The Libyan Nuclear Horn (Daniel 8:8)

Preventing proliferation: Tracking Uranium on the blockchain

Meghna Bal

 

Advances in technology, the shifting sands of the global nuclear energy market, and the extant standards and practices surrounding the monitoring of radioactive materials raise important questions about the future of nuclear security. Technological advancements have enabled the retrieval of radioactive materials from unconventional sources and made fuel fabrication easier. The emergence of new players in the nuclear energy market also flags concerns about the ability of these nations to track and secure nuclear material within their borders. As nuclear terrorism becomes an increasingly real threat, newer measures must be introduced to securely monitor the movement of radioactive materials. This brief argues that a blockchain-based tracking system may help overcome current monitoring deficits in the trade of radioactive materials and help check proliferation in the process. 

Introduction 

Since the advent of Bitcoin, blockchain technology has gone from a financial novelty to an innovative phenomenon that is disrupting multiple industries including healthcare, public service, energy, manufacturing, and media and entertainment. Now, even the defence sector is looking to deploy blockchains to secure critical infrastructure and sensitive information. In this context, one particular area where blockchains would be invaluable is in monitoring the movement of radioactive materials and checking proliferation.
Advances in technology raise important questions about the future of nuclear security. Compounding the situation are the shifting sands of the global nuclear energy market, and the extant standards and practices surrounding the monitoring of radioactive materials. Technological advancements have enabled the retrieval of radioactive materials from unconventional sources and made fuel fabrication easier. The emergence of new players in the nuclear energy market also flags concerns about the ability of these states to track and secure nuclear material within their borders. This is exacerbated by the fact that the full extent of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards only apply to the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle. Thus, globally, these materials are not closely tracked until they are shipped out of the conversion plant. Additionally, digital tracking systems are largely absent, making it difficult to monitor the movement of these materials from the mine to the plant/reactor and their final destination that is the disposal site.^[i]
Between 1993 and 2012, there were 419 incidents involving illegal dealings in nuclear material that were reported to the IAEA’s Incident and Trafficking Database (ITDB).^[ii] According to Rukhlo and Gadaric, there have been 91 incidents, between 1993 and 2007, involving the illegal trafficking of natural uranium.^[iii] As nuclear terrorism becomes an increasingly real threat, newer measures must be introduced to securely monitor the movement of radioactive materials. Inertia at this juncture would be catastrophic.
A blockchain-based tracking system may help overcome current monitoring deficits in the trade of radioactive materials. The blockchain is a technology protocol that enables a network of computers to store information, complete transactions and manage a distributed ledger of these transactions. Building a blockchain-based tracking system can foster a more secure network for the transport and movement of these materials in the future.

Figure 1: Nuclear Fuel Cycle

Radioactive materials: The current state of safeguards

The International Atomic Energy Agency is the watchdog for global nuclear safety and security.^[iv] It oversees the creation and application of safeguards to check the veracity of declarations that States make about their nuclear material stockpiles and ancillary activities. The IAEA safeguards are couched in legally enforceable treaties known as “safeguards agreements”.^[v] States accept these safeguards by entering into these agreements with the IAEA.^[vi] These safeguards are meant to apply to all nuclear material within each member nation as a whole.
Most IAEA safeguards have been captured under the IAEA statute and within the IAEA Information Circular, INFCIRC/153 of 1972 (INFCIRC/153). INFCIRC/153 indicates the point at which the full extent of IAEA accountancy and monitoring measures begin to apply to a particular stock of radioactive material. Paragraph 34(c) of the document provides that the full measure of safeguards within the agreements only apply to nuclear material that is ready to be fabricated or enriched.^[xv] Thus, the application of these safeguards begins only when the material leaves the conversion plant.
Uranium at the front-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, i.e., Uranium ore that is mined and the Uranium Ore Concentrate (UOC) or yellowcake that is extracted from the ore—is quite low-risk as only a small percentage of it is fissile. As such, both are exempt from full material accountancy and control as it is presumed that these materials are easily secured using existing best practices.
The IAEA has included limited provisions for reporting the trading of UOC. Under these provisions, a State is obligated to report to the IAEA if it has imported or exported any radioactive material, unless it has done so for non-nuclear purposes. Reporting and recording is mandatory if any source material is traded for use in a nuclear reactor. This system of reporting is the only safeguard that is in place for radioactive source materials. It must be noted that no safeguards apply to Uranium ore.
In 1997, the IAEA passed the Model Additional Protocol (INFCIRC/540), to bolster existing safeguards and reporting stipulations. INFCIRC/540 provides that States must furnish an annual report of total uranium and thorium holdings. States must also report the import and export of radioactive source materials for non-nuclear purposes.^[xvi]

