Take a step back and all the easy Texas cordiality might have seemed inappropriate to the serious business at hand: dispensing with thousands of nuclear bombs the United States and Russia are each ready to unleash on the other at a few minutes’ notice. But at the Texas summit, informality was more than a mood–it was a key U.S. strategy. Both leaders agreed to cut the number of warheads by two thirds, a deal similar in scope to the reductions former presidents Bush Sr. and Gorbachev accomplished in the early 1990s. But this time there will be no treaty, no formal exchange of data or procedures for verifying that warheads have been destroyed. Instead of Reagan’s “trust but verify” maxim, Bush will rely on staying best friends with Putin. “To me, that’s how you approach a relationship that is changed and different,” Bush told a reporter. “I looked the man in the eye and shook his hand.”
Is that the right formula for nuclear security in the post-cold-war era? Compared with the more recent threat of terrorism, talk of strategic nuclear arms is almost comforting, in a nostalgic way, like the distant memory of the playground bully in second grade. But the old U.S.-Russia standoff doesn’t take into account the new reality of nuclear weapons. Terrorism has breathed new life into this old nemesis. The new fear is not so much of Putin’s or Bush’s finger on the button, but of the prospect of Osama bin Laden or one of his disciples getting their hands on a bomb. The mother lode for nuclear terrorists is the former Soviet nuclear arsenal, which is spread throughout Russia and often guarded only lightly, if at all.
Although most experts think bin Laden doesn’t yet have a bomb, their denials sound less than reassuring. “We are certainly aware that he has some material that could contribute to a nuclear weapon,” says British Defense Secretary Sir Geoff Hoon. “[But] we are not convinced at this stage that he is capable of producing a nuclear bomb.” The normally cautious Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national-security adviser, doesn’t dismiss the possibility that bin Laden has nukes. “We have no credible evidence that he has them at this point in time but we’re not going to take any chances,” she told CNN. And then there’s the chilling remarks bin Laden made to Hamid Mir of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn: “If America uses chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent.”
Bin Laden is probably bluffing, but nothing Bush and Putin publicly agreed to can challenge him. Like the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which Bush Sr. and Gorbachev signed in the 1990s, the Bush-Putin agreement is limited to strategic warheads–the ones flung half a world away, on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines or bombers. START reduced U.S. strategic warheads from 12,000 to about 7,000 for the United States, and by a similar number for the Soviet Union, and put in place an elaborate procedure whereby each party could verify reductions by exchanging data and visiting missile sites. Thanks to START, both countries now know a lot about each other’s strategic nukes, down to precise numbers of warheads deployed and missile designs. This thorough accounting makes strategic nukes difficult for terrorists to steal.
Now Bush is willing to reduce the U.S. arsenal of “operational” nukes to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads, and Putin is willing to go as low as 1,500, or even 900 by some reports. This isn’t a bad thing, of course, but it also isn’t as impressive coming in a war on terrorism as it would have been in the middle of a cold war. ICBMs, not least because Bush and Putin are bosom buddies, are no longer as useful as they once were. Russia can’t afford to maintain them and would have cut back regardless. Experts worry more about the lion’s share of Russia’s nuclear arsenal that doesn’t fall under the rubric of strategic weapons. Says former Clinton adviser Kenneth Luongo: “The problem is what’s been left off the table–components and scientists that remain in Russia and aren’t as secure as they should be.”
Back when the cold war was in full swing, military planners in the United States and the Soviet Union got the idea that nuclear bombs need not be saved for a doomsday war but could be useful in a more conventional way–against an opponent’s army, navy or air force. Both countries stockpiled thousands of nukes for use in artillery shells, torpedoes, mines and so-called suitcase bombs–far too large and heavy to fit in an ordinary suitcase, but portable nonetheless. The Soviets even built nuclear-tipped anti-aircraft missiles. Eventually these tactical nukes came to be seen as politically problematic and fell out of favor. Gorbachev and Reagan agreed to unilateral reductions but never signed a treaty. Since the cuts weren’t verified, nobody knows how many are still around. At one time the Soviets had 20,000 tactical nukes. Current estimates vary from as few as 3,000 to as many as 14,000 warheads. A tactical warhead, by the way, can pack the same punch as a strategic one–typically 400 kilotons, about 25 times more than the Hiroshima bomb.
Russia keeps its tactical nukes in about 50 locations throughout the country under varying security conditions. Although security has been tightened in many places–barbed-wire fences have been put up and keyboard entry devices have replaced padlocks–experts believe many facilities are vulnerable to theft by insiders trying to make a quick buck. Consider that an Arab recruit brought in by the Qaeda network to fight for the Taliban is paid $1,200 a month. A Russian nuclear worker with 20 years of experience in a weapons factory is paid $200 a month. If terrorists managed to bribe their way to a warhead, it’s unclear to what degree safeguards built into the bombs themselves would prevent them from detonating it.
