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Guarding Nuclear Reactors and Material From Terrorists and Thieves
George Bunn and Fritz Steinhausler
For decades the United States has sought international standards
to ensure that nuclear facilities and materials are physically protected
against theft and sabotage. On September 11, the need for such an
initiative became strikingly apparent as analysts pondered the other
possible targets of a terrorist attack. What would have been the
loss of life if, for example, a hijacker had crashed a fuel-laden
jetliner into a nuclear reactor, causing a meltdown and dispersing
radioactive material?
Indeed, just days after the attacks, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head
of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), made it clear
that the attack had dramatic implications for the nuclear industry
and for non-proliferation: “The tragic terrorist attacks on
the United States were a wake-up call to us all. We cannot be complacent.
We have to and will increase our efforts on all fronts—from
combating illicit trafficking to ensuring the protection of nuclear
materials—from nuclear installation design to withstand attacks
to improving how we respond to nuclear emergencies.”
Spencer Abraham, the U.S. secretary of energy, appeared before
the IAEA to urge “maintaining the highest levels of security
over nuclear materials.” “We need to strengthen international
commitments and cooperation on the physical protection of nuclear
materials, particularly those that can readily be converted to weapons
use,” he said.
If terrorists were willing to kill thousands of innocent people
in suicidal attacks against buildings symbolizing America’s
economic and military power, they would probably not hesitate to
use truck bombs made of conventional explosives to attack nuclear
reactors in order to create clouds of radioactivity like those produced
by the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl. They would have little trouble
acquiring anti-tank weapons that could blow up the heavy canisters
in which radioactive spent fuel from nuclear reactors is transported
through populated areas. It is even possible that they could acquire
fissile material from one of the poorly guarded nuclear facilities
around the world and find scientists willing to make nuclear weapons.
Current international agreements do not require that nuclear material
and facilities in domestic use be guarded against thieves or saboteurs,
including terrorists. This is a dangerous gap in the global barrier
against proliferation. The IAEA has taken the first steps toward
requiring measures to physically protect nuclear materials, but
it is essential that this effort be pursued expeditiously and that
countries take all reasonable steps to ensure that nuclear material
is not part of the next terrorist attack.
Safeguards Do Not Protect
The 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) requires non-nuclear-weapon
states to accept safeguards administered by the IAEA on all their
nuclear activities. But, when the NPT was drafted, nuclear terrorism
was not perceived as a significant threat, and the safeguards consist
of monitoring and accounting measures designed to prevent non-nuclear-weapon
states from diverting nuclear material from peaceful nuclear activities
to weapons programs. The safeguards are not intended to prevent
theft of nuclear material by outsiders or the bombing of reactors
and spent fuel by terrorists.
Today there are threats not foreseen in 1968 that are unlikely
to be deterred by NPT requirements: terrorists who want to blow
up nuclear reactors with high explosives to kill civilians and create
chaos, thieves who want to steal weapons-usable nuclear material
to sell to states or terrorists seeking nuclear weapons, and disgruntled
employees who want to steal material and sell it on the black market.1
The threat that a terrorist might try to blow up a U.S. nuclear
facility is frighteningly plausible. Even before the September 11
attacks, conventional high-explosive bombs delivered by car, truck,
or boat had been used in numerous terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities:
a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the World Trade Center
in New York City in 1993, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City
in 1995, a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996,
two American embassies in Africa in 1998, and a U.S. naval vessel
in a port in Yemen in 2000.