The Risk

The systems currently in place to control the illegal use of nuclear material consist of a smorgasbord of disjointed international treaties and documents, unofficial measures, and national regulatory frameworks. Unsurprisingly, there are significant disparities in the domestic implementation and enforcement of these systems, making it difficult to thwart proliferation. These deficits, along with the changing face of the global nuclear market, have made it easier for unverified intermediaries to enter the network and create paths that illegal procurement rings can exploit.

Deficits in the implementation of IAEA safeguards^[xvii]

The IAEA annually publishes a Safeguards Implementation Report (SIR) that it submits to its Board of Governors. The SIR provides data to member nations about the obstacles faced by the Department of Safeguards when fulfilling its obligations to ensure the integrity and comprehensiveness of a member State’s declarations about its nuclear activities and material. In 2013, a copy of the 2012 SIR that was leaked to the media brought disturbing details to light. The report revealed that 22 States which had Additional Protocols in force failed to adhere to the declaration requirements under these protocols. Additionally, significant delays were noted in report submissions for States that had executed CSAs with the IAEA. Many States also actively thwarted IAEA inspections by hindering access to nuclear facilities or the areas around them and prohibiting the collection of environmental samples. Finally, the report found that States were yet to establish national protocols for material accountancy and safety.
Although larger supplier countries report the trading of radioactive source material on a regular basis, the 2012 SIR revealed that there was considerable inconsistency in the reporting activities of other member States.

Nuclear materials: Accounting for inventory^[xviii] 

Industrial nuclear entities in most countries follow a standardised process to account for material inventory. Unique identification (UID) numbers are allotted to each drum. Producers can trace a particular drum to a specific batch of product as UID numbers are linked to the production lot number. Labels contain information about the purity and weight of the material. The information on these labels is usually filled in by felt pen. Drums are weighed and then shipped to the fabrication or conversion plants in batches of 50 and upwards. At the fabrication or conversion plant, the drums are weighed once again. If any discrepancies arise in the weight of the product that was shipped and that which was received, independent auditors are called in to review the shipment. Incongruities are then reported to the regulatory authorities.
Although major private players have deployed control systems within their supply chains and most nations maintain databases to capture the stock of nuclear materials within their borders, these mechanisms remain fragmented and the information exists in silos.
It takes private entities from one to 30 days to detect the loss or theft of material at the mills, mines, or during transit. Although drum inventory management processes are automated at most facilities, information about drums and their contents are recorded by hand on paper, leaving room for transcription errors.  Moreover, hardly any digital barcoding systems exist for the tracking of material that exit the mines or enter conversion facilities.
Inventory issues are the most pronounced at conversion facilities. Globally, the output of most uranium mines is handled by five conversion plants – Canada, Russia, United States, France, and China. These facilities accumulate huge volumes of material in their storage spaces, which leads to an immense backlog and issues with efficiency. 

Nuclear source materials: The threat of complacency^[xix]

Overall, it is difficult to steal uranium ores without being detected as the requisite quantities for most applications are quite large. One would have to divert at least ten trucks worth of material to make the venture worthwhile. This has not, however, dissuaded attempts to misappropriate uranium ore. In 2004, authorities confiscated 600 kilograms of ore from a vehicle near the Caetite mine in Brazil. In 2011, 324 Kg of uranium ore were stolen from the Trekkopje mine in Namibia.
Research has shown that UOC also needs additional safeguards to mitigate the risks involved. The most prominent risk is the pilfering of UOC from the mine, the mill, or during the transport phase by either individuals working within the system or outside it, or both working as cohorts. This was demonstrated in 2009 when personnel at the Rossing Uranium mine in Namibia were caught in a covert police operation attempting to sell 170 Kg of UOC. Materials are also at risk of being diverted from sanctioned routes and end-users once they have been exported from a supplier country. A notorious instance was the “Plumbat Affair” in 1968. Some 200 tonnes of UOC were redirected in Antwerp from its original destination in Italy to Haifa, Israel and onward to Dimona. The incident occurred before the NPT was incepted, though Euratom safeguards were in place at the time. As UOC is currently exempt from full material accountancy and control, there is also a danger that parties could store it and sell it in the black market to a nation that has the capability to process and convert it into reactor fuel or weapon-grade fissile material. This threat increases in the face of inadequate tracking and monitoring measures.

