http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu2klgyQzEI
So Sam Harris thinks that “getting nukes into America” is “just a matter of time”. Why? Because there are 30,000 former Soviet nuclear scientists who who would be happy to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans for a big payday and that illegal drugs are smuggled into the US. From the terrorists perspective it all sounds too good to be true. The “reality” is perhaps somewhat different.
DOES THE NUCLEAR THIEF STAND A CHANCE IN RUSSIA?
The Moscow Kremlin is certainly guarded very well, but Russia’s nuclear materials depots are guarded even better. “The nuclear thief does not stand a chance in Russia: it is nearly impossible to steal nuclear materials, let alone of weapons grade, such as plutonium or enriched uranium,” Sergei Antipov, Deputy Atomic Energy Minister said.
But ten years ago there was a chance and a thief who used it: ten grammes of plutonium were stolen from a depot in Siberia in 1993. It takes at least ten kilogrammes to make a bomb, yet when the dangerous “bit” disappeared, all the concerned services were alerted and the stolen property was soon restored to its rightful place. 1993 was the peak year of social and economic destabilisation that swept the country after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It turned out that a depot employee, who had not been paid for months, decided to sell the plutonium just to get something to live on.
This theft of weapons-grade materials went down as the ONLY one in Russia’s 50-year nuclear history.
Like all other nuclear powers, Russia pledged to preclude the proliferation of nuclear technologies and materials, which must be registered and controlled as strictly as possible. Nikolai Shingarev, head of the PR department of the Atomic Energy Ministry, said, “All nuclear power engineering and nuclear-fuel facilities have strong physical protection systems. All nuclear and radiation dangerous facilities (about 50) are guarded by large groups of Interior Ministry Troops. A large amount of equipment and special monitoring cameras keep under surveillance the movement and actions of people on the guarded territory around the clock.”
There are also protection measures against radiation terrorism, which is the use of radioactive materials to contaminate people. The nuclear industry has a strict system of registration and control of radioactive and nuclear materials. Russia stands very well in the IAEA statistics, where the ministry provides information about the disappearance and unwarranted handling of radioactive materials. Many more accidents, including the disappearance of radioactive materials, have happened in the USA.
The West mounted physical protection and defence measures at nuclear facilities after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, while Russia did this before, when the Chechen war increased the terrorist threat and led to apartment blocks in Moscow and other cities being blown up. According to Mr Shingarev, “we continually modernise nuclear facilities’ protection systems, employing the best specialists who had worked for the defence industry before conversion. They use the up-to-date, unique technologies to create security equipment for us.”
Nuclear materials are controlled not only in storage but also during their transportation, meaning the delivery of fuel to nuclear power stations and return of fuel waste, the dispatch of fuel from scrapped submarines, and so on. The Atomic Energy Ministry has a Crisis Centre, whose satellites monitor the movement of radioactive cargoes across the country. Such cargoes are carried in special containers, mostly by railways and always catching the “green wave.”
Every year up to 1,000 “nuclear trains” move across Russia. The containers with radioactive materials they carry are made at specialised factories and are supplied to “clients” only after extremely rigorous tests. They must remain intact after falling 9 metres onto a concrete floor, withstand direct fire from all kinds of weapons, and remain safe in a fire.
According to Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev, “The ministry’s interaction with international organisations and foreign partners produces a considerable effect. The EU is financing several nuclear safety and waste disposal projects within the framework of the TACIS programme. Russia and the USA are working together to register, control and ensure physical protection of fissionable materials. US experts inspect related facilities in Russia and invariably praise the high standards of protection of nuclear facilities and materials.”
Nuclear terrorism is a possibillity; but is it something that we should fear like Harris suggests?
Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley of George Mason University, specialising in “Tacit knowledge and biological weapons, WMD export controls, WMD-related trafficking, proliferation financing, proliferation threats from former Soviet states” doesn’t think so.
She wrote in 2007 for The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
Nuclear terrorism’s fatal assumptions
By Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley | 22 October 2007In a casual, often-irreverent tone, journalist William Langewiesche walked readers of the December 2006 issue of The Atlantic through the possibilities and hurdles associated with procuring the required material for a nuclear weapon, transporting it to a safe place, and assembling the bomb. With no ambitions to provide solutions to these questions, his article was a pretext to draw attention to the successes and failures of U.S. assistance to Russia and other former Soviet states in protecting fissile material, safeguarding borders, identifying trafficking routes, and exposing the involvement of local criminal groups.
Langewiesche diverges from the conventional wisdom: The odds of terrorist success are very slim, he concludes. Yet he, like many other journalists and researchers, makes two assumptions that neglect important qualifying factors that would improve our understanding of a state’s or terrorist group’s capability to acquire nuclear weapons or dirty bombs.
The first and most common assumption is that procuring material and equipment is the largest obstacle. Most reports fall prey to the simplistic notion that globalization and the internet have made scientific knowledge virtually universal: Once the material is in hand, states or terrorist groups are merely a few steps away from their goal.
