PREVENTING NUCLEAR TERRORISM

HEARING OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY,
VETERAN AFFAIRS, AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE
HOUSE GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE

September 24, 2002

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:  My name is Christopher Paine, and I am a Senior Analyst in the Nuclear Program of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Washington, D.C. I appreciate the opportunity today to present NRDC’s views on strategies for preventing nuclear terrorism.

Mr. Chairman, you asked us to address a broad set of questions regarding the threat of nuclear terrorism. This statement addresses those dimensions of the problem that are within our areas of expertise. This expertise involves the fundamental characteristics, vulnerabilities, and effects of nuclear energy systems and explosives, and really does not extend to the capabilities of known terrorist organizations to acquire or develop nuclear weapons.

With that caveat, let me summarize briefly what we at NRDC see as the fundamental technical ground truths regarding the risks of nuclear terrorism, and whether current US and international policies are doing enough to address these fundamental risks. 

At the broadest level of analysis, we discern five complementary approaches to reducing the risk of nuclear terrorism: Nuclear Materials Elimination, Access Denial, Controlled Use under Enhanced Safeguards, Interdiction, and Preemption. All these approaches need to be pursued in some measure, Mr. Chairman, but from both the technical and political perspectives, they are not all equally effective in reducing risks. We are concerned that current policies strike the wrong balance, and are therefore far less effective than they could be.

In roughly descending order of technical effectiveness, I would summarize the range of plausible policy approaches as follows:

-      Eliminate reliance on nuclear energy for any purpose, civil or military.

-     If the long-term cumulative risk of nuclear terrorism is seen as sufficiently dire, phase-out nuclear power (16% of global electricity supply in 2001) and the production of nuclear fuels.

-     The US government actually pursues a narrow, “discriminatory” variant of this approach when it seeks to deny Iran and others access to any form of nuclear energy technology.

-     Immobilize all stocks of nuclear explosive materials in spent fuel or radioactive waste/glass matrix, and bury in secure internationally monitored repositories.

-     Invest heavily in natural gas, solar-thermal, photovoltaics, increased efficiency, and hydrogen-based alternatives, such as fuel cells, to forestall the spread of nuclear power, and replace it in all but a few countries by 2025.

-       Increase controls on nuclear weapons and explosive materials at the source.

-     Physically secure and then eliminate a high percentage of existing national stocks of intact nuclear weapons, nuclear components, and “direct-use” nuclear materials.

-      End further production and use of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium for either military and civil purposes, and reduce existing stocks.

-      Outlaw all nuclear energy activities and trade not specifically licensed and inspected under the authority of the UN Security Council.

-       Continue restricted civil use of nuclear explosive materials under tighter safeguards.

-     Require technically adequate physical protection of all nuclear facilities against theft, terrorist intrusion, and large-scale suicide attacks.

-     Require technically adequate international safeguards arrangements that will provide “timely warning” of state-sponsored or insider-conspiracy diversions of weapon-usable nuclear materials.

-       Interdict illicit commerce in nuclear technology and materials to increase “homeland security.”

-     Increased border inspections can foil unsophisticated smuggling efforts, but technically adept smugglers are not likely to be detected.

-     Many international borders are essentially unguarded, and likely to remain so.

-     As the volume and variety of international commerce continues to grow, it will be difficult to attain and sustain a high probability of intercepting technically competent nuclear smuggling.

-       Preemptively destroy or disrupt known terrorist groups and networks, and hostile “outlaw regimes,” before they gain access to nuclear weapons or explosive materials.

-     No guarantee of continuing success over the long-term.

-     Success depends on timely knowledge of terrorist threats, which will not always be available.

-     Erroneous intelligence could lead to misdirected preemptive attacks, increased political hostilities, and an increased risk of further terrorism

-     Does not defend against the risks of  “societal breakdown” or hostile “regime change,” that could swiftly occur within existing sovereign nuclear weapon-capable states.

Ironically, if one considers the above five approaches from the perspective of current political effectiveness or political will, then one finds that the rank ordering above is nearly reversed. That is, the technical approaches least likely to succeed are the ones attracting all the attention and funding. There is now a great political head of steam behind nuclear risk reduction strategies that emphasize preemption – possibly involving even preemptive use of U.S. nuclear weapons – and increased border security. 

