administration. Canada and Ukraine may an- nounce that they are switching re- actors from highly enriched to low-enriched uranium, according to U.S. officials and analysts. As the only nuclear superpower
after the Cold War, the United States has led on the issue of nu-
d
BRITAIN FRANCE
CHINA INDIA
PAKISTAN
RUSSIA
Who was not invited?
Notable countries with nuclear material that were left off the list include North Korea, which has a nuclear weapon; Iran, which is accused of trying to develop one; Syria, which the U.S. government says has not worked effectively on nonproliferation; and Belarus. Analysts speculate that the latter country was excluded because it is considered a dictatorship.
RUSSIA: The U.S. and Russian governments will sign a protocol to put into force a long-stalled agreement under which each side will dispose of
34 metric tons of plutonium from decommissioned nuclear bombs.
9,400 12,000
clear materials security. The 1991 Nunn-Lugar Act has helped to se- cure more than 90 percent of the nuclear materials left in Russia and the former Soviet republics, an achievement experts in the field call remarkable. But what is left remains highly
vulnerable. “In a strange turn of history,” Obama noted in his April 2009 speech in Prague in which he called for a world free of nu- clear weapons, “the threat of glob- al nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up.”
Persistent attempts
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former
CIA officer now at Harvard Uni- versity’s Belfer Center, wrote in a recent report that it would be “ex- tremely difficult” for terrorists to steal a bomb or enough material to build one. But al-Qaeda has tried persistently for 15 years to get such a weapon and attempted to buy nuclear material on the black market at least twice, he said. “Is it worth gambling the fu- ture on a bet that terrorists won’t roll snake eyes?” he wrote. “The hardest part of making a bomb is to get the material,” En- ergy Secretary Steven Chu, a No- bel laureate in physics, told ABC News in a recent interview. “That’s why it’s so imperative that we get that material locked up tightly in a way that [is] essen- tially like a super Fort Knox.” The United States is not im- mune from problems, experts say. Four U.S. civilian research re- actors still use highly enriched uranium. One facility is at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology, an urban campus in Cam- bridge. Such reactors are not bound by the same tight security rules as U.S. nuclear power plants. Miles Pomper, a nuclear expert
at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, said that “it’s a big engineering proc- ess” to switch reactors to low- enriched uranium, which is hard- er to weaponize. “There’s going to be a lot of em- phasis on the need for training people in nuclear security, and education,” Pomper said. “Espe- cially as you expand nuclear en- ergy worldwide. These countries don’t necessarily have experience in how do you protect facilities.” The Obama administration has requested $3.1 billion for “inter- national weapons of mass de- struction security programs” for the coming fiscal year, a double- digit increase. In the past, there has been bipartisan support for such security efforts. But the House Appropriations energy and water development committee ex- pressed skepticism last month about the size of the request. “There’s a lot that has been done. There’s a lot more to do. And the key will be to convince policymakers and nuclear manag- ers around the world that this is a threat,” said Matthew Bunn, a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who has written on the subject.
wilsons@washpost.comsheridanm@washpost.com
Earthquake complicated U.S. removal of nuclear material from Chile
by David E. Hoffman
When the shaking began just
after 3:34 a.m. on Feb. 27, Andrew Bieniawski woke up with a start in his room on the 15th floor of the Sheraton Hotel in Santiago, Chile. A picture fell off the wall. He raced to the lobby. He had arrived from the United States just the day before to oversee a delicate operation that the U.S. government and Chile had been quietly setting up for more than a month, and now an earthquake was tearing apart the center of the country. The magnitude-8.8 quake killed 486 people, set off a tsunami, cracked buildings and roads, cut off electricity and phone lines, and spawned dozens of aftershocks.
While the disaster unfolded,
Bieniawski and his team from the Energy Department had another worry: They had packed 39.6 pounds of highly enriched urani- um, enough to make a nuclear bomb, into a shipping container, ready for a secret evacuation by road to a port and then by sea to the United States. The quake threw up several
new hurdles for the secret mis- sion, and Bieniawski’s first con- cern, he recalled in an interview, was this: Was the container dam- aged? Grabbing a phone before the lines went dead, he learned that the weapons-grade material was intact. But his team’s prob- lems had just begun.
