Overview
	Technical Background
The Threat   The Threat in Russia & NIS   The Global Threat   The Demand for Black Market Fissile Material   Anecdotes of Insecurity
	Securing Nuclear Warheads and Materials
	Interdicting Nuclear Smuggling
	Stabilizing Employment for Nuclear Personnel
	Monitoring Stockpiles
	Ending Further Production
	Reducing Stockpiles

 

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Previous Publications
	Funding for U.S. Efforts to Improve Controls Over Nuclear Weapons, Materials, and Expertise Overseas: Recent Developments and Trends February2007 Readthe Full Report (1.5M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb 2006 The latest report in our series, from May 2006, finds that even though the gap between the threat of nuclear terrorism and the response has narrowed in recent years, there remains an unacceptable danger that terrorists might succeed in their quest to get and use a nuclear bomb, turning a modern city into a smoking ruin. Offering concrete steps to confront that danger, the report calls for world leaders to launch a fast-paced global coalition against nuclear terrorism focused on locking down all stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials worldwide as rapidly as possible. Read the Executive Summary (379K PDF) or the Full Report (1.7M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb 2005: The New Global Imperatives Our May 2005 report finds that while the United States and other countries laid important foundations for an accelerated effort to prevent nuclear terrorism in the last year, sustained presidential leadership will be needed to win the race to lock down the world’s nuclear stockpiles before terrorists and thieves can get to them. Read the Executive Summary (281 K) or the Full Report (1.9M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb: An Agenda for Action Building on the previous years' reports, this 2004 NTI-commissioned report grades current efforts and recommends new actions to more effectively prevent nuclear terrorism. It finds that programs to reduce this danger are making progress, but there remains a potentially deadly gap between the urgency of the threat and the scope and pace of efforts to address it. Download the Full Report (1.2 M PDF) Выписки из доклада по-русски (423K PDF)
	Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan 2003 report published by Harvard and NTI measures the progress made in keeping nuclear weapons and materials out of terrorist hands, and outlines a comprehensive plan to reduce the danger. Download the Full Report (2.7M PDF)
	Securing Nuclear Weapons and Materials: Seven Steps for Immediate Action 2002 report co-published by Harvard and NTI outlines seven urgent steps to reduce the threat of stolen nuclear weapons or materials falling into the hands of terrorists or hostile states. Read the Full Report (516K PDF)

Introduction: The Threat

The Threat in Russia and the Newly Independent States of the Former Soviet Union

Locking Down Nuclear Stockpiles in Russia

The danger of nuclear theft is not a Russia problem, it is a global problem.  Highly enriched uranium (HEU) or separated plutonium exist in some 40 countries around the world, with widely varying levels of security.

But there are good reasons why post-Soviet Russia remains a focus of concern.  Russia has the world’s largest stockpiles of both nuclear weapons and the materials to make them, scattered among hundreds of buildings and bunkers at scores of sites.  Over the past 15 years security for those stockpiles has improved from poor to moderate, but there remain immense threats those security systems must confront.

Given the tightly controlled nature of Soviet society, there had been no expectation that there would be terrorist teams operating on Soviet territory, and therefore the need to protect against armed outside attack on nuclear facilities in peacetime had been modest.  Similarly, little investment had been made in Soviet times in technical systems to protect against insider theft threats, as nuclear insiders were carefully screened, well compensated, and closely watched: if they did steal something, they could not meet with a foreigner or leave the country in an attempt to sell it without being very closely monitored by the KGB.

For these reasons, when the Soviet Union collapsed, most nuclear facilities did not have any detector at the door that would set off an alarm if plutonium or HEU were being carried out (known as "portal monitors"); most did not have security cameras in the areas where the plutonium and HEU were stored and handled; there was an accounting system intended primarily to monitor facilities’ performance in meeting their production quotas, never intended to be able to detect nuclear material thefts; the padlocks on doors into nuclear material areas were often of types that could be cut in seconds using a bolt-cutter from any hardware store; and wax seals—the same technology Louis XIV used to seal his letters—were still in wide use to indicate whether containers had been tampered with or vaults opened (allowing any worker with an authorized stamp to break the seal, remove material, and replace the seal with an identical one without detection).

