DISARMAMENT: U.N. Moves to Curb Nuclear Terrorism

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 1 1998 (IPS) - The United Nations is getting ready to contain a new post-Cold War military threat: nuclear terrorism.

A U.N. Adhoc Committee, comprising all 185 member states, will begin a two-week session Feb. 16 to formulate a new U.N. convention specifically aimed at nuclear terrorists. The proposed treaty – titled Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism – is expected to be approved by the General Assembly later this year. Last year the Assembly adopted a similar convention against terrorist bombings, in general.

The Russian Federation, the lead player in the new treaty, has already prepared a 20-article draft convention to be discussed by the committee. The Russians point out that such a convention would pre-empt potential acts of nuclear terorrism.

“The object of terrorist attacks is normally to achieve an immediate dramatic impact, and this can best be done by using weapons of mass destruction or radioactive material,” says Ambassador Sergey Lavrov, the Russian envoy at the United Nations. The use of nuclear weapons or an attack on a nuclear plant is “particularly attractive” to terrorists, Lavrov warns.

In a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Lavrov points out that since nuclear technologies were developed, the world community has more than once encountered cases of “leakage” of nuclear components. “There are familiar instances in which private individuals and groups proclaimed their intention of using the nuclear potential allegedly in their possession for terrorist and criminalk purposes.”

Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala, the new head of the U.N.’s Department for Disarmament Affairs, says that Annan already has warned of new security threats from “uncivil” society. “This is a new challenge in the proliferation of weapons, including nuclear weapons and the international community must enhance the physical protection of nuclear material and technology, and cooperate over export controls,” he told IPS.

Dhanapala also pointed out that the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has already taken important steps to curb this danger, but member states need to heighten their vigilance to prevent smuggling and other ways in which existing controls are circumvented.

In 1980 the United Nations adopted a Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, but that treaty does not cover the use of nuclear weapons as an instrument of terror either by individuals, rebel groups or sovereign nation states.

In a U.S. television network interview last year, Alexander Lebed, a decorated Soviet war hero and a former national security chief under President Boris Yeltsin, said there are about 100 suitcase-sized Russian nuclear weapons missing and unaccounted for. The Russian secret intelligence agency, KGB, is said to have acquired an unspecified number of small nuclear weapons, each weighing less than 75 pounds, that were never included in any post- Cold War inventory on global disarmament.

John Pastore, Secretary of the International Physicans for the Prevention of Nuclear War, says ever since the break up of the former Soviet Union, the world continues to face the threat of “loose nukes.”

The danger continues to grow every day, he says, because the Russian military has been deteriorating under the weight of “neglect, poverty, inadequate civilian control, and poor morale.”

How much damage could be done by a terrorist who get his hands on a loose nuke? “Massive casualties, on a scale unseen since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would result from a nuclear explosion of a major city,” he warns.

A Hollywood movie titled “The Peacemaker”- partly shot outside the United Nations last year – dramatised the story of a disgruntled Bosnian diplomat who acquires a backpack-sized nuclear weapon and brings it to New York to blow it outside U.N. headquarters.

“Although experts will quibble with the details of the film’s scenario, its basic premises are all true,” says William Potter, director of the Centre for Non-Proliferation Studies at the California-based Monterey Institute of International Studies. “The former Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons and material stockpile is at risk, and America is extraordinarily vulnerable to terrorists employing weapons of mass destruction.”

Potter points out that, until recently, most experts downplayed the risk of theft or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons from Russia’s vast arsenal. He also says that a more likely variety of nuclear theft, however, is the diversion of weapons-usable material from the hundreds of tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium at dozens of sites throughout the former Soviet Union.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, he said, a significant quanity of this material is located in Belarus, Georgia, Latvia,Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. “Especially worrisome because of its geographical location are three tons of plutonium at Aktau, Kazakhstan, on the Caspian Sea across from Iran.”

Pastore says the “Peacemaker” is not a bad dream but a possible vision of the future. “Having made nuclear weapons the coin of the realm in global politics for nearly half a century, the nuclear powers may find that it’s only a matter of time until some of that loose change falls into the wrong hands,” he adds

Nearly 10 years after the end of the Cold War, there are still some 30,000 nuclear warheads around the world. Of this, more than 10,000 are in Russia alone. Some of these weapons are being dismantled under ongoing arms control treaties. The New York Times said last year that “the peaceful dividends that have come with the end of the Cold War may look meagre in the years ahead if the danger of nuclear disaster is not more effectively contained.”