Even assuming that Russia dismantled most of its tactical warheads, plenty of weapons-grade nuclear material is left over. Russia sends its obsolete warheads to one of four nuclear cities, where workers extract the nuclear “pit”–a plutonium and uranium sphere, about the size of a volleyball–which forms the warhead’s explosive core. Experts estimate that Russia is holding 600 metric tons of this weapons-grade material. The United States has a program to buy up about 30 tons of weapons-grade uranium each year, over the course of more than a decade, after it has been diluted with natural uranium for use as fuel in nuclear power plants. (The leisurely pace is intended to prevent any disruption to the uranium and uranium-enrichment markets.) Meanwhile, the reductions in strategic nukes that Putin plans to make are expected to add another 150 tons to this stockpile.
Since nuclear material is even farther down the food chain than tactical nukes, security is even more lax. “It’s hard to imagine what a Russian nuclear facility is like,” says Luongo. “They don’t have the rabid safety culture you have in the U.S. The Russians are only just beginning to develop a regulatory infrastructure.” Stories abound of plutonium being stored in milk pails or behind massive steel doors bolted with a single skeleton-key lock. In 1994 the U.S. Energy Department began providing money and expertise to improve Russia’s storage of nuclear materials, but 60 percent of the country’s facilities have yet to be secured. (Prior to September 11, President Bush cut the program’s $170 million budget to free money for research; Congress has since restored most of it.) The U.S. Defense Department has a similar program to boost security at weapons-storage sites, but the program is limited by Russia’s refusal to allow U.S. Defense officials into them. Another bone of contention: three Russian nuclear reactors built for the Soviet military are still cranking out weapons-grade material, adding to Russia’s surplus. Since they provide heat for two Siberian cities, Russia won’t shut them down without U.S. aid for replacement oil and coal plants, an expenditure that House Republicans are resisting.
If smugglers, perhaps with inside help, managed to pass the radioactivity detectors that surround many Russian materials facilities, there’s only a small chance they’d get caught at the borders of the former Soviet Union, experts believe. Only a handful of airports are equipped with radiation detectors, and most road crossings also do not have them. Although proliferation experts are quick to point out that there is no evidence that any terrorist has managed to obtain enough weapons-grade material to make a bomb, customs officials along Russia’s southern borders catch a steady stream of would-be smugglers, mostly involving a few grams of plutonium or occasionally as much as a kilogram of a poor grade of uranium. “Most of these are rank amateurs,” says Scott Parish, a proliferation expert at the Monterey Institute for International Studies in California. But in the past two years, smuggling attempts seem to have changed in character. “The early cases were opportunistic, people who were desperate for money,” says Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration. “But in the last couple of years, there’s been more of a demand pull, where before it was a supply push.” A source at Interpol agrees: “Someone is putting the word out that they’ll pay large amounts for weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. The worrisome thing is, we have no idea how much is really getting through.”
“A terrorist organization that has access to a lot of money certainly could have access to fissile material,” says Alexander Pikayev, a nonproliferation expert with Carnegie Endowment in Moscow. Just how much bin Laden was willing to pay was highlighted by Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, the Qaeda defector who became a federal witness against the bombers involved in the U.S. Embassy attacks in Africa. He brokered a deal in the early 1990s to buy allegedly highly enriched uranium for $1.5 million from a Sudanese military officer in Khartoum. Al-Fadl never knew for certain whether the deal went through, but he received $10,000 as a bonus for his work from bin Laden. Even more worrisome is the case of two Pakistani nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid, who have been arrested by the Pakistanis at U.S. urging because of links with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Pakistani intelligence sources told NEWSWEEK that the two scientists acknowledged during questioning that they met with bin Laden twice in the past 18 months to discuss nuclear weapons.
Most experts believe that, at best, bin Laden has enough low-grade nuclear material to make a so-called dirty bomb. These are conventional bombs wrapped with nuclear waste or the radioactive material from hospital equipment. A dirty bomb could wreak plenty of havoc by spewing radioactive debris, but it wouldn’t produce the death toll of a bona fide nuke. If bin Laden succeeded in obtaining enough weapons-grade material to make a true nuclear bomb, doing so would be difficult but not impossible. Frank von Hippel, former nuclear adviser in the Clinton White House and a professor at Princeton University, worries most about the possibility of terrorists making a crude bomb like the one dropped on Hiroshima. For that you’d need about 60 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Shoot half of it through a gun barrel into the other half, and the collision would trigger a nuclear explosion. A more sophisticated Nagasaki-type bomb would require only 6kg of plutonium, but you’d need to surround it with a shell of conventional explosives and detonate them simultaneously to trigger an explosion. That’s tough to do, and it would have to be tested in advance. “It would be hard for terrorists to make a Nagasaki-type bomb,” says von Hippel. “But a Hiroshima bomb would be easier to make. You might even be able to do it in a machine shop such as you might find in Afghanistan.”
If Bush and Putin discussed the threat of nuclear terrorism last week, they kept it to themselves. It’s unlikely that the issue made them as uncomfortable as Bush’s desire to wriggle out of the antiballistic-missile treaty, which he must do soon to accommodate tests of his missile defense scheduled for the spring. Bush wants a missile defense to protect the United States from rogue states with nuclear ICBMs, but it would do nothing to keep terrorists from getting nukes. For that, the best first line of defense is to invest whatever it takes in securing Russia’s nukes.
