The theft at Chernobyl reveals a bitter irony. With the end of the superpower conflict, it is easy to think that the world has become a safer place–after years of inching toward midnight, the famous “doomsday” clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been turned back. Yet the very source of this new safety–the collapse of Soviet power–has also nourished new dangers.
Nuclear-weapons technology is 50 years old, dating from a time when computers were clunky and slow, when microengineering was in its infancy. The world’s good fortune in avoiding nuclear conflict since 1945 was in large measure due not to any technical difficulties but to the control that America and the Soviet Union exercised over materials and skilled personnel.
The Soviet half of that control is now wasting away. “In the old days,” says Leonard Spector, a nuclear-proliferation expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “it took 10 years from the time a country wanted a bomb to when they could actually get a bomb. Now countries may be able to suddenly jump ahead.”
The growing concern over nuclearweapons proliferation takes a variety of forms. Among countries already known to have had programs underway, the news is not all bad. Though Israel, India and Pakistan are undeclared nuclear states, South Africa, Argentina and Brazil have halted their programs. Kazakhstan and Belarus, which became independent with Soviet weapons on their soil, have signed the Nonproliferation Treaty and are shipping weapons to Russia.
The key problem among the known nuclear states is Ukraine, which, with about 1,800 warheads, is notionally the world’s third most powerful nuclear state. The government of Leonid Kravchuk has promised to ratify nuclear-weapons treaties and dismantle its warheads. But nationalists see the weapons both as a protection against Russia–a concern heightened by the Russian elections–and as a bargaining chip for cash from the West. “We should be in no hurry to get rid of the missiles,” says Ihor Derkach of the Parliament’s defense committee. Last week there was some good news. In meetings in Moscow and Kiev, Vice President Al Gore and American Ambassador at Large Strobe Talbott found Ukraine more receptive to solving the proliferation problems, though much will depend on the internal political struggle between Parliament and president.
There is even greater proliferation anxiety about the programs in “rogue states” such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea–even Algeria, which has a Chinese-supplied research reactor and a “hot cell” to help produce plutonium. A combination of allied bombing during the gulf war and United Nations inspection after the war destroyed most of Iraq’s nuclear-weapons capability. But the CIA thinks that some parts of the program remain hidden–and that if U.N. sanctions were lifted, Saddam Hussein’s program would be humming again.
He may be beaten to the punch by Iran. Though the CIA thinks that Teheran is still perhaps a decade away from building its own bomb, it could hasten the process by buying materials and skills from Moscow and Beijing. Iranians are scouring Central Asian republics for nuclear components. And NEWSWEEK has learned that the CIA keeps a close eye on Iranian students at Western schools who are vacuuming nuclear technology.
North Korea, in a standoff with the West over its refusal to allow inspection of the suspect research center at Yongbyon, may have enough plutonium stockpiled to make two to five bombs. So far Pyongyang appears to be unable to fabricate a bomb small enough to fit onto its new Rodong-1 missile, which has a range of more than 600 miles (enough to reach Japan). in the short term, North Korea could deliver a bomb only by means of a plane or by special teams on the ground. But intelligence officials think it may have a bomb small enough for the Rodong-1 within six years.
China, meanwhile, has been upgrading its weapons capability, which used to depend on obsolete bombers and missiles. Russian experts are helping China develop a version of the SS-25 with multiple warheads and supplying China with nuclear triggers, large rocket engines and nuclear-propulsion technology for its submarines. “You have a pattern of discount shopping from Russia for the best technology that’s scaring China’s Asian neighbors,” says Henry Sokolski, a nonproliferation official in the Bush administration.
That leads directly to another concern: that Russia–and, for that matter, Ukraine–will try to turn its nuclear expertise into cash. The Russians have told Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary they are considering closing a reactor that produces plutonium at Tomsk. But by 1994, Russia plans to quadruple its arms sales over 1992 levels; the sales will include ballistic missiles.
Meanwhile, workers at the Hartron Institute, in the grimy Ukraine town of Kharkiv, make battery-powered toys and earn $10 to $15 a month: they once designed systems for missile guidance. It won’t take much of a carrot to woo them, say, to Iran. CIA Director James Woolsey says “the current emigration and customs bureaucracies [of the former Soviet Union] cannot monitor more than the most critical personnel.”
Dima Litvinov, the head of Greenpeace in Russia, worries about “loose nukes walking around Russia.” With good reason: sources say that a draft study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has documented the disappearance of Russian highly enriched uranium–a key component for bombs. The great fear of nonproliferation officials in the West is that such materials–deadly even in quantities that can be hidden in a suitcase–end up not just with rogue states but in the hands of organized crime and terrorists.
In this new climate, the cold-war mechanisms to control nuclear weapons are of little use. Safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Agency, says Sokolski, “are very effective at keeping safe nuclear facilities in safe countries safe.” Such measures did little good in Iraq and are quite inadequate in the chaos of the post-cold-war world. Both the CIA and the Pentagon are seeking new ways to counter proliferation, including training special commando teams to penetrate nuclear plants. But the theft from Chernobyl–still one of the most dangerous places in the world–shows the lengths to which nuclear smugglers will go. Nearly half a century after Hiroshima, the old doomsday clock is still ticking.
