Overview
	Technical Background
	The Threat
	Securing Nuclear Warheads and Materials
Interdicting Nuclear Smuggling   Second Line of Defense   Export Control & Border Security   International Counterproliferation   WMD Proliferation Prevention   International Interdiction Efforts
	Stabilizing Employment for Nuclear Personnel
	Monitoring Stockpiles
	Ending Further Production
	Reducing Stockpiles

 

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Previous Publications
	Funding for U.S. Efforts to Improve Controls Over Nuclear Weapons, Materials, and Expertise Overseas: Recent Developments and Trends February2007 Readthe Full Report (1.5M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb 2006 The latest report in our series, from May 2006, finds that even though the gap between the threat of nuclear terrorism and the response has narrowed in recent years, there remains an unacceptable danger that terrorists might succeed in their quest to get and use a nuclear bomb, turning a modern city into a smoking ruin. Offering concrete steps to confront that danger, the report calls for world leaders to launch a fast-paced global coalition against nuclear terrorism focused on locking down all stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials worldwide as rapidly as possible. Read the Executive Summary (379K PDF) or the Full Report (1.7M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb 2005: The New Global Imperatives Our May 2005 report finds that while the United States and other countries laid important foundations for an accelerated effort to prevent nuclear terrorism in the last year, sustained presidential leadership will be needed to win the race to lock down the world’s nuclear stockpiles before terrorists and thieves can get to them. Read the Executive Summary (281 K) or the Full Report (1.9M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb: An Agenda for Action Building on the previous years' reports, this 2004 NTI-commissioned report grades current efforts and recommends new actions to more effectively prevent nuclear terrorism. It finds that programs to reduce this danger are making progress, but there remains a potentially deadly gap between the urgency of the threat and the scope and pace of efforts to address it. Download the Full Report (1.2 M PDF) Выписки из доклада по-русски (423K PDF)
	Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan 2003 report published by Harvard and NTI measures the progress made in keeping nuclear weapons and materials out of terrorist hands, and outlines a comprehensive plan to reduce the danger. Download the Full Report (2.7M PDF)
	Securing Nuclear Weapons and Materials: Seven Steps for Immediate Action 2002 report co-published by Harvard and NTI outlines seven urgent steps to reduce the threat of stolen nuclear weapons or materials falling into the hands of terrorists or hostile states. Read the Full Report (516K PDF)

Interdicting Nuclear Smuggling

Second Line of Defense Program

Written by Micah Zenko and Matthew Bunn. Last updated by Micah Zenko on 20 November 2007

Status

As of the fall of 2007, Second Line of Defense had identified 480 border crossings and 75 megaports for the installation of radiation detection equipment; this work is projected to be complete in 2014. The Megaports Initiative will provide the radiation detection equipment required to comply with the requirement to scan 100% of all cargo containers coming to the United States by July 2012, included in H.R. 1, the 9/11 Commission recommendations implementation bill. Questions remain, however, over the Second Line of Defense effort's effectiveness in the face of intelligent adversaries who may find ways to defeat the detection or use other routes. Furthermore, any efforts by the U.S. government to provide radiation detection equipment to foreign countries to screen cargo containers, trucks, or people will be constrained by the effectiveness of border control agencies in foreign countries, and will face the inherent physical limits associated with identifying shielded nuclear material. Finally, there are serious doubts about the wisdom and feasibility of scanning 100% of the cargo containers coming to the United States.

Second Line of Defense is focused on identifying and assessing points of entry and exit in key countries that pose a high risk of nuclear trafficking, and then providing nuclear detection equipment, along with training for its use and "leave-behind" materials to allow for the proper use of the equipment into the future. The equipment the program installs includes hand-held detectors, pedestrian, vehicle, and train "portal monitors" (systems designed to detect material as some one walks through or a vehicle drives through), and mobile detection vans. This equipment is designed to detect both gamma and neutron emissions from nuclear material, creating an enhanced level of sensitivity to a wider array of material than if either gamma or neutron detection were used by itself. [1] In all but a few cases, monitors are linked to command points within the post, allowing centralized logging of what has passed through the monitors as well as notification in the event of an alarm – and making it far more difficult to bribe a border guard to ignore what the monitor says (since some of those watching are elsewhere).