Moreover, funding to maintain nuclear security systems plunged in the years following the Soviet collapse, leading to gaping holes in security fences, alarm systems that no longer worked, and the like—situations that in several cases were, in fact, exploited by individuals who stole HEU or separated plutonium.  In one case in which a naval officer walked through a giant hole in the fence at a naval base, snapped the padlock on a shed, put several kilograms of HEU in his backpack, and walked off without detection, the military prosecutor concluded that "potatoes were guarded better."[2] Even then-Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Evgeniy Adamov acknowledged in 1998 that "the weakening of our ability to manage nuclear material has been immeasurable."[3]  In 1996, the U.S. Director of Central Intelligence testified that weapons-usable nuclear materials "are more accessible now than at any other time in history—due primarily to the dissolution of the former Soviet Union and the region's worsening economic conditions," and that none of the facilities handling plutonium or HEU in the former Soviet states had "adequate safeguards or security measures" in place.[4]

For a more detailed discussion of nuclear security conditions in Russia in the 1990s, see Box 1: Hanging on After the Soviet Collapse.

Improved Nuclear Security Systems Facing Deadly Threats

In addition, U.S.-Russian cooperative efforts to improve security and accounting for nuclear stockpiles have made a dramatic difference at many sites, providing greatly improved fences and barriers, intrusion detectors, access control systems, material accounting equipment, and more.  (For specifics, see our pages on Material Protection, Control, and Accounting and Warhead Security.)  As of the end of Fiscal Year 2005, U.S.-funded comprehensive upgrades were completed for 54% of the buildings with weapons-usable nuclear material in the former Soviet Union (including all of the buildings in the non-Russian states).  Rapid upgrades, such as bricking over windows and installing nuclear material detectors at exits, have been completed for a modest number of additional nuclear material buildings and a substantial number of additional warhead sites.  Upgrades at warhead sites have gotten a slower start, but are catching up: those upgrades the two sides considered to be needed (comprehensive upgrades at most permanent warhead sites, only rapid upgrades at some temporary sites) had been completed for 48 warhead sites, which we estimate represents some 40% of the total number of sites, as of the end of FY 2005.  The European Union and a number of European countries have also funded projects to improve nuclear security and accounting in the former Soviet Union, but these have been at a far smaller scale than the U.S.-funded efforts.

At the same time, Russia has taken steps to strengthen nuclear security on its own—though these appear to be only limited initial steps toward putting in place the security measures that are needed to meet today’s threats.  During 2005-2006, the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency (known by its Russian name Rosatom) continued a series of in-depth inspections of physical protection and nuclear material accounting at Rosatom sites (launched with U.S. funding), uncovering a wide range of problems and weaknesses which the inspection teams then began to help sites address.[5]  The Russian government completed a new basic regulation on nuclear security, which will take a more graded approach to protecting different types of nuclear materials, and will for the first time require facilities to have defenses adequate to protect against an identified design basis threat (DBT)—though as of the fall of 2006, the new rules were not yet issued.[6]  Russia announced new budget allocations for nuclear safety and security, but little public information on specific spending for security was made available.[7]  Finally, a number of sites invested in improved security measures themselves, to comply with Russian regulations.

As a result of this combination of U.S., international, and Russian efforts, the most egregious nuclear security weaknesses of the early 1990s have largely been fixed, even at sites where U.S.-funded security upgrades have not been completed.  It is unlikely that there are any remaining facilities in Russia that are not adequately protected against the minimal theft threats that succeeded in the mid-1990s—a single outsider walking through a gaping hole in a fence, snapping a padlock on a shed, stealing HEU, and retracing his steps without being noticed for hours, or a single insider with no particular plan repeatedly removing small amounts of HEU and walking out without detection. [8]

But the threat of nuclear theft remains substantial, as significant security weaknesses remain at a variety of sites, and even the upgraded security systems being installed with U.S. assistance are unlikely to be able to defend against the huge threats terrorists and criminals have shown they can pose in today’s Russia.

Russia remains the only country where senior officials have confirmed that terrorists have carried out reconnaissance at nuclear warhead storage facilities.[9]  In late 2005, Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev, in charge of the troops that guard most key nuclear facilities in Russia, confirmed that in recent years "international terrorists have planned attacks against nuclear and power industry installations" intended to "seize nuclear materials and use them to build weapons of mass destruction for their own political ends."[10]  The scale of the threats terrorist groups in Russia pose has been demonstrated all too well in incidents like the 2004 attack by 32 terrorists on the school in Beslan and the 2002 takeover by 41 terrorists of a theater in Moscow—both of which involved well-trained terrorist teams armed with automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, and explosives, who launched carefully planned attacks with no warning and who were prepared to die for their cause.[11] Nor is that size of those attacks the upper limit: the Beslan attackers had acquired some of their weapons stockpile in a June 2004 raid on Russian Interior Ministry buildings and arms depots in the neighboring province of Ingushetia that involved at least 200 attackers and left some 80 people dead.  In that raid, the attackers, dressed in uniforms of the Russian Federal Security Service, Army intelligence, and other special police squads, overwhelmed local forces, who did not receive reinforcements from federal security service troops for several hours.[12]  (This is particularly distressing since the usual approach to security at nuclear facilities—including nuclear weapon storage sites—is to have a relatively modest defensive force on-site and to rely on reinforcements arriving in a timely way.)

