Monitoring Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Chemical and Biological Weapons Convention Compliance:
A Summary of Some Problems

Introduction

The US cannot act at will, but with respect to international cooperation nothing can happen without the leading role or at least the active participation of the USA. More than any other nation this country can influence the development and shaping of the world. Other countries have to react on US policies, but we can choose the policies which other states have to deal with. This imposes a singular responsibility on the USA: Our country has to be concerned with the well being of the world." (George Soros, "The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power", Public Affairs, New York, 2003, translated back from German into English by J. Gruber)

I. 1 Ephraim Asculai
Verification Revisited: The Nuclear Case

• "The historical application of verification has been uneven. It is evident that the verification regimes established to date are imperfect, and that states can cheat on their obligations without being caught. On the other hand, the lessons of failure can inform efforts to improve verification. For example, Iraq's successful ability to cheat on its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations and evade full-scope safeguards led to the improvement of the safeguards regime.
  Some verification regimes have yet to be fully tested. The strengthened International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards regime is not in force in many countries where cheating is suspected.
• "The use of national technical means (NTM) -which played a major role in convincing the IAEA to be persistent in the North Korean case- will complicate a cheater's efforts to hide its activities."
• "The lesson of these experiences is that verification organizations must understand and clearly communicate their own limitations. The Agency [IAEA], in particular, has had difficulty historically in admitting its own problems."
• "Even when a state is transparent, it may be difficult to draw conclusions. For example, there was little doubt about the honesty, openness, transparency, and cooperation shown by South African officials and nuclear weapon scientists towards special IAEA investigators. However, it took a long time and a team of highly skilled and knowledgeable inspectors to arrive at a positive conclusion that South Africa had fully dismantled its nuclear weapons and accounted for its nuclear-explosive materials. Where a state is not transparent, it is appropriate for the verification agency to be skeptical. When North Korea refused to allow the IAEA to conduct a special inspection, the Agency -correctly- pronounced North Korea to be in noncompliance with its safeguards obligations. By extension, North Korea's compliance with its NPT obligations was cast in doubt."
• "Political Support for Verification Activities is Imperative: The history of verification shows that, even under the most technically rigorous verification regime, political support by the international community is vital. If a verification regime lacks support, it will fail."

