Alexander Gillespie: The sum of all nightmares

'The risk of nuclear terrorism is the sum of all nightmares,' says Alexander Gillespie. Photo / Thinkstock.

According to the Doomsday clock, it is five minutes to midnight. The Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul aims to wind this clock back. The Doomsday Clock is an image of how close humanity is to extinction -- the figurative midnight. The clock has been inching towards this point since 1991, where at the end of the Cold War, it was wound back to seventeen minutes to midnight.

Before that point, humanity was playing the most deadly of games, of which the stakes were tens of thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at each other. The American arsenal peaked at about 30,000 warheads in the mid-1960s and the Soviet arsenal at 40,000 warheads in the 1980s. The fear of all of those who grew up in the shadow of Hiroshima, was that heightened tensions between the two jittery superpowers would lead to an all-out nuclear exchange.

For most of the Cold War, overt hostility between the United States and Soviet Union, coupled with their enormous nuclear arsenals, defined the nuclear threat. This is no longer the case. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the overt risk of oblivion went with it. Although both Russia and the United States maintain 1,000 warheads on high alert, pointed at the heart of each other, the real threats to the survival of humanity are elsewhere.

The largest jumps in the hands of the clock between 1991 and 2012 have been due to the conventional and unconventional threats. The conventional threats involve the nuclear armed tensions between India and Pakistan, the belligerence of North Korea, and the nuclear tipped Russian roulette that Iran is playing with Israel.

The unconventional threat, which is the primary focus of the summit in South Korea, is nuclear terrorism. The risk of nuclear terrorism is the sum of all nightmares. This is because the theory of nuclear deterrence is built upon the assumption that rational opponents will not let nuclear weapons be used because of the fear of mutually assured destruction.

Whilst terrorists who seek goals which they seek to be realised in this temporal realm will fit into this pattern, terrorists who seek religious goals will not necessarily fit. Their fear of destruction of themselves is not necessarily a restraining factor. September 11 showed us this very clearly.

Moreover, one act of terror could cause the avalanche of Armageddon. If Jerusalem is turned to radioactive rubble, it is likely that many other cities in the Middle East, that are not in Israel, will join it, like falling dominoes. Whether the other nuclear powers could stay out of this drive to extinction that would be decided in a matter of hours, by intention or accident, is unknown.

The fundamental goal, therefore, is to ensure that nuclear materials do not end up in the wrong hands. It is a clear fact that the wrong hands are actively seeking to obtain weapons of mass destruction. According to the international monitoring of the illegal traffic in nuclear materials, between the beginning of 1993 and the end of 2011, there have been 2164 confirmed recorded incidents. Of these, 399 involved the unauthorised possession of nuclear materials and related criminal activities.

Incidents included in this category involved illegal possession, movement or attempts to illegally trade in or use nuclear material or radioactive sources. Sixteen incidents in this category involved high enriched uranium or plutonium. During 2011, a further 147 incidents were confirmed. Of these, 20 involved possession and related criminal activities, 31 involved theft or loss and 96 involved other unauthorized activities.

During this latter period, four incidents involved highly enriched uranium, one of which was related to an attempted sale and three were related to other unauthorized activities. To date, the size of the material that has been seized has not been sufficient to construct a nuclear device. Nevertheless, as with all criminal activity, the size of the market is much greater than what is being detected.

Originally, the former Soviet Union was the source of the leakage in nuclear material. This leakage occurred because the country lacked the security it needed to hold all of its weapons securely. Since that point, whilst Russia has become more secure, other areas have become insecure.

Some of the trade in the potential to build nuclear weapons has been done at the highest levels, with countries like Pakistan, through the criminal networks of Abdul Khan, being involved in the attempted proliferation of nuclear material to, at least, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Libya. In other instances, the desire to obtain the lethal technology has been driven by more traditional criminal enterprises seeking to steal from existing stockpiles.

This temptation is fueled by the substantial quantities of the base material for nuclear weapons that remain in more than 40 non-weapon states. By 2010, the world plutonium stockpile was estimated at about 500 tonnes, divided equally between weapons and civilian stocks.

There is also about 1600 tons of highly enriched uranium in the world, produced mostly for nuclear weapons, naval propulsion, with smaller quantities for research reactors. If the United States and Russia reduced their nuclear arsenals to 1000 weapons each, each State would require less than 5 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium and 30 metric tons of highly enriched uranium.

In total, current global stocks of plutonium and highly enriched uranium are sufficient, in principle, for more than 100,000 simple nuclear weapons. Even with the improvement of nuclear reactor design and international controls provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency, proliferation concerns persist.

New Zealand, in addition to 54 other countries, is now trying to be part of the solutions to all of these problem noted above. The solutions will be found in the enhancement of the existing laws and creation of new ones. These laws cannot be too strong, over resourced or the subject of too much interest. It is five minutes to midnight.

* Alexander Gillespie is Professor of Law at the University of Waikato. His latest work is the three-volume History of the Laws of War published by Oxford.