T3 B22 Recommendations Fdr- Draft Bass Memo- Preventing Nuclear Terrorism (See DM B8 Team 3 Fdr) 095

8/14/2019 T3 B22 Recommendations Fdr- Draft Bass Memo- Preventing Nuclear Terrorism (See DM B8 Team 3 Fdr) 095

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Preventing Nuclear TerrorismA Proposal for a Recommendation Area

Warren Bass

Three years after 9/11, the United States remains unnecessarily vulnerable to the gravest

imaginable terrorist threat: a nuclear explosion in an American city.

While this problem has received significant attention in the past, the Commission'sfindings clearly urge renewed activism.

Moreover, it is impossible to make the case that the history-making bloodshed and impactof 9/11 has slaked al Qaeda's thirst for spectacular attacks. Indeed, if terrorist groups—asRAND's Bruce Hoffman puts it—are like sharks that need to constantly swim forward to

stay alive, al Qaeda is likely to be feeling significant internal pressure to ensure its nextattack on the United Sta tes tops even 9/11. In congressional testimony on February 24 ,2004, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet underscored the threat by noting thatUsama bin Ladin had decreed the acquisition of W MD to be a "religious obligation" andwarning that al Qaeda "continues to pursue its strategic goal of obtaining a nuclearcapability." Bin Ladin's spokesman, Sulayman Abu Ghaith, brags that al Qaeda wants"to kill 4 million Americans, including 1 million children." Nor can we saf ely assumethat the threat of nuclear terrorism is necessarily limited to al Qaeda; T enet testified that

"more than two dozen othe r terrorist groups are pursuing CBRN materials."

With this context, the Commission ought to use its unprecedented platform to promotethe agenda th at will do more than anything else to make our nation safer: acceleration ofefforts fo con trol nuclear material and weapons. This has been a top U.S. priority sincethe signing of PDD-39 in President Clinton's first term; after 9/11, we must do far more.

With bomb designs now widely available, nuclear experts largely agree that the largesthurdle would-be nuclear terrorists face is acquiring the nuclear material to fuel a bomb.Bu t there is plenty of tha t material around. "Theworld's stockpiles of separatedplutonium and HEU [highly enriched uranium] are estimated to total some 450 metrictons of military and civilian separated plutonium, andsome 1,600 tons of HEU- enoughto make nearly a quarter million nuclear weapons," notes the nonprofit Nuclear Threat

Initiative. The problem is not limited to Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea; policymakersmust also focus on other states supplied by the Soviet Union and the United States withreactors large enough to produce the highly enriched uran ium needed f or a bomb ,including Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ghana.

The concern centers less around strategic nuclear weapons and missiles, which are sobulky as to be very difficult to steal, bu t around tactical, battlefield nuclear w eapons an daround the nuclear material that could be used to make a bomb. Anoth er concern is that a

nuclear bomb might be built with a relatively small quantity of nuclear materials. Fo rinstance, a 15kt nuclear bomb - strong enough to kill over 250.000 people if detonated inlower Manhattan - could be built with 20kg of HEU or 4kg of Pu. (See Baker-CutlerTask Force final report for these figures.)

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Security at many of nuclear stockpiles is reassuringly thorough, particularly in NPTsignatory states, bu t some stockpiles are still kept well below U.S.standards for safety.Nor is the threat abstract. From 1993 to mid-June 2002, the IAEA's Illicit TraffickingDatabase has rec orded 440 incidents of illicit trafficking of nuclear and other radioactivematerials that have been confirmed by U.N. member states. Of those, 18 involvedconfirmed attempts "to illegally acquire, smuggle, or sell weapons-usable HEU orplutonium." Press reports note that in Au gust 2003, Russia arrested the deputy director ofAtomflot (theRussian repair agency fo r nuclear icebreakers and submarines) inMurmansk for his role in one such plot.

Nor does the United States have reliable ways to stop the shipment of a bomb intoAme rican cities. Ports still screen only a tiny fraction of the massive inflow of cargo intothis country; radiation detectors have no t been installed. Ev en if they were there arephysical limits that may make most radiation detection devices ineffective against adetermined smu ggler. Airline cargo remains a majo r vulnerability, too.And ourTborderscould be penetrated at any numbe r of points.

TU.S.Tefforts have simply notjtept pac e witl^ the .enormity ofjthe former Soviet Union.poorly controlled and poorly stored, and that the world is not in a near-state of hysteriaabout thedanger," - 95% of allnuclear weapons andmaterials outside of the United

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U.S. efforts have simply no t kept pace with th e enormity of the threat. Th e United States,which ha s shown a willingness to wage war in Iraq to foreclose on e scenario whereby alOaeda might ac quire nuclear weapons or other so-called weapons of mass destruction,should show as much if not more vigor in foreclosing other risks that many nuclearexperts regard as significantly greater.

