Nuclear Issues

Through structured interviews and a literature review, we assess which approaches to protection against insider thefts in the casino and pharmaceutical industries could be usefully applied to strengthen protections against insider theft in the nuclear industry, where insider thefts could have very high consequences.

"Our crystal ball is not clear enough to predict with confidence whether the global nuclear future will be characterized by peace and prosperity or by conflict and destruction. But we do believe that the choices made in the coming few years will be crucial in determining whether the world can have more nuclear power without more nuclear weapons dangers in the future."

"Keeping nuclear weapons and the difficult-to-manufacture materials needed to make them out of terrorist hands is critical to U.S. and world security — and to the future of nuclear energy as well. In the aftermath of a terrorist nuclear attack, there would be no chance of convincing governments, utilities, and publics to build nuclear reactors on the scale required for nuclear energy to make any significant contribution to coping with climate change."

Will the growth of nuclear power lead to increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism? Will the nonproliferation regime be adequate to ensure safety and security in a world more widely and heavily invested in nuclear power? The authors in this two-volume (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010) special issue of Dædalus have one simple and clear answer to these questions: It depends.

"I would urge every scientist and engineer with an interest in the intersection of S&T with sustainable well-being...to 'tithe' 10% of your professional time and effort to working in these and other ways to increase the benefits of S&T for the human condition and to decrease the liabilities. If so much as a substantial fraction of the world's scientists and engineers resolved to do this much, the acceleration of progress toward sustainable well-being for all of Earth's inhabitants would surprise us all."

Matthew Bunn argues that plutonium disposition—physically transforming it into a form that would be difficult and costly to recover for use in nuclear weapons—if carried out on a large scale would “mark a key step toward deeper and less-reversible nuclear arms reductions.”  But, as he documents, delays, costs, and obstacles have plagued plutonium disposition plans in both the United States and Russia.

Article in The Nonproliferation Review

The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union posed an unprecedented challenge: to keep tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium to make tens of thousands more, out of hostile hands. In this crisis, small groups of policy entrepreneurs launched major innovations to spur the nuclear complexes of the former rival superpowers to pursue their common interest in securing and dismantling nuclear stockpiles. Billions of dollars have now been spent pursuing these efforts, thousands of bombs' worth of nuclear materials have been permanently destroyed, and security both for thousands of nuclear weapons and for enough nuclear material for tens of thousands more has been substantially improved.

Despite extensive diplomatic efforts to facilitate the six-party talks, domestic policy constraints, differing priorities, and conflicting historical analogies among each of the countries have brought vastly differing perspectives to the multilateral negotiating table.

A universal Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), which would ban the production of fissile material (separated plutonium, highly enriched uranium (HEU), and uranium-233) for nuclear weapons, has long been seen as a key building block in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.