The possibility of insider conspiracies to steal nuclear weapons or material—or to help outsiders do so—is no less alarming.  Corruption and insider theft of a wide range of valuables are endemic in today’s Russia.[13]  These problems have deeply penetrated into the military and the security and law enforcement services (including the interior ministry forces charged with guarding nuclear facilities); theft and sale of weapons, fuel, and other military property are commonplace.[14]  Indeed, the Russian Audit Chamber reportedly concluded that when submarines arrive at a Murmansk facility to be dismantled, 50% of their electronic components have already been stolen—and a gang war that led to several murders in Murmansk apparently focused on control of the lucrative trade in stolen sub parts.[15]  Even more disturbing, corrupt or ideologically converted law enforcement officers or security officials—again, including some from the interior forces that guard nuclear facilities—are believed to have directly contributed to some of the recent brutal terrorist attacks in Russia.[16]

The corruption case against former Minister of Atomic Energy Yevgeni Adamov is only one of many indicators suggesting that this corruption and insider theft has penetrated Russia’s nuclear establishment as well.  In April 2006, Russian police arrested a group of conspirators that included a foreman at the Elektrostal nuclear fuel fabrication facility—which processes large quantities of HEU every year—for stealing 22 kilograms of low-enriched uranium.[17]  Several of the mayors of Russia’s ten closed nuclear cities have been arrested or forced out either for corruption, or for helping to set up fraudulent tax schemes for Yukos and other businesses.[18]  An investigation by a team of American and Russian researchers uncovered extensive corruption, drug use, organized crime activity, and theft of metals and other valuable items at the Mayak plutonium and HEU processing facility in the closed city of Ozersk.[19]  In another case in 2003, a Russian businessman was offering $750,000 for stolen weapon-grade plutonium for sale to a foreign client.  Even though in this case the businessman linked up with scam artists and was caught, who can be confident that there is no one in Russia’s vast nuclear infrastructure who could be convinced to provide plutonium in return for $750,000?[20] While this and other past cases suggest that it has been very difficult to make the connection between Russians who may be willing to consider stealing material and terrorists such as those in al Qaeda who may want it, that too may be changing – as the businessman’s effort to secure material for a foreign client suggests.  It now appears that a significant fraction of the Afghan heroin crop is being smuggled through Russia on its way to European markets—creating crime linkages and transport routes from the heart of Russia to Afghanistan and Pakistan that might be exploited for nuclear smuggling.[21]  In short, the threat of insider theft is very real.

Continuing Weaknesses

At the same time, neither the personnel nor the equipment for protecting against these threats are yet what they should be.

Guard forces.  Low pay, poor conditions, and low morale undermine the effectiveness of Russia’s nuclear guard forces. Many nuclear guards in Russia are low-level personnel, often conscripts, with little understanding of the importance of what they are guarding—little realization that they are quite literally on the front lines of the global struggle to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.  While there has been an effort to shift from Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) troops guarding nuclear facilities to contract guard forces, the MVD troops remain the dominant guard force so far, and even Russian officials have complained that in some cases the contract forces are even less effective than the troops they replace.[22]  In a 2003 article, the director of security at one of Russia’s largest plutonium and HEU facilities reported that the guard forces at his site routinely fail tests of their ability to stop both outsider and insider thefts; that they often patrol without ammunition in their guns; that they are poorly motivated and trained; and that there are frequent corruption problems, making the guards themselves "the most dangerous internal violators."[23]  Incidents of brutal hazing and suicide remain troublingly common among those guarding Russia’s closed nuclear cities.[24] One recent indicator of the effectiveness of these cities’ guard forces would be funny if it were not so serious: in late 2005, a resident of the closed nuclear city of Lesnoy, site of a major nuclear weapon assembly and disassembly facility, dressed in combat fatigues and used a forged identification badge with the name and photograph of Chechen terrorist leader Salman Raduev to pass through three guarded checkpoints and gain access to the closed city.[25]  Obviously that city’s guards were not bothering to check whether people had legitimate passes to the city or not.