Both resources and coordination are badly lacking. Over the past decade, the U nitedStates ha s budgeted more than $4 billion (think the number might be a bit more than thislfor securing nu clear arms and materials in the former Soviet Union. W ashington has alsomade various agencies responsible fo r various components of the U.S.effort to increase

nuclear safety, including securing and accounting fo r nuclear weapons and materials;

stopping nuclear sm uggling; limiting incentives for people to try to steal or sell nuclearweapons, fuel, or expertise; and monitoring and reducing stockpiles. After some initialsigns to the contrarv.Jhe administration ha s modestly increased funding fo r£ounterproliferation efforts jn the former Soviet Union such as, the Nunn-LugarCooperative Threat Re duction Program. It has also made a major push to get the G-8states to match the U.S. contribution to threat reduction efforts in the form er SovietUnion,—$1 billion per year—each year over the decade.

But these efforts remain inadequate and piecemeal. As Harvard's Graham Allison hasnoted recently in Foreign Affairs, "were the president today to ask his cabinet who isresponsible for preventing nuclear terrorism, e ither a dozen people would raise then-

hands, or no one would." Vladimir Putin would ge t even less clarity. As N TI notes,

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Deleted: threat. TheUnited States,which has shown a w illingness to wagewar in Iraq to foreclose one scenariowhereby al Qaeda might acquire nuclearweapons, should show as much if not

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"Total funding for all threat reduction funding, including all the efforts devoted toensuring that weapons of mass des truction do not fall into the hands of terrorists orhostile states, is now ru nning at just over $1 billion per year—less than one third of onepercent of a budget for the Department of Defense that in FY 2003 was over $365 billion.By way of com parison, the budget Congress approved for missile defense in FY 2003 isover $7.4 billion." We do not believe that missile defense will make Americans seventimes safer from al Qaeda than a coordinated and appropriately resourced effort to secureevery nuclear weapon in the world.

The failure to fund and coordinate has left dangerous gaps. More needs to be done toupgrade security—even, as NT I notes, easily done fixes such as bricking up windows atRussian nuclear facilities. The overwhelming majority of Russia's long-since-unneededstockpiles of highly enriched uranium is still in existence, standing as a constanttemptation to terrorists. Tens of thousands of nuclear scientists and technicians could beout of work in Russia, creating horrifying incentives for them to sell their expertise tomurderous bidders. Am ericans dare no t comfort themselves by thinking that everythingthat could be done is being done.

• We recommend thepresident appoint an NSC national coordinator to supervise an

urgent and highes t-priority U.S. program to ensure that we are doing everythingpossible to account for and secure every single nuclear weapon and every supply

of nuclear fuel in the world.• We recomm end that this coordinator be tasked to involve both foreign and

domestic arms of the U.S. government to tackle nuclear security, includinghomeland defense efforts, and we recommend that the coordinator haveprincipals-level rank on related issues.

• We recommend that renewed efforts be made to work together with our Russianfriends to ensure that our efforts are coordinated and comprehensive, includingencouraging them to appoint a national counterproliferation coordinator of theirown.

• We recommend follow-on steps to imitate the Augu st 2002 success of ProjectVinca (a few months mere was a similar operation in Romania), which removedfrom a dangerously unprotected nuclear facility in Yugoslavia enough HEU tomake three bombs; these steps should include placing such projects under the

control of the proposed national coordinator and appropriating a pool of money—NTI gives the sensible figure of $50 m illion per year—to fund rapid securityupgrades.

• W e recommend renewed efforts to fund (a t similar levels as the above program)and expand the U.S.-Russian HEU Purchase Agreement to ensure that as muc hHEU as possible is destroyed as quickly as possible, including more thandoubling the current pace of destroying 30 tons of H EU per year.

• We recommend tasking the DCI todramatically upgrade collection efforts on

nuclear safety, including detailed annual reports to principals and the nationalcoordinator about w hat we know and don't know about nuclear safety in states ofparticular concern, (check CIA report on the insecurity of the Russian arsenalfrom early 2002-Februarv. 1 think)



We recom mend the screening of all materials entering the United States— by air,

land, and sea—for radiation, including pre-screening at departure ports and fastermethods to search containers upon their arrival at U.S. ports.

We recommend raising funding fo r counterproliferation and nuclear securityefforts dramatically - up to the $3 billion/annum as suggested by the Baker-CutlerTask Force. W hile contributions from allies should be sought, the U.S. cannotwait for our allies to increase funding while this important problem persists.,. [ Deleted: .

W e recommend international efforts, by both U.S. diplomats an d those in nuclear-

related agencies coordinated by the new national coordinator, to ensure that theglobal regime to counter nuclear smu ggling is as Affective as possible. [Deleted: t o u g

We recommend having the national coordinator rework the promising but thus fartroubled Nuclear Cities Initiative designed to reemploy Russian nuclear workersin less dangerous economic sectors, as well as other efforts to ensure that

Russians with nuclear expertise are kept promptly paid an d fully employed.

We recommend that the new national coordinator ensure that consequencemanagement efforts for the unthinkable scenarios of a nuclear or radiologicalattack on the United States stand ready.

We recommend that counterproliferation efforts be woven fully into U.S. grandstrategy in the war against al Oaeda and other terrorist groups that might engagein catastrophic terrorism against U.S. targets.

Documents

T3 B22 Recommendations Fdr- Draft Bass Memo- Preventing Nuclear Terrorism (See DM B8 Team 3 Fdr) 095