Abstract
Consider, for a moment, the state of technology 60 years ago.
There were no microprocessors, lasers, fiber optics, transistors, satellites, or for that matter, self-cleaning ovens.
And yet, we had the technology to build a nuclear weapon.
Today, that knowledge has spread worldwide. While building a nuclear bomb is not easy, it's not impossible for those with sufficient technical savvy and access to the proper resources. This is not alarmist speculation: In 1964 a secret government experiment selected three young physicists and–without offering them access to any classified information–told them to design a nuclear weapon. They succeeded. All that was lacking was the fissile material.
And so, the race is on. Unable to completely suppress the know-how to build these weapons, the United States seeks to deny states and terrorists the necessary fissile materials. To that end, the Bush administration created the Global Threat Reduction Initiative–a multimillion-dollar global effort to secure and remove bomb-grade nuclear material, particularly from civilian facilities that may not be as well protected as military ones.
But as Alan J. Kuperman, senior policy analyst at the Washington D.C.-based Nuclear Control Institute, reports in this issue of the Bulletin, the U.S. government has recently passed legislation that threatens to undermine such initiatives (see p. 44). Foreign companies that rely on U.S. exports of highly enriched uranium (HEU) to manufacture medical isotopes have been reluctant to undertake the inconvenience and one-time cost of converting their production lines to use low-enriched uranium, which is unsuitable for nuclear weapons. Instead, the companies launched an expensive lobbying effort to water down existing export controls. Despite strong misgivings on Capitol Hill, the legislation passed. As a result, Kuperman warns, “Annual worldwide HEU commerce could increase by several hundred kilograms–sufficient for multiple nuclear weapons each year.”
If the United States is serious about preventing nuclear terrorism, it should not only reverse this legislation, but also jump-start negotiations of the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, which has languished since the 1990s. As William Walker, professor of international relations at the University of St. Andrews, observes in this issue, an international agreement banning the production of weapons material–HEU and plutonium–is integral to preventing proliferation (see p. 68). Implementing this idea, he reminds us, is long overdue: In March 1946, the Acheson-Lilienthal Report advised President Harry S. Truman that international control of fissile material was the surest way to prevent an arms race.
By today's standards, the technology of the 1940s might seem backwards. But the thinkers of that era were decades ahead of their time.