Nuclear material accounting.  Inadequate accounting of nuclear material in the past also means that it will never be possible to know for sure how much material may already have been stolen.  In his February 2005 testimony, CIA director Goss warned that in Russia "there is sufficient material unaccounted for so that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct a nuclear weapon," and pointed out that because some material was unaccounted for, he could not assure the American public that enough nuclear material for a bomb was not already in terrorist hands.[26]  Russia is still transitioning from its Soviet-era nuclear material accounting system, designed to monitor production, not to detect theft.  In essence, each facility measured its input and its output, and as long as the differences were small, they were written off as normal losses to waste—making it possible for careful thieves to steal nuclear material undetected day after day, as long as the individual thefts were small.  Over the decades of the Cold War, the few-percent uncertainties tolerated in this accounting system amount to many hundreds of bombs’ worth of material that cannot be reliably accounted for.  (To be fair, the U.S. nuclear material accounting system was also not good enough during much of the Cold War to rule out the possibility that nuclear material had been stolen: when the United States published its plutonium inventory in the mid-1990s, some two tons of plutonium was "material unaccounted for." Probably this represents material plated out on pipes, plutonium lost to waste, and overestimates of how much was produced in the first place, but no one can demonstrate conclusively that none of it was stolen.)

Today, at a number of sites in Russia where large quantities of nuclear material are processed every year, accounting has been much improved.  But at many sites, there are still vast numbers of containers of nuclear material built up over decades, and no one has yet had the time and resources to measure each one to make sure that it still contains the nuclear material that the paper records say it should.

Funding for nuclear security.  At the same time, security systems for Russia’s nuclear stockpiles remain severely underfunded.  Experts from Russian sites continue to describe immense difficulties in getting funding for physical protection or material accounting improvements the United States will not pay for.[27]  Indeed, representatives of two Russian sites recently independently estimated that the upgraded systems the United States is paying to install would only last five years after U.S. assistance is phased out if Russian support does not increase.[28]  In May 2005, the head of Eleron, the physical protection firm for the Russian atomic energy agency (known by its Russian name Rosatom), estimated that funding for nuclear security comes to only 30% of the need.[29]  In March 2005, the commander of the Ministry of Interior (MVD) troops for the Moscow district said that only seven of the critical guarded facilities in the district had adequately maintained security equipment, while 39 had "serious shortcomings" in their physical protection.[30]  This lack of funding persists even though the Russian government today, flush with revenues from high international oil prices and Russia’s continuing economic recovery, has the resources to finance its nuclear security systems alone—if the Russian government were to assign such security the priority it deserves.

Progress Since Bratislava

The accord on nuclear security reached at the February 2005 summit in Bratislava, Slovakia, between U.S. President George Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin has led to a significant acceleration of U.S.-Russian nuclear security cooperation, and heightened the dialogue on key subjects such as security culture and plans for sustaining security upgrades.  The interagency process the summit established, under Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman and his Russian counterpart (first Alexander Rumiantsev and now Sergei Kirienko) has helped push progress toward completing agreed milestones.  Soon after the Bratislava summit, Russian officials provided a list of additional nuclear warhead sites where they would permit security cooperation.[31]  By June 2005, in the bilateral group’s first progress report to President Bush and President Putin, the two sides had reached agreement on a joint plan to complete agreed sets of nuclear security upgrades at an agreed list of nuclear warhead and nuclear material sites by the end of 2008—though some nuclear material and nuclear warhead sites are not yet on the agreed list.[32]

Critical Issues Remaining

Remaining Nuclear Security Weaknesses.  Though the nuclear security improvements in Russia have been substantial, it is essential that policy makers and the public understand that there remains a dangerous gap between the threat facing nuclear stockpiles in Russia and the current security arrangements for those stockpiles.  In fact, the key nuclear security issues in Russia now have less and less to do with the specific percentages of buildings or materials covered by the various levels of cooperative security upgrades.  Instead, other crucial questions about international assistance for Russia’s nuclear security system are now moving into the foreground:

• Are the security upgrades enough, given the immense scale of corruption and insider theft of everything else in Russia, and the huge scale of the outsider terrorist threat?
• Is the human factor that is using these upgrades working, given reports of guards patrolling without ammunition in their guns, and staff propping open security doors for convenience?[33] 
• Will the upgrades be sustained after U.S. assistance phases out? 

The upgrades provided by U.S.-Russian cooperation are designed to be sufficient to protect against modest groups of armed outsiders, or one to two insiders, or both together.  While greater than the security levels maintained for nuclear stockpiles in some other countries, this security level is less than the threats that terrorists and criminals have shown they can pose in Russia, and less than what the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is now requiring its facilities to protect against—even though the threats to nuclear stockpiles are clearly lower in the United States at present.  (This is among the reasons why we do not describe sites with initial U.S.-funded upgrades completed as "secured," as the Department of Energy does). 