Specialized know-how, however, is difficult to come by. Knowledge can be divided generally into two categories: explicit knowledge (information or instructions that can be formulated in words, symbols, formulas, or diagrams and can be easily transferred) and tacit knowledge (unarticulated, personally held knowledge or skills that a scientist or technician acquires and transfers through a practical, hands-on process and direct interactions with other scientists).
Explicit information such as designs and instructions cannot be efficiently used in the absence of the related tacit knowledge. Science and technology scholars have demonstrated that it took Manhattan Project scientists with explicit knowledge of physics and possession of fissile material considerable time to design and construct a workable and reliable prototype implosion nuclear weapon. First they needed to solve a multitude of difficult engineering and interdisciplinary scientific problems, which required hiring thousands of technical specialists to develop a unique knowledge base and building an extensive, indigenous infrastructure.
The novelty of nuclear technology was not the sole challenge. Soviet scientists encountered significant problems replicating the U.S. design and production process obtained from Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, even though they already had an active nuclear program with knowledgeable scientists and engineers. The British encountered similar problems, even though their scientists contributed to the Manhattan Project. Each country’s program had the character of an independent invention.
More recently, bioweapons research illustrated the critical role that specialized know-how plays in transferring existing technologies to a new environment. It took Soviet scientists at the Stepnogorsk bioweapons production plant about five years to design and produce a weaponizable strain of anthrax in in the late 1980s despite about 400 pages of protocols describing the development and production of earlier Soviet anthrax weapons, samples of an anthrax strain developed at the Kirov bioweapons facility, and the transfer of 65 senior bioweaponeers from other weapons sites.
The focus on material leads to a second widespread assumption: the existence of a nuclear black market in the former Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union’s dissolution, former member states inherited an enormous amount of nuclear and radioactive material, which has been the source of a number of trafficking incidents. Revelations about the nuclear network of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan only reinforced trepidations of a burgeoning black market in the region, adding concerns that organized crime might coalesce with this market to channel nuclear material to terrorists.
Before concluding anything about the nature of a nuclear black market in the former Soviet Union, it is useful to consider the qualities of markets in general. At the very least, a market consists of a transaction between a supplier and a client and the transportation and financial mechanisms that allow goods and funds to circulate. The Khan network possessed these features. With an established clientele, a network of suppliers, transport and funding mechanisms that evaded scrutiny, and direct contacts between Khan or his suppliers and their clients, the network provided a flexible list of equipment and expert services that clients could choose from.
The supposed nuclear black market in the former Soviet Union lacks an important component of any market: an established clientele. According to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies’s Illicit Trafficking Database and publications, most nuclear transactions are conducted by isolated suppliers–primarily economic opportunists–who have no clients at the outset, and blindly probe the underground world to identify potential buyers. An analysis of 183 cases that occurred between 2001 and 2006 in the former Soviet Union also showed that traffickers transport their goods along various routes–an east-west route from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus to Europe; a southwest corridor crossing Central Asia and the Caucasus toward Europe; and a southeast corridor, from Central Asia to neighboring Asian and Mideast countries–presuming the existence of a demand in countries along the way. These smugglers are usually intercepted before reaching their declared destination, caught while transporting the goods, crossing a border, or during the sale of the material (often to an undercover agent).
Additionally, the vast majority of materials involved in documented trafficking transactions have no application in a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb, and their value is typically overestimated. Fifty percent of trafficking incidents between 2001 and 2006 concerned radioactive orphan sources, contaminated scrap metal, and radioactive isotopes. Accounts of these incidents rarely indicate the exact quantity or quality of the radioactive material, making it difficult to evaluate the significance of the incident; the analysis of these cases showed, however, that most of them involve industrial instruments that typically contain small quantities of radioactive material. Among the 10 reported incidents involving highly enriched uranium (HEU), only 3 involved weapon-grade material enriched to 80 percent or more. And in these cases, the total material amounted to gram-quantities (5 grams, 170 grams, and 100 grams), hardly enough material for a weapon, which requires at least 10 to 15 kilograms of HEU.
The data-set shows no clear nexus between trafficking, organized crime, and terrorism. Three incidents have involved undocumented connections with terrorist organizations, and 12 cases have a crime-group connection. These cases, however, display the same amateurish features as the rest of the data-set, and involve small quantities of material–such as Osmium 187, low enriched uranium, and depleted uranium–that have no weapons or dirty bomb application. Only one incident involved both weapon-grade HEU and a crime connection.
With these examples, one can see how focusing on access to materials dangerously mischaracterizes the challenges that terrorists and states face in pursuing nuclear weapons. The general emphasis on explicit scientific knowledge, rather than the highly specialized know-how derived from extensive hands-on experience is similarly misleading. While focusing on vulnerability-based analyses of the nuclear threat, the true capabilities of terrorists or states are overlooked.
