ATTEMPTS to smuggle radioactive materials have doubled over the past five years, according to figures released this week by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. The revelations bolster fears that the threat of nuclear terrorism is increasing.

The IAEA's database on trafficking in nuclear materials has logged more than 550 incidents since 1993, it revealed at a conference in Stockholm. The rate of incidents in 1999 and 2000 was twice that in 1996. In the first three months of 2001, there were 20 confirmed cases, including thefts in Germany, Romania, South Africa and Mexico.

The majority of cases involved the movement of materials which could not be made into bombs, such as contaminated scrap metal or radioactive sources. But 15 instances since 1993 involved plutonium or enriched uranium, which could be used in bombs. No single consignment has so far contained enough for a bomb, but the most worrying to the IAEA was the seizure of nearly a kilogram of enriched uranium in April last year in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
The risk of nuclear terrorism is "the worst of all nightmares", says Morten Bremer Maerli of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. The cold war has left the world with "a staggering legacy" of 3 million kilograms of fissile material, he says-enough for a quarter of a million bombs.

Maerli says two of the most notorious terrorist groups-Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida in Afghanistan and the Aum Shrinrikyo cult in Japan-have been trying to acquire a nuclear capability. Alex Schmid of the UN's Terrorism Prevention Branch suggests that there could be as many as 130 terrorist groups that pose a nuclear threat. "Vigorous efforts need to be made to keep the nuclear genie in the bottle and out of the hands of terrorists," he says.

With nuclear smuggling on the increase, how long before a terrorist builds a bomb?

THE nuclear arms race has left the world with a terrifying legacy: 3 million kilograms of bomb-grade plutonium and uranium. A terrorist would need no more than a few kilograms to make a devastating bomb, so you'd think this material would be kept under guard in secure military installations. You'd think so, but you'd be wrong.

Radioactive materials are going missing, border controls are almost non-existent, monitoring equipment doesn't work and smuggling is rife. This was the frightening picture painted at a conference of nuclear experts in Stockholm earlier this month organised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Interpol and the World Customs Organization. It seems only a matter of time before a terrorist group acquires the ultimate bargaining chip.

Terrorists don't even have to get hold of enough to make a nuclear bomb, says Friedrich SteinhÄusler, a physicist from the University of Salzburg in Austria and a former member of the International Commission on Radiological Protection. They could steal radioactive isotopes from unprotected research and medical facilities with "relative ease" and combine them with conventional explosives to contaminate large areas, or simply spread them through the ventilation system of an airport, office complex or shopping mall. "Such a potential future scenario emphasises the low-tech terror of 'mass disruption' rather than 'mass destruction'," SteinhÄusler says.

Today's leading terrorist groups, however, may have the means and the determination to achieve mass destruction. These groups include Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, which bombed US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, and Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult, which in 1995 released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway. There is evidence that both have been trying to acquire a nuclear capability, and according to the US State Department there are as many as 130 terrorists groups worldwide that pose a potential nuclear threat.

If any of these groups is intent on building a nuclear weapon, the end of the cold war has provided them with ample opportunity. According to SteinhÄusler, up to a hundred countries may hold radioactive materials that they can't safeguard properly. In many of these countries, often former Soviet republics, the soldiers guarding the materials are hungry and haven't been paid for months. And there are long stretches of open country across their borders where, as SteinhÄusler puts it, "no one checks what you have in your rucksack".

SteinhÄusler, working with colleagues at Stanford University in California, has just completed a study of nuclear security in 11 typical countries: the US, China, Germany, Austria, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Israel, Brazil, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh. It reveals gaping holes in their ability to detect nuclear smuggling, worrying flaws in their audits of radioactive materials and serious shortages of trained staff, equipment and resources.

None of the 11 countries has any radiation monitoring equipment covering its unfenced borders, where there are few roads, railways or settlements. One of the countries had no radiation monitoring equipment at any of its borders.
Although the study does not point the finger at any particular country, it discloses that around a quarter of them do not keep registers of radioactive sources that may have been lost from laboratories or hospitals. Half of the countries knew of unlicensed radioactive material, and in nearly a third nuclear material has been stolen from licensed sites in the past 10 years.

