Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9408210032
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: D-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Medium
When the Soviet empire collapsed, a top Western priority was to prevent its vast nuclear stockpile from falling into the hands of terrorists or would-be nuclear powers.
Despite good intentions, however, little has been done to help Russia and other former Soviet republics safeguard hundreds of tons of uranium and plutonium.
"We should have been doing a lot, but we're almost shutting the door after the horse has bolted," said Patricia Lewis, director of the Verification Technology Information Center, an independent organization that studies methods of verifying arms-control agreements.
Russia has accused Western news media of exaggerating concerns about its nuclear security.
"Our existing system of security at nuclear facilities is quite reliable, and the accounting is meticulous," Valery Bogdan, special assistant to the Russian nuclear power minister, told The Associated Press in Moscow.
But Russian experts conceded last week that there is no foolproof way to safeguard nuclear material. Alexei Lebedev, director of protocol and personnel at the Ministry of Atomic Energy, told the AP in April that plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons was being stored at unsecure facilities.
There is convincing evidence that thieves have been at work in Russia. Initial reports indicate, however, that stolen material is not coming directly from nuclear warheads, but from plants where plutonium and uranium are processed, research laboratories or nuclear reactors.
German police have seized four small amounts of nuclear material since May, the first weapon-grade uranium and plutonium smuggled to the West. No other cases involving bomb-making materials have been confirmed.
Officials at Euratom, the European Union's nuclear regulatory agency, are testing the material and said the probability is "very high" that at least some of it came from Russia.
"The Russian nuclear industry is like a leaking tea bag - it's in a shambles," said John Large, a British nuclear engineer who said he was asked to help sell Russian uranium and plutonium. "The real problem is, has Germany caught the first consignment or the 50th consignment? We don't know, nor do they."
Large said senior employees at two Russian nuclear facilities asked him to find a Western laboratory to test the purity of plutonium and uranium so they could sell it. He said he refused both offers when he realized the material would be smuggled to the West. He refused to identify the people involved or say where they worked.
David Kyd, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, was quoted in New Scientist magazine as saying the agency had found 80 cases of nuclear crime involving 20 European countries since November 1991 that were worthy of its interest. Kyd was not immediately available for comment, and the IAEA could not confirm the figure.
In Germany, the federal police released a report Wednesday saying cases of nuclear crime went from 99 in 1992 to 123 in 1993 and totaled 54 in the first half of this year.
Last year, there were two failed attempts in Germany at nuclear blackmail involving threats to release radioactivity and explode a bomb, New Scientist, a British publication, reported in its current issue.
by CNB