Moreover, the upgraded security and accounting equipment being installed with U.S. help will only provide high security if coupled with effective security staff and guard forces, which it is Russia’s responsibility to provide (though the United States can and does provide some equipment and training).  So far, as already noted, despite high-level statements of priority, Russia does not appear to be assigning remotely sufficient resources to maintain, operate, and eventually replace the modern security equipment now being installed with U.S. assistance.  Moreover, although Russia has announced that poorly trained conscripts will no longer be used for some key missions, such as the war in Chechnya, no similar commitments have been made for the guards at nuclear or other critical facilities.  Until Russia can be convinced to increase the priority assigned to nuclear security, continued U.S. assistance will be crucial to ensuring security for Russia’s nuclear stockpiles, and thus will remain an excellent investment in U.S. homeland security.

Inadequate Abilities to Recover and Intercept Stolen Material. Once stolen, nuclear material is extraordinarily difficult to find and recover—or to intercept as it moves across international borders.  The laws of physics limit what can be done—and most of the states of the former Soviet Union do not have the resources in place to do even what can be done.

Russia's capabilities to find and recover stolen nuclear material on its own territory—on the model of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) in the United States—are largely shrouded in secrecy.  The known arrests of nuclear thieves that have occurred have generally not been because of any nuclear search, but rather because some one involved in the theft, or some one the thieves tried to sell the material to, informed on them.  Russia has not made public what sort of capabilities in its national police and intelligence services are devoted to monitoring and blocking nuclear theft and trafficking.  The other former Soviet states are believed to have very little domestic ability to search for and recover stolen nuclear material.  Few of these states have units of their national police or intelligence forces dedicated to, and trained and equipped for, handling nuclear smuggling cases.

The borders of the former Soviet states stretch for tens of thousands of kilometers; there are hundreds of official border crossings, and thousands of other points at which borders can be crossed.  Millions of people and vehicles cross these borders every year.  Within the former Soviet Union, several of the key states have agreed on open borders with each other, greatly reducing controls on and inspections of traffic going between them.  As with MPC&A, in the non-Russian states of the former Soviet Union, procedures and approaches for customs and border control had to be built anew, as these states had never managed these functions for themselves before; many of the resulting customs and border patrol forces are still quite weak.  When the Soviet Union collapsed, none of the relevant border crossing points had nuclear detection equipment or personnel trained to use it; now a few do, but most still do not.  Corruption among these customs and border patrol forces has been endemic for much of the decade since the Soviet collapse.[34] 

For more on addressing this issue, see our section on Interdicting Nuclear Smuggling. 

The Underfunded and Oversized Nuclear Complex.  Any nuclear security system is only as good as the people who operate it.  As essential as efforts to improve security systems for warheads and materials are, these systems will only provide effective security if the people the system relies on are adequately paid, trained, motivated, and screened.  Therefore, it is critical to (a) help Russia reduce the size of its nuclear complex (both military and civilian) to a level it can afford to maintain safely and securely, including helping to provide alternative employment for the excess nuclear scientists and workers, and (b) work with Russia to ensure that the scientists, workers, and guards who remain as custodians of nuclear weapons, materials, and information are adequately compensated and controlled.  (From the U.S. point of view, shrinking the Russian weapons complex is also essential to reduce Russia’s substantial capability to fabricate new nuclear weapons, should circumstances change.[35])

Thus, the conditions that existed in Russia’s nuclear complex in the 1990s, with both workers with access to nuclear material and top weapons scientists going unpaid for months at a time, amid a burgeoning culture of crime and corruption, greatly heightened the proliferation dangers of the Soviet collapse; the improved economic conditions since then have reduced the danger, but corruption remains a severe problem, and the ongoing downsizing of Russia’s nuclear complex still means that thousands of people who have access to potential bomb material today know that they will lose their jobs before long.

Russia is a very different country than it was in the early to mid-1990s, when programs like ISTC and IPP were first established.  Initially, the idea was to fund useful civilian research with short-term grants to keep key weapons scientists from becoming desperate enough to sell their knowledge before the Russian economy recovered.  Although it took some time for key programs such as the ISTC to get up and running on a large scale, they played a critical role for many nuclear facilities and scientists.  For example, even before the worst of the 1998 Russian financial crisis, ISTC funding was covering at least a quarter of the salary funds available at the nuclear weapons design institute in the closed nuclear city of Sarov.[36]  In particular, under current programs the last plutonium production reactors (two in Seversk and one in Zheleznogorsk) and the reprocessing plants that support them will shut down in a few years (see Plutonium Production Reactor Shutdown), leaving thousands of nuclear workers out of work, in closed cities with few other opportunities.  The infrastructure to create alternative jobs or secure retirements for the excess nuclear weapons workers still likely to lose their jobs in the future has not yet been built.