SteinhÄusler's unnerving analysis was backed up by other studies presented at the Stockholm conference. These include new figures from the IAEA showing that the number of attempts to smuggle radioactive materials has doubled over the past five years (New Scientist, 12 May, p 6).

Some 10 per cent of the 370 incidents of illicit trafficking confirmed since 1993 have involved plutonium or enriched uranium, six of them since April 1999. "In most cases the quantity of highly enriched uranium and plutonium encountered is small compared with the amounts required for a nuclear explosive," IAEA analysts say, although these may simply have been samples of larger quantities up for sale.

Recent seizures of atomic contraband

And the material that is intercepted may be just a fraction of what is actually being smuggled. Ian Ray, a forensic nuclear scientist from the Institute for Transuranium Elements in Karlsruhe, Germany, estimates that only 5 to 10 per cent of the illegal traffic in radioactive materials is detected.

So why are so few smugglers being caught? One reason is that most radiation monitors at border crossings don't work, according to a survey for the IAEA by the Austrian Research Centre at Seibersdorf. Out of 14 installed systems, 12 failed to meet the IAEA's minimum standards for detecting radiation from weapons-grade plutonium, and 11 out of 24 portable monitors either failed tests or could not be tested.

Another study, by the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate, found "imperfections in many national systems for combating illicit trafficking", including inadequate laws, poor regulations, unclear lines of responsibility and a "shortage of suitable and modern equipment for monitoring and detection".

The US Department of Defense tried to improve this situation with a four-year programme to train and equip police and customs officials in 17 Eastern European countries. But it is far from satisfied with the results. "Some recipient countries have failed to demonstrate an earnest commitment to programme goals," says the DOD's Harlan Strauss.

Russia is the epicentre of the nuclear smuggling problem, and the US has committed $2.2 billion to a programme aimed at ensuring that nuclear material held there is secure. But a report from the US General Accounting Office in February showed that after seven years only 14 per cent of Russia's 603 tonnes of weapons-grade material has been fully secured.
Norwegian scientists also criticise the programme for failing to cover 120,000 spent fuel assemblies from Russian submarines and icebreakers. Spent fuel is usually regarded as "self-protecting" because it is too radioactive to handle safely. But a new investigation by the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority concludes that after 30 years or less the radiation will have decayed sufficiently for terrorists to be able to extract enriched uranium and plutonium. Despite the risks, the Bush administration has said that it intends to scale back the programme.

SteinhÄusler believes that spent fuel from civilian reactors could also be a danger. There is a already a 1000-tonne stockpile of plutonium from commercial power stations, and recently declassified US documents show that it can be made into bombs. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has even suggested that only "a relatively low level of sophistication" is needed to make americium and neptunium-also found in spent fuel-into nuclear explosives.
Nuclear authorities are starting to call for action. The Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate wants the IAEA to set up a unit to combat smuggling. And experts are meeting in Vienna this week to discuss plans to strengthen the IAEA's Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material.

Others advocate a more direct approach. Phil Williams, an international security specialist from the University of Pittsburgh, thinks police forces should step up undercover operations to trap smugglers. More than 40 such operations in six countries have had "considerable success" at catching smugglers, he says.

Alex Schmid, head of the UN's Terrorism Prevention Branch, warns that just as nuclear weapons technology has spread to countries like India, Pakistan and Israel despite the best efforts of the major powers, it may be impossible to stop it spreading to terrorist groups. "Time might not be on our side," he says.

VIENNA, Austria -- The threat of illicit trafficking in nuclear materials and radioactive sources will bring more than 300 officials from over 70 countries to Stockholm next week.

The Swedish government and the Vienna based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will co-host a conference from May 7 to 11, entitled "Security of Material, Measures to Prevent, Intercept and Respond to Illicit Uses of Nuclear Material and Radioactive Sources."

Among those in attendance will be representatives of the World Customs Organization, the International Criminal Police Organization - Interpol, and the European Police Office.