Not nearly enough attention is being paid, in our view, to reducing dependence on diversion-prone nuclear fuel cycles, and to better controlling – or better yet eliminating – nuclear weapons materials at the source, before they are produced, stolen, or diverted.

“Dirty Bombs” are Not Nukes. When considering whether terrorists could acquire a radiological or nuclear weapon, the risks involved should not be equated. There are considerable differences between a nuclear weapon and a radiological weapon in terms of availability of nuclear explosive and radiological materials, the ease in fabrication, and the likely consequences if used.

A one-kiloton nuclear explosive device, if detonated in a dense metropolitan area, could kill upwards of 100,000 people. The consequences of detonating a radiological weapon, a so-called “dirty bomb,” will depend on several factors, including most importantly the type and amount or radioactivity employed. With a few exceptions, the direct fatalities are likely to be dominated by the blast from the chemical high explosive used to disperse the radioactivity. The economic consequence due to radiological contamination could be small or large, depending on the type of device and its placement, but the economic consequences are likely to be less than those of a nuclear explosive device detonated at the same location.

Consequently, a higher priority should be given to preventing non-nuclear weapon states of concern or terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons, as opposed to “dirty bombs.”

Too much uncertainty persists about the size and disposition of the former Soviet nuclear stockpile.  There is no evidence in the public record that anyone has attempted to steal a nuclear weapon from a weapon storage facility in Russia, but you may in the course of your investigation want to consult the intelligence community on this question.  Most, but not all, Russian nuclear weapons are too heavy to be carried by a single individual acting alone. Some tactical nuclear weaponsľfor example, some types of artillery shells and atomic demolition munitionsľcan be carried by one or two individuals.

The U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile used to include the W48, a 155-mm artillery shell that weighed about 120 pounds and had a yield of about 100 tons, and the W54, an atomic demolition munition that weighed about 60 pounds and had a yield range of 10 to a few tens of tons of chemical explosive equivalent.  It is not know how many similar warheads remain intact in the Russian nuclear weapon stockpile, or in inactive storage, or indeed whether all such Soviet-era weapons were retrieved from Eastern Europe and Central Asia and are all presently accounted for in one form or another.

We do not know this because, despite the Biden Condition added by the Senate in 1992 as a binding condition on ratification of  the START  I Treaty, both the U.S. and Russian governments have resisted a bilateral data exchange that would identify the number, type and location of all nuclear warheads in Russia and the United States.

Even more unfortunate, the Moscow Treaty signed by Presidents Bush and Putin does not require the elimination of a single nuclear warhead, or nuclear warhead component, over the next ten years in Russia or the United States, and it has no provisions for identifying or controlling the number of non-strategic nuclear weapons, including Russian tactical nuclear weapons. This Administration has demonstrated that it is more interested in preserving a bloated U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, currently numbering some 10,000 intact nuclear devices, than in eliminating the proliferation and terrorist threat represented by Russian stocks of strategic and non-strategic nuclear warheads. 

To reduce both immediate and longer term risks, NRDC believes a much higher priority should be given to seeking a bilateral agreement to verifiably account for total Russian and U.S. warhead and fissile material production, and to steadily eliminating all but a few hundred nuclear warheads in Russia and the United States.

Theft of Weapon-Grade Material from Non-Weapon Facilities is a Major Concern. Nuclear weapons are maintained under tighter security than the nuclear explosive materials contained in Russia’s naval-fuel and civil-research sectors.  This is no doubt true in other nuclear weapon states as well.

But there have been several cases in which individuals or groups of individuals have sought to steal weapon-usable materials from the naval fuel facilities and civil nuclear research institutes in Russia. In some cases the individuals were apprehended after the nuclear material was removed from the facility or institute, and in some cases after it was removed from Russia. 

Fortunately, to date, no known cases involved large quantities of weapon-usable nuclear materials, but at least one incident involved a quantity of HEU (3 kg) that, in the hands of skilled designers and fabricators, could have produced a nuclear yield in the range of hundred tons to a kiloton of fission yield. Had the amounts involved in these separate episodes been combined in a single explosive device, the yield of the resulting device could significantly exceeded one kilton.

Explosive nuclear materials, namely, plutonium and highly enriched uranium, if diverted to a non-weapon state, could reduce the time to acquire nuclear weapons from years to weeks. The diversion of a few tens of kilograms of plutonium or highly enriched uranium could suffice for a small nuclear arsenal, not just a single weapon.

