Can terrorists divert nuclear material?

Given the events of the times, many people find themselves questioning their safety - specifically whether or not they should be worried about the threat of a non-state nuclear attack. It would be a mistake to view nuclear terrorism strictly through the prism of the threat posed by ISIS today. As important as this is, the reality is that the threat posed by nuclear terrorism is much broader than the aspirations of any single terrorist group. We live in a world of escalating levels of asymmetric vulnerabilities. When the first suicide bombers attacked the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut in 1981, no one at the time imagined a day when suicide attacks against civilians would become commonplace. The extremes of 20 years ago are no longer extreme, and we must guard against any conventional thinking that places limits on the art of the possible for terrorist action. It is precisely the potential to surprise, along with the asymmetric impact of weapons of mass destruction that makes them appealing to the desperate designs of terrorists.

IAEA experts have evaluated the risks for nuclear terrorism in these three categories:

1. Nuclear Facilities: IAEA experts believe the primary risks associated with nuclear facilities would involve the theft or diversion of nuclear material from the facility, or a physical attack or act of sabotage designed to cause an uncontrolled release of radioactivity to the surrounding environment. From its inception, the nuclear industry has been keenly aware of the dangers of nuclear material falling into terrorist's hands.
2. Nuclear Material: Terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons would be the most devastating scenario. It is highly unlikely they could use it to manufacture and successfully detonate a nuclear bomb. Still, no scenario is impossible.Beyond the difficulty for terrorists to obtain weapon usable material - scientists estimate that 25 kg of highly enriched uranium or 8 kg of plutonium would be needed to make a bomb - actually producing a nuclear weapon is far from a trivial exercise. Scientific expertise and access to sophisticated equipment would be required. To prevent theft of nuclear material, nuclear facilities employ a range of protection measures, including site security forces, site access control, employee screening and co-ordination with local and national security authorities. These safeguards, the verification tool entrusted to the IAEA in the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), also play an important role in reducing the risk that terrorists could acquire nuclear material without detection (when the NPT was drafted, nuclear terrorism was not perceived as a significant threat).
3. Radioactive Sources: IAEA experts are concerned that terrorists could develop a crude radiological dispersal device using radioactive sources commonly used in every day life. The number of radioactive sources around the world is vast: those used in radiotherapy alone are in the order of ten thousand. Many more are used in industry; for example, to check for welding errors or cracks in buildings, pipelines and structures. They are also used for the preservation of food. There is a large number of unwanted radioactive sources, many of them abandoned, others being simply "orphaned" of any regulatory control.Such a weapon, sometimes referred to as a "dirty bomb", could be made by shrouding conventional explosives around a source containing radioactive material, although handling the nuclear material could well be deadly.

The IAEA is proposing a number of new initiatives, including strengthening border monitoring, helping States search for and dispose of orphan sources and strengthening the capabilities of the IAEA Emergency Response Centre to react to radiological emergencies following a terrorist attack. The IAEA safeguards required by the NPT would eventually detect the absence of the stolen material from safeguarded facilities, but thieves, who intend to steal material and disappear, would not likely be deterred by the fact that the theft would be discovered after they had departed. If significant quantities of weapons-usable material became readily available on the nuclear black market, the other actions taken to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons (such as IAEA inspections, export controls, and NPT conferences) would be futile.

However, at all levels - operator, State and international - there is a complex infrastructure at work to ensure nuclear material is accounted for; safeguarded from diversion; and protected from theft and sabotage. Billions of dollars per year are already being spent to protect and defend nuclear facilities. Indeed, no other industry in the world has such a sophisticated level of security. Nuclear facilities are protected by well-trained security forces and are extremely robust, designed to withstand, for example, earthquakes, tornado-force winds and accidental crashes of small aircraft. Although it is not automatic that any attack would result in a release of radioactivity, they are however industrial facilities and as such are not hardened to withstand acts of war.
Current international agreements do not require that nuclear material and facilities in domestic use be guarded against thieves or saboteurs, including terrorists. This is a dangerous gap in the global barrier against proliferation. The IAEA has taken the first steps toward requiring measures to physically protect nuclear materials, but it is essential that this effort be pursued expeditiously and that countries take all reasonable steps to ensure that nuclear material is not part of the next terrorist attack.

The NRC’s rules do contain explicit requirements for protection of licensed civilian reactors. However, even before the attacks of September 11, those standards were criticized as being too weak, and on September 19 an IAEA statement acknowledged that most nuclear power plants are not strong enough to withstand attack by “a large jumbo jet full of fuel” without dispersion of large amounts of radioactive material.
There is one treaty that provides for physical protection of civilian nuclear material: the 1980 Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material. But it only applies to the protection from theft of material in international transit—for example, reprocessed plutonium being shipped from England back to Japan. The original draft of the treaty, proposed by the United States, was designed to cover both international transport and domestic transport, use, and storage. However, during the negotiations, important potential parties objected to domestic requirements, and in the end the treaty protected civilian nuclear material only against theft in international transport.
In 1997, the United States and the IAEA began to consider amending the convention to make it applicable to nuclear material in domestic use, and in 1999 the director-general of the IAEA convened a group of experts to recommend a course of action based on some observations:

• All of the nuclear material involved in the many incidents of illicit trafficking known to the IAEA seemed to have come from domestic use, storage, and transport—not from the international transport covered by the convention. Amending the convention to require domestic protection could help reduce illicit trafficking.
• Experts in the working group from developing countries reported that they had difficulty persuading their legislatures and other authorities to adopt physical protection statutes and regulations because there was no multilateral treaty requiring standards for domestic protection.
• Finally, the experts saw that the amount of nuclear material in peaceful nuclear programs under IAEA safeguards was rapidly increasing -- six-fold since the convention was negotiated in the late 1970s -- because the risks of theft and sabotage of nuclear material were likely to increase.
  

The early nuclear weapons developed in the United States, United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and China used technology that, while advanced in its time, is now largely commercially available. In assessing the capability of states and groups to make good on their nuclear intent, we must consider the possibility of collaboration between states, states and groups, and as the AQ Khan network revealed, between rogue networks and customers willing to pay for their services.
We must adapt our intelligence and policy efforts to confront the threat along its entire continuum in a persistent, sustained manner. It must be a global effort incorporating police, intelligence services, militaries, government agencies and ministries, and citizens across the world. The effort will require broad and often unprecedented information sharing across every front -- between government and private sector, and among foreign partners, including those who were once our adversaries. And we must take a systems approach that is able to monitor and adjust to fluctuations in all things nuclear across the globe.
We continue to face the enduring consequences of letting the nuclear genie out of the bottle. The power of the atom has become one of the most highly sought after prizes of twenty-first century technological advancement. States want to harness its power for energy, weapons, deterrence, and prestige. Non-state actors desire it for the asymmetric power of becoming a state, at least in terms of the influence they are able to wield. Nuclear terrorism therefore is not a single-point issue but a strategic problem that will continue to grow in significance throughout the twenty-first century.
References
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/the-strategic-threat-of-nuclear-terrorism
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2001_10/bunnoct01
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/calculating-new-global-nuclear-terrorism-threat-0