The changing face of the global nuclear market

Over the last few years, there have been paradigmatic shifts in the demand and consumption of nuclear resources across the globe. Illustratively, traditional consumers of nuclear energy such as Germany, the US and Japan have scaled back and shut down nuclear power operations.^[xx] This can be attributed to concerns about both safety and economic competitiveness arising in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi accident in 2011.
The fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi incident spurred a chilling effect across Japan about the safety of nuclear power. Immediately after the incident, Japan shut down 48 of its nuclear reactors.^[xxi] Till date, it has only restarted operations at five of them.^[xxii] Fukushima was an inflection point for the nuclear energy discourse in Germany as well. The events that transpired at the ill-fated nuclear reactor prompted the pro-nuclear Merkel government to initiate a plan to shut down nuclear reactors within Germany by 2022.^[xxiii]  The rising expenditure associated with the increased emphasis on safety, combined with the dropping costs of fossil fuels and renewables, has made nuclear power a commercially unattractive resource. This is especially true for the US where the rapid increase in shale production has dramatically decreased the price of natural gas.^[xxiv]
At the same time, China and several other rapidly developing nations are turning to nuclear power to satisfy a greater proportion of their energy requirements.^[xxv] Of the 60 new reactors currently being constructed around the world, 39 are in developing nations in Asia.^[xxvi] Since the turn of the 21^st century, 85 of the 105 nuclear reactors that have begun construction are in this region.^[xxvii] This relocation can be ascribed to two key factors. The first is economic: Most developing nations are energy and resource deficient^[xxviii] and need viable, cost-effective sources of energy to meet their growing needs.^[xxix] Although nuclear power is capital intensive at the outset, its operations are relatively low cost.^[xxx]
The second reason is environmental: Climate change, pollution, and other ecological exigencies are prompting several developing nations to turn to cleaner sources of energy to meet their power needs.^[xxxi] Emissions associated with nuclear energy are decidedly lower than fossil fuel-backed resources and comparable to those of wind and biomass.^[xxxii] Further, the generation of most renewable sources is intermittent, dependent as it is on environmental vagaries.^[xxxiii] In contrast, nuclear reactors produce a steady stream of power, making nuclear energy an attractive option for many developing nations.
Although the uptake of nuclear power within developing regions is a positive development, concerns about armed nuclear proliferation and safety loom large. Many developing nations are characterised by political volatility, high rates of terror activity, and a general air of complacency about nuclear safety and security. In Malaysia, for example, proliferation was not a primary policy concern for authorities until recently,^[xxxiv] when it was discovered that a Malaysian company had been producing centrifuges for the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear network.^[xxxv] Malaysia then introduced strong measures to prevent the re-occurrence of such activities.^[xxxvi]
The complacency mentioned earlier may be attributed to the resource and capacity constraints faced by most developing nations. When these countries put their national priorities in order of urgency, nuclear security takes a back seat to much more pressing concerns such as widespread poverty, overpopulation, and food security. As such, they are unable to keep a close check on nuclear activities within their borders, in turn creating opportunities for nefarious actors.
In Africa,^[xxxvii] for instance, where illegal uranium mining and milling activities are rampant, there is a high risk of uranium smuggling.  Between 1994 and 2005, a total of 24 incidents involving the theft of uranium ore have occurred within the continent. Experts suggest that the deteriorating security around the Shinkolobwe mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) presents the most urgent security concern in Africa. In 2010, a UN report revealed that a band of Hutu rebels from Rwanda had attempted to sell six drums of UOC that were produced in the Shinkolobwe mine when the DRC was a Belgian colony. The rebels, however, could not find a buyer and abandoned the venture after a year.
The list of security concerns in Africa includes a lack of transparency in the way in which nuclear materials are transported to and within African nations. There are, for example, around 6,400 containers of UOC currently stored in a facility in Libya. In 2004, Libya confessed to the IAEA that it had imported uranium from Niger from 1978 to 1981. At the time, it was not incumbent upon Libya to report the imported ore as it did not have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Muammar Qadafi had acquired the material to build a nuclear arsenal. In 2004, an inspection conducted by the IAEA revealed that the amount of nuclear material in Libya was consistent with the country’s declaration. And though the last bit of Libya’s enriched uranium was taken away in 2009, stocks of ore still remain. Given the high rate of terror activity in the region, there exists a credible risk of a terror organisation attempting to seize this material.
As there is a strong likelihood of diversion, theft, or misuse of nuclear material in developing nations, there is a serious need for the introduction of a modern, digitised system of controls and safeguards.
Stakeholders in the global nuclear value and governance chains have a duty to create and implement a mechanism that will assist them in tracking radioactive materials. A blockchain-based global nuclear inventory management system may be the answer.