There are two classical methods used to assemble first generation fission weapons: the gun assembly and implosion techniques. The implosion technique is more efficient, requiring considerably less fissile material to achieve the same explosive yield. For example, the Fat Man device, tested at Trinity and dropped on Nagasaki, was an implosion weapon that used 6.1 kilograms of plutonium and had a yield of about 20 kilotons, whereas Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, was a gun-assembly that used 64 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and had a yield of about 15 kilotons. The fourth Chinese nuclear weapon test was of an implosion device that used about 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, and it had a yield of about 12 kilotons.  China reportedly provided this design to Pakistan.

Assuming the availability of the fissile material, it is more difficult to fabricate an implosion device than a gun assembly device. However, if either plutonium or highly enriched uranium were diverted to a non-weapon “state of concern,” an implosion weapon could be fabricated using the full scientific and economic assets available to the government involved, including precision casting equipment and numerically-controlled machine tools. While it appears far more likely that this government would retain such weapons for its own use, or use its own agency for delivery, it is at least conceivable that a country could rely on a terrorist network for delivery and detonation of the device.

In the specific instance of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, given the history of antagonism between Islamic jihadists and the decadent, secular Baathist regime in Baghdad, the only circumstance in which this feared “nexus” might conceivably occur is the one President Bush seems determined to create, in which an egomaniacal dictator under siege thinks he has nothing to lose and seeks to wreak vengeance on those who are toppling him. And this line of inquiry leads one to ponder the following contradiction: the Bush Administration argues that the threat of Saddam’s (unprovoked) nuclear or bio-weapon aggression against the U.S. is sufficiently imminent to justify prompt military intervention, but not so imminent as to justify fears of a vengeful response via a terrorist network when his regime is on in the verge of defeat. 

The only way the Administration could seize upon the former risk while discounting the latter is if it had detailed intelligence indicating that Saddam’s regime does not yet have the capabilities, or the terrorist “nexus” for WMD delivery, which it now claims are the proximate cause of America’s need for “preemptive self-defense.”  In that case, there is time for an intrusive inspection regime to be put in place. In the alternative, the risk of  retaliation via the “WMD-terrorist nexus” could actually be higher than the Administration is admitting publicly, in which case the Congress ought to look very carefully at the wisdom of giving the President a blank check to wage war against Saddam.

I do not know where the truth actually lies, but I am not sure the Administration does either, which I find worrisome. Either Congress and the public have been subjected to a certain amount of disinformation regarding the imminence of the Iraqi threat, or the Administration is embarked on a bit of a gamble that could end very badly for some innocent civilians in Israel, the U.S., or Western Europe..

Mr. Chairman, returning to the technology of the nuclear threat, both the implosion and the gun assembly techniques could be used to fabricate a crude low-yield nuclear explosive device using either plutonium or uranium. If plutonium were used in a crude gun assembly device the yield most likely would be substantially less than a kiloton, but it could be larger than the explosion that destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Consequently, to prevent the terrorist seizure, theft, or clandestine diversion of weapon-usable highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium, a high priority should be assigned to phasing out their use in civil research and test reactors, civil power reactor programs, and ultimately, naval nuclear fuel cycles.

Current International Safeguards Criteria are Technically Inadequate. If the implosion assembly technique is used a low-yield nuclear explosion can be realized with considerably less plutonium than was used in Fat Man. A one-kiloton explosive device can be fabricated with just over one kilogram of plutonium or about 3 kilograms of highly enriched uranium.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) defines a “significant quantity” (SQ) of nuclear material as “the approximate quantity of nuclear material in respect of which, taking into account any conversion process involved, the possibility of manufacturing a nuclear explosive device cannot be excluded.”  The SQ value used by the IAEA for direct use plutonium is 8 kilograms, and for direct use high-enriched uranium is 25 kilograms.  These values are technically wrong and are in error (too high) by a factor of about eight.

As a consequence of using incorrect, non-conservative, SQ values, IAEA safeguards are far less stringent than they should be. This is particularly troubling at bulk handling facilities, such as reprocessing facilities and plutonium and highly enriched uranium fuel fabrication plants, where measurement of material quantities is imprecise. Many nuclear facilities that are operating today could not continue to operate if the IAEA and nuclear regulatory agencies required that the diversion of a significant quantity of nuclear material could be detected with high confidence in time to prevent its incorporation into a nuclear device.

