Testimony to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
Subcommittee on European Affairs
August 23, 1995
Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and Director, Center for Science and International Affairs
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee:
It is a great honor for me to appear before your Committee today, and you personally, Senator Lugar. As many of you know, Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs has recently completed the draft of a major study attempting to examine the issue of loose nukes and loose nuclear weapons-usable material from the former Soviet Union.
Entitled "Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material, the study is co-authored by Owen Cote, Rich Falkenrath, Steve Miller, and me. At your committee's request, we prepared an advance summary of some of the findings from that study that bear directly on the subject of this hearing today, namely the shape of the nuclear threat to Americans.
Our report also assesses the current performance of the U.S. Government in attempting to address this threat and outlines a strategy of action more commensurate with U.S. stakes in this issue. I understand that those will be topics for subsequent hearings. I promised your colleague, Senator Nunn, that we would be certain to have the report finally completed before those hearings, which I understand may occur at the end of September. In fact, I was with him at a conference on this subject in California at which there were high officials and experts from the U.S. Government, as well as Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, attempting to explore alternative perspectives on the extent of the risks and the appropriateness of the current responses.
Senator Lugar: Dr. Allison, I would like to interject at this point, I appreciate your mentioning my colleague, Senator Nunn. He would be here with us today involved in this hearing if he were not involved in the conference you have just described. He is doing important work. We hope to be together in our partnership in the hearings you suggested late September and the rest of the fall.
Dr. Allison: I think he will have some interesting findings to report from that conference where cabinet-level officials from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus were quite candid about both what has been accomplished and what remains to be done.
You have already suggested that the advance summary of the findings will be submitted for the record. So, let me rather limit myself then to some briefer and more pointed introductory remarks.
Albert Einstein, the father of all of this mess in a way, had a saying that I like very much: things ought to be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. The subject that we are trying to explore today involves so many complexities and technicalities that one can get lost in the trees and indeed in the leaves and miss the forest.
The core of the big picture in my view can be reduced to two central questions:
- Question one: Is the assertion that has been made by you, Senator Lugar, and by your colleague, Senator Nunn, that the number one threat to U.S. security today is the threat of what I have called loose nukes and loose weapons-usable nuclear materials correct? Yes or no?
- Question two: If the answer is yes the threat of loose nukes is indeed the number one threat to American national security today are the current priorities, programs, budgets, and day-to-day activities of the U.S. Government and the Russian Government roughly proportionate to this number one challenge?
If one compares this threat to other international challenges, for example, Haiti, Bosnia, NATO expansion, Russian sale of reactors to Iran, peace process in the Middle East or the potential missile threat to the U.S. from third states, how much of the time and energy of the President of the United States, of the Secretary of State, of Secretary of Defense, of the leaders of the Senate and House, of Members of Congress, of voices in the press, and the community of foreign policy commentators is focused on this number one threat versus all of these other issues?
I think my answers to these two questions are suggested by the way in which I posed the questions. But stated bluntly, and clearly at the outset, my answers are: Yes, the threat of loose nukes and loose weapons-usable nuclear material is the number one threat to America's vital interest today. And no, measured by priorities time, or numbers of men and women working on this issue every day, or dollars, or energy the actions of the U.S. Government and of the Russian Government are not remotely proportionate to the problem and the challenge.
Since I have stated this judgment so starkly, I understand this will appear unfair or indeed unduly critical to some. So, please permit me a word on that concern.
Today, most Americans appear to have bought the reassuring, often repeated slogan that with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. faces no direct threat to American security, and specifically no nuclear threat.
Similarly, most Americans are skeptical today about any new government initiative, especially one that costs money, and most especially if it appears to represent some form of aid from American tax payers to foreign recipients.
In such an environment, even you Senator Lugar, and your colleague, Senator Nunn, and a few others efforts to fight to preserve the all-important Nunn-Lugar program at the current modest levels of funding are slipping backwards rather than forward. I salute you for those efforts and hope that you are more successful than current results in the four committees suggest.
A number of my former colleagues at the Department of Defense, a handful of individuals at the Energy Department, several key staffers in the White House, Jack Gibbons, and some of his associates, and others are working as hard as they can within the constraints set by current legislation and funding to reduce the risk of loose nukes, and they are making some progress.
