Any chance of success in stemming the nuclear weapons proliferation threat from Iran will require international consensus on a firm strategy to change Tehran’s calculations of the costs and benefits. Meanwhile, having failed to stop North Korea’s nuclear proliferation, United States policy there emphasises containment. More broadly, the world is moving too slowly to take the measures required to address non-state proliferation and to secure the nuclear materials in Russia, which contributes to the threat of nuclear terrorism. For biological weapons, the best option is managing the consequences of an attack.
Three years ago, iraq, libya and india were among the most worrying countries as far as proliferation is concerned. Since then, they have all been taken off the list – by war, negotiated settlement and political redefinition. But looking ahead, other proliferation problems demand attention.
Iran is the world’s greatest proliferation challenge. In contrast to North Korea, where non-proliferation efforts have already failed, Iran might still be dissuaded from obtaining nuclear weapons, although the odds of success have become worse. In the next few years a further expansion of Iran’s missile programme is likely, including technology for longer-range ballistic missiles. The nuclear program will also move forward, while the US will continue to have trouble mustering world consensus to force a strategic change in Tehran’s policy.
Short of a further Iranian escalation, Russia, China and India are unlikely to agree to stiff Security Council sanctions. Their geopolitical, commercial, and internal political interests argue for negotiations, even when Iran’s resumption of enrichment activity has destroyed the conditions for the talks with the socalled E-3 of Britain, France and Germany.
RED LINE
Enriching uranium is the red line that should persuade all concerned nations to unite on a firm response. Enrichment using even one centrifuge would allow Iran to learn the difficult technology of balancing the spinning machines. It would be able to test whether domestically produced units work before centrifuge cascades were covertly replicated elsewhere.
Agreeing to enrichment would make it much more difficult for the International Atomic Energy Agency to decide where an overt programme stops and a covert one begins. If Iran learns how to spin centrifuges and also has a stock of uranium hexafluoride feed material, sufficient when enriched, for a nuclear weapon, it will then be past what the Israelis call the point of no return.
Iran’s move to proceed with enrichment came when Washington was fully supporting the European engagement strategy. The transatlantic allies must now come up with a new game plan, involving both Russia and China.
All the major players agree with the goal of stopping enrichment in Iran and all had agreed on Russia’s face-saving plan for Tehran to enrich uranium in Russia in a joint venture, a plan Iran shows no sign of accepting. But there has been no consensus on strategy. If the agreement on goals does not lead to a strategic consensus, the US is likely to abandon the Security Council framework and seek action in other arenas, once it no longer has its hands so full with Iraq.
NORTH KOREAN NUKES
North Korea is the worst failure of the non-proliferation arrangements and is now on track to steadily increase its nuclear weapons arsenal. In 2001, the North was assumed to have sufficient fissile material for one to two nuclear weapons. It now has approximately eight weapons worth.
The six to seven kilogrammes of plutonium produced annually in the reactor that has resumed operation will be enough for an additional weapon each year. In four years, North Korea will have separated plutonium for about twelve weapons. At the end of this decade, the rate of increase could jump again if North Korea follows through with its aim to resume construction of the much larger reactor at Yongbyon, frozen in 1994. If completed, it would be able to produce 55 kilogrammes of plutonium a year, enough for five to ten weapons.
Quadrupling North Korea’s nuclear arsenal did not force action from United States President George Bush’s administration, and another doubling is not likely to either. Bush’s aversion to repeating former President Bill Clinton’s Agreed Framework, that promised two nuclear power reactors in return for a freeze on North Korea’s weapons programme, means there is little prospect the Six Party Talks will succeed in producing a real agreement to dismantle the programme.
To preserve alliances with Japan and South Korea, Washington may agree to some concessions. At best, negotiations might produce another freeze on some Yongbyon facilities. The administration will not be party to a deal to provide Pyongyang with a nuclear reactor, but the North says it will not settle for anything less as the price for giving up its nuclear weapons.
While the nuclear threat commands attention, the North’s missile programmes pose a further danger. Pyongyang continuesto honour its 1998 moratorium on missile testing, but not because of any agreement. Resumption of testing is a possibility if the North feels the need for further provocation – to provoke a crisis if it believes that might help its negotiating position, or if it believes it has been pushed into a corner.
Proliferation of missile technology will continue to be another problem. Although Pyongyang’s missile salesmen have been shut out of many of their former markets by US pressure, sales to Syria and Iran continue.
STOPPING SHIPMENTS
Fortunately, the Six Party talks are not the only game in town.The Proliferation Security Initiative, which aims to intercept shipments, mostly at sea, is among a series of practical steps the US is taking to stop weapons of mass destruction trade to and from North Korea. Washington boasts that seventy countries now support the Initiative, and that actions involving partners have halted eleven proliferation transactions. Most would have been intercepted anyway, and several involved cooperation from China, so were not strictly speaking related to the Initiative.
Critics claim that not a single North Korean ship has been intercepted by the Initiative. It is too early to judge success, however, particularly given the difficulty of measuring its deterrence effect. The US is now trying to expand cooperation to air and ground interception, seeking agreements from Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, for example, to deny overflight clearance for suspect flights from North Korea.
Washington is also taking action to disrupt financial flows that support proliferation networks. Since June, the US has designated eleven North Korean organisations whose funds are subject to seizure. Although none have assets in the US, the intent is to deny them access to the international financial system.
Washington is also going after North Korean criminal activity more broadly. In September, it put sanctions on the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia for alleged money laundering, causing a run on the bank and deep grief in Pyongyang, where officials had come to rely on the profits.