If such an attack against a nuclear plant were successful, the
number of casualties could be extremely high because of the resulting
spread of radioactive material. In 1981, an environmental impact
statement prepared by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
estimated that a large truck bomb used against a nuclear reactor
in a highly populated area could produce 130,000 fatalities.2
In effect, a simple conventional explosive used against a nuclear
facility would serve as a large radiological weapon. The possibility
of terrorist attacks on nuclear reactors is, of course, not limited
to those in the United States. Attempts to blow up or penetrate
nuclear reactors have been reported in Western Europe, Russia, South
Africa, Argentina, and South Korea.3
Despite the danger, no multilateral treaty requires that nuclear
material and facilities be protected from such attacks. The IAEA
recommends, but does not require, general provisions to protect
reactors against sabotage, and IAEA inspectors do not check whether
these recommendations are observed. The Nuclear Suppliers Group
asks that the recipients of nuclear exports take into account IAEA
recommendations, but it does not make them mandatory.4
The NRC’s rules do contain explicit requirements for protection
of licensed civilian reactors, and in 1993—after the World
Trade Center bombing and after a car that could have contained a
bomb crashed through the fences around Pennsylvania’s Three
Mile Island reactor—the commission adopted new standards for
protecting U.S. civilian power reactors from truck bombers. However,
even before the attacks of September 11, those standards were criticized
as being too weak,5 and on September
19 an IAEA statement acknowledged that most nuclear power plants
are not strong enough to withstand attack by “a large jumbo
jet full of fuel” without dispersion of large amounts of radioactive
material.6
It is also difficult to ascertain whether the U.S. departments
of Defense and Energy require similar standards for comparable government
facilities because many of their rules on protection are classified.
Some Department of Energy nuclear facilities appear vulnerable to
terrorist attack. A 1999 Energy report states, “Recent tests
have shown that barriers and vault systems used by the U.S. Department
of Energy are not as robust as once thought…. Although many
approaches have been investigated, a promising technological alternative
has not yet been identified.”7
Although the danger that hostile states or terrorists will acquire
and use nuclear weapons seems smaller than the threat that terrorists
will use conventional explosives to destroy nuclear facilities,
the consequences could be far greater.
There is clearly a market for weapons-usable nuclear material,
and inadequately protected nuclear material threatens everyone.
It is not just states like Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea that
may be seeking nuclear weapons; the Aum Shinrikyo sect and Osama
bin Laden’s al Qaeda group have also tried to acquire nuclear
material for weapons.8 If hostile
states or terrorists were to obtain enough highly enriched uranium
(HEU) from civilian facilities, the manufacture of a simple Hiroshima-type
bomb would be within their ability.9
The IAEA safeguards required by the NPT would eventually detect
the absence of the stolen material from safeguarded facilities,
but thieves, who intend to steal material and disappear, would not
likely be deterred by the fact that the theft would be discovered
after they had departed. If significant quantities of weapons-usable
material became readily available on the nuclear black market, the
other actions taken to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons (such
as IAEA inspections, export controls, and NPT conferences) would
be futile.
A great deal of fissile material exists in civilian facilities
around the world, and experience has shown that some of it is vulnerable
to theft. According to August 2000 IAEA estimates, a total of more
than 1,306 kilograms of highly enriched uranium exists in research
reactors in 27 countries, sometimes in quantities large enough to
make a bomb.10 Twenty percent of
these reactors are in Asia and the Middle East. Plutonium is often
better protected than HEU, but 12 countries possess a total of 180,000
kilograms of civilian plutonium, and the amount is growing rapidly.
As of September 1999, the IAEA had recorded 139 reports of illicit
trafficking of nuclear material,11
most of which have come from Europe—although it is unclear
whether this is the result of more trafficking there or simply more
effective police work. Much of the nuclear material in these cases
has probably come from Russia or other former Soviet republics.
For example, several kilograms of HEU from Russia were seized in
Prague from a gang with members in Belarus, the Czech Republic,
Germany, and Russia. European security authorities are currently
investigating alleged arrangements for the sale of Russian radioactive
material by a prominent member of a Russian crime organization to
representatives of al Qaeda. But Russia’s troubled nuclear
infrastructure is not the only source of at-risk fissile material:
HEU stolen from a research reactor in the Congo was apprehended
by police in Italy and Belgium in 1998.12
Earlier this year, 600 grams of HEU of unknown origin was seized
in Colombia.13
Addressing the Gap
The IAEA refers to securing nuclear facilities against thieves
and saboteurs as “physical protection” to distinguish
it from the monitoring and accounting “safeguards” required
by the NPT. “Physical protection” means providing walls,
fences, human guards, sensors, and alarm systems that will detect,
warn against, and ultimately help prevent the unauthorized movement
of humans, vehicles, or radioactive substances within a protected
area.
