Plutonium Plunder: Nuclear Smuggling is on the Rise

The Boston Sunday Globe
September 4, 1994, p. 65

This summer, the German police are suddenly reporting a flood of nuclear smuggling cases. Small amounts of nuclear material have leaked out of the former Soviet Bloc since 1991, but these latest reports are unprecedented. For the first time, more than half a pound of weapon-useable plutonium turned up–confiscated August 10 in the Munich airport on a flight from Moscow. And in May, the German police had found a small amount of exceptionally pure Russian plutonium in Tengen-Wiechs and launched an unfruitful search for 100 to 150 kilograms more, rumored to have gone from Greece to Switzerland.

It took only six kilograms of plutonium -not even thirteen pounds — to produce the world’s first nuclear explosion in 1945. If that much or more is now circulating on the black market, the world will have to rethink its security. The trillion-dollar shield that the Pentagon built against the Soviet Union is no protection against nuclear terrorists. In fact, if nuclear weapon material is now leaking out of Russia, the Soviet arsenal will have entered its most dangerous phase.

The Iraqis were the suspected buyers of the material found in May. If Saddam Hussein starts getting warhead quantities of plutonium under the table, he will completely defeat the current UN monitoring effort, mounted at great cost, to keep Iraq’s industry from going back into the bomb business.

Iran is another potential customer. The Central Intelligence Agency openly accuses Iran of trying to build the bomb, and Iranian terrorist attacks are growing. If Iranian-linked terrorists can blow up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, it doesn’t take much imagination to see what they might do to Boston, New York or Washington with an atomic bomb.

And there is North Korea. If Pyongyang can set up a plutonium pipeline to Russia, it can agree to anything the State Department asks in the current talks and still build the bomb. International inspectors might be able to keep track of Pyongyang’s reactors and fuel rods, but they could never find a small cache of bombs made from clandestine imports. It would be like trying to find a dozen objects the size of a trash can in the state of New York.

Unfortunately, it is easier to build a bomb today than it used to be. From secret documents discovered in Iraq, we know the design of the bomb the Iraqis were building before the Gulf War in 1991. It was strikingly similar in size and configuration to the one China tested successfully in 1966 and gave to Pakistan in the early 1980s. After getting the design, Pakistan scoured Europe for the parts to fit it. U.S. government analysts speculate that China’s design probably became known to Pakistan’s suppliers, and through them to the Iraqis.

Thus, the design works–and is available. A nuclear-minded Iran or Iraq today starts its climb partway up the mountain. The main bottleneck has always has been the plutonium or enriched uranium needed to fuel the bomb. These two metals are the ones that explode in a chain reaction. Neither is easy to manufacture, and neither has been for sale on the black market–at least not before this summer. If the bottleneck is gone, or if it disappears soon, workable bombs could start showing up in rogue nations in a few years’ time.

How would they be delivered? Not by an intercontinental ballistic missile, as most people think. It takes time and money to miniaturize a warhead so that it fits on a long-range missile. And to be confident that the missile would hit its target, one has to test-fire it across thousands of miles of ocean.

The likeliest delivery methods are simpler. The most straightforward is to smuggle a bomb into a country in parts and assemble it on the upper floor of an office building. Bombs can be taken apart and put together safely. Or a bomb could be assembled in a van and driven across a nation’s border to its target. A bomb could also be put on a ship entering port or on a plane landing at an urban airport.

These “low-tech” delivery options have important advantages. One is cost. Vans, boats, airplanes and even office buildings are cheaper than ICBMs. And there is no question about whether a pre-positioned bomb will hit its target. But the main advantage is anonymity–avoiding detection and retaliation. It would be suicidal for a developing country to launch a missile from its own territory at the United States. But a bomb in a building or a boat or a van would not leave much evidence. A US president would never order a nuclear strike against another country without being certain where an attack had come from. This could be difficult to figure out from a hole in the ground. It took years to solve the mystery of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, despite the extensive physical evidence at the scene.

What conclusions should one draw from all this? First, there is no defense against nuclear weapons. This has been the view of every president from Truman to Carter. Only Ronald Reagan thought the American public was naive enough to swallow the “Star Wars” myth–that an anti-missile system in the sky could actually protect us. The truth is that if someone with a nuclear weapon wanted to deliver it to an American city and set it off, we probably could not stop it. That is, we couldn’t stop it unless we found out about it in advance.

This last point suggests that we should be spending our defense dollars differently. We need, for example, better intelligence gathering. Our intelligence on Iraq was dangerously thin before the Gulf War, and our intelligence now on North Korea is plainly inadequate. It is not acceptable to be told that North Korea is a closed society and therefore our government has no idea how close that country may be to making an atomic bomb. If we are going to protect ourselves, we will have to do better intelligence gathering.

We also need a strategy for dealing with the Russians. World safety requires that nuclear smuggling top the list of what President Clinton talks about with Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin. We also need to beef up U.S. customs capability to detect nuclear materials at our borders and to mount sting operations against smugglers.

The German cases are a warning. We know how many shipments the Germans caught. How many did they miss? Did 150 kilograms really go through Greece to Switzerland? All we know is that a stream of nuclear material is coming out of the former Soviet Union. We don’t know how wide or deep that stream is, or in which direction it is really flowing. Our security depends on finding out.