SYDNEY, 9 November 2004 — Nuclear terrorism is a real threat against which the world must take immediate action in order to prevent a nuclear Sept. 11-style outrage, the head of the UN’s atomic energy agency warned yesterday.
Calling it a “race against time”, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed El-Baradei said past assumptions about how to control the spread of nuclear materials needed to be radically overhauled.
El-Baradei said his agency had never assumed until the attacks of Sept. 11 that terrorists would deliberately use nuclear or radiological weapons or be willing to lose their own lives.
Those attacks and the growth of an illicit market in radioactive materials had left previous assumptions about nuclear security completely out of date, he told a two-day security conference in Sydney to address proliferation.
“We need to take preventive measures before a nuclear or radiological emergency. We should not wait to see the kind of situation like 9/11 or Chernobyl,” he said.
“The danger exists everywhere. It’s real, it’s current and it’s everywhere. We have to cross our fingers that nothing will happen.”
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer backed the IAEA chief, saying considering the international outcry that would result from any radiological attack, preventive measures should get greater consideration.
“There would be a sense of global pandemonium,” he said.
The level of security surrounding nuclear facilities was inadequate in some places, he added. Downer said that the most likely kind of attack was some kind of radiological “dirty bomb” which would contaminate a large area rather than terrorists building or stealing a nuclear bomb and detonating it.
“That is a little more likely than them either building a nuclear weapon or stealing a nuclear weapon,” Downer said.
El-Baradei said key themes emerging at the conference were preventing the theft of nuclear material and making sure such material was used peacefully.
Referring to Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, El-Baradei said a country with enriched uranium or plutonium was a “latent nuclear weapons state” and multinational control of the nuclear fuel cycle for civilian reactors might be needed.
A country with enriched uranium or plutonium could manufacture a weapon within months, he said.
“We do not want to see ourselves in the next 10, 20 years with 40, 50 countries sitting on plutonium or highly enriched uranium. I think the security margin that provides is very close for comfort,” he said.
“In the post 9/11 environment to see countries enriching uranium and the number of the countries enriching uranium expanding all the time is a matter of enormous concern.”
The agency’s work on suspected nuclear weapons programs in Libya and Iran had revealed an extensive black market for radioactive materials, with around 630 confirmed incidents of trafficking in nuclear or other radioactive materials since 1993, he said. This illicit market “clearly thrived on demand”, he said.
“The relative ease with which a multinational illicit network could be set up and operated demonstrates clearly the inadequacy of the present export control system,” he said.
More than two-dozen companies and individuals were involved and in most cases the market carried on without the knowledge of their governments.
“The technical barriers to mastering the essential steps of uranium enrichment — and to designing weapons — have eroded over time.
“Much of the hardware in question is ‘dual use’ and the sheer diversity of technology has made it much more difficult to control or even track procurement and sales.”