In short, Russia today is a different country than it was in the mid-1990s, and the potential security threats posed by the economic and social conditions in its nuclear complex have changed—but very real risks remain.  For more on the situation in the 1990s, see Box 2: The Soviet Collapse through the 1998 Russian Financial Crisis. The remaining dangers appear to be less from desperate scientists still in place who would be willing to provide sustained help to another state trying set up a complete nuclear weapons program, and more from those scientists, technicians, and security personnel who have lost their jobs or see they are about to, who still might have access to nuclear material, and who might provide assistance to a state or non-state group trying to acquire a single bomb.[37]  (Of course, the international proliferation network led by Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan, who had a very comfortable lifestyle and was nationally revered, shows that there may always be those who are not desperate but would still seize opportunities for greater wealth through illicit collaboration.)

These changed circumstances require a rethinking of approaches to these programs, and this is taking place.  Overall, in the former Soviet Union there is an increasing shift away from short-term grants to tide individuals over until better times, toward efforts to build sustainable commercial employment for former nuclear weapons scientists and workers.  Yet the creation of sustainable commercial jobs remains a difficult and slow enterprise, particularly in locations as remote, and with as little experience competing in the global economy, as Russia’s closed nuclear cities.  At the same time, relatively short-term grants supporting useful scientific investigation can be an important tool to keep former Soviet scientists connected to Western scientists and scientific activity, and to open up facilities to Western access and interaction.  Indeed, such relationships may well help to reduce the willingness of former Soviet scientists to collaboration with proliferation-sensitive states or non-state groups for reasons other than the monetary value of the assistance.[38]

For more on this topic, see our pages on programs working to Stabilize Employment for Nuclear Personnel.

Secrecy.  All of these changing security conditions exist within a nuclear complex that remains shrouded in secrecy.  Of course, there are many nuclear secrets which must be protected to prevent proliferation and avoid revealing vulnerabilities.  But the scale of nuclear secrecy that still exists in Russia goes well beyond those requirements, reflecting the legacy of decades of Communist obsession with secrecy, and centuries of tsarist secrecy before that.

After a period immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union when a substantial amount of new information was released, and Russia seemed positively inclined to pursue nuclear transparency, the opponents of nuclear openness in Russia appear to have regained the upper hand.  This pervasive secrecy – symbolized by the arrest and trial of individuals such as Alexander Nikitin, Gregory Pasko, and Igor Sutiagin on espionage charges, for helping to compile publicly available information – poses substantial barriers to cooperation to improve security, and even more fundamental obstacles to the kinds of monitoring and openness that would be required to verify deep reductions in nuclear warhead stockpiles.  The increased concern over nuclear terrorism has led to even tighter controls over nuclear information.

An enormous range of nuclear issues remain shrouded in secrecy, not subject to any form of international verification or cooperation.  It is not widely understood, for example, that arms control agreements to date have focused only on delivery vehicles and launchers; once warheads were removed from delivery vehicles, there has been no requirement that they be dismantled, or even accounted for.  The United States has never verified the dismantlement of a single Russian nuclear warhead, or provided a penny of assistance directly for warhead dismantlement.  Nor has Russia ever been permitted to verify the dismantlement of a single U.S. warhead.  Nor have the two countries ever told each other how many warheads they now have, how many they plan to retain under future arms control agreements, or how large their stockpiles of fissile material are (though Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin agreed to such a stockpile data exchange in September, 1994).

Indeed, excessive secrecy is a barrier that both countries, not just Russia, must address. In both the United States and Russia, for example, the total number of nuclear weapons in the stockpile—to say nothing of the breakdown by specific types—remains a closely guarded secret, though revealing these figures could not possibly undermine either country’s security.  In the United States, at least some substantial first steps have been taken toward eliminating unnecessary Cold War secrecy: large areas of the nuclear facilities have been opened to visitors, vast arrays of safety-related information has been made public, and a number of important facts about the stockpile – the total quantity of plutonium (and the breakdown of this plutonium stock by location, grade, and form), the average isotopics of plutonium used in weapons, the number of nuclear weapons dismantled year by year, and the history of the HEU stockpile – have been declassified and made available both to the public and to Russia and other foreign powers.[39]  (With the September 11 attacks coming on the heels of increased information controls following the scandals over alleged Chinese nuclear espionage,there are virtually no prospects for further reductions in nuclear secrecy; [40] indeed, an enormous amount of information that was previously publicly available has been removed from the Department of Energy website since the September 11 attacks, much of it very useful to informed public debate and of limited interest to terrorists.)  All of this information remains secret in Russia, and access even to the cities surrounding the facilities where nuclear weapons work is done remains closely controlled.   No American, for example, has ever set foot in the plants where nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly work takes place in Russia.  Restrictions on access and information at other facilities are so far-reaching that in some cases it has been impossible to judge which buildings at a facility require security upgrades, as the Russian experts at the facility cannot openly provide accurate information on what types of materials the buildings contain; in some cases, even the location of the building or facility to be upgraded is considered a state secret.