More such actions are likely, targeting North Korean weapons smuggling, narcotics trafficking and the trade in endangered species and other sanctioned items. For the moment, these steps have caused the breakdown of the Six Party Talks. Given the likelihood the talks will drag on for years, with little chance of success, it makes sense to proceed simultaneously on other fronts.
Diplomacy is usually stronger when backed with credible muscle, and the new steps demonstrate Washington has multiple options. It should be recognised, however, that the Proliferation Security Initiative and other such moves are only a containment policy. They will help prevent onward proliferation from North Korea and some of its imports, but will not have much impact on domestic weapons of mass destruction and missile production.
TERROR THREATS
Al Qaeda has tried to acquire or make weapons of mass destruction for at least ten years and Osama Bin Laden reportedly sees a nuclear weapon as the most spectacular means to top the September 11 2001 attack. Nuclear terrorism is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when. The solutions pursued since 2001 have largely been the supply-side attempts to limit access to weapons that apply to non-proliferation in general. It is harder to attack the demand side of terrorism proliferation because the logic of deterrence does not work.
Were governments to make it a priority, nuclear weapons could be kept out of terrorist hands. There are a finite, if large, number of such weapons, and they are difficult for non-state actors to make. If terrorists, denied a secure sanctuary and dogged by the world’s best intelligence agencies, cannot acquire a nuclear bomb, they are most likely to go for something that sounds similar: a radioactive bomb. Tens of thousands of highrisk radioactive sources – such as cesium-137, cobalt-60 and strontium-90 – are used in industrial, medical and scientific applications round the world. Dirty bombs made from such materials would cause immense disruption, impeding rescue work and possibly requiring billions of dollars for clean-ups before affected urban areas could be habitable, even if they do not actually spread much radiation.
Many experts think a terroristattack using bioweapons is also highly likely. Amid concern over avian flu, the threat of bioterrorism has triggered a new sense of vulnerability. Unlike nuclear terrorism, bioterrorism cannot be addressed with the usual non-proliferation tools. While some bioweapon materials can be controlled, most of the process of making such devices is indistinguishable from legitimate applications and many use naturally occurring substances. The defence strategy must focus on consequence management rather than prevention. Advance coordination and planning is critical. If bioweapon attacks can be identified in time, if stockpiles of inoculations are ready, if communication channels among local and national government agencies have been well established, and if international assistance organisations and authorities are coordinated in advance, then it may be possible to contain the damage.
LOOSE NUKES
Concerns about terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction are firmly linked to the problem of unsecured nuclear warheads and material. There has been some progress. The agreement reached by Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin last year provided momentum.
Russia has opened several dozen additional nuclear weapons storage sites for inspection and security upgrades. The US and Russia have mostly resolved liability issues that had long delayed efforts to eliminate plutonium from dismantled weapons. In the past year and a half, four shipments of highly-enriched uranium have been returned, from research reactors in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, to safe storage in Russia.
However, in its final report in December the 9/11 Commission gave a D grade – a bare pass – to the US efforts. At the current rate, Russian weapons and materials will not be safely stored until between 2020 and 2030. Spending on cooperative threat reduction programmes has not been significantly accelerated, and falls far short of the need.
The Bush administration asked for less than $1 billion for the Nunn/Lugar Cooperative threat Reduction Program last year, for example, and $127 million to intercept nuclear smuggling – compared to $10 billion for the missile defence programme. The Commission reported that approximately half of former Soviet nuclear materials still lack adequate security. The pace of upgrading security is less than half the rate the US had intended, largely because of access disputes. Most troubling to the Commission, was that more than one hundred research reactors in forty countries still use highly-enriched uranium that could be diverted to nuclear weapons.
Realistically, concerns about the security of Russia’s nuclear complex have been overstated. An International Institute of Strategic Studies Adelphi Paper by Robin Frost says the vast majority of reported smuggling incidents – those that are not complete scams like red mercury – involve natural, depleted, or low-enriched uranium, which could not be used as fissile material for a weapon. There is no concrete evidence of a single case in which a substantial portion of the fissile material needed to make a bomb has been, or was close to being, illicitly transferred.
As for Russia’s nuclear weapons, none have been stolen, even in the chaotic months following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is certainly not grounds for complacency. Given the enormity of the calamity should terrorists get their hands on nuclear material, the Commission rightly recommended that Bush develop a comprehensive plan to dramatically accelerate the timetable for securing all nuclear weapons usable material worldwide.
PRIVATE PROLIFERATION
The unravelling of the network run by disgraced Pakistan scientist AQ Khan, the ‘father’ of its Nuclear programme, exposed the worst proliferation problem of the last decade: the private sale of enrichment technology to at least three countries. Since 2003, there has been no known further secondary proliferation from Pakistan, nor any reported from the countries where the Khan Network had its tentacles. Court cases are proceeding in most of these – with the notable exception of Pakistan, where the failure to prosecute Khan raises questions about the disincentives for others there to follow his example.
The beginning of a solution to the black market network was UN Security Resolution 1540 of April 2004, which requires effective legal and regulatory measures to prevent proliferation. The resolution provides a framework for action in a multilateral, UN context that should make Countries more willing to take the difficult steps needed. It was astounding that Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman living in Malaysia, was found not to have violated any laws, even though the factories he oversaw there allegedly produced key components of Libyan bound centrifuges. Nearing two years after the adoption of Resolution 1540, the record of implementation is spotty. By November, 67 states had still not provided reports required a year earlier, and there were large gaps in many of the 124 reports that had been submitted. Only eighteen percent showed clear evidence of measures taken to deal with proliferation.
It is to be hoped that in another three years, one or more of these problems will be off the proliferation agenda – and not by military action or redefining the problem.Expectations, alas, are not that rosy.
