In two fast-paced April days in Washington, the world took a big step out of the age of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and into an even madder age, when a dark vision of random nuclear terror will shadow our days for decades or more to come.
Almost 20 years after the Cold War’s end, after the end of the chilling US-Russian nuclear standoff of MAD, US President Barack Obama ushered in the new era with an unprecedented, 47-nation summit to begin to confront this ultimate threat.
It was an important first step. From the highest levels, it conferred top priority on what is planned as a continuing effort to better marshal global resources to keep the stuff of nuclear bombs — plutonium and highly enriched uranium — out of the hands of terrorists and smugglers.
Doing so will demand unusual, difficult cooperation around the world. Nations’ nuclear secrets may be exposed. Global inspectors may spotlight governments’ ineptitude. International advisers may have to rewrite nations’ laws to crack down on nuclear sloppiness.
What’s needed is a “new manner of thinking,” Obama told the assembled presidents and prime ministers, echoing a prophetic warning from the earliest days of the nuclear age.
On Monday and Tuesday, signaling their readiness to join in, those leaders pointed to or pledged actions to better lock down weapons-grade nuclear material and technology.
Egypt boasted of new legislation criminalizing trafficking in nuclear goods, for example, and Malaysia of a law tightening export controls, in a nation grown notorious as a clandestine transit point for nuclear technology. Ukraine, Mexico and others vowed to give up their highly enriched uranium. And the leaders’ final communique endorsed Obama’s goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear materials within four years.
DIFFICULTIES
Experts say that will be hard to do, however, as the world tries to ascertain just how much is out there, where it is and what’s “vulnerable.” The fissile materials sit in some surprising places worldwide — in the power plants of Russian icebreakers and US missile submarines, in university research reactors, in storehouses within Japan’s nuclear power system. And hundreds of tonnes are packed into deployed or disused nuclear warheads in the US and Russia.
Experts can only estimate the amounts: Something between 1,179 and 1,724 tonnes of weapons-grade uranium is stockpiled worldwide, the authoritative International Panel on Fissile Materials reported last year. Mere kilograms, meanwhile, can make a city-leveling bomb.
The deadly tonnage accumulated during the MAD era, when the US and Russia outdid each other in producing these exotic man-made heavy metals, and even donated some to friendly nations for research reactors.
That Cold War rivalry has faded, but its fissile legacy lingers on. Now a nervous world worries less about a superpower Armageddon and more about the known nuclear aspirations of al-Qaeda and other terror groups.
No evidence has emerged that any have gotten close to obtaining or building a doomsday bomb. Analysts note, however, that the world didn’t know of the Sept. 11 terror plot before al-Qaeda struck.
“With what confidence does the intelligence community answer that question [about terrorists’ nuclear capabilities]?” wondered former ambassador Robert Gallucci, a veteran US government nonproliferation negotiator. “We really don’t know very much with confidence.”
As for the extent of nuclear trafficking, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, counts almost two dozen known incidents involving plutonium or highly enriched uranium since the early 1990s. Again, however, the world doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.
Experts say what’s needed are more universal and stronger treaties and other agreements to collect and dispose of fissile materials, to stop their production, to share intelligence, to enact tougher domestic laws and with more money flowing from rich to poor nations to tighten borders and controls on illicit trade.
OVERSIGHT
A stronger IAEA and possibly new, permanent oversight bodies would have to grow ever more intrusive in demanding an accounting of bomb materials, even in the excess stockpiles of the US and Russian militaries, no-go areas in today’s world.
That’s why the US president told the summit the post-MAD era’s deadly new challenge requires “a new mindset,” and why he drove the point home with an assist from a genius who forever mourned his role in the making of the nuclear age.
“We are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond comparison,” Obama quoted Albert Einstein as saying in those early years. “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”Charles J. Hanley has reported on nuclear arms control for three decades.
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