They will discuss ways to strengthen international security against terrorists and look at measures to prevent the unauthorized removal and movement of nuclear materials and critical equipment.

"The potential for the smuggling of large quantities of weapons usable material may be low," said IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei.

"However, even trafficking of small quantities of such material deserves full attention in the context of non-proliferation, since quantities of nuclear material of strategic value could be accumulated.

"Trafficking involving other radioactive materials does not pose a proliferation threat, but can cause, and has resulted in, serious radiation exposure to individuals."

Some of those cases have been documented by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

The Center's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Terrorism Project closely monitors the news media for reports of terrorist or criminal incidents involving the acquisition and/or use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear materials.

After reviewing more than 280,000 media reports during 2000, staff documented 181 "relevant" incidents. Fifty eight were hoaxes. Here is a sample of the 123 that were not:

* On February 3, the head of the Moldovian Republic of Russia Federal Security Service antiterrorism department stated that a "reliable source" alleged that Chechen rebels were planning to terrorize Russian nuclear facilities.

* On March 1, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that Chechen rebels had threatened to use radiological agents, obtained from nuclear materials being stored at a combine 30 kilometers southeast of Grozny, against Russian troops.

* A bomb exploded on March 6 at a nuclear research institute in Rostov-na-Donu, Russia. The blast from the remote controlled device, which injured two, was most likely tied to Mafia infighting, officials stated. Rumors of high casualties and radioactivity caused by the explosion turned out to be false.

* On March 29, Japanese police reported the Aum Shinrikyo cult had acquired information concerning nuclear facilities including details relating to the security of the facilities as well as the transport of materials in Russia, Ukraine, Japan, and other countries. It was suggested that Aum stole the information using the cult’s software companies, which had contracts with government agencies in other countries.

* On March 30, Uzbek customs officials detained a vehicle on the Kazakhstan border headed for Pakistan and carrying 10 lead-lined containers emitting radiation 100 times the legally permissible level. The cargo was destined for a Pakistani company, and a British newspaper suggested the shipment could have been intended for delivery to Al-Qaida, Usama Bin Laden’s Afghanistan based organization, and that U.S. intelligence sources had identified the agent as strontium-90.

* On May 10, a 9.6 kilogram object believed to be uranium was found with two former members of the Khmer Rouge and a local villager in Prek Mahatep, Cambodia. The three individuals were arrested by Cambodian military police.

* On June 2, it was reported that Islamic Jihad had attempted to obtain small amounts of uranium and plutonium from Russia.

* On June 6, an envelope laced with monazite, which contains the radioactive element thorium, was received by the Japanese Imperial Household Agency in Tokyo, Japan. The envelope was sent by Tsugio Uchinishi, ostensibly to warn government officials about illegal exports of uranium to North Korea. The incident was similar to nine others involving various government offices in Tokyo between June 6 and 8.

* On September 22, the Ukrainian Security Services arrested a group of residents from the Chernigov, Zaporozhye and Sumy regions of Ukraine who were planning to conduct acts of sabotage on a list of Ukrainian facilities, including the nuclear power facility at Chernobyl, in an effort to overthrow the government.

In its conclusions, CNS staff said 2000 saw a slight increase over 1999 in incidents involving chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear material (CBRN). Of 1999's 175 cases, 99 were hoaxes.

"This total shows a continuing steep rise in frequency of CBRN incidents since 1998, when the number of incidents rose to 153 after an average of 42 incidents from 1995 to 1997," said the center's terrorism project report.

It went on to note, "The most dramatic development in 2000 was a sharp rise in the number of incidents of actual CBRN use... The 93 cases where agents were used represent a 138 percent increase from 1999 and constitute the largest event category in 2000.

"The increase in the number of casualties was even more impressive, rising from 366 (with four fatalities) in 1999 to at least 782 casualties (and 144 fatalities) in 2000."

Many countries have been trying to develop better means of combating illicit trafficking threats. The IAEA's annual conference has in yearly resolutions since 1994 underlined the need for more action in this area.

