Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
4/24/2015
A National Nuclear Security Administration program to install radiation detection equipment at borders, airports and seaports around the world would take a big hit under a provision in the House version of the Fiscal Year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, unveiled this week. The House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee cleared its portion of the bill April 23, and the legislation included a prohibition on using any funds in FY 2016 and into the future from being “obligated or expended for the research and development, installation, or sustainment of fixed site radiological portal monitors or equipment for use in foreign countries.” It would not impact mobile radiation detection equipment.
Such a provision would severely impact the NNSA’s Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence Program, which until earlier this year was known as the Second Line of Defense Program. A House Armed Services Committee staffer told NS&D Monitor that the fixed portal monitors were not effective in curbing nuclear smuggling and that funding was shifted to higher priority work. “Mobile detectors have the advantage of the bad guys not knowing where they are. The fixed stuff, it’s too easy for the bad guys to defeat the fixed portal monitors,” the staffer said.
The language drew strong opposition from Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), the ranking member of the subcommittee, and is expected to be hotly debated at the full House Armed Services Committee markup next week. The Administration asked for $142.5 million in FY 2016 for the program. “It’s one thing to cut nonproliferation funding as is done in the bill, which to many people is deeply worrisome,” Cooper said. “It’s another thing to prohibit a type of technology that could be very useful in preventing a nuclear incident in the United States.”
Cooper: Fixed Monitors a ‘Huge Part of Our Nonproliferation Infrastructure’
Over the last decade, the program has spent more than a billion dollars to install radiation detection equipment in 49 countries around the world. According to the NNSA’s FY 2016 budget request, the program completed a planned 13 fixed site installations and 20 mobile installations during FY 2015, with 24 fixed site installations and 20 mobile installations planned for FY 2016. Through FY 2016, the program projected to have installed 587 fixed site installations and 108 mobile installations, and by 2020, it expects to transition 786 installations to the responsibility of the host country. “NSDD deploys its systems at carefully selected locations as part of the broader … layered, defense-in-depth approach to countering nuclear trafficking,” the NNSA said in its budget request.
Cooper called it a “huge part of our nonproliferation infrastructure,” and noted that most of the detectors are not installed in Russia. “So any grievance we have vis a vis … the Russians, is really separate. This is a way of detecting loose nukes as they cross some of the wildest frontiers in the world. I was a little bit struck when I first saw this effort to have a blanket prohibition on the use of this technology. It seems to me to go way too far.”
NNSA Nonprolif. Chief Defends Detection Approach
At a Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing last week, NNSA nonproliferation chief Anne Harrington defended the fixed portal monitor program when Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) suggested that “some have said maybe this doesn’t have as much value because it’s easy to simply smuggle the materials around these sites.”
Harrington, however, said the fixed monitors are part of a broad effort to stop nuclear smuggling. “I have to confess that when I hear that sort of thing, I wonder, what else would you do?” Harrington said. “Every one of us when we go through an airport has to walk through a detector. And that’s there for a purpose because if you try to go around it, TSA will not think kindly of it and will probably escort you aside to give you a secondary inspection. Same is true when you look at border crossings, airports, seaports. But what’s important here, just like in an airport, a detector is not effective on its own. It takes people. It takes training. It takes other capabilities along with it.”
