[iwar] [fc:Nuclear.security.fears.mushroom.Measures.to.keep.weapons.from.terrorists.found.to.be.weak]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-17 21:31:44
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Nuclear.security.fears.mushroom.Measures.to.keep.weapons.from.terrorists.found.to.be.weak]
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Nuclear security fears mushroom Measures to keep weapons from terrorists found to be weak 
By John Emshwiller, Michael Orey, Daniel Machalaba and Rebecca Smith,
The Wall Street Journal, 10/17/2001
<a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/643914.asp">http://www.msnbc.com/news/643914.asp>

Oct. 17 - In February, Jamal Ahmed Mohamed al-Fadl, a longtime member of
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organization, gave some unsettling testimony
in New York federal court: He helped arrange meetings in Khartoum,
Sudan, in the early 1990s with the aim of helping al-Qaida acquire
uranium.

AL-FADL, WHO testified that he was told that "it's easy to kill more
people with uranium," said he didn't know whether the deal ultimately
went through. His testimony came in connection with the federal
indictment against bin Laden and others for their alleged roles in the
1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. The evidence that bin
Laden's group has tried to obtain weapons-grade nuclear material is
sketchy and unverified. But it has sent authorities around the world
rushing to shore up security measures that are in some cases
surprisingly weak. The armed guards at nuclear-weapons depots often lose
in exercises with mock assailants. Materials for making a nuclear bomb
are accessible enough to support a black market. The first reaction
after Sept. 11 was to tighten security. Kansas officials are keeping
fishermen off a lake near the Wolf Creek nuclear plant. Japan ordered
round-the-clock patrols of the waters near its nuclear plants. France,
which even encouraged school trips to its many nuclear-power plants to
promote acceptance, has severely restricted access to facilities.
Authorities in the Czech Republic tightened airspace restrictions over
nuclear power stations. 
The U.S. Department of Energy briefly halted shipments of nuclear
materials. Just last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission temporarily
closed its Web site, saying that it had to review all the material as
part of "our mission to protect public health and safety." Corbin
McNeill Jr., the chairman of the Chicago-based power company Exelon
Corp., has a plan for making future nuclear plants more resistant to an
airborne assault by terrorists: Bury them. He's thinking that if and
when Exelon builds a new-generation nuclear plant, most of the structure
and equipment will be housed below the surface of the earth. "There
should be no vital components above ground," he says. "The whole world
has been turned upside down" by the events of Sept. 11, says Richard
Meserve, chairman of the NRC, which oversees commercial security
measures for nuclear-power plants. "We have to re-examine our entire
capability to withstand a terrorist attack." 
The means for carrying out nuclear attacks are scattered around the
globe - in the form of hundreds of commercial nuclear plants, tens of
thousands of nuclear weapons and tons of stored uranium and plutonium
that could be fashioned into bombs. Efforts to make nuclear materials
more secure have been hampered by tight budgets, geopolitical squabbling
and inertia. While security has frayed in many places, authorities
believe that a nuclear assault by terrorists remains unlikely. Since
Hiroshima, 56 years ago, there have been few significant breaches of
security anywhere in the world that could have produced a nuclear weapon
or incident, and there have been no incidents. Besides the technical
barriers to making a nuclear bomb, nuclear weapons and bomb-grade
material have always been relatively well-guarded. Authorities have long
counted on the technical barrier - namely, that designing and
fabricating a nuclear device remains a formidable challenge. Despite the
sophistication of bin Laden's al-Qaida network, the prospect of
terrorists going nuclear is still "highly unlikely," says Graham Andrew,
a senior official at the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy
Agency, a United Nations-related body created to prevent the
proliferation of atomic weapons. 
But the possibility remains. A draft report for an IAEA conference in
May cited intelligence-agency and other reports of bin Laden efforts to
obtain small nuclear weapons, with the devices to be possibly stored in
Afghanistan. The draft report, prepared by Alex Schmid,
officer-in-charge of the United Nations' Terrorism Prevention Branch,
stated that while he hadn't seen evidence that the terrorist had
succeeded, "it's clear that bin Laden is actively seeking to acquire
weapons of mass destruction." Schmid declined to be interviewed. A U.S.
intelligence official says intelligence sources also have reported
efforts by bin Laden's organization to acquire nuclear weapons. The
technical barrier also seems to have gotten lower. A 1998 report by the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign-policy think tank
in Washington, found that "a number of American college students have
come up with plausible designs based on unclassified information."

