Overview
	Technical Background
	The Threat
	Securing Nuclear Warheads and Materials
	Interdicting Nuclear Smuggling
Stabilizing Employment for Nuclear Personnel   International Science & Technology Centers   Nuclear Cities Initiative   Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention   Civilian Research & Development Foundation   Impact of Other Programs
	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)

Introduction: Stabilizing Employment for Nuclear Personnel

Any nuclear security system is only as good as the people who operate it. As essential as efforts to improve security systems for warheads and materials are, they will not solve the proliferation problem if the people who guard and manage nuclear weapons and materials are desperate, ill-paid, underfed, unable to provide for their families, and embedded in a larger culture of crime and corruption.

Hence, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and other governments have undertaken a number of programs to help Russia address the economic desperation that could create temptations for theft of nuclear material or sale of nuclear knowledge. These efforts are intended to help Russia to:

• Provide alternative civilian employment for weapons scientists and workers;

• Shrink the size of the nuclear complex (both military and civilian) to a level Russia can afford to maintain safely and securely (and which would have a reduced capability to mass produce new nuclear weapons should circumstances change); and

• Ensure that the scientists, workers, and guards who remain as custodians of nuclear weapons, materials, and information are adequately paid, fed, and housed.

The last of these goals, while essential, is largely something Russia will have to do itself. Other nations cannot be expected to pay the costs of Russia's maintaining its nuclear weapons complex – though they can work with Russia to help lay out effective approaches to accomplishing this goal. The need for Russia to accomplish the last goal itself makes it all the more essential to help Russia shrink its complex to a size Russia can sustain on its own, appropriate to the complex’s post-Cold War missions – which is every bit as much in Russia’s interest as it is in the U.S. interest.

This section includes analyses of five key programs or collections of programs focused on these goals:

Table 1: Major Activities Carried out by U.S. Stabilization Programs

What is the goal? Initially, the goal of efforts such as the ISTC was very clear: provide a lifeline for weapons scientists during what was expected to be a short-term economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to reduce their incentives to sell their knowledge. A substantial portion of that goal was achieved. But now more the issue of goals is more complex. A key issue that must be addressed is how much of the focus of these programs should now be on providing new, sustainable civilian employment for former weapons scientists and workers, and how much on shrinking the physical size of the Russian nuclear complex and its ability to mass produce nuclear weapons. Both these missions have their advocates, but the question of which should have greater priority for limited resources has not been resolved.

If the main goal is on sustainable civilian employment, the obvious question is for who, and to address what threat? Should U.S. and international programs focus only on the several thousand weapons scientists who could design a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon from start to finish – and who would presumably be most useful to a terrorist group or proliferating state – or on the many tens of thousands of weapons experts who know some important part of the larger puzzle? If they should focus on the smaller group, how would the members of that group be identified? What about workers and guards, who may have little knowledge to sell, but may have access to nuclear material that could be stolen – a notion that would dramatically expand the circle of people of concern? Given that many of the incidents of leakage of militarily sensitive technologies have involved entire institutes, not just individuals, should these programs be attempting to stabilize Russia's weapons institutes (and civilian institutes focusing on sensitive technologies) – or attempting to encourage these institutes to scale back or shut down? Should these efforts, for example, focus on providing jobs that would draw weapons scientists away from working at their home institutes, or on jobs that take place at the original institutes? Relatedly, should efforts focused on the nuclear cities emphasize creating jobs within those cities, or also on creating jobs in nearby open cities that could lure workers away from the closed cities?

If the main goal is to shrink Russia's nuclear complex, how can that best be achieved? Should the United States simply work with Russia to implement the significant reductions in Russia's nuclear weapons complex that Russia has unilaterally undertaken, or should the United States be pushing for more – and offering some restraints on its own nuclear stockpiles or complex in return? What level of transparency or verification to confirm that particular facilities really are shut down is appropriate – and what will Russia accept? How is the answer to that question affected by the scale of the resources the international community is prepared to offer to help shut down these facilities, provide alternative employment for their workers, and clean up the radioactive mess left behind?

For each of these categories of goals, there is also a need to develop better metrics for assessing progress toward the goal, a concept of when the job will be judged "complete," and a strategy for getting there. In short, there is a need to return to first principles in thinking through an overall strategic plan for these efforts.