As a result, U.S. estimates of the size of the Russian warhead stockpile are officially judged to be uncertain to plus or minus 5,000 warheads, estimates of the size of the Russian fissile material stockpile are uncertain to more than a hundred tons, and assessments of the security situation at individual facilities are based on information that ranges from nearly complete to virtually nonexistent.

Excessive Stockpiles and Continued Production.  With the end of the Cold War, Russia and the United States both have far more nuclear warheads than they could possibly need, and far more plutonium and HEU than needed even to support those bloated warhead stockpiles.  According to unclassified estimates, the United States still possesses approximately 10,000 assembled nuclear weapons (counting both strategic and tactical weapons, both those deployed and those in reserve), and plans to retain some 6,000 of these, along with enough plutonium and HEU weapons components to build thousands more, even when the Moscow Treaty is fully implemented.[41]  The United States has an estimated stockpile of nearly 100 tons of separated plutonium and some 705 tons of HEU.[42]  Russia is believed to have some 16,000 nuclear warheads remaining, along with huge stockpiles of plutonium and HEU.[43]  These remaining plutonium and HEU stockpiles on both sides would be sufficient to support a rapid return to Cold War levels of armament.  It is this fact, combined with the risks of nuclear theft posed by maintaining such vast stockpiles in readily weapons-usable form, that makes disposition of nuclear materials an important security issue for the United States.

Yet in Russia, production of new weapons plutonium continues, at a rate of approximately a ton per year – not because Russia needs or is using the plutonium for new weapons, but because the reactors that produce it also produce essential heat and power for nearby communities.  (See Plutonium Production Reactor Shutdown.) Similarly, Russia’s civilian spent fuel reprocessing enterprise continues to operate at the RT-1 plant at Mayak, separating somewhat more than a ton of reactor-grade (but weapons-usable) plutonium each year to add to the 40-ton stockpile already in storage[44] –again, not because there is any need for this plutonium, but because the contracts for this work from foreign countries with Soviet-designed reactors keep nuclear workers gainfully employed (though these contracts are slowly running out).

Finally, there is the problem of what to do with the enormous excess stockpiles of plutonium and HEU in the long run.  With HEU, the answer in general terms is straightforward (though implementation has been anything but): it can be blended with other forms of uranium to produce non-weapons-usable low enriched uranium, which is a valuable commercial product as fuel for nuclear power reactors.  This is being done, in the U.S.-Russian HEU Purchase Agreement, but at a rate of only 30 tons per year, and there are no plans to eliminate more than 500 tons of Russia's HEU stockpile, leaving half or more of the stock remaining.  (See The HEU Purchase Agreement.)  Plutonium can also be blended with uranium to produce fuel, but because of the special handling procedures required by plutonium’s radiotoxicity and proliferation hazard, doing so is more expensive than simply buying equivalent low-enriched uranium fuel on the open market, even if the plutonium itself is considered "free."  Moreover, in contrast to the situation with uranium, simply blending the plutonium does not solve the proliferation problem, as virtually all mixes of plutonium isotopes are weapons-usable, and plutonium mixed with uranium can be chemically separated from the uranium without great difficulty, at least until has been irradiated in a reactor.[45] Here, too, cooperative efforts are underway to burn excess plutonium as reactor fuel, but the obstacles are so great that even if current plans succeed, it will be years before the process even begins, and it will then take more than a decade to burn 34 tons of excess plutonium on each side – roughly one-fifth of the total Russian separated plutonium stockpile.  (See U.S. Plutonium Disposition and Russian Plutonium Disposition.)

Shifting U.S.-Russian Relations

Meeting the challenge of securing nuclear stockpiles in Russia in the coming years will require coping with a souring in broader U.S.-Russian relations.  Many in the United States have seen a wide range of President Putin’s recent moves as steps to centralize power and disenfranchise the opposition, creating a creeping authoritarianism.[46]  President Putin and some of his security services chiefs have accused the United States and other Western powers of interfering in Russian politics and attempting to foment a revolutionary uprising on the model of that which occurred in Ukraine.  The United States and many governments in Europe have protested what they see as crude economic and political pressure by Russia on its neighbors, while Russia has voiced distress that United States and Europe are interfering in Russia’s historic sphere of influence.  Some politicians in the United States and elsewhere have called for Russia to be expelled from the Group of Eight (G8) industrial democracies (which Russia is chairing this year).[47]  While Russia and the United States have cooperated more closely than ever before on confronting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Russia remains deeply concerned that the United States is heading toward another war on its southern borders.