BUILDING A 'DIRTY BOMB' Far easier to build, and much less deadly, is a
"dirty bomb," in which conventional explosives are used to spread
radioactive material. The key to averting this and any other nuclear
threat, security experts say, is keeping nuclear material out of
terrorists' hands, particularly plutonium or highly enriched uranium,
which are what is needed to create nuclear fission. That means wiping
out the shadowy black market for nuclear materials. The biggest
potential source of such material is Russia and other parts of the old
Soviet Union - though the IAEA considers all the ex-Soviet Republics,
except Russia itself, free of nuclear weapons. Here, too, information
can be incomplete and even contradictory. Take the Russian "suitcase"
bombs.

Extras to help you understand this complex story:

o In-depth features

o Multimedia

o Interactive library

Republican Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania recalls that in
hearings held in 1997, retired Russian Gen. Alexander Lebed testified
that Russian authorities couldn't account for dozens of portable nuclear
bombs once in the Soviet arsenal and designed for use behind enemy lines
to blow up specific objects, such as tunnels or power stations. Weldon
said other top Russian military officials, including former Defense
Minister Igor Sergeyev told him directly that such devices existed. More
recently, both U.S. and Russian officials have issued statements denying
the Soviets ever built such weapons. Portable atomic demolition devices
produced by the U.S. military were all dismantled by 1989, a Defense
Department official adds. Watchdog groups such as the nonprofit Monterey
Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., which attempt to
verify reports of nuclear proliferation, keep track of various incidents
in which nuclear materials may have escaped the grip of governments. In
the Monterey files is an example from 1998 when the Russian Federal
Security Service announced that it had thwarted an attempt by employees
at a facility in the Chelyabinsk region to steal around 40 pounds of
nuclear material. Matthew Bunn, a nonproliferation expert at Harvard
University, says an official with the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy
told him the material had been highly enriched uranium. Vladislav
Petrov, a spokesman for Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, maintains
that this incident "did not happen." Some bomb-grade material does seem
to have made its way out of Russia. In 1994, Czech officials seized
nearly six pounds of enriched uranium from a car in Prague.
Investigators in that case believed that the material came from one of
two Russian facilities. Petrov, however, says the Czechs never allowed
Russia to test the material to determine its origin. The information
about the theft "was created by their special services," he says, "to
show that Russia isn't in control of its uranium." 
One of the suspect facilities in the Czech case is the Mayak nuclear
materials production complex in the Chelyabinsk region, which is home to
a number of nuclear facilities. In a visit to Mayak last year, former
Energy Department official Rose Gottemoeller says she found several tons
of plutonium "stored in simple bucketlike containers." It would be "easy
to carry," she notes, "if you could get through the wooden door or
nonbarred window." Although a joint Russian-U.S. venture was in the
process of upgrading security at Mayak during her visit, Gottemoeller
notes, it was just starting to install a perimeter fence. That fence has
now been completed, according to Sarah Lennon, a DOE official. She also
says windows have been bricked up and that other security improvements
are in progress. Gottemoeller also visited Russian Naval facilities in
1999 and 2000, where she said that nuclear weapons being moved on and
off of ships were kept in shacklike buildings on the base. The DOE's
Lennon says there is an "aggressive program under way" to improve
security measures for the Russian Navy's weapons.

BEHIND ON UPGRADES For the past eight years, the U.S. government has
been helping the Russian government shore up security at its nuclear
installations. So far, though, upgrades have been completed for less
than 40 percent of the more than 660 tons of enriched uranium and
plutonium not contained in Russia's nuclear-weapon stockpiles, says
Bunn, who is also a former Clinton adviser on nuclear proliferation. In
a Sept. 19 letter to President Bush and Russian President Vladimir
Putin, Bunn wrote that "over the past five years, many of the major
U.S.-Russian cooperative nuclear security programs have slowed" and "had
their timelines unnecessarily extended into the future." Jonathan Kiell,
a spokesman for the DOE, insists that major strides have been made in
helping Russia secure its nuclear material and in redirecting the
activities of Russian weapons scientists. However, he says, "following
the attacks of Sept. 11, [the DOE] is evaluating possibilities of
accelerating its [security program], based on guidance from the
administration."

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