Insider threats are perhaps the most serious challenges that nuclear security systems face. Insiders perpetrate a large fraction of thefts from heavily guarded non-nuclear facilities as well, yet organizations often find it difficult to understand and protect against insider threats. Why is this the case? Part of the answer is that there are deep organizational and cognitive biases that lead managers to downplay the threats insiders pose to their nuclear facilities and operations. But another part of the answer is that those managing nuclear security often have limited information about incidents that have happened in other countries or in other industries, and the lessons that might be learned from them.

So what did the nuclear security summit in The Hague accomplish?  A good deal.  Despite being overshadowed by the crisis in Ukraine and the associated crush of side meetings, the summit in The Hague once again served as a forcing event to cut through bureaucracy and get important decisions made.  Just as having friends over for dinner motivates you to clean up your house, going to a major global summit motivates leaders to push their bureaucracies to give them something worthwhile to talk about when they get there.

Today, the United States and Japan announced that Japan would eliminate all the plutonium and highly-enriched uranium at its Fast Critical Assembly (FCA) at Tokai-mura.  This is a tremendous step forward for nuclear security; for terrorists, this would be some of the best material that exists in any non-nuclear-weapon state.  The material includes 331 kilograms of plutonium, most of it weapons-grade, and 214.5 kilograms of weapons-grade HEU.  (The FCA also includes over a ton of material just at the 20 percent U-235 mark that defines HEU.)   The weapons-grade HEU is enough for four simple terrorist “gun-type” bombs or a larger number of trickier-to-build implosion bombs.  The plutonium amounts to more than 40 bombs worth of material.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor of Practice Matthew Bunn was interviewed on PBS NewsHour about the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague and Japan’s announcement at the Summit that it will hand over to the United States its supplies of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium on Monday, March 24, 2014.

In the lead-up to the nuclear security summit, Advancing Nuclear Security: Evaluating Progress and Setting New Goals outlines what was accomplished in a four-year effort launched in 2009 to secure nuclear material around the globe—and what remains to be done. The effort made significant progress, but some weapons-usable nuclear materials still remain “dangerously vulnerable." The authors highlight the continuing danger of nuclear and radiological terrorism and call for urgent action.

Many of the international diplomats preparing for the nuclear security summit in The Hague are more used to discussing disarmament, nonproliferation, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy – known as the “three pillars” of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the foundation of the global nonproliferation regime – than they are to discussing the security measures for protecting nuclear weapons, materials, or facilities.  Some have argued that the summit should turn from an exclusive focus on nuclear security to discuss next steps on the three pillars.

On March 24-25, leaders from around the world will gather in The Hague for the third nuclear security summit.  What should we expect the summit to accomplish? Overall, the summits have already transformed the international nuclear security discussion, elevating the topic from the bowels of governments to presidents and prime ministers, motivating states to make decisions to upgrade security, increasing understanding of the nuclear terrorism threat, and getting thousands of people around the world focused on improving nuclear security.  But that progress may come more from the process than from the pageantry of the summits themselves.

In this presentation to an Institute for Nuclear Materiials Management workshop on risk-informing security, Matthew Bunn proposes a new approach to judging which materials would be easiest or more difficult for terrorists to use in a nuclear bomb, and hence which materials require more or less security.

HKS Professor of Practice Matthew Bunn presented this presentation at the Plutonium Disposition Alternatives Workshop for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC on January 30-31, 2014.

The world is rightly worried about Iran's uranium enrichment program. Iran claims this technology is for producing fuel for nuclear power plants, but it could be quickly shifted to making nuclear bomb material.