Blockchains: A conceptual overview

Blockchains first gained notoriety as the technology underpinning Bitcoin – a decentralised cryptocurrency application that allowed users to safely transact over an untrusted medium like the internet without the oversight of a “trusted” central intermediary such as a bank.  The trusted intermediary was supplanted by the blockchain. Resultantly, blockchain technology is often referred to as the “trustless protocol”—^[xxxviii] as it has an in-built mechanism that helps overcome a tricky computer science puzzle known as the “Byzantine Generals Problem”. First described by Lamport et al. in 1982, the Byzantine Generals Problem is an allegory for the redundancy or trust deficits in computer systems.^[xxxix]
In a blockchain, the mechanisms that secure trust between the nodes on the network are the following:

1. A Consensus Protocol: This ensures ledger consistency across the network and decreases the risk of fraudulent transactions because, any interference, if it is to be effective, would have to occur synchronously on more than 51 percent of the network.
2. Cryptographic Hashing: Hashes are functions that convert any informational input into a string of arbitrary letters and numbers of a defined length. Any amount of information can be hashed and the same data input will give you the same hash output every time. However, if a single character in the data input is different, the hashing function will churn out a completely different hash output. Thus, hashing precludes the alteration of transaction inputs on the blockchain.
3. Digital Signature: A mathematical method that is deployed to validate the authenticity, integrity, and validity of transaction participants.
4. Public-key cryptography: Encrypts transaction information with a public key that may only be decrypted with a corresponding private key.

The combination of these components gives users an immutable, chronological record of transactions that cannot be altered or reversed.
Although blockchains were originally classified as financial breakthrough, their use potential now extends well beyond the realm of banking. For one, the blockchain technology protocol can be leveraged to operate “Smart Contracts”, which are lines of code that execute autonomously once certain contingencies are met. They can be used to execute business logic and legal agreements automatically, and store records and underpin decentralised applications.
More significantly for the subject of this brief, blockchains can be used to track the provenance of any physical asset across a system. It could revolutionise the logistical workings of any industrial ecosystem.
There are currently three varieties of blockchains. The first are public blockchains that are open for anyone to join. Participants are not scrutinised and everyone on the network may read and write data. The public blockchain network is driven by a direct economic incentive such as a cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin and Ethereum networks are examples of public blockchains. The second is a consortium blockchain, a semi-restricted network where only verified stakeholders are allowed to participate. Transactions generally go through quicker on this type of blockchain as the consensus modality does not involve mining. The third is a private blockchain, a permissioned ledger or controlled environment designed for rapid application, immediate deployment, and intra-corporational usage. Accountability on such networks is incentivised and preserved primarily through reputational risk, as all participants are known to each other.
Private and consortium blockchains were conceived to overcome certain issues with public blockchains such as the requirement for large amounts for computational power, limited transactional output, and the limited privacy for more sensitive transactions.^[xl] Private and consortium blockchains have been envisioned as secure databases for intra- and inter-corporation transactions, but the possibilities are not restricted to these cases alone.^[xli] Both these types of blockchains can be used to securely track and monitor the global migration of nuclear material.

