Every country’s nuclear weapons facilities are vulnerable to insider terrorism

Break-In at Y-12 How a handful of pacifists and nuns exposed the vulnerability of America’s nuclear-weapons sites .New Yorker, BY ERIC SCHLOSSER , 9 March 15 “…….The United States is far more open about its nuclear-weapons programs than any other nation. But that openness, and the many security problems it has revealed, should not imply that the greatest threat of nuclear terrorism comes from sites in the United States. On the contrary, America may have the best nuclear-security systems in the world. The management challenges that the United States has faced are now being encountered by every other country that possesses nuclear weapons.

Pakistan tops the list of nations that cause terrorism experts the greatest concern. It has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. It has dispersed nuclear weapons to multiple locations, making them less vulnerable to attack by a foreign nation but more vulnerable to theft by terrorists. It has extremist groups seeking to infiltrate the military. And few people outside Pakistan know how its nuclear enterprise is really being run. One of the top-secret documents obtained by Edward Snowden in 2013 says that American intelligence agencies have little “knowledge of the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and associated material.” The question deeply concerns Russia as well. A classified State Department document released by WikiLeaks describes a meeting between Russian and American diplomats in Washington. “Islamists are not only seeking power in Pakistan but are also trying to get their hands on nuclear materials,” an official at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. Perhaps a hundred and twenty-five thousand people were directly involved in Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons and missile programs. The Russian official warned that “regardless of the clearance process for these people, there is no way to guarantee that all are 100% loyal.”

Remarkably little is known about the security arrangements at India’s nuclear facilities. Its weapons aren’t as widely dispersed as Pakistan’s. But in both countries terrorists and extremists are more likely to seek plutonium and weapons-grade uranium. Fissile materials are easier to steal than nuclear weapons and much lighter to carry. An improvised explosive device can be made with just a hundred and twenty pounds of uranium or twenty pounds of plutonium. And those amounts don’t have to be stolen all at once.

An insider at a nuclear facility might secretly remove a few ounces of fissile material every so often and accumulate a significant amount of it over time. That happened at a nuclear laboratory south of Moscow in 1992……

Russia has the most nuclear weapons and the largest amount of fissile material in the world. For more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia worked closely together to improve nuclear security and reduce the danger of nuclear terrorism. Thousands of nuclear weapons were safely transported from former Soviet republics and dismantled. New storage facilities were built in Russia; modern security systems were introduced; fissile materials were removed from unguarded sites and locked away. But in December, 2014, Congress voted against additional funding for the nuclear-threat-reduction program. And Russia announced that it would end most of its coöperative work with the United States, despite the need to upgrade security at more than two hundred buildings. Sam Nunn, the former U.S. senator who helped to create the program, has often called the effort to prevent nuclear terrorism “a race between coöperation and catastrophe.” The Russian decision, Nunn thinks, just made the latter more likely. Russia still has about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds of plutonium and about 1.4 million pounds of weapons-grade uranium……..http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/break-in-at-y-12?mbid=social_twitter

March 7, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, safety

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