Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
11/13/2015
A report released this week by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) calls on governments to address lax protection of military nuclear materials globally by bolstering physical security at nuclear facilities, sharing information on inventories and security procedures with international partners, and offering public commitments at next year’s Nuclear Security Summit on securing military materials.
The report, prepared by a group of officials from the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, and Pakistan, notes that over 1,800 metric tons of weapon-usable nuclear material is stored across 24 countries, some at inadequately secured facilities. Moreover, international accountability mechanisms apply to only 17 percent of all weapon-usable nuclear materials – those used for civilian applications – while the 83 percent that consists of military materials falls outside of global security standards and agreements. “Terrorists bent on stealing nuclear materials will not distinguish between nuclear materials designated as civilian and those designated as military,” the report says.
Study group member Andrew Bieniawski, vice president of material security and minimization at NTI, said by telephone that the report was the culmination of a 12-month effort by study group members. The advantage of the report, Bieniawski said, lies in the menu of material security options from which nations can choose measures that are “most applicable to them based on their national interest.” The recommendations apply to the nine countries that possess military nuclear materials, and are meant as a resource particularly for those in the Nuclear Security Summit process: China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, the U.S., and the U.K.
The report defines military nuclear materials as “weapons-usable plutonium and highly enriched uranium found outside civilian nuclear programs” that fall under both civilian and military control, depending on the country. To address the military materials security gap, the report recommends establishing training and procedures that develop security culture among personnel at facilities; regularly conducting facility vulnerability assessments, security reviews, and surveillance; bolstering cybersecurity measures; establishing insider threat mitigation measures; training nuclear facility protective forces; developing systems that track the transportation of nuclear materials; and minimizing the quantity of weapons-usable nuclear materials at facilities.
The report promotes unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral confidence-building measures. It encourages countries to unilaterally publish reports that account for the military material in national inventories, offer nonsensitive results of security incident investigations, and share information on physical protection procedures and nuclear security personnel training programs. NTI further urged countries to participate in international nuclear security peer reviews to exchange best practices and lessons learned, and to conduct joint materials security training exercises.
The report also recommends incorporating military nuclear materials concerns into the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit to be held at the end of March in Washington, D.C. Participating nations could do this by offering consensus statements “reaffirming the responsibility of each state to develop and maintain appropriate effective accounting and physical protection of all nuclear materials” and committing to existing international standards for securing materials, it says. “Countries with military materials should now consider forming a new multilateral technical level working group” to “exchange best practices, conduct training exercises, and share lessons learned related to military materials security,” the report suggests.
Asked about the potential consequences of increased information sharing, Bieniawski said mechanisms such as information-sharing agreements exist to prevent exploitation of data. “You can definitely build international confidence on the topic of military materials without disclosing any sensitive or classified information,” he said, noting that best practices exchanges could be conducted on an unclassified basis or through agreements that limit information to the countries directly involved. Bieniawski recalled a U.S.-Russian highly enriched uranium purchase agreement in which “we had access to sensitive Russian facilities, we had information-sharing agreements where that information was shared between the two parties and was kept as confidential, but it was not released to third parties or the public.”
