The republics of the former Soviet Union cannot account for a large share of the hundreds of tons of bomb-grade uranium and plutonium once listed in their stockpiles, creating a "primary national security concern for the United States," government investigators are warning in a new report.
The investigators say that the nuclear material is an easy target for smugglers and terrorists, given the lax security procedures at scores of civilian and military nuclear sites throughout the former Soviet Union, and that the United States has little ability to track the material if it is stolen.In the report released Wednesday, the investigators for the General Accounting Office said, for example, that they had been able to wander into one prominent nuclear storage site in Moscow, the Kurchatov Institute, without showing identification, and that it had been guarded by a single unarmed policeman.
While the investigators said they had no direct evidence of the existence of a nuclear black market linking sellers in the former Soviet Union to buyers elsewhere, the recent seizure of nuclear material in Russia, Germany and the Czech Republic suggests that a black market could be forming.
The report was prepared for the Senate Government Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations, a panel whose leaders have joined in a bipartisan call for the Clinton administration to step up programs aimed at controlling the international spread of materials used to make nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
While there has long been concern over the smuggling of uranium and plutonium from the former Soviet Union, the report provided several new, disturbing details on the lax security systems protecting nuclear stockpiles, and on the ease with which thieves could steal and sell nuclear components.
The report suggested that social and economic tensions in former Soviet republics had created new opportunities for nuclear thieves and terrorists, with employees in nuclear plants so poorly paid and demoralized that many might be tempted to steal.
"The challenge is to ensure that the former Soviet Union does not become a vast supermarket for the most deadly instruments known to man," said Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, the senior Democrat on the investigations subcommittee. "Unfortunately, there already appear to be many prospective customers."
The GAO report said that when the Soviet Union fragmented in 1991, it had stocks of 1,200 tons of highly enriched uranium and 200 tons of plutonium, some built into warheads but much held in civilian and military storage sites in containers small enough to be carried by one or two people.
Now, the report found, the nuclear material is scattered across Russia and several other republics, and many of the newly independent governments are clearly unable to provide adequate security. The report said the material would be highly attractive to terrorist groups because it was easy to transport and could be easily converted to weapons use.
GAO investigators said they had traveled to nuclear sites throughout the former Soviet Union and found that several had no "comprehensive" records on the size of their stockpiles of uranium and plutonium.
At one site in the Russian city of Obninsk, the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering, Russian officials said that there were 70,000 to 80,000 small disks of uranium and plutonium, but that they had no exact count.