NRDC tried to get the IAEA to correct the SQ deficiency in 1995 by petitioning the IAEA and the United States government to make the necessary changes. We were thwarted by the IAEA and the State Department, which claimed that using technically correct safeguards requirements would lead to an inefficient allocation of the limited financial resources available to the IAEA.

In light of the post-September 11^th concerns, the United States and other wealthy nuclear industrial states should place pressure on the IAEA to substantially reduce the SQ values, and if necessary, assume the added financial burden this imposes on the IAEA.

Table 1.

Approximate Fissile Material Requirements
for Pure Fission Nuclear Weapons

Interdiction is a Tool, not a Solution. Some radioactive materials are relatively easy to detect with the x-ray and radiation detection equipment currently being deployed by U.S. Customs and other authorities at border control points. For other radioactive materials, detection can be exceedingly difficult.  U.S. Customs officials will be able to catch unsophisticated smugglers, but relative sophisticated smugglers will be able to beat the system.  This is particularly true with regard to weapon-usable highly enriched uranium, as was demonstrated recently by an ABC News simulated smuggling experiment. 

In early June, NRDC loaned ABC News a 15-pound (6.8-kilogram) cylinder of depleted uranium metal for the purpose of conducting an experiment resembling nuclear smuggling. ABC News wanted to test the effectiveness of security procedures at U.S. and other national bordersľand it found them wanting. In sum, the network found that the United States is ill equipped to stop terrorists from smuggling certain types of nuclear materials into the country.

ABC first shipped the depleted uranium cylinder by air from the United States to Vienna, and transported it by train through Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to Istanbul. ABC then shipped it as ocean freight back to New York.

TABLE 2.

Technical Realities Confronting Strategies to Reduce
the Risk of Nuclear Proliferation and Terrorism

§    The plutonium required to make a pure (unboosted) fission nuclear explosive, with a maximum probable yield in the range, 1-20 kilotons (kt) of chemical high explosive equivalent, is quite small, on the order of 1-8 kilograms (kg), with the exact material requirement within this range depending primarily on the level of expertise employed in design and fabrication, and secondarily on the plutonium's isotopic composition and the nominal expected yield chosen for the device.  The plutonium cores of modern thermonuclear warheads typically contain only 2 to 4 kg of plutonium.

§    Typical stocks of low-enriched uranium fuel (4.5% U-235) represent 71% of the "separative work" required to produce 80%-enriched uranium suitable for use in simple gun-type uranium weapons, such as the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima and the six weapons that were stockpiled by the former white minority government of South Africa, highlighting the importance of close controls on low-enriched uranium and uranium enrichment facilities to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and terrorism.

§    While less than ideal for military applications, the isotopic composition of the plutonium typically produced in civil power reactors does not represent a serious obstacle to the fabrication of efficient and powerful weapons as well as crude terrorist devices. The separation of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel for recycle in fresh fuel results in the availability of large quantities of weapon-usable plutonium.

§    The plutonium breeder-reactor and its fuel cycle provides a technical potential to produce large quantities of separated weapon-grade plutonium; and advanced technologies are under development in several countries that will permit rapid "clean-up" of reactor-grade plutonium inventories to weapon-grade.

§    Current levels of international safeguards are not technically capable of providing timely warning of theft or diversion from bulk handling facilities, e.g., reprocessing, enrichment, and plutonium fuel fabrication facilities, of a "Significant Quantity" (SQ) of material -- the quantity the IAEA uses to represent the minimum amount of material required by a non-weapon state to construct a single nuclear explosive device.

§    Basic consideration of critical mass requirements for nuclear explosive material at various levels of compression, and the obvious reality that separate stolen quantities can be combined to make a weapon, strongly indicate that the current IAEA SQ values for plutonium (8 kg) and HEU (25 kg) are far too high, and should be reduced eightfold, particularly if the international system seeks to place primary reliance in the future on international safeguards of peaceful use, rather than proliferated arsenals, to deter the use of nuclear materials for weapons purposes.

§    The pacing factor in any nation's acquisition of its first nuclear weapon, or a large nuclear arsenal, is the availability of weapon-usable fissile materials.