Core Program

Russian Second Line of Defense. Collaboration between the Russian Federation State Customs Commission and DOE (including the Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Pacific Northwest, and Oak Ridge national laboratories) began in March 1998, and was formalized with a protocol between the two organizations in June 1998. [2] In their original assessment of the points of entry/exit, planners identified over 300 potential crossings, but evaluated that about 60 sites were suitable for targeting by the program, based on crossings' proximity to facilities housing nuclear material, the frequency of traffic, and their potential as a route for smugglers. [3] The initial project was the installation of pedestrian portal monitors at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport in the summer of 1998. [4]

By the end of fiscal year (FY) 2007, after nine years of cooperation with Russia, the Core program had completed installing radiation detection packages at 117 Russian border and transit sites. [5] On 1 June 2007, NNSA and the Russian Federal Customs Service (FCS) announced an agreement to install fixed radiation portal monitors at approximately 350 border crossings in Russia—including airports, seaports, railway, and land crossings—by the end of 2011, six years faster than the previously planned schedule. [6] Discussions since that agreement have increased the planned total to 360-380 sites. [7] Under the June agreement, the NNSA and the FCS each pledged to provide some $140 million to install the remaining portal monitors, and each party is slated to cover 180-190 of the total sites to be addressed in Russia. To ensure long-term sustainability, between 2009 and 2013 the NNSA plans to transition the operations and maintenance of the U.S.-provided monitors to Russia. [8]

Expansion Beyond Russia. Beginning in FY 2002, Congress directed the Core program to begin to seek bilateral agreements with countries outside of Russia. To support this expansion, DOE developed a prioritization strategy based on whether sites were near potential sources of nuclear material, along likely transit routes for smuggling, or led to countries that might be seeking nuclear material (or where groups seeking such material were active). The Core program then pursued agreements with the non-Russian countries in order of greatest to least risk. [9] All told, the Core program has identified approximately 480 sites that should receive detection equipment installations worldwide (roughly 100-120 of which are outside of Russia), a steady increase from the 330 sites that DOE identified in 2005, and 350 sites in 2006. [10] As of November 2007, the program has installed radiation portal monitors in nine countries outside of Russia: Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Slovenia, Slovakia, Greece, and Mongolia.[11]

Megaports Initiative

In FY 2003, DOE launched the Megaports Initiative, which seeks to install radiation detection equipment at those ports that generate the largest volumes of shipping headed for the United States without posing an undue burden on commercial shipping. Some ports tend to have more container traffic that enters the port via truck or rail, while others are mainly transshipment ports, in which containers are brought in on one ship and sent off on another; the Megaports Initiative targets both types of ports, looking for choke points in the port operations to scan containers. Like the Core program, the Megaports Initiative developed a risk-based strategy—the Maritime Prioritization Model—that ranks global seaports by attractiveness from a potential nuclear material smuggler's perspective. The model evaluated over 1,200 ports, assigning them a Port Score that was a summation of two scores: Country Score (consisting of seven metrics, from terrorist groups operating in country, to ranking on the Human Development Index), and the amount of scannable volume that passes through each port.[13] A Sandia National Lab peer review panel found that Megaports Initiative model was conceptually sound, and provided a baseline from which to pursue bilateral engagements with foreign governments.[14]

As of September 2007, DOE plans to install radiation detection capabilities at approximately 75 megaports by the end of 2014, and DOE officials are at various stages of engagement with approximately 40 countries.[15] By the end of fiscal 2007, DOE had completed installation of radiation detection equipment at ports in twelve countries: the Netherlands, Greece, Sri Lanka, Spain, Singapore (Phase I), the Bahamas, the Philippines, Belgium, Thailand, Honduras, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom.[16] This represents some 16 % of all the ports DOE expects to target for these installations. DOE reports that radiation detectors are at various stages of implementation for additional ports in: Belgium, China, Colombia, Dominican Republic, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Israel, Jamaica, Mexico, Oman, Panama, South Korea and Taiwan. [17] Reflecting the differences in size and container volume, the estimated cost to DOE to make each port operational ranges from $2-30 million. [18]

