Putting Plutonium In Prison
By Jessica Mathews
Tuesday, February 4 1997; Page A15
The Washington Post
Three years ago, the National Academy of Sciences reported its unsettling answer to the question of what should be done with the tons of plutonium coming out of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that would be retired as the Cold War ended.
The surplus material, it said, "constitutes a clear and present danger to national and international security." Worse, it could find no options to remove the threat, only to reduce it. Worse still, the measures it did come up with would be achingly slow. They could not significantly reduce the threat for at least a decade and would take years longer to complete, leaving enough plutonium for tens of thousands of weapons on both sides for decades. Coping with plutonium was going to be a lasting security hangover of the Cold War.
One committee member -- reviewing the technological, environmental or cost drawbacks of option after option -- concluded, tongue-in-cheek, that maybe the safest course was to put the stuff back into nuclear weapons.
Events since then have underlined the academy's message. Iraq and North Korea showed that access to fissile material is generally the chief bottleneck in a covert weapons program, while conditions in Russia's collapsing nuclear empire -- where tons of plutonium sit in abysmally protected facilities, soldiers moonlight for food and technicians go unpaid for months at a time -- make sales or theft not unlikely.
Three other developments are worth noting. On the strategic front, START II is in deep trouble. Russia shows no interest in ratifying it, partly because of unhappiness over NATO expansion but also for the unassailable reason that in order to maintain equivalence with the United States, Moscow would have to spend billions it doesn't have to build new ICBMs to make up for weapons that START II would ban.
The answer is a formula that would fudge START II and go directly to a START III agreement of about 2,000, instead of 3,500, weapons on each side. But that, of course, would greatly increase the amount of plutonium to be dealt with.
It also has become clear that the two sides differ profoundly on what to do with separated plutonium. Russia sees the stuff as precious reactor fuel. The United States sees it as an enormous proliferation risk that would be better treated as waste and buried.
Finally, as the number of operational warheads has plummeted, focus has inevitably shifted to the fact that both SALT and START deliver less arms control than they seem to. The amount of weapons fuel in either country does not actually change a lot. Weapons above negotiated limits are stored as reserves. Some warheads are dismantled, but with the fuel cores still intact and in-country the possibility remains of a relatively quick and massive reversal. An agreement signed by presidents Clinton and Yeltsin in January 1994 to consider steps to make arms reduction irreversible has gone nowhere.
Analysts at the Rand Corp. have proposed a notion that could address all of these concerns. They suggest that SALT and START be followed by SMART -- Strategic Material Accelerated Removal Talks. The idea is to quickly move excess plutonium and highly enriched uranium out of both countries to a third-country site (they suggest Greenland), where it would be protected by a joint force and by engineered features that would make it easy to move material in quickly but hard to take it out (collapsing tunnels, dismantled railroad tracks, etc.).
While it would take years to negotiate, to construct the facility and to move the material, the authors estimate that at the end of a decade, 90 percent fewer potential nuclear warheads would be in both countries than in the case of either or both disposal options. That's a big enough difference to command attention.
The facility would be neither a graveyard, from which plutonium could never be withdrawn, nor a bank, from which it could easily be withdrawn, as most international storage plans propose. Rather, the SMART site would be a prison from which material could be removed but only at agreed rates and for agreed purposes, presumably civilian use. Thus it would take a giant step toward irreversibility, yet without having to confront the huge difference of view in Washington and Moscow over plutonium's final fate.
Would Russia ever agree? That probably depends on what financial incentives the United States might provide. Should the United States pay? Yes, if it would otherwise cost more to buy less security. If START II is not ratified, for example, the Pentagon estimates it will have to spend an additional $5 billion. SMART might be linked to a START III agreement.
If such a site could be agreed upon for excess weapons fuel, it also could house civilian plutonium until it becomes clear whether it will ever be needed for reactor fuel. The SMART prison could easily become a multilateral site as well, providing a resting place for the likes of North Korean, South Asian and Middle Eastern weapons fuel.
Any new idea as difficult as this one would be to negotiate is easy to dismiss. To take just one example, no country might want to house the site, even for the income and as a major service to world peace. However, SMART's potential benefits for both arms control and the vexing problem of plutonium management are great enough to warrant a close, hard look.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
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