The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom, points out that “there is potential nuclear material in more than 40 countries, some of it well secured and some of it poorly secured. This is a global problem, not one limited to Russia.” Deepening the concern about Russia is the fact that “in some of these facilities, they don’t even know what they have,” notes Laura Holgate, vice president for Russia/ New Independent States programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington NGO widely considered the pre- mier source of information on nuclear proliferation. (Hol- gate previously managed the Nunn-Lugar Cooper- ative Threat Reduction program at the U.S. Department of Defense.) Especially in Russia’s research centers, abandoned nuclear materials from decades’ worth of experiments are simply “put in some container and put off in a corner,” says Holgate. “The notion that there will be perfectly traceable and preserved records of every gram [is] just not reasonable.” In addition to Russia itself, six former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Latvia, Georgia and Uzbekistan — have nuclear facilities that concern prolif- eration experts. Three of those —Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan — also once had Soviet nuclear weapons stationed in them. But by 1996 all those weapons had been removed to Russia, and most have been dismantled. However, those three countries have civilian research reactors containing highly enriched uranium, which can be used to build nuclear bombs. Various organizations, including NTI and DOE, are working with the three gov- ernments to make the facilities safer; for example, by get- ting them to convert to low-enriched uranium, which can’t be used for weapons. “Potatoes Were Guarded Better” As troubling as things are now, every expert we talked to agreed that conditions were far worse in the early and mid-1990s. Siegried Hecker, co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and emeritus director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, first visited Russia as a DOE representative in 1992. “The sit- uation was truly alarming,” he tells the Journal , “especial- ly in terms of their naval fleet — submarines, icebreakers — as well as their civilian institutes. The actual physical security [had] collapsed, so the threat was very, very high.” The horror stories from that period are numerous. In one instance, a thief entered a facility through a hole in a fence, snapped the padlock, retrieved nuclear materials and was able to leave without being detected. The theft might not have been discovered for weeks if the perpe- trator had not been sloppy and left the padlock lying in the snow. When the identity of the thief was discovered months later and he was put on trial, the prosecutor con- cluded that — in a phrase that has become famous among proliferation experts — “potatoes were guarded better.” Conditions were even worse in the non-Russian areas of the former Soviet Union, because they had never had operational responsibility for managing nuclear materials. That had always been Moscow’s job. According to experts at Harvard’s Belfer Center, when civil war broke out in Georgia, scientists at one nuclear facility in Tbilisi that housed 10 kilograms of highly enriched uranium took turns guarding it “with sticks and garden rakes.” There were simply no security guards. A principal reason for the collapse in security was that the old Soviet system was predicated on the existence of a closed society, not a fragile, crime-ridden market economy. As Matthew Bunn of Harvard observes, “In the Soviet Union, the whole point of the security controls was to keep American spies out — they weren’t focused on theft.” Bunn adds, “The old closed society of the Soviet Union meant that you could have lower security at the perimeter of nuclear facilities.” If someone did manage to smuggle some nuclear material out of a nuclear facility, what were they going to do with it? It was almost impossible to meet with foreigners without being detected. There was no way to leave the country without the KGB detecting it. Some analysts called the dictatorial state “the second line of defense” for nukes, but that protection disappeared with the Soviet collapse. While the situation has improved considerably in the last 15 years, Russian nuclear safeguards still have some very serious flaws. A revealing article on the weak “culture of security” surrounding Russian nuclear facilities highlights the reali- ty that technical fixes can only achieve a limited amount if the human element is deficient. Published in the Russian journal Nuclear Control in 2003, the piece by Igor F O C U S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37 Bob Guldin, a Washington-based writer, was editor of the Foreign Service Journal from 1998 to 2001, and was previously editor of Arms Control Today.