On the front lines
The Santiago operation put Bie-
niawski, associate deputy admin- istrator for global threat reduc-
tion at the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Admin- istration (NNSA), on the front lines of an effort to clean out nu- clear materials from reactors and other facilities around the world so that they will not fall into the hands of terrorists. At a summit in Washington on
Monday and Tuesday, President Obama will press leaders or other representatives of 46 countries to accelerate such efforts and fulfill his pledge to lock up all the vul- nerable material within four years. In the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to worries about hundreds of tons of weapons-grade uranium and plu- tonium left spread across 11 time zones, as well as questions about the security and storage of nu- clear materials from weapons be- ing withdrawn and disassembled. Today, the focus is on smaller but still dangerous quantities of nuclear material, often nestled in research reactors well beyond the former Soviet Union. In the past year, the United States has cleaned out highly enriched ura- nium from Romania, Taiwan, Lib- ya, Turkey and Chile. Bieniawski said 18 countries have been swept free of highly enriched uranium. “It is a shrinking circle,” he said. Under the Nunn-Lugar pro-
gram approved by Congress in late 1991, billions of dollars have been devoted to securing nuclear materials and dismantling weap- ons in the former Soviet Union. The region, with its porous bor- ders, still concerns U.S. officials. Attempts to sell highly en- riched uranium have been uncov- ered twice in Georgia in recent
the uranium rods into shorter pieces and had packed them into sealed casks, which were put in larger shipping containers. The containers, all told, weighed 50 tons and were ready for trucking to the port when the offshore quake hit. The epicenter was 200 miles from Santiago. After calling to check on the containers, Bieniawski learned that the port the team had planned to use, at San Antonio, had been damaged, so a switch was made to Valparaiso, about 66 miles northwest of Santiago. The police checked to make sure that it was safe and the bridges intact. On Sunday afternoon, Bieniawski surveyed the route himself. Then some drivers balked be- cause their homes and families had suffered in the quake, and the trip was delayed, he recalled. Fi- nally, on March 2, the trucks pulled out. As the convoy crept along the
NATIONAL NUCLEAR SECURITY ADMINISTRATION
The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration was in the process of removing the last highly enriched uranium from Chile when a powerful earthquake struck the country on Feb. 27.
years. Ronnie Faircloth, director of cooperative threat reduction for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said joint efforts to detect possibly illicit transfer of nuclear materials are underway along the coasts and land borders of coun- tries such as Azerbaijan, Uzbeki- stan and Ukraine.
Risky business
The cleanout operations are of-
ten risky. David Huizenga, associ- ate deputy administrator of the NNSA, recalled one mission to
move material from Bogota, Co- lombia, to the coast at Cartagena. When guerrillas took over part of the territory through which the uranium would be trucked, Hui- zenga and his team loaded their cargo aboard a rented Antonov plane and flew over the conflict on the ground.
When the quake struck in
Chile, Bieniawski again had to scramble. The materials, which were be- ing removed in cooperation with the Chilean Commission of Nu-
clear Energy, included 30 pounds of highly enriched uranium from the La Reina Nuclear Center in downtown Santiago, about 91
pounds of slightly irradiated, highly enriched uranium and a small amount of spent fuel from the Lo Aguirre Nuclear Center, 40 miles west of the city. Sarah Dickerson, a deputy di-
rector at the NNSA’s Office of For- mer Soviet Union and Asian Threat Reduction, said the U.S. team that had gone ahead to pre- pare for the evacuation had cut
⁄2
highway that night, Bieniawski heard radio reports of aftershocks striking Valparaiso. When the team arrived, he noticed a large crack along the pier, but he said the quake damage did not in- terfere with loading. The uranium was taken by ship through the Panama Canal and arrived in the United States in late March. With the operation complete,
Bieniawski said, South America is free of highly enriched uranium, except for a small quantity in Ar- gentina. The United States re- supplied Chile with $2 million worth of low-enriched uranium for its research reactors and paid it $3 million to cover the cost of the operation.
hoffmand@washpost.com
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