Moreover, with a growing economy and a government budget in surplus, Russian officials have made clear that Russia will no longer tolerate being treated as a weak country desperate for assistance.  In recent years, Russian officials have taken a noticeably tougher line in a wide range of threat reduction negotiations – at precisely the moment when support for flexibility in taking Russia’s interests into account in Washington was weakening.  At the same time, the resurgence of the Russian security services under Putin’s leadership, and their omnipresent control over any foreigners involved in nuclear issues, has made cooperation more difficult.

While this downward trend in relations has not yet led to any major halts in threat reduction cooperation, the negative atmosphere has created greater hurdles to cooperation, and particularly to building the kind of genuine nuclear security partnership that is urgently needed to build effective nuclear security that will last for the long haul.[48]  

Locking Down Nuclear Stockpiles in the Former Soviet States Outside Russia

In those former Soviet states other than Russia that inherited weapons-usable nuclear material, U.S.-funded security and accounting upgrades were completed in the late 1990s, though some further improvements have been made since then.[49]  As in Russia, it is unlikely that a single outsider or a single low-level insider could any longer steal nuclear material without detection from any of these facilities.  The three questions asked above about Russia, however—are the upgrades enough to meet today’s threats, are human operators using the upgraded systems correctly and taking security seriously, and will high security be sustained—all apply here as well.  Indeed, the question of the adequacy of the upgraded security systems is particularly troubling here, as these facilities have only been upgraded to meet rather vague International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recommendations—a security standard significantly lower than the upgrades being implemented in Russia are designed to meet (which, in turn, is lower than the new DOE standards, as noted above).[50] 

At the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Uzbekistan, for instance, the Department of Energy (DOE) declared that it had completed upgrades in 1996.[51]  It then did so again in 2000, when further upgrades were implemented to meet revised IAEA recommendations.  Yet given the presence in Uzbekistan of an armed Islamic movement closely linked to al Qaeda, and the political unrest that resulted in the government’s brutal clampdown in Andijon, the capital, in May 2005, this facility remained a top priority for removing the HEU entirely.[52]  Fresh HEU fuel was in fact removed from the facility in September 2004, and DOE completed sending back to Russia a large stockpile of slightly irradiated HEU fuel from this facility in April 2006.[53]  The shipment of irradiated HEU from Uzbekistan, in particular, represented a major milestone in the effort to send Soviet-supplied HEU back to Russia, finally getting past the bureaucratic obstacles to implementing such shipments under the terms of Russia’s spent fuel import law that had delayed the effort for years. 

Also during the past year, a cache of 2.5 kilograms of fresh HEU was returned to Russia from Latvia,and discussions continued with Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan about returning their HEU stocks to Russia or blending them down.[54]  Perhaps most impressive, Kazakhstan blended down some 2.9 tons of HEU left over from its closed Aqtau breeder reactor, in a private-government partnership financed by the Nuclear Threat Initiative.  This operation eliminated the danger that this material could ever be used in bombs without complex re-enrichment.[55]

A Still Dangerous Legacy

In short, nuclear security in the former Soviet Union has notably improved in recent years, as a result of economic stabilization, Russia's own efforts to upgrade security, and U.S.-Russian cooperative programs.  But grave nuclear risks remain.  A decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nearly half of the buildings with potentially at-risk nuclear material and the sites with potentially at-risk nuclear weapons still do not have even U.S.-funded "rapid upgrades" of security and accounting systems in place; these stockpiles remain scattered at a far larger number of buildings and sites than are actually needed;  thousands of nuclear weapons workers will soon be laid off, with little infrastructure in place to provide alternative employment for them; weapons plutonium and weapons-usable civilian separated plutonium continue to be produced, adding to an already massive nuclear material stockpile; only a fifth of Russia's HEU stockpile has been destroyed; and virtually none of the plutonium stockpile has been destroyed.  Urgent action is needed to accelerate the effort to address these remaining nuclear risks.

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Written by Matthew Bunn. Updated by Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier on 2 October 2006.

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The Securing the Bomb section of the NTI website is produced by the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) for NTI, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of and has not been independently verified by NTI or its directors, officers, employees, agents. MTA welcomes comments and suggestions at atom@harvard.edu. Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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