Nuclear Threat Initiative IV - How It Went During Obama's Administration: Part Three
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries you might find interesting, see the Archive.
President Obama’s second Global Nuclear Security Summit was held in Seoul, South Korea on March 26-27, 2012. Even more countries, fifty-three, attended this one. As with the first one, the purpose was developing ways of cooperating to locate and secure nuclear weapons and stocks of the fissile fuel required to make them.
I wasn’t seeing much news about these Summits. If the news is, as one of William Randolph Heart’s editors once said, “anything that makes a reader say, 'Gee whiz!"', I don’t suppose there would have been a lot of of that in these Global Nuclear Security Summits.
Also in 2012, the same year as the second Summit, NTI and an international group called Economist Impact established an “index” that ought to help here, called the Nuclear Security Index. The index would rank countries around the world in terms of the security of their nuclear materials. The Index set one kilogram of weapons-grade fissile fuel—Highly Enriched Uranium or Plutonium—as the amount that doesn’t rule out the material’s use in a nuclear weapon. One kilogram, that’s all. A quart of milk just a little less than that. They determined that twenty-two countries now had more than one kilogram.
The Nuclear Security Index would also monitor radioactive materials, which is different from fissile fuel. Any countries that have nuclear power reactors in them—there were more than thirty at the time the index was released—will possess radioactive materials in any spent fuel rods from these reactors. Some countries might have bought radioactive materials from other countries for, say, research and medical uses. They do have important uses for this.
But radioactive materials are their own problem. They can’t be used to make a nuclear weapon but they can be poisonous. More like chemicals that can be used for weapons, then. Like chlorine. But with a lethality that can be more long-lasting. They can be used to make what are called “dirty bombs,” bombs that use conventional or other means to spread around radioactive materials that will be dangerous for quite a while.
What would you do, do you think, if a dirty bomb was detonated where you live?
NTI published its sixth edition of the Nuclear Security Index in July 2023. The 280-page report found that since the previous report conditions had deteriorated.
The 2023 NTI Index finds a host of troubling developments. Among them, countries and areas with weapons-usable nuclear materials and nuclear facilities have made almost no progress since 2020 toward improving security culture and insider threat prevention; stocks of weapons-usable plutonium at civilian nuclear facilities have grown rapidly; 34% of countries and areas with nuclear facilities have no regulatory requirements in place for protecting nuclear infrastructure during a natural or human-caused disaster; in those same countries and areas, support for political and legal commitments to improve security is faltering; support for the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—the world’s leading agency with a mission to prevent nuclear proliferation and strengthen the global framework for nuclear safety and security—is inconsistent; and minimal progress has been made on securing radioactive sources against those who might steal them to build radioactive dirty bombs.
So losing ground here since President Trump had been elected. That’s too bad. The report also shows, then, that in one crucial respect no progress toward elimination of nuclear weapons had been made since the founding of the Index. Before you can eliminate the weapons, you have to create the conditions that allow for elimination.
Perhaps we can say that the establishment of the Index itself has shown progress. It at least lets us know whether, not yet having eliminated nuclear weapons, conditions in this area of “nuclear security” are improving or deteriorating.
President Obama’s third Nuclear Security Summit was held at The Hague in The Netherlands March 24-25, 2014. This one was attended by fifty-eight “world leaders,” some five thousand “delegates’ and some three thousand journalists. President Obama and the Chinese President Xi Jinping both attended. Security was massive, as you can imagine.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin did not attend. A few weeks earlier, Russia had stealthily invaded and annexed Crimea. That might be why.
After this summit, progress could be reported. Since 2009, twelve countries worldwide had removed all highly enriched uranium from their territory. Those countries called on all the other countries to remove any HEU they had from their countries by the final summit, in 2016. The countries that had already done so agreed to help the others get there.
Another tough issue when it comes to elimination: How do you verify it?
NTI set up a significant new initiative to help here. With President Obama’s Department of State they led a group of more than twenty-five countries in, as their Annual Report put it, “imagining, devising, and formalizing the methods and technologies to facilitate future multilateral efforts to verify the elimination of nuclear weapons.” In July 2014, four months after the third Nuclear Security Summit, NTI released four reports in a series called Innovating Verification: New Tools & New Actors to Reduce Nuclear Risks. In December 2014, they formed a partnership called the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification.
The challenges here were, well, challenging. The Partnership would have to assess “monitoring and verification issues across the nuclear weapons lifecycle.” Not just the lifecycle of the weapons but of the processes that produce the fissile fuel necessary for them. They would be embarking, then, on an international process “to assess verification gaps, develop collaborative technical work streams and contribute to overall global nuclear threat reduction.”
They recognized that they would in their work be able to build “on the U.S.-Russia monitoring and verification experience, the U.S.-UK Program on Nonproliferation and Arms Control Technology, and the UK-Norway Initiative on Nuclear Warhead Dismantlement Verification.”
If you’d like to get a sense of just how complicated the process of verifying the dismantling of a nuclear weapon would be, you can check out this graphic step-by-step account IPNDV developed of what would be involved. Scroll down the page a bit to get to the graphic.
Now that these weapons had been brought into the world, getting them out of it would not be a simple process. Not impossible, but not simple. Especially if you didn’t trust one other.
It may take a leap beyond what seems simply “safe.” The writer Ernest Hemingway once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries you might find interesting, see the Archive.