Delegates at next week's conference in the Swedish capital will focus on closer cooperation between countries and with law enforcement authorities and intelligence agencies.

Some 130 countries belong to the IAEA, which serves as the world's central inter-governmental forum for scientific and technical cooperation in the nuclear field. The agency has conducted two international conferences on the same topic.
The first was the November 1997 International Conference on Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials: Experience in Regulation, Implementation and Operations, and the other was the International Conference on the Safety of Radiation Sources and the Security of Radioactive Materials held in Dijon, France, in September 1998.

Dozens of Russia's nuclear weapons are missing. There is clear evidence that Osama bin Laden's agents have been scouring the world to buy or steal such devices in order to attack the West. Our correspondent investigates how near they may be to succeeding.

When Ahmed Salama Mabruk was arrested three years ago in Baku, in Azerbaijan, no one in the West could confirm what he claimed to know. Some still doubt him, but no one now dares to say that he was lying.

Mabruk was personal assistant to Ayman Zawahiri, the bespectacled lieutenant to Osama bin Laden who is now thought to have masterminded the September attacks on New York and Washington.

When Azerbaijani security forces confiscated Mabruk’s laptop they were able to download from it a mine of information about the structure of the al-Qaeda network. He was extradited to Egypt and is now serving a 25-year sentence for planning terrorist activities there, but during his trial he had a chance to exchange a few words in his Cairo courtroom with Mohammed Salah, a reporter with the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper.

“I asked him if al-Qaeda had obtained nuclear weapons and he told me that both al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad had done so with the help of several different countries,” says Salah. “He said that bin Laden had told his men not to use them except when ordered to.” Salah was sceptical at first. “But now,” he says, “I believe everything.”

Another story that is also suddenly credible comes from Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who travelled to Khartoum, the Sudan capital, in 1993, with $1.5 million (£1 million) and orders from bin Laden to buy South African weapons-grade uranium. He says he made contact with a Sudanese Army officer offering the fuel for sale in a 3ft steel cylinder. Al-Fadl was paid $10,000 for his efforts before being removed from the negotiations.

Three years later al-Fadl walked into an American embassy in Africa and turned himself in. He is now the FBI’s most valuable source on bin Laden, its al-Qaeda supergrass, with secret accommodation and a new identity as a member of the bureau’s Witness Protection Programme. He says he doesn’t know if the uranium deal went through.

In fact there has been no confirmation of nuclear weapons or nuclear material falling into bin Laden’s hands — nor any firm statement that he has failed to obtain them. But the deeper you look into this information vacuum, which US taxpayers increasingly consider a poor return on their $30 billion-a-year investment in foreign intelligence, the more worrying it becomes.

Bin Laden has said that it is his duty to seek weapons of mass destruction, and the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) in Vienna has confirmed hundreds of instances of nuclear smuggling since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They litter the map of Eurasia and implicate a gallery of crooks, usually offering small amounts of non-weapons-grade material to buyers with even less knowledge of nuclear physics than themselves.

A group of Georgian Customs officers treated in 1997 for deep brown leg wounds provides a case in point. They had confiscated several phials of highly radioactive caesium and pocketed it in the hope of finding a buyer. Instead they found that the caesium, which cannot be used in bombs, ate into their flesh.

The following year, according to an Afghan refugee from Mazar-i Sharif now living in London, an entire family fell ill when a smuggler buried a large quantity of what was believed to be uranium in their garden. “Some of them were paralysed from the waist down and all the vegetation in their garden died,” the refugee says. “The uranium probably came from Taliqan or Kunduz province, near the border.”

For most of the 1990s the international community persuaded itself that nuclear smuggling on a larger scale than this was easy to detect and probably not happening. Western leaders are now having to assume the reverse: that only the clowns got caught.
“They are probably the tip of the iceberg,” says Dr Laurie Mylroie, a US academic who claims that the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing was almost certainly masterminded by Iraq, and who insists that President Saddam Hussein was likewise behind the September 11 attacks.

