Nuclear Conference Still On The Mind

Last week DC hosted a conference on nuclear non-proliferation. Aside from turning the area near where I work into a mock up of an old Soviet style checkpoint complete with barricades, armed troops, and humvees and managing to rack up a kill count in the name of peace, there wasn’t a whole lot that happened. One of the few things that did come out of it was a statement made by the attending nations to secure all nuclear material inside their borders within four years time. While this might sound like an admirable goal, what will probably happen is that a lot of money is going to end up being spent for almost no real gain in security.

First off it’s worth noting that the statement comes in the form of a non-binding agreement, which means that if the nations that agreed to it fail to follow through, then there is no penalty. This is usually a sign that the people signing it don’t actually intend to follow through, but are doing it because it’ll play well in the media. All nations that is, except for the United States. It would not play out so well on the international stage if the Obama administration did not at least attempt to do the plan that they themselves proposed. Still, the idea that the agreement is for four years from now means that there is at least the theoretical possibility that a different person might be in the White House when the completion date comes up, and that person might have different ideas about the agreement. Still, one could safely assume that the United States intends to follow through with their push to secure all nuclear material within four years time.

So, what does this mean exactly? The document makes no claims as to what “secure” actually looks like, or to what standards it would be held up against. Likewise a definition of what “nuclear material” constitutes. If it literally means any material that might conceivably be used to create a nuclear weapon, that’s a rather broad definition. There’s a big step between possessing uranium and creating a nuclear weapon with it. A large amount of processing needs to be done before the material can even begin to take the form of a dangerous weapon.

Just to give you an idea, Iran and North Korea have had access to nuclear material under this definition for several decades, yet have been mostly unsuccessful in refining it into a viable nuclear weapon. North Korea is thought to have under a dozen low yield warheads and Iran possesses none at all. Both of these nations have invested billions of dollars and decades of time into trying to create nuclear weapons. The chances that some small terrorist group might be able to do so with a block of unrefined uranium or plutonium is quite small.

The last group that tried to do so was the Aum Shinrikyo, a terrorist group out of Japan, back in the 1990’s. They eventually settled on the use of sarin gas as nuclear weapons proved to be too expensive and hard to create and only managed to kill thirteen people. This despite having invested more then a billion dollars into creating weapons of mass destruction.   

This is not to say that we shouldn’t secure nuclear material, but we shouldn’t spend money out of proportion to the threat either. Part of the agreement had Canada agreeing to ship all of its nuclear waste, an ingredient for nuclear weapons, to the United Sates for safekeeping. It also had Mexico downgrading a nuclear power plant to a lower yield reactor so that any potential material stolen would be harder to format for a weapon. These things just don’t need to happen. Both nations are capable of securing their own material independent of United States interference, and the chance of terrorists being able to do anything with the material is low even if they did get their hands on it. All that this does is put an extra financial strain on the United States.

It’s not a bad thing to secure the nuclear material that is our there, we just need to recognize the dangers that it actually represents. It is far more likely that terrorism will strike by way of more conventional means. If we’re going to invest money in counter-terrorism measures, lets make sure that the money is actually going towards programs that could actually make us safe, rather then just make us feel safe.

-Phillip