Many countries provide some form of physical protection for their
nuclear material, but because there is no international standard
or requirement for physical protection of civilian nuclear material
(as there is for safeguards), countries’ protections vary widely
and are often inadequate. For example, of 19 countries with nuclear
facilities covered by a 1997 survey, only 11 reported that they
had designed their physical protection facilities to deal with terrorism.14
Just as the NPT’s requirement that non-nuclear-weapon states
have safeguards is essential to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons,
so is the requirement that all countries with nuclear material have
physical protection for nuclear material. If terrorists can crash
large planes into the Pentagon, they can certainly find a way to
attack nuclear reactors. And if thieves can steal weapons-usable
material in Russia, the Congo, Colombia, or elsewhere, they can
use it to make nuclear weapons or sell it to someone who will.
There is one treaty that provides for physical protection of civilian
nuclear material: the 1980 Convention on the Physical Protection
of Nuclear Material. But it only applies to the protection from
theft of material in international transit—for example, reprocessed
plutonium being shipped from England back to Japan. The original
draft of the treaty, proposed by the United States, was designed
to cover both international transport and domestic transport, use,
and storage. However, during the negotiations, important potential
parties objected to domestic requirements, and in the end the treaty
protected civilian nuclear material only against theft in international
transport. It now has 69 parties, including most countries with
major nuclear programs.
The convention divides nuclear materials into categories, which
receive different levels of protection depending on the amount of
material in question and how useful that material would be in making
weapons. For example, more than two kilograms of unirradiated plutonium
and more than five kilograms of unirradiated uranium (containing
more than 20 percent of the isotope U235) are in Category
I, which receives the highest protection. The convention requires
that Category I material in storage related to international transport
be located within a “protected area” with access restricted
to “persons whose trustworthiness has been determined,”
and it requires surveillance of the material by guards in close
communication with response forces.
In 1997, the United States and the IAEA began to consider amending
the convention to make it applicable to nuclear material in domestic
use, and in 1999 the director-general of the IAEA convened a group
of experts to recommend a course of action.15
Experts in the IAEA working group did not have a lot of information
on current country practices for domestic protection because there
is no treaty that requires providing that information, which most
countries regard as confidential. To compensate, the experts relied
in part on a few general observations.
First, they noted that all of the nuclear material involved in
the many incidents of illicit trafficking known to the IAEA seemed
to have come from domestic use, storage, and transport—not
from the international transport covered by the convention. Therefore,
they concluded that amending the convention to require domestic
protection could help reduce illicit trafficking.
Second, experts in the working group from developing countries
reported that they had difficulty persuading their legislatures
and other authorities to adopt physical protection statutes and
regulations because there was no multilateral treaty requiring standards
for domestic protection. This meant that passing legislation and
appropriations at home for adequate physical protection was often
difficult.
Finally, the experts saw that the amount of nuclear material in
peaceful nuclear programs under IAEA safeguards was rapidly increasing—six-fold
since the convention was negotiated in the late 1970s. This meant
that, without major efforts to provide new funds for physical protection
in each country needing improvements—funds that legislatures
were reluctant to provide without an international requirement—the
risks of theft and sabotage of nuclear material were likely to increase.16
The experts concluded that the IAEA director-general should convene
a group to draw up the text of an amendment to the convention. They
specifically recommended that the amendment make the existing convention
applicable to domestic use, storage, and transport of nuclear material.
They further recommended that the convention be expanded to require
protection against sabotage, not just theft; that the convention
clearly state the objectives of physical protection; and that information
about how a particular facility is protected be kept confidential.