“If Russian organised-crime groups with good contacts and resources got involved in this, you might never hear about it,” says Gary Milhollin, of the Wisconsin Project, a Washington anti-proliferation think-tank. “You tend to pick up the amateurs, not the pros.” Before September 11 such talk might have been alarmist. Now it is a sane reminder of the most sobering reality of the post-Soviet world order. What was the world’s largest nuclear power, with between 15,000 and 40,000 nuclear weapons and enough fissile material for 40,000 more, has spent the past decade staggering under the pressure of rampant corruption and criminality with its nuclear stockpile ill-guarded, compared with America’s. And vulnerable, above all, to the thousands of scientists who built it, but now earn on average $50 a month. The result is what one of Washington’s more moderate non-proliferation experts calls “a nuclear K-Mart”.

Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles are not for sale. They are so central to Moscow’s vision of itself as a world power that they remain almost as secure and secret as in the Cold War. But a black market has existed since before the Soviet collapse for a wide range of lesser nuclear assets — from battlefield weapons to “suitcase nukes” built for Soviet special forces and low-grade radioactive material that could be packed with conventional explosives to make the most basic poor-man’s atom bomb.
In the worst scenario, impossible to rule out with no UN weapons inspectors left in Iraq, Saddam could already have acquired enough fissile material for a warhead and mounted it atop a Soviet-built Scud missile.

In the early 1990s the smugglers’ preferred routes led west out of Russia and Ukraine to Eastern Europe and Germany. In 1994, a German police sting at Frankfurt airport led to the arrest of a Colombian in transit from Moscow with a consignment of plutonium in his suitcase, and the smugglers’ focus shifted towards the Caucasus and Central Asia.

There are few wilder or more porous frontiers than the 3,000-mile fence along the southern fringe of the former Soviet Union. It starts on the Black Sea near Batumi, winds along the spine of the Caucasus and continues through scorching deserts to the Pamirs and the Tien Shan, interrupted only by the Caspian.

In the middle of it, Uzbekistan’s short border with Afghanistan has been closed for the past four years. Otherwise all bets are off. I have interviewed Chechens in Georgia’s spectacular Pankisi Gorge who walk unhindered over the high passes of the Caucasus in and out of their war-torn homeland when the snows allow. Not far to the east, customs checks on trains from southern Russia to Azerbaijan are entirely avoidable with bribes. In the high Pamirs you can drive for hours along Tajikistan’s border with the Vakhan Corridor in northeastern Afghanistan and see hardly a soul.

It is no surprise to learn from the IAEA that in September 1998 police arrested eight people in Turkey and seized 10lb of uranium-235, destination unknown; nor that two men were arrested trying to sell plutonium in the remote Kyrgyz border town of Kara Balta the following year; nor that 4lb of highly enriched uranium was found less than three months ago packed into a glass jar in neat discs the size of ice hockey pucks in an hotel room in the Georgian Black Sea port of Batumi.

The list is merely a sample of what is known. It does not include police and media reports based on personal testimony, such as one in the Arabic Al-Watan news magazine in early 1999 claiming that bin Laden had pulled off a huge deal for 20 Russian nuclear warheads obtained for him by the Chechen mafia in exchange for $30 million in cash and two tons of opium. It does not include the FBI’s ongoing operation against a Pakistani intelligence agent with close ties to bin Laden identified as Mohammed Abbas, who placed an order with an undercover US agent posing as an arms dealer for six nuclear switches and a quantity of plutonium after announcing over lunch in New York that he meant to “kill all Americans”.

None of this, at any rate, came as a surprise to the CIA. “Bin Laden has been trying to get his hands on enriched uranium for seven or eight years,” Robert Wolsey, the agency’s former director, told reporters a week after the September 11 attacks.
Why, then, did the world’s only superpower not do more to stop him? It is a question that torments America, but answers are already emerging. On the one hand the US intelligence community was hamstrung by internal turf wars, bureaucratic regulation and limits on what it could do to protect Russia’s nuclear stockpile because of Russia’s security interests and the risk of losing its own agents — a scenario considered unacceptable in the “risk-averse” post-Cold War era. Even more seriously, the CIA appears to have relied too heavily on the assumption that bin Laden could not have nuclear weapons since building and maintaining them takes huge political will and the resources of a nation state.