While I applaud these efforts, stand back at a distance from this problem and consider. If this is the number one threat to American security, can it be appropriate to spend less than one percent of our defense effort on this subject? Indeed, current spending targeting this threat amounts to less than one-tenth of one percent of the funds Congress is allocating to provide for our American common defense. If this is the number one threat, are the number of individuals working daily on this problem, the time and energy of the leaders of our Executive Branch and our legislative Branch devoted to this, relative to say Bosnia or Iran or any other issue, or to any other appropriate measure of priority, roughly right? I think the answer is quite clear. The answer is no.
There is an old Pogo cartoon that says we searched for the enemy and the enemy is us. I think we who believe that this is the number one problem have so far failed to make plausible to our fellow citizens the magnitude and urgency of this threat.
As the scriptures say, if the trumpet sounds an uncertain call, who will respond to battle? Therefore, I applaud your own personal effort to make this threat real to the American people in terms that they can understand. I remain confident that if Americans do come to grasp the stakes that we have here, that in time they will support and indeed demand a greatly enlarged response.
So much for my introduction. Let me then summarize the major findings of our Harvard study in seven brief propositions. These propositions are, in the main, quite consistent with those that you have heard from the first two experts.
Proposition one. Loose Nukes the loss, theft, or sale of weapons-usable nuclear materials or nuclear weapons themselves is not a hypothetical threat. It is today a brute fact hard to ignore. In the past 4 years since the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the number of reported, suspected, and documented cases of diversion of weapons-usable nuclear material has been increasing steadily at a sharp pace.
Instance: Murmansk. One night in November 1993, a Russian naval officer entered a shipyard near Murmansk, located a building used for naval reactor fuel storage, removed fuel containing about 10 pounds of weapons-usable, highly-enriched uranium smaller than this can of Coca-Cola put the fuel in a bag and walked out of the shipyard the same way he came.
The officer had been briefed beforehand by his brother, a civilian employee of the shipyard. He was aware that the flimsy security protecting the substantial inventory of highly-enriched uranium fuel for naval nuclear reactors was easily penetrated. He penetrated it successfully, put the material in his garage and was searching for a buyer when Russian police caught him.
Second instance: Plutonium seized in Munich in August, 1994. Almost a pound of weapons- usable plutonium seized by German police at the Munich Airport. The plutonium had been carried in a suitcase on a flight from Moscow to Munich. Two passengers on the flight were arrested along with a third man in Munich who was the intended buyer.
This came about as a result of a sting operation organized by the German law enforcement agencies. There is no doubt that the plutonium came from Russia and that there would have been other buyers had the German Government not interrupted this sale.
John Holdren has already mentioned a third incident. HEU found in Prague in December of 1994: 6 pounds of highly-enriched uranium, two metal containers in the back seat of a Saab parked on a side street; a Czech nuclear scientist, a Russian and a Belarusian arrested in connection with the seizure.
If these examples leave any lingering doubt about this threat, consider the largest and most dramatic case in which the American Government purchased and removed about 1,000 pounds of highly-enriched uranium from Kazakhstan just last year material sufficient to allow a terrorist or rogue state to build a serious arsenal of 20 nuclear weapons.
In this case, when the Kazakh Government discovered the material that had been left at a former submarine fuel facility, it contacted the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government purchased this thousand pounds of highly-enriched uranium, took it, and brought it to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, paying for it an amount that has been reported to be about $20 million. $20 million paid; 20 weapons equivalents received; 20 potential terrorist weapons now safely protected at Oak Ridge. This threat is not hypothetical.
Proposition two. If a rogue actor a state like Iran or Iraq or Libya or Cuba, or a terrorist group like Hamas who exploded the weapon in Israel the day before yesterday, or a drug cartel obtained as little as 30 pounds of highly-enriched uranium, or less than half that weight in plutonium, they could produce a nuclear device in a matter of a month or two with design information that is publicly available, equipment that is readily available in the commercial market, and modest levels of technical competence found in graduates of any respectable engineering program. How much is 30 pounds of highly-enriched uranium or half that of plutonium? Tom Cochran's Coke can here could be filled with just such material.
