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International Herald Tribune
November 12, 2001
Russians Acknowledge Nuclear Security Breaches
Steven Erlanger
New York Times Service
VIENNA. Russian officials have privately acknowledged that in the last year there have been dozens of violations of their own rules regarding nuclear security, that there has been at least one loss of fissile material, that Taliban emissaries have tried to recruit Russian scientists and that there have been at least two efforts by terrorists to stake out a secret Russian nuclear storage facility, according to senior officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Western governments.
Despite significant improvements in Russian nuclear security in the last few years, some of it with American money and advice, up to half of Russia's civilian and military nuclear stockpiles with weapons-grade material are not well protected.
In Aktau, on the Kazakh coast, one ton of plutonium and two tons of highly enriched uranium sit near a now-closed breeder reactor. Ukraine, with 17 nuclear reactors and one research reactor, is considered a country of "serious concern" by officials because of its climate of government corruption and crime.
Enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb sat at a research reactor just outside Belgrade throughout the 1999 Kosovo war.
Just last week, Turkey announced it had broken up a gang of smugglers who tried to sell 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of what appeared to be highly enriched uranium for $750,000 to undercover police, material they said they had bought several months ago from a Russian of Azeri origin.
Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency here in Vienna are deeply skeptical of Osama bin Laden's claim, in an interview published in Pakistan on Friday, that he possessed nuclear weapons. On the other hand, given the vulnerability of material in the former Soviet Union, the increasing professionalism of nuclear smuggling and the relative ease of fabricating a primitive weapon, they cannot rule it out.
And they are increasingly concerned that terrorists willing to die could create a "dirty bomb," wrapping more easily stolen radioactive materials used in medicine and industry around a conventional explosive, like dynamite, to try to make a significant area of a city uninhabitable for many years.
Russian officials say that their fissile nuclear material is under strict and improving controls. But only 10 days ago, in a discussion with officials of this UN agency, which monitors nuclear programs, Yuri Volodin, chief of safeguards for the Russian nuclear regulatory agency, revealed that in the last year, there were dozens of violations of regulations for securing and accounting for nuclear material, including one loss of nuclear material, an extraordinary admission, which Mr. Volodin described as of the 'highest consequence.'" Mr. Volodin said he could not be more specific about the type of material or the size of the loss.
Last month, Colonel General Igor Volynkin, head of nuclear security for Russia's military, said that twice this year Russian forces discovered stakeouts by terrorists of a secret nuclear arms storage facility, although he did not say where.
Also last month, an official of the Russian Security Council, Raisa Vdovichenko, said that emissaries of the Taliban had asked "a collaborator of an institution related to nuclear technologies to go to their country and work there in this field." Three of his colleagues have already moved abroad, but he was not sure where, Miss Vdovichenko said.
There is continuing evidence of efforts to traffic nuclear material that give many officials deep concern. For example, in January, Greek police found more than 200 industrial radioactive sources buried in a forest by criminals trying to find a buyer.
Altogether, the plates contained about 3 grams of plutonium.
In April 2000, police in Georgia seized, in Batumi, several hundred fast-reactor fuel pellets, containing 920 grams, nearly a kilo, of highly enriched uranium; in September, at Tbilisi airport, police confiscated half a gram of plutonium.
At the end of 1998, the Russians say they thwarted an effort by an organized gang to steal 18.5 kilos, more than 40 pounds, of highly enriched uranium from a military weapons facility in the Chelyabinsk oblast.
Still, senior officials in Vienna and in Washington, speaking on background, do not believe that Osama bin Laden or even any state interested in a shortcut to a bomb - from Syria and Iran to Iraq and Libya - have been able to obtain the roughly 25 kilos of highly enriched uranium required to make a simple bomb, or the roughly 8 kilos of 3D20 plutonium, a much more difficult material with which to work.
But they also admit that they cannot know for sure.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has built a database of incidents of nuclear trafficking since 1993, only counting incidents confirmed by the states involved.
Of the 175 cases of trafficking in nuclear material and 201 cases of trafficking in medical and industrial radioactive materials, only some 18 cases involved even small amounts of the fissionable material needed for a nuclear bomb: plutonium or highly enriched uranium (enriched by 20 percent or more).
Altogether in all these cases, agency officials say, there have been seizures of about 400 grams of plutonium and another 12 kilos of uranium at varying levels of enrichment, equivalent to only some 6 kilos of uranium-235.
Given the variety of incidents, sources and traffickers, these numbers are somewhat reassuring, officials say. And they point out that the most serious cases, involving large amounts of material, took place in 1993 and 1994, when Russian, German and Czech police made large seizures of very highly enriched nuclear material manufactured in the former Soviet Union, usually at nuclear-fuel fabrication plants.
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