Experts are now saying that this was a false assumption on several counts. The first dates from 1997, when General Aleksandr Lebed, then head of Russia’s national security council, dropped a bombshell by declaring that dozens, possibly hundreds, of suitcase-sized nuclear weapons built in the 1970s were unaccounted for and were “a potentially perfect weapon for nuclear terrorism and blackmail”.

Lebed was blackballed by the Russian military establishment and thrown off a commission set up to investigate his allegations. Russian nuclear officials ridiculed them, but the following month Lebed named the weapons as the RA-115 and the RA-115-01 (an underwater variant), each weighing roughly 30 kilograms. Aleksei Yablokov, a former environmental adviser to President Yeltsin, said that 84 out of a total of 132 were missing. At a conference in Berlin, Lebed said he believed that most of them had been stationed in border areas no longer within Russia. He warned one of his detractors, the then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin: “Sleep, Viktor Stepanovich, and you just might not wake up.”

Lebed is now running for a second term as governor of Krasnoyarsk and has refused all interview requests since the attacks. However, a former Western diplomat who travels frequently to Central Asia confirmed last week that the suitcase-sized weapons almost certainly exist. “It’s very plausible that a device has been smuggled out and even to Afghanistan,” he adds. “Osama bin Laden is as possible a recipient as Saddam Hussein.”

Compact nuclear weapons offer terrorists an easy answer to the question “Why build when you can buy?” Pakistan’s rush to build an estimated 120 nuclear warheads has given bin Laden yet another option — theft. President Musharraf insists that his nuclear arsenal is safe, but the US considers the risk of Pakistani warheads falling into the wrong hands so great given the number of Taleban sympathisers in his ISI intelligence service that it has offered to fly in perimeter security for the country’s nuclear bases and install fail-safe mechanisms on its weapons to prevent them being detonated.

So far Musharraf has declined the offer. Pakistan and the West must therefore hope that bin Laden has failed in all his attempts to buy nuclear weapons and material. But even if he has, the risk of nuclear terrorism remains real and serious, thanks to Saddam.

The Iraqi dictator nearly bankrupted his country trying to build nuclear weapons before the arrival of UN inspectors in the wake of the Gulf War. This has not stopped him trying again since their departure.

The proof, or the closest thing to it, is in the form of a strange order placed with the Siemens electronics giant by the Iraqi Government in 1998 for six lithotripter devices designed to break up kidney stones with highpowered shock waves. As medical machinery the lithotripters were not covered by UN sanctions. Each used a precision electronic switch, and Iraq ordered an extra 120 of these. As Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project wrote in The New Yorker: “Iraq’s strange hankering for this particular spare part becomes less mysterious when one reflects that the switch in question has another use: it can trigger an atomic bomb.”

Former UN weapons inspectors in Iraq believed in 1999 that Saddam already had the components for three nuclear weapons, each needing 32 electronic switches. Whether he has obtained enough fuel for them is one of the critical questions driving the debate in Washington on whether to expand the war on terror to Iraq. Another is whether Saddam sponsored the September attacks.

Hawks in the Bush administration have been scouring the globe for an Iraqi link that would justify finishing the job begun by Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and they may have found it: earlier this month the Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Kavan, flew to Washington with documents showing that Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first jet to hit the World Trade Centre, visited the Iraqi embassy in Prague for meetings with its consul last year.

“Why would they meet?” asks Laurie Mylroie, whose work on Iraqi-sponsored terrorism has a close following among those in the Bush White House pushing for a broad offensive against Iraq. “To have a cup of tea?” Asked how scared we should be of the possibility of an Iraqi-manufactured nuclear weapon detonating as the conflict unfolds, Dr Mylroie replies: “Scared is not the right word. This is war. It’s like the Second World War. People have to make the right decisions; if they make the wrong decisions tens or hundreds of thousands could die.”