I carry this briefcase with me everywhere, as you know from having seen me in other settings. In this briefcase, I carried today in addition to the pile of papers, first one softball. It is an American softball. If this softball were highly-enriched uranium, it would weigh 30 pounds. It fits in my briefcase quite well. Actually, I could carry several softballs of highly-enriched uranium in my case.
If we were talking about plutonium, enough plutonium to make a bomb, a second item in this same briefcase is more than enough. This is an American baseball. Several of them can fit alongside the softball very well. So the amounts of weapons-usable material involved, as Drs. Holdren and Cochran have already said, are very small. Once this amount of material is in-hand, the rest of the problem is relatively easy.
As Johnny Foster, the former Director of Livermore Lab, wrote in the Encyclopedia Americana more than 20 years ago: "If the essential nuclear materials like these are in-hand, it is possible to make an atomic bomb using the information that is available in the open literature.
Proposition three. If the terrorists who attacked the 110-story World Trade Center in 1993, or more recently last April, the Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City killing 162 men, women, and children, had used the same minivan they drove, but filled it not with the explosives they used, but rather with a weapon that started with this softball, what would have been the consequences?
They could have created an explosion of 10,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT which would demolish an area of about 3 square miles. I brought a couple of charts that my colleague, Matt, will display.
Here is Oklahoma City. The blue internal ring is the area that was demolished by the bomb that was used by the terrorists at the Federal Office Building. Had this same van carried this softball worth of highly-enriched uranium, this red area suggests that all of downtown Oklahoma City would have disappeared.
This second chart gives you Oklahoma City on a larger map. I don't think the television can show it. In fact, as we know from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the larger effects actually come from the fires that are set off by such an explosion, but this chart limits itself to damage done by the nuclear blast alone.
For those who live in New York, it is worth considering what would have happened if the terrorist van at the World Trade Center had carried just the softball or the baseball rather than the explosives that it carried. As chart three illustrates, lower Manhattan basically disappears, including the financial district up to Gramercy Park.
For those here in Washington, I think Tom Cochran has already made the point clearly. But the next chart shows Washington as a target area. Downtown Washington would not survive.
Proposition four. As the most open society in the world, the U.S. is also most vulnerable to nuclear terrorist attack. My personal bet is that we will not be the most likely first target. As I try to explain to my Russian friends, the threat of loose nukes is greater to them than it is to us, since Russia is an attractive first target.
I believe the Middle East offers the second most attractive target. But the United States is indeed the most open and therefore most vulnerable set of targets. If a rogue state or terrorist group acquired this softball of HEU, could they transport it to the U.S.? As one of my colleagues at Harvard likes to say, if they have any doubt, they could always wrap it in a bail of marijuana, since they know that can be delivered to any of our major cities.
How many uninspected packages arrive in the U.S. every day? The answer is literally millions. The irony will be if the first one of these softballs comes in a Federal Express package.
Proposition five. Why is this problem arising now? Why is this an urgent problem now, four decades into the nuclear age? What is new, or significantly worse about this problem, now?
As John Holdren has already indicated, your hearings yesterday answer this question. But it is hard for us to appreciate the depth of what is happening in Russia today. We are witnessing a historically unique and unprecedented event, whose consequences we still can't seem to take seriously.
Russia is a state in revolution: a genuine sinew-shaking transformation in its economy, its government, its society, every aspect of life. This revolution is shredding the fabric of a command and control society, in a state that houses a superpower nuclear arsenal and a superpower nuclear enterprise.
This ongoing Russian revolution is driven by the deepest and most powerful forces, none more important than individuals demand for freedom. As we watch the Russian reformers attempt to deconstruct what was actually a prison in which they lived for 70 years and create a society in which they can live free from the fear that was the backbone of Soviet society, we have to applaud.
But the same forces that are tearing down the old prison state are also liberating the individuals and systems charged with controlling more than 30,000 nuclear weapons that are still left there; more than 1,000 tons of highly-enriched uranium that remain in scores of locations; more than 100 tons of plutonium still there in place.
As you know, Senator, I go to Russia every several months on a project that I have been part of for 5 years now. I am in touch with Russian officials and friends every week. While I am optimistic about Russia, and hopeful about the current economic and political reforms, I note that in every other area of life, significant quantities of every other item of value have been "liberated, as people there often say. Individual entrepreneurs, new businessman, and criminals have seized assets for themselves and exported them for money.