What are the most effective approaches to achieving the goal? To date, U.S. and international programs have focused on two principal strategies: providing short-term R&D grants, and promoting commercialization of technologies from the former Soviet weapons institutes. Each of these approaches is important, and has had successes, but they are not likely to be sufficient to address the magnitude of the challenge. As far as the authors are aware, there is no example anywhere in the world in which the economy of a region where the principal industry had drastically declined was revitalized solely through commercializing technologies from a few institutes in that region. Rather, a much broader set of tools – investment incentives, infrastructure, and other steps to make a region economically attractive to business – have generally proved essential to success. Indeed, given the marginal conditions for investment in new businesses in Russia, and the even more difficult conditions in Russia's closed nuclear cities, it is simply not realistic to rely on commercialization activities alone. A broader package of activities, should be undertaken, including: (i) a “contract research initiative” in which the United States would devote a fraction of the money it already spends on nuclear cleanup and nonproliferation R&D to be done by Russian experts (getting the work done for less while employing Russian weapons scientists), moving toward the establishment of competitive contract R&D enterprises in Russia; and (ii) paying for retirement incentives for older WMD experts, which may be among the lowest-cost approaches to reducing Russia’s WMD workforce.

Still more broadly, the United States and other interested governments should be working closely with the Russian government at the highest levels to develop a targeted package of approaches to re-employing the scientists and workers of Russia's nuclear weapons complex, drawing on the economic lessons learned in regional redevelopment efforts around the world, and combining steps that only the Russian government can take and steps that can be funded by the international community. Conditions in Russia's nuclear weapons complex have already improved markedly in recent years – but for reasons that have very little to do with U.S. or international programs. It is crucial to work with Russia to understand how that has happened, what national policies have improved the situation, what policies are still undermining progress, and how those can be changed.

Similarly, if the main goal is not job creation but complex downsizing, it is not obvious that the programs as currently structured are focusing on the best tools for the job. Millions of dollars have been spent on opening a part of the Avangard nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility to commercial production, ending all weapons work there – but this facility was always a very small part of Russia's nuclear weapons assembly capacity. Because of political disputes with Russia, no work is underway at the other, larger weapons assembly facility that Russia plans to shut down, or at Seversk, where Russia plans to end all assembly of plutonium and uranium weapons components. Little thought has been given to working out nonintrusive arrangements to confirm that these facilities have been shut down and cannot easily be restarted – or to reemploying their workers.

Are the resources provided matched to the challenge? Currently expected funding for the Nuclear Cities Initiative for fiscal year 2003, to take just one example, is $16 million. There is simply no hope of having much effect on the economies of ten entire cities, where 750,000 people live – or even of the three cities where NCI is focusing its initial efforts – with that amount of money, especially if it is targeted primarily on remodeling infrastructure and subsidizing commercial start-ups, both of which are expensive when judged on the cost per job created. Assuming that a clear set of goals and an effective strategy to meet them can be identified, substantially more resources should be provided. This should be a significant focus of the $20 billion Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction announced by the Group of Eight industrialized democracies in June, 2002.

How can the relevant efforts be appropriately coordinated? Currently, the various U.S. programs described above overlap significantly in their goals and activities, though they all have quite different approaches. In principle, one can imagine a reasonably clear division of labor among them, with ISTC supporting basic research, IPP taking over when the research is reaching the point of commercialization, and NCI handling all the economic aspects beyond high-tech commercialization. But despite repeated assertions of improved coordination – and the folding of IPP and NCI into an integrated management structure – no such clear division of labor is yet in place. Moreover, these efforts are hardly coordinated at all with other programs that are employing experts in the nuclear cities: the plutonium disposition program, for example, is looking for places to dismantle the plutonium "pits" of Russian nuclear weapons and make the plutonium into fuel, while the Nuclear Cities Initiative should be looking for new missions for Russia's plutonium processing facilities – yet the two have not been discussing the possibility that each of them may hold a part of the solution to the other's problem. A new structure is needed to draw back and see the big picture, ensuring that parts of the mosaic fit together.

In short: the challenge is daunting, but the opportunities that remain are substantial. A sweeping agenda of reform of these efforts is needed, focusing them on clear goals and an effective strategy for meeting them.

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Written by Matthew Bunn. Last updated by Anthony Wier on November 6, 2002.

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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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