Managing Military Uranium and Plutonium in the United States and the Former Soviet Union: Conclusions

CONCLUSIONS

Bunn, Matthew, and John P. Holdren. "Managing Military Uranium and Plutonium in the United States and the Former Soviet Union." Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 22 (1997): 403-486.

The control of plutonium and HEU— the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons— is perhaps the most serious and urgent security challenge facing the United States in the coming decade. Successful acquisition of enough material for one or a few bombs by a rogue state or terrorist group could cause a severe threat to international security with little or no warning. And controlling nuclear warheads and fissile materials will be an essential part of any long-term effort to drastically reduce or ultimately eliminate nuclear arsenals.

Meeting this challenge will require a comprehensive program of action on many fronts. To succeed, this program will require more energetic leadership and substantially higher levels of funding than it has had to date, along with strong Congressional and international support. All told, the programs outlined above will cost several billion dollars over the next decade or more.49 Although these sums are substantial, particularly in the current atmosphere of budget constraints, they are tiny by comparison to the hundreds of billions a year the United States is accustomed to spending to ensure its security.

The costs to the United States of improving the protection of nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union should be seen as an investment in national and international security— just as the cost of producing the US stockpile of nuclear weapons and weapons materials was once viewed. The costs of failure to act— in higher defense budgets and lower security in the future— would be far higher than the cost of timely action now.

49 Plutonium disposition alone will cost more than a billion dollars in the United States, and a similar amount in Russia, in discounted terms; MPC&A will cost another roughly half-billion dollars; and the costs for comprehensive approaches to nuclear smuggling, transparency, and economic diversification of the nuclear cities, while not yet fully calculated, are likely to be significant.