A March 2005 Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that the Megaports Initiative was having difficulty gaining the cooperation of foreign governments that ranked as higher-risk on the Maritime Prioritization Model, and had not developed a comprehensive long-term strategy to guide the Initiative's efforts. [19] Two years later, the GAO found that DOE had succeeded in convincing more governments to participate in the Megaports Initiative, and had developed a strategic plan to better forecast cost estimates, but continued to face three technical challenges regarding the installation and maintenance of radiation detection equipment: ensuring the ability to detect radioactive material, especially highly-enriched uranium; overcoming problems related to the ports' physical layouts and cargo stacking configurations; and sustaining effective equipment in an environment characterized by high winds and sea spray. [20] Despite these shortcomings, DOE has publicized one success from the Megaports Initiative when in late 2005 a DOE-installed radiation portal monitor in India successfully detected a small neutron signal from a scrap metal container traveling from Sri Lanka. [21] DOE has not made public instances where its equipment, or trained foreign port workers, failed to detect radioactive material in tests or real-life scenarios.

Related Programs

Since 9/11, the possibility that terrorists might use shipping containers to transport weapons of mass destruction or other terrorist equipment has been a major concern. Several U.S. programs are addressing parts of this issue, and the Second Line of Defense program is cooperating with each of these new initiatives.

Customs Container Security Initiative. On January 17, 2002, U.S. Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner announced the Container Security Initiative (CSI), a series of bilateral agreements to identify and pre-screen high-risk shipping containers from the twenty foreign ports that collectively account for 90 percent of shipping traffic into the United States, before such containers even start their trip to the United States. [22] Part of the CSI consists of examining U.S.-bound selected containers that are assessed as high-risk for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear material, as well as potentially dangerous dual-use items. The Second Line of Defense program has agreed to contribute its expertise in supplying radiation detection equipment to foreign countries for screening for radiological and nuclear material. As of October 2007, the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP—successor agency to U.S. Customs) has installed a system of non-intrusive inspection equipment and radiation detectors at 58 ports in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin and Central America, which reportedly covers around 90 percent of all transatlantic and transpacific cargo imported into the United States—though only a small portion of those containers are screened for radiation. [23] The CSI effort involves stationing CBP personnel at foreign ports to review the screening information and scanning data on containers passing through the ports. The estimated cost to CBP to make each port operational is only around $300,000, primarily for arrangements for the CBP personnel, as the host governments pay for the non-intrusive imaging equipment. [24] Under the Container Security Initiative's 2006 strategic plan, CBP aspires to make almost 70 ports operational, which will cover some 95 percent of all container volume destined for the United States. [25] Under CSI, Second Line of Defense officials work with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to engage, negotiate with, and consult host port and government officials in the installation of the necessary equipment for radiation scanning of containers.

Secure Freight Initiative In December 2006, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and DOE announced the first phase of the Secure Freight Initiative (SFI). The Initiative complements and coordinates with DHS's Bureau of Customs and Border Protection's Container Security Initiative (CSI) and DOE's Megaports Initiative. Under the joint work-plan, either the host government or DHS pays for the non-intrusive imaging systems while DOE deploys the radiation portal monitors. [26] The SFI works to integrate the data and images provided by the DOE monitors and the non-intrusive imaging systems. All of the data is provided to the host government. Any data that concerns U.S.-bound containers is provided to on-site U.S. CSI systems, and the CBP National Targeting Center (NTC) in the United States. If the DOE-provided radiation monitors set off an alarm from scanning a U.S.-bound container, U.S. and host country personnel are notified at the same time, providing some degree of oversight for the effectiveness of U.S.-funded equipment and training. [27]