§    Continued pursuit of fast reactors and inertial confinement fusion (ICF) in leading industrial countries worldwide, and the availability of increasingly capable computers and simulation codes, will likely result in the replication of nuclear scientific cadres in numerous countries with relevant skills for the design of nuclear (and possibly thermonuclear) explosives, not all of which would be classified today as "crude" devices.  Some of these scientific or engineering cadre could develop terrorist sympathies, as was the case with members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan that produced sarin nerve gas in the mid 1990’s.

U.S. Customs inspected the shipping container at Staten Island. After the inspection, ABC transferred the container to Brooklyn, and stored the contents at Pier One at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Officials failed to detect the uranium at every checkpoint. U.S. Customs officials x-rayed the shipping container at Staten Island, but were not able to identify the depleted uranium cylinder in its shielded container.

Although the material was relatively harmless depleted uranium, the experiment demonstrated that weapons-grade uranium with the same or only slightly more shielding also would have sailed through without being detected.

The nuclear smuggling problem is not going to be solved by increasing border security, going to war with Iraq, or jailing al Qaeda suspects. The only effective means to significantly reduce the risk of smuggling weapons-grade uranium is to eliminate use of the material wherever possible, and maintain extremely tight security over the remainder. For many areas of the world, particularly in Russia, it has proven difficult to provide adequate security for weapon-usable highly enriched uranium (and separated plutonium) in the civil and naval propulsion sectors.

Thus, ultimately, the only effective way to prevent the unauthorized use of weapon-usable uranium is to blend existing stocks of highly enriched uranium into low-enriched uranium, which is not directly weapon-usable, and to prohibit the future commercial use of highly enriched uranium.

The United States has in place programs to:

§    "blend down" excess military stocks of highly enriched uranium into low-enriched uranium for use as power reactor fuel;

§    improve the physical security of some Russian stocks of highly enriched uranium, and

§    convert research reactors that currently use highly enriched uranium fuel to low-enriched uranium fuel.

Unfortunately, these programs are moving ahead at a pace that is far slower than they should be moving, a pace that is well nigh inexplicable in the wake of Sept. 11.  The third program – research reactor conversion – is voluntary for reactor owners, and consequently many reactors continue to rely on highly enriched uranium fuel. Even the United States refuses to lead by example by promptly converting all of its research reactors to low-enriched fuel.

Congress and the Administration should take immediate steps to eliminate the use of highly enriched uranium in U.S. research reactors and insist that other countries follow suit.

Some Misguided Programs Are Actually Increasing the Risk of Nuclear Terrorism. The Bush Administration and the Congress are pursuing several policies and programs that are likely to increase the risk that nuclear explosive materials will be diverted for unauthorized purposes, including possible use against American citizens.  For example:

§    The United States continues to turn a blind eye to the use of separated plutonium in the commercial nuclear industry in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Russia, Japan, China, and India. Surely, one of the most important lessons from 9/11 is that exposing direct-use nuclear weapon materials in commerce to seizure by terrorists with the mind-set of al Qaeda should no longer be tolerated anywhere in the world.

§    Vice President Cheney’s Energy Plan seeks to encourage plutonium research and use, for example by promoting pyroprocessing – a technologically advanced form of spent fuel reprocessing – and the development of advanced closed nuclear fuel cycles.  This is an implicit reference to the Integral Fast Reactor, a sodium-cooled plutonium breeder reactor with a pyroprocessing plant attached to it.

§    Russia’s Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) is seeking financial support from the United States to develop a future generation of plutonium breeders in Russia. The Department of Energy (DOE) is encouraging joint research with Minatom on advanced nuclear fuel cycles and breeder reactor concepts that are based on reprocessing nuclear spent fuel. DOE is using the lame argument that it must participate in this joint research effort in order to “influence the direction” of Russia’s program. This joint research will never lead to a more commercially viable nuclear fuel cycle. But these programs are likely to encourage non-weapon states to develop similar research efforts, including the development and operation of nuclear hot cells and nuclear fuel processing facilities, and the training of cadres of experts in plutonium metallurgy.

§    The United States continues to promote the use of mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel, a mixture of plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, in Russian reactors as a means of converting excess Russian weapon plutonium into spent fuel. While the goal of getting plutonium into spent fuel is worthwhile, the operation of a MOX fuel fabrication facility in Russia will result in an increased risk, over tens of years, of plutonium diversion from Russia, and alternative technologies exist for permanently disposing of weapons plutonium in a proliferation-resistant form.