Consider precious metals and ask how Estonia can be the second largest exporter of precious metals in the world when it produces no precious metals? Consider diamonds and ask how many show up in the gray market. Take gold. Take any other item of value. To date, we have no evidence that a nuclear weapon s equivalent of highly-enriched uranium or indeed a bomb itself has been successfully exported. But this is something for which I give thanks. We are living on borrowed time.
If when the first several weapons equivalents of highly-enriched uranium are discovered in the Middle East or indeed even here in the U.S., what will the pundits say? That this was obviously to be expected. It was inevitable. Anyone could see this was going to happen.
Proposition six. How big is this problem? My colleagues on this panel have already noted the more than 100 sites across Russia at which nuclear weapons can be found. I have brought a map of the Russian nuclear weapons archipelago: more than 100 sites over what is now one-seventh of the earth's land mass. There are an additional hundred sites at which there are significant quantities, that is numbers of bombs worth, of highly-enriched uranium or plutonium. So, we are talking about several hundred locations.
These locations include weapons storage depots. They include deployed weapons. They include research laboratories. They include abandoned research facilities. There are many, many different sites. This next chart is too dense, I think, for television viewers, but it offers a stylized overview of the Russian nuclear complex. It is worth walking through. As you can see, it is a virtual spaghetti chart. First one has to mine the uranium. Then you have to refine it. Then you assemble weapons. You then have stockpiles, deployment, and maintenance. As one dismantles weapons, one dismantles components. Then highly-enriched uranium and plutonium must be safely stored.
If one takes as a defining example the case that we know best, namely Project Sapphire, which removed more than 1,000 pounds of highly-enriched uranium from Kazakhstan, what was the story? This facility had been producing highly-enriched uranium for naval fuel in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Production ceased in the mid-80s when facilities elsewhere in Russia were producing sufficient amounts of submarine fuel to meet the Soviet navy's needs. The Soviet Union disappeared in the end of 1991. A thousand pounds of highly-enriched uranium remained in place at this facility in what became a newly-independent country. The Russian Government took no action to recover this material. Indeed, the best evidence suggests that the Russian Government was not aware that this material had been left there.
As the Kazakh national security adviser explained to us at this meeting that Senator Nunn and I were just attending in California, he and President Nazarbayev had no idea that this material was there. The new facility director discovered the material, and said, aha, here we have a thousand pounds of highly-enriched uranium.
As Secretary Christopher has testified publicly, the Iranian Government was in Kazakhstan actively pursuing this material. Fortunately, because of good relations between the Kazakh Government and the U.S. Government and effectiveness on both sides, this material is in Tennessee today rather than in Tehran.
This outcome is the result of hard work and very good fortune. It is not an isolated case. I believe that we will discover over time a number of additional facilities at which there are weapons equivalents of materials still left at sites that we and the Russian Government have still not identified.
In fact, in this Project Sapphire case, when the highly enriched uranium arrived at Oak Ridge, we found that we had 4 percent more material than we had purchased. I think this answers the earlier question about the reliability of current accounting procedures.
My seventh and final proposition. Is there anything we can do to prevent this? Or is this just inevitable? As John Holdren has suggested, and as I am sure Dr. Gibbons will testify, there are a large number of initiatives underway. Indeed, as the Co-Chairman of the Nunn-Lugar legislation, you know more about these initiatives than almost anyone.
There has been significant progress in the past year. I support all the current efforts. I support the recommendations of the Holdren committee for more money and more flexibility. But when I stand back and ask whether on the current track, at the current level of effort, we are going to get from here to there, I think the answer is clearly no.
In the light of our stakes, is the current program of action, level of effort, urgency of effort, timetable, and commitment of funds consistent with American vital national security interests? I think the answer is certainly no.
Our Report has a final chapter that states an agenda for action in a much more substantial
effort that would be undertaken by a government that really believed this was the number one
threat to American security today. But I understand that this is not the subject for today's
hearings. I look forward to the subsequent hearings you and Senator Nunn are planning where
that will be the focus of debate.
JFK School of Government, Harvard UniversityThis is a working document. Your comments and suggestions are encouraged. This page is maintained by Adrianne Kaufmann, e-mail at kaufmann@ksg1.harvard.edu Last Modified: April 9, 1996
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