When world leaders focused their attention on possible scenarios that might emerge with respect to terror networks vis-à-vis nuclear terrorism at an in-camera briefing during the closing session of the nuclear security summit in Washington, influential sources privy to the deliberations revealed that three potential methods of unleashing nuclear or radiological terrorism were primarily discussed.
And they are, acquiring nuclear bomb for creating catastrophic destruction in populated urban areas, setting off radiological dispersal device or dirty bomb — a lethal weapon of mass destruction made of radioactive material attached to conventional explosives and group of trained extremists sabotaging nuclear facilities with insider assistance to release radioactive material over a wide area of human habitation.
As US President Barack Obama rightly observed, madmen could kill or injure innocent people using only plutonium the size of an apple especially when not all of the 2,000 tons of nuclear materials held at military and civilian facilities world over are secure and may fall in wrong hands.
There are more than 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world presently, with over 90 percent of them being kept at strategic locations in Russia and the United States and Obama himself acknowledged that Washington and Moscow were unlikely to further reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons any time soon. However, to be fair to Obama, he remains the best bet for the world to achieve genuine denuclearization.
Obama owned up the moral responsibility for launching a new era of nuclear disarmament aimed at eliminating nuclear stockpiles. Indeed, the US president put flesh on the bones of his praiseworthy vision with significant and specific policy departures aimed at injecting nuclear disarmament with a momentum never seen before. Obama promised to downgrade the role ascribed to nuclear weapons in America’s national security doctrines, pledged to enforce a global ban on nuclear weapons testing by starting from his backyard in the form of pressing the US Senate to ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty at the earliest, committed himself to the cause of strengthening the nuclear non-proliferation treaty — bedrock of a global effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, preferred a new global ban on the production of weapons-grade fissile materials and most significantly promoted the idea of establishing an international fuel bank that would supply and monitor enriched uranium for civil nuclear power generation thus avoiding the risk of rogue states diverting material from peaceful to weapons programs.
Though it is a hard fact that since the first nuclear summit held six years ago, the world has measurably reduced the risk of nuclear terrorism by taking many concrete and tangible steps, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s absence in Washington may be a setback for the struggle that Obama has initiated for the sake of future generations. Russia, in fact, houses the largest number of nuclear weapons, 7,300 warheads to be precise compared to America’s 6,970. And without Moscow’s active support, the momentum created by the shifting of 2,965 kilograms of civilian highly enriched uranium (HEU) — equivalent to 100 atomic bombs — to safeguarded sites in the last six years will be lost midway. Undoubtedly, Obama has at least opened the door for a serious negotiation to reduce global stockpiles of nuclear warheads with 98 percent of bomb-making materials remaining in opaque military installations. As the US president rightly observed, the massive nuclear arsenal maintained since the Cold War days is “poorly suited to today’s threat perceptions” even as anti-nuclear proliferation watchdogs have reported laxity in on-site physical protection and security during transport as well as chinks in the ability to recover lost radioactive materials.
Despite ushering positivity in nuclear risk reduction, the nuclear security summit, which is Obama’s brainchild, has failed in its strategic goal of developing an effective global nuclear security system. Unfortunately, since the last summit in 2014, some nations have reportedly moved toward augmenting their nuclear stockpiles. While Obama may be basking in the glory of 12 nations having completely eliminated weapons grade HEU or separated plutonium, the steps have been relatively minor in the backdrop of the mammoth risk posed by nuclear weapons to humanity. With the realistic threat of non-state actors using deadly weapons looming over the horizon, there is an urgent need for concerted action on two fronts — preventing a dirty bomb from falling in extremists’ possession and securing atomic sites, both overt and clandestine, from subversion. Experts have warned that much of the world’s HEU and plutonium remains vulnerable to theft at thousands of sites, including universities and hospitals.
It is a warning sign especially for a country like India whose nuclear materials have been found to be less than secure, as a recent Harvard University study has exposed the vulnerability of Indian nuclear facilities citing an American inspector assessment. With the whole of South America being free of nuclear weapons presently and central Europe and Southeast Asia expected to achieve the goal soon, hopefully the dream of a nuclear weapons-free planet will remain afloat and guide us through difficult times.