I. 2 David Albright¹ and Kevin O'Neill² (eds.)

I. 3 David Kay

• "Saddam Hussein turned to the individual who eventually became the scientific head of the Iraqi program, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, and said, "Dr. Jaffar, if we stay in the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA], will it in any way hinder the clandestine nuclear program?" Jaffar says his answer was an immediate and unequivocal no; he said it would have absolutely no effect upon Iraq's program. That is one of the most important lessons to learn. If anything has to make tomorrow different from today, and all other days previous, it has to be that governments that are trying to make a similar decision (that is, if we stay in the NPT, will it make a difference) have to not be able to reach such an absolute conclusion with such assurance. The Iraqis did reach this conclusion, and Iraq went ahead and developed an enormous program."
• "... The Iraqis also had in place three major uranium enrichment programs: a calutron program (the original method used by the US, which was also used by the Soviet Union, Britain, Japan and the PRC); a gas centrifuge program, which acquired or built enough parts for at least 10,000 gas centrifuges, which is a huge number; and a chemical enrichment program. They also did a significant amount of research on gaseous diffusion, laser enrichment and jet nozzle enrichment as well. "
• "... A team of modern weapons designers that looked at them remarked on how primitive they were, but we had the people who had worked in the US and British programs in the early days of the programs look at them as well. We asked them to baseline the Iraqi codes against codes that were used in the 1950s and 1960s. The codes that the Iraqis used are freely available - they run on PCs - and they are much, much better than the codes that were available to weapons scientists then."
• "... there is a rising level of technological wealth and managerial skill. Let me stress the last part, managerial skill. The Iraqis defeated the export control regimes, not because of the ineptness of the regimes or because of corruption, but because they learned that they did not have to buy a final assembled instrument with everything they wanted. If they could buy it in parts from three different countries and had the proper project management skills, they could put it together themselves. In fact, if you want to look at scientific talent in developing countries, the most important talent for a nuclear program is not physicists. In fact, the Iraqi program would have gone a lot better is they had locked the physicists up (because they spent too much time thinking about better ways to do things). It is the mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, chemical engineers, project management types that make a difference. Even in countries that we look at as being poor and disorganized, these types of engineers are there in large numbers, and there may be some sectors that are very, very advanced."
• "... they [the Iraqis] had learned to defeat national technical means (NTM), i.e., signal and satellite intelligence.
• "... The photo interpreters had looked at it and didn't believe that it was a major site because it had no security fences around it, no anti-aircraft around it, and no electrical power going into it. It looked like another one of the industrial complexes you find a lot around Baghdad.
• "... People do not have to get on a plane and fly to point A. All they have to do is plug a Macintosh in with a modem and they can work any place in the world. A lot of the data exchange on the centrifuge program into Iraq did not come from people going to Iraq. It was done in other places. This also makes it much harder to track and identify, since people aren't necessarily flying into countries where they shouldn't be. "
• "... Don't tell me you can't rat on people who have been your friends. They charge you, you pay a risk premium, and everyone knows that you pay a risk premium because there's a risk that the supplier will be exposed. Go ahead and tell us." Instead, Jaffar pulled out the invoice (without the supplier's name on it) and, sure enough, they had only paid a couple of cents per pound over the world market price for maraging steel. That tells you that for a lot of commodities there is, in fact, not much of a risk. And, maraging steel is one of the more strictly controlled. That is something you have really got to worry about. Material does get out and will continue to get out. "
• "... The material presents another risk. Somewhere in the order of 4 kg to 12 kg of plutonium is sufficient for a nuclear device. That is an amount that is smaller than an American softball, if it were in a single source. If you look at how drugs are moved around the world, you realize the problem of preventing the transfer of small amounts of material. There are ways to smuggle this material that are not technically difficult. "
• "... If Iraq had not invaded Kuwait when it did in 1990, but if it had waited until 1994, not only would Iraq have had a nuclear weapon,..."
• "... I'm afraid that unless steps are taken in 1995 at the NPT Review Conference, and unless other steps are taken soon, we will see a number of states start exploring the nuclear weapon option again, and this time it is going to be different. They can do all the non-nuclear work essentially out in the open. And they only have to worry about the acquisition of special nuclear material at the very last stage and that, for a series of technical reasons, is not going to be very difficult to do. Those things working together, in addition to what Iraq already taught us, mean that for proliferation we are entering a period far more dangerous than anything we have seen before, at least in the last thirty years. And that is really an optimistic view to conclude all of this. "

I. 4 Graham Allison
Loose nukes: The Eight spoke loudly, and did little

1. Fewer former Soviet "near-nukes" - lumps of highly enriched uranium and plutonium from which a terrorist could make a nuclear weapon - have been secured in the two years since Sept. 11, 2001, than in the two years before that date.
2. Only one-fifth of Russia's weapons-usable fissile material has been adequately secured.
3. Of Russia's fissile material stockpile, 57 percent - enough for more than 20,000 nuclear weapons - has not received the most basic security upgrades.
4. Hundreds of potential nuclear weapons of highly enriched uranium will remain at risk in developing and transitional countries for the next 10 years.

In 2000, for instance, the United States and Russia signed an agreement to remove the threat of 68 tons of Russian weapons-grade plutonium. In the three years since the agreement, how many tons have been destroyed? Zero. Liability and access disputes continue to hold up the project, and less than half of the $2 billion required to do the job has been pledged.

At the current rate, the global partnership will not secure Russia's loose nukes until 2017. If the material for the terrorist bomb that blows up in Paris or Moscow or New York in 2005 is scheduled to be secured in 2008, voters will look back at the elegant language of multiple G-8 summit meetings and wonder why it was so hard to translate those words into action.

Graham Allison is author of "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophy".

Book Description - editorial review
"A leading strategist opens our eyes to the greatest terrorist threat of all -and how to prevent it before it's too late:

In this urgent call to action, Graham Allison, one of America's leading experts on nuclear weapons and national security, presents the evidence for two provocative, compelling conclusions.

1. If policy makers in Washington keep doing what they are currently doing about the threat, a nuclear terrorist attack on America is likely to occur in the next decade. And if one lengthens the time frame, a nuclear strike is inevitable.
2. The surprising and largely unrecognized good news is that nuclear terrorism is, in fact, preventable.

In these pages, Allison offers an ambitious but feasible blueprint for eliminating the possibility of nuclear terrorist attacks."
(more details about the book).

II. Chemical and Biological Technologies

III. Further Reading