However, the experts opposed amendments that would mandate any
international oversight, reporting requirements, or peer review
of how states implemented physical protection measures. Instead,
the experts explicitly placed the onus of ensuring physical protection
on the national governments. In a set of 12 fundamental principles
that they approved in addition to their recommendations for amendments,
the experts said that the country with nuclear material should be
“responsible for establishing and maintaining a legislative
and regulatory framework to govern physical protection” and
that that country should provide inspections of physical protection
under its authority. Clearly, the experts wanted to avoid international
verification of how states would implement the amended convention’s
requirements.
The experts also opposed amendments that would permit more changes
in protection standards at a later date without once again going
through the arduous amendment process, apparently not wanting to
make it too easy to raise standards again.
It may seem surprising that some experts opposed principles or
amendments that would support some sort of international verification,
which would help ensure that agreed-upon measures were actually
being implemented. Perhaps the nuclear industries in important developed
countries were resistant to changes that would cost them more money.
Perhaps some of the European Union countries, which had earlier
contributed to improvements in safeguards and physical protection
in Russia, could not believe that nuclear material stolen in the
Congo or Colombia could threaten them. Perhaps China and Russia
feared inspections or a requirement that reports on their physical
protection practices be submitted to other countries.
In the end, U.S. experts, who supported verification provisions,
could not overcome opposition to any measure requiring any type
of international oversight over national protection practices. If
the experts’ recommendations are the basis for the negotiation
of a treaty amendment, there will be no required international verification
and no required reports from parties providing significant information
on physical protection practices. This weakens the convention and
makes it more difficult to standardize protection procedures internationally.
What Next?
The IAEA’s Board of Governors and the IAEA’s General
Conference welcomed the experts’ report on amending the convention,
the Board meeting just before and the Conference meeting just after
the September 11 attacks. The General Conference accepted the Board’s
approval of the experts’ fundamental principles, which state
that responsibility for regulation of a system for physical protection
“rests entirely within” the state having the system. It
commended the IAEA’s programs of training, guidance, and technical
assistance to assist states in establishing or improving systems
of physical protection. Finally, it requested the IAEA to strengthen
all of its work “relevant to preventing acts of terrorism involving
nuclear materials and other radioactive materials,” and it
urged IAEA members to support all of these programs.
Most importantly, the General Conference unanimously supported
the decision by Director-General ElBaradei to convene a meeting
of experts to draft an amendment to the convention on physical protection.
That meeting is scheduled for December 2001. Given the new concerns
about physical protection after September 11, there could be a new
effort in the drafting meetings to add some sort of international
verification or reporting requirement. Or perhaps an amendment could
simply require that each country’s national implementing legislation
be reported to the IAEA. This would allow the IAEA to verify whether
states-parties had in fact adopted national standards and whether
their application is subject to national inspection.
However, even if it does not include provisions for international
verification, an amendment to the convention making its requirements
for physical protection applicable domestically and adding provisions
on sabotage is essential. Physical protection practices vary a great
deal from country to country, and the threat from terrorists, thieves,
and saboteurs is all too real.
Adoption of stronger physical protection standards against these
threats is essential, and the sooner the better. Unfortunately,
putting an amendment into effect will probably take several years.
In the meantime, the Board-approved principles for physical protection
and the IAEA-recommended standards for physical protection, both
of which deal with sabotage as well as theft, should be applied
immediately.
If adequately funded, the IAEA can provide guidance, training,
advisory services, and technical assistance to help countries improve
their protection practices and to implement the new principles and
recommendations. For countries that accept an IAEA advisory team
and cannot afford the protection that that team recommends, financial
assistance could be provided as it already has been to Russia, some
former Soviet republics, and a few East and Central European countries.
This could be an inducement to the states given assistance not only
to provide the protections but to join the convention if they have
not yet done so.
The United States and the international community can no longer
postpone taking stronger measures to ensure the physical protection
of nuclear facilities and nuclear material. Weapons-usable material
must be kept out of the hands of states and terrorists trying to
make nuclear weapons, and nuclear reactors and spent fuel must be
protected from sabotage, lest an attack spread radioactive debris
over a large area, killing many and injuring more. Now is the time
for the United States and the IAEA to take the lead in securing
the world’s vulnerable nuclear infrastructure.