The initial phase of the Secure Freight Initiative involved the deployment of nuclear detection devices to six foreign ports: Port Qasim in Pakistan; Puerto Cortes in Honduras; Southampton in the United Kingdom; Port Salalah in Oman; Port of Singapore; and the Gamman Terminal at Port Busan in Korea. By October 2007, under the Secure Freight Initiative, the participating ports in Pakistan, Honduras, and the United Kingdom were scanning all maritime containers destined for the United States for nuclear or other radiological materials. [28] The plan had been to integrate the lessons learned from Phase One into the effort to achieve the goal of 100 percent overseas radiation scanning of U.S.-bound cargo containers called for in the Safe Ports Act of 2006, but the new H.R. 1 requirement to achieve 100% scanning by 2012 may cut that lessons-learned effort short. [29] DOE officials believe that it will be impossible to achieve 100 percent overseas scanning of all cargo containers from the 700 ports who ship to the United States, because of the complexity of identifying U.S.-bound containers out of the over 100 million containers circulating throughout the globe, and the problem of the trans-shipment of containers that occurs between ships at sea just outside of ports. [30]

Budget

See budget table

DOE has proposed a budget of $119 million for FY 2008 for the Second Line of Defense program. This represents a decrease of $5 million from the amount appropriated in FY 2007. The FY 2008 request includes $73 million dedicated to the Core Program and $47 million for the Megaports Initiative. [31]

Key Issues and Recommendations

Nuclear smuggling is extraordinarily hard to stop. The small size of the materials needed to make a nuclear bomb; the weak radiation these materials emit; the almost limitless number of pathways across national borders stretching for thousands of kilometers all over the world; the millions of people and vehicles that legitimately cross these borders every year; and the existence of established routes and networks for smuggling other contraband – which governments have been largely unable to stop – all conspire against efforts to interdict nuclear smuggling. It is worth investing in improved border detection systems, to make the nuclear smuggler's job more difficult and uncertain. But this line of defense will inevitably be highly porous, and the world should not place undue reliance on it. Some of the specific challenges facing the Second Line of Defense program are described below.

Very limited ability to detect HEU. Most of the radiation emitted by HEU is weak, easy to shield, and difficult to detect. HEU that is contaminated with U-232 (as is true of nearly all Russian HEU) [32] emits more penetrating gamma radiation that is easier to detect and harder to shield, but this radiation is not enough to stand out against the background of natural radiation unless detectors are looking in a specific energy "window," and unfortunately is the same as the radiation emitted by some natural radioactive materials. (See discussion in Technical Background.) The detectors being deployed in the Second Line of Defense program simply detect gamma and neutron radiation, without attempting to zero in on particular energy levels, and would have almost no ability to detect HEU above the background of natural radiation if the HEU had even modest shielding. [33]

DHS is developing "advanced spectroscopic portal monitors" (ASPs) that do examine the energy ranges of different gamma rays, allowing them not just to detect nuclear or radiological material, but also to identify the type of material. The ASPs are expected to reduce the rates of false alarms caused by naturally radioactive materials (such as kitty litter, among others). The ASPs are far more costly than non-spectroscopic detectors, and there is a substantial controversy over whether the savings from fewer false alarms will justify the extra expense of deploying them. [34] The ASPs may also have a better ability to detect shielded HEU if it is contaminated with U-232. The ASPs, however, will still be passive detectors, whose ability to detect shielded HEU will always be limited. Active sensors – such as neutron beams coupled with detectors to detect the induced fission neutrons when they struck nuclear material – would offer higher confidence of detecting HEU (especially when combined with imaging that could reveal the presence of heavy shielding), but these raise cost and practicality issues of their own.

• Recommendation: The Second Line of Defense program should continue to evaluate the cost, practicality, and detection capabilities of more advanced sensors, and should begin replacing existing sensors with more advanced systems if and when the advanced systems appear to offer a practical approach to improved detection that is worth the increased cost.
  
  
• Recommendation: Wherever practical, the Second Line of Defense program should couple radiation detection with imaging (as is done in the Container Security Initiative), to increase the ability to detect smugglers' shielding, and to improve detection of a broader array of contraband.

