Tracking nuclear material worldwide - Detection

It take just a Jew kilograms of plutonium, and less than 20 kilograms of highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb. According to a database compiled by researchers at Stanford (Calif.) University's Institute for International Studies (IIS), about 40 kilograms of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium have been stolen from poorly protected nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union during the last decade. While most of that material has been retrieved, two kilos of highly enriched uranium taken from a research reactor in Georgia is still missing, and that's just for starters.

"I think this is the tip of the iceberg," says Lyudmila Zaitseva, an IIS researcher who has been sifting through databases, technical journals, and newspapers since 1999 to compile what could be the most-complete picture of illicit trafficking of nuclear material worldwide. She estimates that the real amount of missing weapons-grade material could be 10 times higher than is officially known. For example, law enforcement officials in the U.S. seize just 10-40% of illegal drugs smuggled into the country every year, and Russia stops only two to 10% of immigrants and illegally imported goods entering from neighboring Kazakhstan. Based on such statistics, Zaitseva's estimate of missing nuclear material is not far-fetched. "We don't know what's missing," she notes. "That's the most frightening thing."

Nuclear physicist Friedrich Steinhausler is the driving force behind the IIS Database on Nuclear Smuggling, Theft and Orphan Radiation Sources (DSTO). Unlike existing databases, it aims to cover incidents worldwide because "the new terrorism is global," he warns. "Not knowing what goes on globally is like having [blinders] on."

DSTO combines information from two unclassified databases with additional open sources confirmed by government agencies. The Stanford researchers then reevaluate that material for accuracy. "You'd be surprised how much scientific junk is in the existing databases, from mixing up units to reporting on tertiary sources," Steinhausler indicates. "We decided to look at each case--is it scientifically credible? And who is reporting this? Is it a scientific agency or a central Asian local newspaper?"

The database, which will be accessible only to carefully vetted researchers cooperating with the IIS team, focuses on illicitly trafficked material and what is referred to as "orphaned" radiation sources--material that has been lost intentionally or by mistake. The database is divided into 21 categories that can be statistically analyzed. These include types of incident, type of material, suspected origin, perpetrators involved, reported destination, and intended use. It also categorizes the reliability of information used and identifies major routes of illicit trafficking and how they have changed during the last decade. For example, in the early 1990s, Western Europe was the place to sell nuclear material. Today, the market has shifted to Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Turkey.

Steinhausler, a visiting scholar at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, explains that orphaned radioactive material presents a real threat because victims may not know that they have been exposed. "Many countries don't even have a central register of radioactive materials. If they don't know what they have, they don't know what they've lost." As a case in point, in 1997, La-Z-Boy, Inc. made approximately 6,000 recliner chairs with steel from Brazil that was accidentally contaminated by radiation. About 1,000 were sold in the U.S. before the contamination was discovered.

"The best description of the threat scenario is the U.S. itself," which has one of the best registration systems for radioactive material, Steinhausler notes. Every year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission receives 200 reports of lost, stolen, or abandoned radioactive sources. "If the U.S. loses control of a registered source almost every second day, what do you expect goes on in the rest of the world? Whether it is in scrap metal or in terrorism, you will meet it again."

That happened with devastating results in Goiania, Brazil, in 1987, when scavengers dismantled a lead canister from a radiotherapy machine at an abandoned cancer clinic. Soon afterward, a junkyard worker pried open the canister and discovered a pretty, blue, glowing dust--radioactive cesium-137. In the following days, scores of people were exposed to the substance, and some parents painted their children with it and even sold tickets to neighbors to watch them dance. As a result, 112,000 people had to be monitored. Of those, 249 were contaminated; 28 suffered radiation burns; and four died. More than 67 square kilometers were monitored; large areas had to be decontaminated; and 3,500 cubic meters of radioactive waste was generated. For years afterward, the region was stigmatized and its economy devastated.

Steinhausler is concerned more with the threat of a technologically simple "dirty bomb"--conventional explosives packed around radioactive material--than of a sophisticated nuclear bomb. "If I was a modern terrorist, I wouldn't go after a site that is being upgraded continuously; I would go after the weakest link. And the weakest link is a dirty bomb in a shopping mall. I'm concerned about radioactive material ... combined with very simple explosive techniques, causing a devastating psychological effect on the public. I call this not a weapon of mass destruction, but a weapon of mass disturbance."