The Institute of National Security Services (INSS) part of Tel Aviv University and with ties to the Israeli state reached similar conclusions as Dr. Ben Ouaghrham-Gormley in their report of 2010.
| Nuclear Terrorism: Threat to the Public or to Credibility? INSS Insight No. 178, April 28, 2010 Schachter, Jonathan, Guzansky, Yoel, and Schweitzer, Yoram |
During a recent trip to Prague, where he signed a new arms control treaty with Russia, President Barack Obama declared that nuclear terrorism is “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” Though the unique destructive power of nuclear arms justifies his concern regarding their spread and potential use, this grave assessment regarding the imminent threat of nuclear terrorism does not appear to stand up to scrutiny, and might even set the stage for weaker international non-proliferation resolve in the future.
Threat comprises both intent and capability. Analysts are nearly unanimous in their evaluation that al-Qaeda has demonstrated the former through its public statements and its efforts to secure both nuclear materials and religious rulings supporting their nefarious use. Documentary evidence of the group’s interest reportedly was found in Afghanistan in the years immediately after 9/11. This is significant, for not only is the intent to cause large numbers of casualties consistent with the philosophy and modus operandi of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, but very few other groups have ever demonstrated any interest in or willingness to acquire nuclear weapons and bear their real and potential associated costs.
Capability is another matter. According to the RAND Corporation’s Brian Jenkins, who first wrote about terrorists “going nuclear” in 1975, “Usama bin Laden certainly wants a nuclear weapon. He’s been trying for the last 15 years to get a nuclear weapon. There’s no doubt that if he had one, he would use it. Al-Qaeda frequently talks about nuclear weapons….But the fact is there is no evidence that al-Qaeda has nuclear weapons or that it has the material or knowledge to make nuclear weapons.”
If al-Qaeda has neither the weapons nor the ability to make them, the concern remains regarding the group’s acquisition of a weapon from a nuclear state, either through cooperation or following regime collapse. Here the question centers mainly on Pakistan, Iran and North Korea. For over 30 years Iran has provided shelter to and trained, equipped, and dispatched terrorists to strike at American and Israeli targets. Is it likely that a nuclear Iran would usher al-Qaeda or Hizbollah into the nuclear club as well?
The evidence suggests not. First, despite reports of al-Qaeda members finding refuge and passing safely through Iran, the tensions and mistrust between Shiite Iran and Sunni al-Qaeda would almost certainly be a deal breaker. Second, and perhaps most importantly, we have seen no evidence that state sponsors of terrorism have ever provided terrorist groups with non-conventional weapons. The US has designated Iran and Syria, for example, as state sponsors of terrorism for more than a quarter of a century, and both states are known to have large stocks of chemical weapons (which they appear to be developing together; according to Janes, in July 2007 an accident at a joint Iranian-Syrian chemical weapons plant in Aleppo led to dozens of deaths). Nevertheless, none of the terrorist groups sponsored by these two states has ever carried out an attack using these weapons, nor is there evidence that they’ve been equipped to do so.
The traditional and still quite convincing explanation for this non-phenomenon is that states are loath to share such deadly technologies because this in some ways dilutes their national power (this would be all the more so with nuclear weapons) and also causes them to lose control of when and where the weapons are used. In the worst case scenario, from their perspective, a terrorist group could even use the weapons against the sponsors or the sponsors’ interests. Moreover, with regard to nuclear arms, while the forensic science is far from perfect, the weapons are largely traceable, meaning that a state’s ability to deny a connection to a nuclear terrorist attack is greatly diminished, particularly since the number of suspect states is small in any case. Thus while deterring terrorist groups carries its own particular challenges, state-to-state deterrence can help keep such weapons out of the hands of terrorists in the first place.
History might or might not be a good predictor of future behavior, however, and the fact that states have not provided non-conventional weapons to terrorists in the past does not mean that they will not do so in the future. What, then, is the problem with President Obama’s efforts to focus attention on the terrorist threat?
As Jenkins has pointed out, the spotlight on a nuclear al-Qaeda has created enormous fear, itself a terrorist goal, even in the absence of any nuclear capability. In addition, President Obama’s hyperbolic reference to an immediate terrorist nuclear threat can create a “crying wolf” dynamic similar to that created by the Bush administration vis-à-vis weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Unless there is some dramatic new evidence that suggests otherwise, which is of course possible, the US government’s assessments of adversary capabilities stand to lose credibility among allies, members of Congress, and perhaps most importantly in terms of terrorism, the public.
Finally, the narrow focus on terrorism comes at the expense of focus on what should be the administration’s greatest concern – nuclear proliferation among states and the potential for arms races and the ensuing loss of control. It is not by chance that some of Iran’s nuclear technologies appear to be based on the designs of Pakistani nuclear engineer A.Q. Khan, and that the Syrian nuclear reactor reportedly destroyed by Israel in 2007 was built with North Korean assistance. Addressing the issue of state-to-state proliferation carries the added benefit of being the best way to reduce the likelihood of nuclear weapons reaching the hands of terrorists as well, whether because of intentional sharing or regime failures. As in all instances of crying wolf, the loss of focus and credibility can make genuine threats more likely to succeed.
SOURCE
It appears that when there is a will there isn’t neccessarily always a way…
outofhisarris 
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