A global decentralised ledger for nuclear material

A consortium blockchain can be used to capture the movement of the global uranium supply through the nuclear fuel cycle. This solution should ideally be deployed in two parts. The first part can track the movement of nuclear material through the front-end of the nuclear cycle, i.e., from the time the ore is loaded into a drum at the mine up to when it reaches the conversion facility. The second part may follow the converted uranium from the conversion facility until its final destination. The IAEA may also consider recommending that importers of uranium supplement this global tracking system with a blockchain-based monitoring mechanism that tracks the movement of uranium within the importing nation’s borders.
How would it work?
Once uranium ore is loaded into a drum at the mine, the container can be secured with a tamper-evident sealing device that has a Near Field Communication (NFC) or Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-enabled microchip.^[xlii] The microchip acts like an immutable identifier that creates a digital identity for the drum.^[xliii] It would contain important identifying information about the drum such as the type of material, its UN Number and shipping name, weight, the quantum of radioactivity, the point of origin, the destination, the date for which the activity is estimated, and the names of the individuals handling the container at each point. This digital identification, along with other logistical information, is then uploaded to the blockchain. Inlays can be used to provide real-time location tracking as well.^[xliv] Additionally, motion sensor boards can be embedded into the seals to notify parties about any aberrant movements.
This system would allow all stakeholders in the global nuclear supply chain such as State entities, private companies and auditing entities to verify the origins of the ore and track its movements as well as the identities of the individuals handling it. Feedback would be received in real-time, rather than the one to thirty-day window industry players currently require. This would help the IAEA be more efficient with inspection planning and declaration analysis.^[xlv] Additionally, if an incident were to take place, the response can be immediate.
Information and records would no longer be produced in silos. Each stakeholder on the network would have data on the entire history of a particular drum’s movements and where it is on the globe. A blockchain-based monitoring mechanism can also be integrated with legacy recording systems that may be in place across different facilities.
As stated earlier, a majority of the world’s conversion activities take place in just five countries. As a result, these facilities amass huge volumes of material that remains at storage lots for years. The implementation of a blockchain-based tracking system would help alleviate the problems with backlog and inventory maintenance faced by these facilities. The use of blockchains would also safeguard the shipments from cyberattacks which can be used to create dummy lots of material and wipe out information.

Issues for consideration and the way forward

Global material monitoring systems like the one proposed in this brief have already been established in the diamond industry, where each stone is given a digital identity and tracked from mine to store, to thwart the use of “conflict diamonds”.^[xlvi] There would, however, be significant impediments to the actualisation of such a system when dealing with a politically sensitive material like uranium.
First, the implementation of such a monitoring system will require a reimagining of the existing policy landscape surrounding nuclear safeguards. Most of the protocols in place exist in the form of guidelines and reporting standards – many of which are voluntary in nature. A blockchain-based monitoring mechanism would render most of these policy frameworks redundant. Second, determining which stakeholders should form the nodes on the network would be a political minefield. While the on-boarding of private actors, the IAEA, and the exporter states seems intuitive, importers would have to form a part of the system as well. This might lead to an impasse, as the platform could be used as a pretext by members of the NPT to get countries like India, Israel and Pakistan to sign the treaty. Third, most proliferation occurs surreptitiously and is more dependent on technological aspects than material availability. A prime example of this is the workings of the notorious Abdul Qadeer Khan network, which originated as a result of Abdul Qadeer Khan stealing important technical papers from Germany to help Pakistan develop a nuclear arsenal.^[xlvii] The availability of material was inconsequential to Pakistan as the country had rich, natural stores of Uranium.^[xlviii] What was more important was developing the technological infrastructure that would help make the material fissile.
The AQ Khan network then went on to assist countries such as North Korea and Iran in developing their own nuclear capabilities.^[xlix] It is alleged that this took place under the watch of American and European stakeholders.^[l] Thus, a blockchain-based monitoring system can never be a panacea and must be bolstered by added measures and efforts to ensure such activities do not take place in the future.
Despite the significant obstacles to implementing a blockchain-based monitoring system for nuclear material, the IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) must work together and seriously consider how such a mechanism could be incorporated into the current uranium governance framework. A possible first step could be piloting the technology at the low-enriched Uranium (LEU) bank in Kazakhstan. The bank is owned and controlled by the IAEA, and was established as a supplier of last resort for countries that encounter a disruption of their regular nuclear fuel supply chains. This poses a relatively low-risk environment to help test the efficacy of the blockchain in securing the transport of materials. Additionally, it will help in garnering a better understanding of how the dynamics of the different actors within the system could work. It would also help establish guidance on how assurances, transfers, and end-user licensing systems could be carried out in the midst of implementation. Thus, it would serve as an effective microcosm for a global system.
The full-scale realisation of such a scheme may be a distant dream for now. Yet it is becoming increasingly evident that blockchains must form an integral part of the global nuclear monitoring system in the foreseeable future.

