The warning from the UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed El-Baradei that the world is in a race against time to stop terrorists procuring nuclear materials must be taken very seriously. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have demonstrated that there are no limits to the degree of evil they are prepared to inflict on the world. Driven by their mad fantasies they act without pity and scruple.
The UN campaign against the spread of these weapons has until now focused on sovereign states acquiring nuclear technology. But Pakistan and India, who came so close to conflict last year, are no longer the worry. Even maverick and paranoid North Korea is now apparently behaving with more circumspection because it believes that its nuclear program has gained it the protection it seeks from a hostile outside world. Libya has abandoned its own nuclear weapons program, Iraq’s WMD no longer exist and Iran continues to insist that its nuclear developments are for entirely peaceful purposes. Israel meanwhile continues to remain silent though everyone now knows about its atomic weapons, developed in the desert at Dimona.
The IAEA is now refocusing on the likelihood that terrorists are on the verge of obtaining uranium or plutonium to create deadly new terror weapons. The technology to make a functioning atomic bomb may not be beyond Al-Qaeda, but with their ouster from Afghanistan they seem to lack the secure base in which to undertake such work. A so-called “dirty bomb”, in which nuclear material is packed around conventional explosives, is a far easier option. The IAEA continues to be extremely disturbed about the danger of military nuclear material being stolen from Russia. There are other sources of radioactive substances, including spent fuel from atomic power stations which once used must either be re-processed or stored for hundreds of years until it is safe. There is also the waste from hospitals equipped with nuclear medical technology.
This week the IAEA endorsed a plan put forward by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which calls for far more pragmatic cooperation among both nuclear and nonnuclear states to ensure that nonproliferation also means that the devastating weaponry does not find its way to terrorists. It accepts that because of the discovery that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent, had been selling the technology to anyone prepared to pay, the already muddied waters of nonproliferation have become muddier still.
It really must be hoped that all countries, including the United States, will agree that in the face of the menace of nuclear terrorism, the fragmented and sometimes bad-tempered efforts at controls must be improved. Before Washington’s Iraq invasion, this UN initiative would have enjoyed ready international support. Now analysts wonder if such determined backing will actually materialize or if the plan will sink beneath fresh squabbles.
We must all of us hope that it does not fail.