NOTES
1. A survey for Gosatomnadzor, the Russian nuclear regulatory agency,
showed that every nuclear theft from the Russian facilities it regulated
during 1990-95 involved an insider (though outsiders were often
involved) and none were detected by the existing Russian safeguards
and protection systems then in effect. I. Koupriyanova, “Russian
Perspectives on Insider Threats,” Proceedings of the 40th Annual
Meeting of the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management, July
1999.
2. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Supplement to Draft Environmental
Statement Related to the Operation of San Onofre Nuclear Generating
Station, Units 2 & 3,” NUREG-0490, January 1981. See also
Sandia National Laboratories, “An Analysis of Truck Bomb Threats
to Nuclear Facilities,” 1984; Sandia National Laboratories,
“Summary Report of Workshop on Sabotage Protection in Nuclear
Power Plant Design,” February 1977.
3. Oleg Bukharin, “Problems of Nuclear Terrorism,” The
Monitor: Nonproliferation, Demilitarization and Arms Control, Spring
1997, p. 8; Oleg Bukharin, “Upgrading Security at Nuclear Power
Plants in the Newly Independent States,” The Nonproliferation
Review, Winter 1997, p. 28; Three Mile Island Alert Security Committee,
www.tmia.com/sabter.html.
4. The IAEA recommendations are in IAEA Information Circular 225,
Rev.4 (1999). The suggestion from the suppliers that these recommendations
“are a useful basis” for physical protection practices
appears in Annex C to Nuclear Suppliers’ Guidelines, IAEA Information
Circular 254 (1999).
5. Testimony of Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control
Institute, to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, May 5, 1999.
6. See William J. Cole, “Global Atomic Agency Confesses Little
Can Be Done to Safeguard Nuclear Plants,” Associated Press,
September 19, 2001.
7. U.S. Department of Energy, DOE Research and Development Portfolio:
National Security, 1999, p. 87.
8. George J. Tenet, testimony before the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence, February 2, 2000; “U.S. Indictment: ‘Detonated
and Explosive Device,’” The New York Times, November 5,
1998; Gavin Cameron, “Multi-Track Micro-Proliferation: Lessons
from Aum Shinrikyo,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, October-December
1999.
9. J. Carson Mark, Theodore Taylor, Eugene Eyster, William Maraman,
and Jacob Wechsler, “Can Terrorists Build Nuclear Weapons?”
in Paul Leventhal and Yonah Alexander, eds. Preventing Nuclear Terrorism,
(Lexington Books, 1987), pp. 55-65; U.S. Department of Energy, Nonproliferation
and Arms Control Assessment of Weapons-Usable Material Storage and
Excess Plutonium Alternatives, 1997, p. 35-39.
10. IAEA, “Nuclear Research Reactors in the World,” IAEA-RDS-3,
September 2000.
11. IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, statement to the General
Conference, September 1999.
12. See Fritz Steinhausler and Lyudmila Zaitseva, Database on Nuclear
Smuggling, Diversion and Orphan Radiation Sources, Stanford Institute
for International Studies, 2001.
13. Ibid.
14. Kevin J. Harrington, Physical Protection of Nuclear Material:
National Comparisons, Sandia National Laboratories in cooperation
with Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation,
1999.
15. See George Bunn, “Raising International Standards for Protecting
Nuclear Materials from Theft and Sabotage,” The Nonproliferation
Review, Summer 2000, p. 146, 152.
16. M. Gregoric, “Ongoing Efforts to Strengthen the International
Physical Protection Regime,” IAEA International Conference
on Security of Material, Stockholm, May 7-11, 2001, Paper IAEA-CN-86.
(Gregoric was the chairman of the experts working group, and he
gave a report on its work at this Stockholm Meeting.)
George Bunn, who served on the U.S. delegation
that negotiated the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is a consulting
professor at Stanford University’s Center for International
Security and Cooperation. Fritz Steinhausler is a professor at the
Salzburg Institute in Austria and a visiting professor at the Center
for International Security and Cooperation.
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