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Averting a nuclear nightmare
By
Ilan Berman
published in the Baltimore Sun
September 24, 2003
When President Bush meets with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin at Camp David later this week, the agenda for their summit will include an array of high-profile issues, from bilateral economic cooperation to Russian involvement in postwar Iraq.
But one topic that almost certainly won't be on the table is the issue of Russian nuclear security. This is undoubtedly a pity, because Russia's crumbling nuclear infrastructure is a grave - and growing - threat to global security.
It wasn't always so. Throughout the Cold War, the Kremlin kept an iron grip on the Soviet nuclear arsenal through an array of elaborate procedures - from stringent border screenings to multiple, decentralized stockpiles - designed to ensure the safety of its nuclear deterrent.
Paradoxically, these very procedures have now made Russia a model of nuclear insecurity. The collapse of the Soviet Union left Moscow with a sprawling, unreformed atomic infrastructure - one the Kremlin has been unable to bring under control.
Despite some progress in decommissioning and protection, only one-third of Russia's estimated 600 metric tons of weapons-usable nuclear material is currently adequately secure. What's more, these stockpiles have grown over the past decade, courtesy of "denuclearization" accords signed during the Clinton years that transferred control of the atomic arsenals of Belarus, Kazakstan and Ukraine to the Kremlin. The results have progressively outpaced the ability of Minatom, the country's nuclear custodian, to exercise oversight.
The Russian military, intended to be the primary guardian of post-Soviet nuclear security, has fared little better. Destitute and ridden with criminality, the army that emerged from the Cold War was vulnerable to the lure of fast cash brought by the sale of nuclear material - a development that led to a flourishing partnership with the Russian underworld. More than a decade later, remarkably little has changed. Still plagued by rampant corruption, rock-bottom living standards and low morale, the army remains part of the problem rather than part of the solution in the Russian nuclear security equation.
Not surprisingly, given these conditions, a thriving nuclear black market has sprung up in Central Asia, Europe and the Balkans. In one high-profile incident in 1995, Ukrainian officials in Kiev apprehended two former Russian soldiers carrying 13 pounds of stolen highly enriched uranium - half the fissile material necessary for an atomic bomb. In another, authorities in St. Petersburg, Russia, nabbed a Russian nuclear scientist and his accomplice in 1999 for smuggling weapons-grade californium from rusting Russian nuclear icebreakers to St. Petersburg-based crime groups.
In all, close to 100 nuclear smuggling attempts have been thwarted by Russian and international law enforcement over the last five years. But countless others have gone undetected. In 1995, German intelligence agencies were already estimating that there were nearly 200 incidents of nuclear trafficking annually. And last year, a more conservative estimate by the International Atomic Energy Agency officially confirmed that more than 370 smuggling incidents have taken place since 1993.
Even more alarming is that Russia's nuclear complex has become a bargain basement for terrorists. In 1993, the Islamic Jihad organization, a terrorist group affiliated with Iran's radical Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, made a serious bid to acquire nuclear materiel from one of Russia's ailing "nuclear cities."
Since then, other groups have gotten into the game. Al-Qaida is rumored to have paid millions to acquire a Soviet-era "suitcase bomb" in 1998, and to have subsequently enlisted Chechen extremists to raid Russian nuclear facilities. In all, more than 100 terrorist groups around the world are estimated by the United Nations to currently have the tools - and the fissile material - necessary for some form of nuclear capability.
To be sure, policy-makers in Moscow are not blind to the danger posed by their country's lingering nuclear insecurity. But domestic considerations, from the wobbly state of the nation's economy to the Kremlin's systematic efforts to eliminate political opposition, so far seem to have trumped real atomic sector reform. The resulting vulnerability suggests that luck, rather than real safeguards, is responsible for the absence of a catastrophic attack thus far.
Washington, worried about the threats posed by terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, should pay greater attention to the growing global threat posed by Russia's internal atomic disarray. And if it is serious about preventing proliferation, the Bush administration must press Moscow to confront its own looming nuclear nightmare.
Copyright 2003, Baltimore Sun.
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