Pakistan, Russia, U.S. need more nuclear security

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B63Y20100412

(Reuters) - Rich and poor countries around the world -- including Pakistan, Russia and the United States -- need to boost security at their nuclear sites if they want to keep atomic bombs out of the hands of terrorists.

Barack Obama | Russia

The risk of a militant group getting hold of nuclear material and building a bomb with it is "possible, plausible, and over time probable," Robert Gallucci, president of the MacArthur Foundation, told a gathering of nuclear security experts ahead of a summit meeting on the same subject.

John Brennan, U.S. President Barack Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, underlined the threat by telling reporters on the sidelines of Obama's summit that al Qaeda appears to have been trying to get nuclear bomb material.

"There have been numerous reports over the past eight or nine years of attempts to obtain various types of purported material," Brennan said on the sidelines of the summit.

"We know al Qaeda has been involved a number of times. We know they have been scammed a number of times," he said.

Gallucci told the gathering of experts that he had a message for the dozens of world leaders in Washington for Obama's nuclear security summit -- stop producing arms-grade plutonium and uranium, the raw materials for nuclear bombs.

"This material is going to be around for a very long time," he said, adding that growing stockpiles of fissile material for arms increased the risk of it falling into the wrong hands.

Brennan said with more countries investing in nuclear power to meet rising energy demand, there would be a growing amount of potentially dangerous atomic material around the world.

The experts said that terrorists could theoretically build a crude but deadly nuclear device -- or possibly something more sophisticated if they have the money, technical personnel and required amount of fissile material.

Obtaining arms-grade material is the biggest challenge, which is why keeping it secure is so important.

Representatives of 47 nations are participating in Obama's two-day summit, which ends on Tuesday. The point of the meeting is to agree on an action plan for participants to secure all of their nuclear weapons material within four years so that it is no longer vulnerable to theft.

BANNING BOMB-GRADE MATERIAL PRODUCTION

The summit -- the biggest U.S.-hosted assembly of world leaders in Washington six decades -- will be a test of Obama's ability to rally global action on his nuclear agenda.

It had its first tangible outcome when Ukraine announced it would give up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium by 2012, most of it this year.

Kiev has enough nuclear material for several weapons. It will convert its civil nuclear program to operate on low-enriched uranium. Washington agreed to provide technical and financial support for the effort, U.S. officials said.

Gallucci and other nuclear security experts said that securing nuclear stockpiles was a good place to start, but insufficient. They said it was time to agree a ban on producing fissile material for nuclear weapons.

The 65-nation U.N.-backed Conference on Disarmament in Geneva has long been considering such a ban. But Pakistan has blocked the start of negotiations, arguing that it would put it at a permanent disadvantage to India, with which it has fought three wars since independence in 1947.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said earlier on Monday that he would urge the 47 participants at the summit to resume negotiations on such a ban without delay.

Harvard University professor Matthew Bunn said wealthy Western countries like the United States and European Union members needed to do more to improve security at their atomic sites. He said U.S. research reactors that yield plutonium are exempt from U.S. security rules.

Bunn said that exemption should be ended and the costs for upgrading security at research reactors borne by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, a professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Pakistan, highlighted the risks in South Asia. He said that the situation had changed since disgraced Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan admitted in 2004 to sharing nuclear enrichment technology with Iran and Libya.

Since that time, he said, the walls around Pakistan's nuclear program have been "raised higher," which might make it more secure but also more difficult for outsiders to know what is going on. Hoodbhoy said Pakistan has around 80 atomic weapons and bomb-grade material for up to 150 more.

RUSSIA, PAKISTAN CALLED VULNERABLE

Hoodbhoy said Pakistan was very vulnerable. Militants have carried out suicide attacks and successfully targeted installations belonging to the military and the security services in Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state like its neighbor India.

A new report commissioned from Bunn by the U.S.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative said that the highest risks of nuclear theft today were in Pakistan and Russia. The report said Russia's nuclear stockpiles, the largest in the world, could be vulnerable given "endemic corruption in Russia."

Pakistan's heavily guarded stockpile "faces immense threats, both from insiders who may be corrupt or sympathetic to terrorists and from large attacks by outsiders," it said.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are among those attending the conference. Neither country signed the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear arms.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)