The
danger to humanity of
Russian nuclear weapons
By
Jonathan
Power
August 30, 2002
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
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
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link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
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"Like
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