US intelligence reports renew fears over Russia’s weapons stockpile security.

In the wake of the Soviet collapse into 15 independent states, hundreds and perhaps thousands of grammes of nuclear material – including highly enriched uranium used in atomic bombs – were spirited away from Russia’s nuclear heartland.

“We assess that undetected smuggling of weapons-usable nuclear material has occurred, but we do not know the total amount of material that has been diverted or stolen since the dissolution of the Soviet Union,” the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said in a 2011 report, the latest unclassified document released by the intelligence community.”Russia’s vast stockpile of nuclear material, scattered across multiple facilities, continues to present an attractive theft target,” US officials wrote in their report. “Security of this material has improved since the fall of the Soviet Union, but we lack information on the extent of recent thefts, and vulnerabilities remain. Probable Russian-origin weapons-usable nuclear material has continued to circulate on the black market.”

“We judge it highly unlikely that Russian authorities have been able to recover all of the stolen material.”……

In January, a Nuclear Threat Initiative report found Russia’s control of materials was in the bottom third of nuclear states, and its overall score remained unchanged from 2012. The report said Russia has the second-highest risk factors of any nuclear state, ahead of only Pakistan. Those risk factors include political instability, ineffective governance, pervasive corruption, and the presence of groups determined to obtain nuclear materials……….. View the reports below:   http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/02/moscow-struggle-protect-nuclear-material-201421710591960385.html