U.S. to spend $7.9 billion on nuclear nonproliferation
cheap electricity and medical isotopes; but the unforeseen result has been a stockpile of deadly spent fuel — HEU — which can be used as the raw material for the type of atom bomb used at Hiroshima.
Most of the HEU in Eastern Europe has been stored since Soviet times, often in badly maintained and poorly guarded facilities where for years underpaid staff were potentially vulnerable to bribery by well-funded terrorists.
Last year a massive new effort to dramatically reduce the amount of civilian HEU worldwide was announced by President Barack Obama in a high-profile speech in Prague, his first major foreign policy speech delivered abroad.
The president has made countering nuclear terrorism a top priority and described it as “the greatest danger we face.” He has committed the United States to secure the world’s vulnerable civilian bomb-grade material by the end of 2013.
Meo writes that Obama has taken the threat so seriously, that over the next three years he wants to spend $7.9 billion on nuclear nonproliferation programs, including homeland security to detect nuclear bombs or material being smuggled into America, as well as programs like the Global Threat Reduction Initiative.
Western intelligence agencies will not reveal their reasons for being more anxious now about a terrorist organization getting its hands on weapon-grade nuclear materials, something which, for years, seemed a remote and unlikely risk.
Meo writes that this may be because of the deeply troubling cases of smuggling that surface from time to time in Eastern Europe, hinting at the existence of a nuclear black market.
Such attempts at illicit nuclear sales have been made at least twice this year, once in Moldova, when a gang attempted to sell a small amount of nuclear material, and once in Georgia where several smugglers were arrested with an undisclosed amount of uranium. That was a far more disturbing case, according to investigators who said it showed a worrying level of organization.
Since the end of the cold war the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, has logged 800 incidents of radioactive material going missing or being seized by smugglers. A handful of cases have involved weapons-grade material.
Since work started in 2004, HEU has been removed from eighteen nations, including five in the past year — Romania, Libya, Taiwan, Turkey, and Chile, where the shipment was briefly delayed by February’s earthquake.
Meo notes that there are glaring omissions in Obama’s plan. The Global Threat Reduction Initiative cannot make HEU safe in a few nuclear nations, most notably Pakistan and North Korea — and, soon, Iran — three countries which are judged to pose the greatest risk of terrorists obtaining the raw material for a bomb.