Limited ability to prevent adversaries using other routes. An obvious question is why a nuclear smuggler would choose to bring his HEU or plutonium through an official border crossing with readily observable inspectors and radiation detectors in the first place, when many other potential routes are available. Even if the Second Line of Defense program could give countries the ability to detect all nuclear and radioactive material illegally smuggled through all defined border crossings, airports, and ports, these official border crossings are only a tiny fraction of the thousands of miles of border across which nuclear material might be smuggled. Programs such as the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation Prevention Initiative (WMD-PPI) at the Department of Defense are helping a few countries modestly improve their ability to control their "green borders" – that is, wild borders with few official controls – but this remains a fundamental problem. Moreover, many seizures of stolen nuclear material have occurred within countries, not at borders, as a result not of radiation detectors but of effective police and intelligence work.

• Recommendation: The U.S. government should take an overall systems approach to reducing the risk of nuclear smuggling, using "red teams" to envision a wide range of plausible and practical adversary strategies and steps the United States and other governments should take to counter them. The U.S. government must develop a coherent plan that considers not just ports of entry, but the gaps that terrorists would consider to exploit. [35]
  
  
• Recommendation: The U.S. government should work closely with other governments to strengthen intelligence and police cooperation and information-sharing related to nuclear smuggling.
  
  
• Recommendation: The U.S. government should increase its efforts to work with other governments to ensure that each relevant state has at least one unit of the national policy trained and equipped to deal with nuclear smuggling, and the rest of the national police and border forces are trained to call them when cases arise.

Vulnerability to ineffective or corrupt foreign border forces. Widespread corruption and ineffectiveness of border forces is a key problem with any program focused on reducing the chance that illicit items will make it through borders or ports in foreign countries. The Second Line of Defense program already takes some important measures to address this problem, such as making sure that systems are arranged so that if a corrupt guard turns off a detector or waives a vehicle through after an alarm sounds, signals will be sent to monitoring stations some distance away.

• Recommendation: The U.S. government should identify "best practices" in combating corruption and improving effectiveness among border forces, and work with foreign governments in the Second Line of Defense program to put such best practices in place.
  
  
• Recommendation: The Second Line of Defense effort should regularly conduct analyses of the potential impact of corruption throughout the supply chain, and ways to design systems to be more difficult to compromise, and should deploy systems that reduce vulnerability to corruption wherever practical. For example, if containers are sealed after being scanned, could the people who apply the seals or the people who check them later be corrupted, so that they would not check to see if something had been added to the container after it was scanned? How could the system best be designed to prevent that?

Some key borders not covered. In many dangerous areas of the world where stopping nuclear smuggling is a high priority, the borders are too rugged or violent for the Second Line of Defense program to operate effectively, or the United States does not have cooperative relations with the states involved. This includes the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, among others. Moreover, while the program is working with China on megaports, it has not yet succeeded in working with China to install radiation detection on China's border with North Korea – a border that is a focus for a wide range of smuggling activity.

• Recommendation: The U.S. government should regularly reexamine whether there are opportunities to move forward with efforts to control nuclear smuggling on high-priority borders that have not yet been addressed.
  
  
• Recommendation: The U.S. government should explore whether there are other approaches to stopping nuclear smuggling that may be effective in some of these wilder border areas, including cooperation with local tribes and militias who control passage through some of these areas. [36]

Issues raised by requirement for 100% scanning of U.S.-bound containers. The new requirement to scan 100% of cargo containers coming to the United States before they arrive by July of 2012 may not be possible to implement – and may not be an effective enough approach to reducing the overall risk of nuclear terrorism to justify the cost and effort even if it could be implemented. Practically, the reality is that there are over 600 ports around the world that ship cargo to the United States – many times the number of ports DOE has planned to cover in the Megaports Initiative – and the pathways that containers follow through the global shipping system can be extremely complex. It is not at all unusual for a container to be shipped from one foreign port to another, and then re-shipped to a U.S. port, without entering the part of the second foreign port where the scanning would take place – yet at the first foreign port, it might not be labeled as U.S.-bound. In some cases, containers are transferred from one ship to another outside the main docking area of a port, and therefore outside wherever the scanning equipment would be located. [37] At the same time, if terrorists observe that all or almost all of the containers coming to the United States are being scanned, they will presumably choose to send their nuclear material by other routes that are not subject to scanning – such as sailing an ocean-going yacht right up the Hudson, or any one of a myriad other pathways. Moreover, there are a wide range of practical issues the new law does not address, from who will do (and pay for) the scanning to who will analyze the results and respond to alarms, to what kinds of things the scanning has to be designed to detect. [38]

