Nuclear Issues

New sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council on September 11 in response to North Korea’s latest nuclear test are “not significant enough,” according to R. Nicholas Burns, an Atlantic Council board member who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs in the George W. Bush administration.

Sanctions must be part of a “patient long-term strategy” that includes deterrence, working closely with allies, and negotiations, said Burns, laying out the United States’ options for dealing with the North Korean crisis.  

On October 27, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held a hearing titled "Prevention of and Response to the Arrival of a Dirty Bomb at a U.S. Port."

Aaron Arnold, Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center, and Nikos Passas, Professor of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, argue in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that an important, and generally overlooked, aspect of any deal with Iran is the role of banks and financial institutions in monitoring proliferation related transactions and keeping Iran from cheating on the agreement. They point out that banks are necessary for the monitoring and verification of a nuclear agreement because they provide the information used by sanctions enforcers to track illicit proliferation financing. At this point, several holes exist in detecting proliferation financing, including the lack of a clear template for banks and regulatory agencies to be searching for, and the lack of binding regulations for all forms of financial institutions, such as money remitters. They suggest that the Iranian nuclear deal offers a chance for these systematic holes to be plugged by centralizing analysis of data for proliferation financing and seeking reforms in the Iranian financial system.

Matthew Bunn, William Tobey, and I have a new op-ed in The Hill’s Congress Blog, “Don’t weaken our defenses against nuclear smuggling.” We wrote it in response to proposed legislation that would prohibit funding for fixed radiation detectors to catch nuclear smugglers – both for installing new ones and even for maintaining the ones U.S. taxpayers have already paid billions to install.

The snow is melting in Boston and it is hard not to feel the optimism this brings.  But if you are someone who worries about nuclear issues and need more good news, you can find it in an unlikely place – the new Russian Military Doctrine published this past December.

In the spectrum of threats to nuclear security, highly radioactive materials such as cesium-137 and cobalt-60 represent a set of concerns and challenges which is much different from that of fissile materials like highly enriched uranium. Unlike the latter, they cannot be used to build a nuclear weapon. However, terrorists could use such sources to construct a so-called “dirty bomb”, an improvised explosive device which spreads the radioactive substances in a populated area. Although, according to most planning scenarios, such a “dirty bomb” would likely cause few radiation-related casualties, its economic effects could still be in the billions of dollars – especially if parts of a city needed to be shut down for weeks or months while they are being decontaminated.

Next month, top leaders from over 50 countries will meet at the 2014 Hague Nuclear Security Summit.  The leaders’ fundamental goal remains to prevent nuclear terrorism by implementing effective security at all sites that store or process nuclear weapons or fissile materials, or which operate nuclear reactors.