§    The Department of Defense (DOD) is paying Russia to process spent naval reactor fuel at the RT-1 reprocessing plant at Ozersk (Mayak). DOD pretends that this is environmentally beneficial, but highly radioactive waste from the processing of this fuel is dumped into Lake Karachay, an open reservoir that happens to be the most polluted spot on the planet. Also, payment to Mayak for this service helps keep the RT-1 reprocessing plant running, thereby increasing stocks of separated plutonium in the Russian civil sector.

§    The Department of Energy is proposing to buy from Russian some 2.5 tonnes of highly enriched uranium (a good idea), but then plans to use it to fuel U.S. research reactors, directly undermining our effort to get other countries to convert their research reactors to use low-enriched uranium fuel.

§    Closer to home, Mr. Chairman, Sec. 515 of H.R. 4, the House Energy Bill, seeks to establish a new “Office of Spent Nuclear Fuel Research” within the Department of Energy. This provision would require DOE to conduct “research on advanced processing and separations” and the “recycling and disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste,” “include the participation of international collaborators in research efforts”, and even “provide funding to a collaborator that brings unique capabilities not available in the United States if the country in which the collaborator is located is unable to provide for their support.”

Mr. Chairman, this provision is lunacy. It’s a sneak attack on longstanding US policy opposing weapons-usable nuclear materials in the commercial nuclear fuel cycle. It should be stricken from the final bill, before some misguided souls in DOE go out and do even more damage than the old Atomic Energy Commission, when it proliferated nuclear weapons materials and technology around the world in the 1950’s and sixties under the slogan “Atoms for Peace.” 

More than 25 years ago, the Ford Administration determined that separation of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel (i.e."reprocessing") and its fabrication into "mixed oxide" fuel elements present unacceptable risks of diversion to nuclear weapons use by terrorists and nuclear outlaw states. With their huge inventories of radioactive materials, the plutonium separation and fuel fabrication plants themselves present, not just a potential source of diverted weapons material, but also an especially damaging target for terrorist sabotage and attack.

Reprocessing not only introduces large amounts of separated plutonium into nuclear commerce, but it also fosters the creation of a new cadre of experts trained in sophisticated plutonium chemistry and metallurgy who can then transfer their expertise to non-nuclear states and terrorist organizations. In light of the known attempts by al Qaeda, Iraq, and other enemies of the Unites States to obtain nuclear materials for weapons, the bill's sponsorship of increased plutonium use in the commercial sector is egregiously irresponsible.

In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism, we recommend a policy that combines elements of all five major strategic approaches, but is weighted toward stepped-up elimination and access denial, rather than a preemptive attack strategy based on a presumed imminent nexus between nuclear rogue states and terrorist organizations.

If the Administration and the Congress are genuinely concerned about reducing the risk of nuclear terrorism, they will work together to:

(1) Increase the security and accelerate the removal, conversion, and ultimately elimination of vulnerable nuclear explosive material stocks in Russia, the U.S., and elsewhere;

(2) Accelerate completion of a complete accounting of U.S.-Russian fissile material and nuclear weapon production, and step up the pace of nuclear weapons dismantlement and HEU conversion-dilution to low-enriched fuel;

(3) Actively discourage, and where possible obstruct the use of plutonium and HEU in civil research programs and the commercial nuclear fuel cycle, obviously including our own programs if we are to have any shred of credibility in persuading others;

(4) Work with the IAEA to develop and fund an enhanced safeguards program that is based on technically credible standards for how much plutonium and uranium are required to construct a nuclear explosive device that assume highly competent as well as entry levels of proliferant-state or terrorist-network capability;

(5) As part of our foreign assistance and lending programs, do much more to foster the adoption of energy alternatives – natural gas, wind, solar-thermal, increased efficiency, photovoltaic, and hydrogen – that will tend to discourage further deployment of nuclear power;

(6) Develop and promote both open and clandestine programs and capabilities for extending and implementing offers of sanctuary and financial support to scientists in nuclear states-of concern who come forward with information concerning illicit nuclear plans and programs, or nuclear security gaps and weaknesses that could be exploited by black marketers, foreign governments, or terrorists.

NOTE: