LONDON – “A Russian scientist who worked on nuclear reprocessing has gone missing. Sergei Bakhvalov disappeared in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia on Sunday”. That’s all the Financial Times reported. Important enough to be on the front page. Obscure enough to have no further information or follow up. We are left to read between the lines and there is much to read. Ironically a day later newspapers gave prominent coverage to the reporting of a joint American, Russian, Yugoslav, UN mission to whisk away 45 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium from an ageing nuclear reactor in Yugoslavia in what was described as a “dramatic, military-style operation”. It was, supposedly, the first of a series of pre-emptive strikes against the threat of nuclear terrorism. According to the U.S. State Department two dozen research reactors in 16 countries are being considered as subjects of similar missions.
Fine. There is much to be done in countries all over the place in making sure that the raw material for nuclear bomb making is well secure. But the real problem lies in Russia. Without the expertise of Dr X the enriched uranium lying in Yugoslavia or elsewhere is probably not that much use. Is Mr Bakhvalov a Dr X and how many poorly paid Russian scientists desperate to feed and educate their families have already been tempted to abscond? And how many terrorists have already leapt over the fence, if there was even a fence, into one of Russia’s many poorly guarded, even unguarded, nuclear establishments? We don’t know the exact figures but we do know, as a bipartisan panel chaired by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler reported last year, that “the most urgent unmet national security threat to the U.S. today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-useable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists and hostile nation states.” This was written well before September 11th. Since then the U.S. intelligence community has confirmed to Congress that there has been such theft and according to Viktor Yerastov, chief of Russia’s nuclear materials accounting agency, enough has already been stolen to build an atomic bomb.
When in May presidents George Bush and Vladimir Putin signed their pact to reduce their active nuclear weapons to 2200 each by the year 2012 there was great applause both inside their countries and out. Yet it is in reality a most pernicious agreement that is only serving to make the present highly dangerous situation of Russia’s vulnerability to nuclear theft very much worse. The Bush administration for not very clever reasons signed this accord with the proviso it could keep double this number of warheads in reserve. Instead of the U.S. cutting its nuclear stockpile by over 5000, the cutback in effect will be only a modest 1,000, even though Washington argues that there is no longer a need to deter a Russian attack. The Russians now feel under pressure to do the same, even though it means for Putin he will have to order a whole brand new armoury of Russian nuclear weapons. Unlike America’s long-lasting nuclear warheads, Russia’s are an inferior short-life product and on current projections, if nothing is done to counteract natural obsolescence and wastage, Russia will have only 1,350 warheads by the end of this decade, against America’s 6,000.
The treaty has saddled Russia with two immense problems. First how to match America’s numbers at least somewhat, to save totally losing face. And secondly what to do with the roughly 84,000 kilograms of fissile material that will be stockpiled as its ageing fleet of rockets and bombers are dismantled.
Since the end of the Cold War the U.S. has been engaged with its old enemy in helping it secure Russian nuclear weapons- with everything from fences to alarm systems to response kits. Yet money has fallen short of American rhetoric- the Bush administration at one point even moved to cut the budget before having second thoughts- and on the Russian side there has been sensitivity about cooperating when it comes to manufacturing sites, although it has opened its doors to research and civilian sites. The security situation is already dire but if Russia does feel pressured to respond to U.S. policies and maintain a large number of up-to-date warheads in reserve and slows down the amount of fissile material meant to be neutralised there will be much more dangerous materials in various stages of processing and transport. And these are the two vulnerable points that would-be terrorists appear to be focussed on.
The nub of the problem is reciprocity. If the U.S. is to be allowed more access to Russian nuclear sites in order to help Russia dismantle its nuclear warheads, which given its inferior technology it has no alternative but to take out of service, then the U.S. has to open up its system for retiring warheads. The rub is that under the May deal it doesn’t have a significant one. Thus America has to choose between keeping in storage thousands of nuclear warheads that it has no imaginable use for (although they are sufficient to destroy every major city in the world) and an intense cooperative program to monitor the disablement of surplus Russian and American warheads. To pass up this opportunity and responsibility is to undermine the war on terrorism more effectively than America’s worst enemy could ever dream of.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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