Michael Richardson: We're not immune from nuclear threat

Nuclear terrorism, the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Anan observed recently, is still often treated as science fiction. But he warned the global summit on terrorism in Madrid on March 10 that denying terrorists access to nuclear materials was vital.

"Unfortunately we live in a world of excess hazardous materials and abundant technological know-how, in which some terrorists clearly state their intention to inflict catastrophic casualties," he said.

Asia and the Pacific are far from immune from this threat. Radioactive sources, some of them highly dangerous, are widely dispersed in the region, as they are in other parts of the world.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, has said repeatedly that the world is racing against time to prevent a terrorist attack involving a nuclear explosive device or a radiological bomb that uses conventional explosives to disperse radioactive poison. Al Qaeda and affiliated transnational terrorist groups have shown interest in acquiring both types of weapons. Meanwhile, trafficking in nuclear and radiological materials is on the rise. ElBaradei has described a long-established smuggling network headed until early 2004 by Pakistan's now disgraced chief nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan as the "Wal-Mart of private sector proliferation".

The complex procurement, manufacturing, financing and trading network set up by Khan and his associates stretched across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. It supplied nuclear technology to Libya and probably to Iran and North Korea as well.

Underscoring the danger of nuclear smuggling, the New York Times reported recently that looters systematically removed tonnes of equipment from Iraqi weapons facilities, including some with components for making parts for nuclear arms, in the weeks after Baghdad fell in 2003.

The newspaper quoted Iraq's Deputy Minister of Industry, Sami al-Araji, as saying he had no evidence of where the equipment had ended up, but the black market or foreign Governments were possibilities.

William Potter, director of the non-proliferation centre at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, told a meeting of nuclear experts in Sydney in November that given the significant quantities of radioactive material outside regulatory control around the world, a radiological or dirty bomb attack by terrorists was "all but inevitable".

Since the 1950s, millions of radioactive sources have been distributed worldwide for medical treatment, food processing and a wide-array of industrial and commercial applications. This has yielded many benefits.

But some of these radioisotopes - including Cesium-137, Strontium-90, Cobalt-60 and Iridium-192 - emit high levels of radiation and can be dangerous if mishandled. The IAEA estimates that thousands of radioactive sources have been "orphaned" - abandoned, lost, misplaced or stolen.

It has found that more than 100 countries may have inadequate control and monitoring programmes to prevent or even detect the theft of radiation sources.

The radioisotopes have been produced by civilian nuclear research reactors, which are typically much smaller than the reactors used to generate electricity. There are about 280 research reactors operating in 56 countries, according to the World Nuclear Association. It says that in 2004 over 60 of these reactors operated with highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel, typically with the U-235 isotope content raised to 20 per cent but in some older reactors to 93 per cent. The latter is potentially bomb-grade.

Mr Potter's estimate of the number of HEU-fuelled research reactors is higher than the WNAs. He said that about 130 nuclear civilian research reactors in nearly 40 countries used the fuel.

As concern about transnational terrorism has risen in the past few years, so have worries about HEU fuel at research reactors, since many are in universities and other civilian locations with much lower security than military weapons establishments.

The IAEA has listed 10 countries in Asia and the Pacific with research reactors that run on HEU fuel. They include Australia, China, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Pakistan, Taiwan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

Australia has suggested that Asia-Pacific countries consider ways to improve the sharing of experience on nuclear security.

The US and Russia, which supplied most of the research reactors using HEU, are leading efforts to take the fuel back and replace it with low-enriched uranium that cannot be used for bomb-making. But this programme will not be completed before 2013.