• Recommendation: Congress should revisit this provision of H.R. 1, taking the time for in-depth hearings on the practicality of different approaches and how much they might reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism, at what cost compared to other alternatives. Working with the administration and with radiation detection and shipping experts, Congress should consider modifying the provision to include (a) a less than 100% requirement, or allowances for exempting containers that it is not practical to scan; (b) direction concerning who should conduct and pay for the scans, how the information should be analyzed, and what should be done in the event that a scan detects something that requires action or further inspection; and (c) standards for what kinds of materials the scans should be capable of detecting, under what circumstances. Congress may also wish to consider what should be done if other countries demand U.S. reciprocity (that is, if they demand that the United States scan 100% of containers it is exporting to their countries), approaches to giving countries incentives to cooperate with this effort, and other issues.
  

Sustainability. Clearly, a focus on ensuring that the capabilities provided are maintained and used effectively for the long haul is essential: there is little point spending ten years providing training and equipment that is no longer in use after three years. Both equipment maintenance and training pose sustainability issues. In the past, for example, DOE officials have expressed concern that country officials who are trained when equipment is installed frequently leave that post soon thereafter, jeopardizing the continued proper use of equipment. [39] Therefore, the Second Line of Defense is working to help the recipient states establish effective training programs of their own, and to provide so-called "leave-behind" materials to instruct new officials when they arrive at a post.

• Recommendation: The Second Line of Defense program should seek to ensure that the equipment it provides is simple and robust enough that it can be maintained and used effectively after direct U.S. assistance ends.
  
  
• Recommendation: At the time of installation, DOE program officials should develop, with host governments and site managers, a joint sustainability plan, to ensure that equipment is maintained over time and upgraded or replaced when necessary – and that as personnel turnover occurs, effective training is provided to the new personnel responsible for nuclear detection.
  
  
• Recommendation: DOE should work with participating countries to ensure that they understand the magnitude of the threat to their own security and economies posed by nuclear smuggling; that they are committed to providing the resources necessary to operate and sustain these systems after international assistance comes to an end; and that they put in place effective regulations requiring that effective radiation detection equipment be in place at key points and be used effectively.

Coordination with other efforts. Coordination of the many different U.S. and international efforts to interdict nuclear smuggling has reportedly improved substantially since a May 2002 GAO report GAO criticized the lack of coordination among these efforts. [40] Since 2002, the number of U.S. government agencies involved in the effort to prevent nuclear smuggling has grown more dispersed with responsibilities now spread among DHS' sub-agencies: U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Coast Guard, Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, and Transportation Security Agency.  In addition, stopping nuclear smuggling is clearly only one part of the larger challenge of controlling borders and stopping the smuggling of contraband material (from drugs to weapons to people) around the world. The challenge is to ensure that all of the U.S. government's efforts — and those of other governments — are  as coordinated as practicable, to avoid duplication, seize opportunities for synergy, and fix the most important problems first.

• Recommendation: All of the agencies with an interest in nuclear smuggling, including DOE, State, the Defense Department, DHS, and the Intelligence Community, should be part of a formal committee under sustained National Security Council leadership that collectively agrees on an overall strategic plan; coordinates annual funding allocations; coordinates efforts and allocates responsibilities in each individual country where work is being carried out;, and develops country- specific plans.


• Recommendation: Second Line of Defense and other nuclear smuggling interdiction programs should seek, to the extent practicable, to piggy-back on the work of other U.S. government and international programs focused on strengthening border controls and preventing the smuggling of contraband.

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The Securing the Bomb section of the NTI website is produced by the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) for NTI, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of and has not been independently verified by NTI or its directors, officers, employees, agents. MTA welcomes comments and suggestions at atom@harvard.edu. Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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