Loose nukes

On Dec. 18, 1998, an official of Russia's successor agency to the KGB, the Federal Security Service (FSB), said that agents under his command had broken up a conspiracy by employees of a major nuclear facility in the Chelyabinsk region to steal 18.5 kilograms of weapons-usable material. If it had gone through, the theft would have caused "significant damage to the [Russian] state," local media quoted FSB Maj. Gen. Valeriy Tretyakov as saying.

In the US, experts reeled.

Chelyabinsk is home to some of Russia's most important nuclear facilities, including a nuclear-weapons assembly and disassembly plant at Trekhgorny, and a weapons-design lab at Snezhinsk. If a group of insiders at one of these sensitive sites had decided to steal fissile material - well, that would be a highly serious matter. Furthermore, the material involved was apparently not some useless radioactive slurry. It was weapons-usable - meaning 18.5 kilograms might be enough to make an entire nuclear weapon.

This incident is not included on most lists of the most important nuclear trafficking incidents, for the simple reason that it was quashed in its initial phases. But it remains one of the most troubling apparent cases of attempted proliferation of all - because it matches almost exactly the US nightmare scenario for a fissile-material theft.

It wasn't ancient history. It occurred in 1998, after many facilities in the region had received US money for protection upgrades. It involved lots of stuff. And it involved a conspiracy of the knowledgeable.

"Multiple insiders are the hardest thing for any security system to address," says Mr. Bunn of the Managing the Atom project.

Consider the ramifications. Russia has a "three-man rule" in regard to its nuclear weapons. Individuals are forbidden from working alone on warheads, as are twosomes.

But if two scientists are in cahoots, they might be able to overpower the third. To guard against this, security might have to institute a four-man, or even five-man rule. Perimeter guards might need to be doubled. The cost and complexity of protection systems escalates exponentially.

And what would be the genesis of such a conspiracy? Perhaps a group of disillusioned scientists or guards would try such a thing on their own, but that may be unlikely, given the difficulties of marketing the stuff. It's more likely that such a theft might come in response to an enticing overture. Such as Saddam Hussein, perhaps, offering enough money for everyone in the group to buy a South Seas island.

"What I worry about is state intelligence agencies contacting these people," says Scott Parrish, an analyst at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute.

If the Chelyabinsk conspiracy is the No. 1 worrisome incidence of potential trafficking in nuclear material, the Prague seizure might be judged No. 2.

In December 1994, an anonymous tip led Czech police to a marked car. In it, they found 2.7 kilograms of HEU enriched to 87.7 percent. The amount and purity of the recovered material was highly troubling. Worse, in two instances in 1995, Czech authorities recovered small amounts of additional HEU that appeared to be from the same source.

This suggests that there is a stock of weapons-grade HEU out there, of unknown quantity, in unknown hands.

New worries about so-called "dirty bombs," conventional explosives used to spread deadly radioactive material over a wide area, are also making some incidents of trafficking seem important in retrospect.

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