Fueling Nuclear Terrorism (Revelation 15:4)

The fuel for a nuclear bomb is in the hands of an unknown black marketeer from Russia, U.S. officials say
The presence of identical fissile materials in three smuggling incidents indicates someone has a larger cache and is hunting for a buyer
By Douglas BirchR. Jeffrey Smithemail 6:00 am, November 12, 2015 Updated: 4:59 pm, November 13, 2015
The arrest of Teodor Chetrus in Moldova in 2011. Moldovan Police Directorate
CHISINAU, Moldova – The sample of highly-enriched uranium, of a type that could be used in a nuclear bomb, arrived here on a rainy summer day four years ago, in a blue shopping bag carried by a former policeman.
According to court documents, the bag quickly passed through the hands of three others on its way to a prospective buyer. It was not the first time such material had passed through this city, raising international alarms: It had happened twice before. And mysteriously, in all three cases, spanning more than a decade, the nuclear material appeared to have the same origin – a restricted military installation in Russia.
This news would quickly reach Washington. But that day, the first to pick up the blue bag was the wife of a former Russian military officer, who handed it off to a friend while she went shopping in this former Soviet city’s ragged downtown.
Not long afterward, a 57-year old lawyer named Teodor Chetrus, from a provincial town near the Ukrainian border, retrieved it and brought it to a meeting with a man named Ruslan Andropov. According to an account by Moldovan police, the two men had, earlier in the day, visited a local bank, where Chetrus confirmed that Andropov had deposited more than $330,000 as an initial payment.
Andropov next examined the contents of the bag: a lead-lined cylinder, shaped like a thermos. It was meant to be the first of several shipments of highly-enriched uranium totaling 10 kilograms (22 lbs), a senior investigator here said. That’s about a fifth of what might be needed to fuel a Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosion — but almost enough to power a more technically-advanced “implosion-style” nuclear bomb.
But then, abruptly, Chetrus’s participation with this group of shadowy characters in the illicit sale of nuclear explosive materials — the stuff of nightmares at the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House — went awry.
Andropov turned out to be working with Moldovan police, who were monitoring communications between those involved, with advice from the U.S. embassy in Chishinau. On June 27, 2011, they swooped in. Photos of the arrests show a policeman in a ski mask holding a Kalashnikov while Chetrus knelt on a sidewalk in front of the bank. He would eventually be sentenced to five years in prison.
Chetrus’s arrest ended one of four attempts in the past five years by Moldovan residents to smuggle dangerous nuclear materials into the hands of unscrupulous buyers. But his capture did not ease the concerns of Western intelligence services.
Instead, it stoked them, because the resulting international probe into the case has sparked fresh, and previously unreported worries, that thieves inside of Russia somehow made off years ago with a full bomb’s worth of highly enriched uranium. Western spies fear the thieves have been doggedly looking for a buyer for the past sixteen years, by repeatedly dangling in front of them identical, genuine samples of that highly valuable material.
Five current or former U.S. officials who have tracked nuclear smuggling, and who declined to be named because this assessment is classified, said it is now a consensus view within the intelligence community.
But no one in the West knows exactly who has this nuclear explosive material, and where they may be.
It’s a mystery that so far has stumped America’s best spying efforts, in no small measure because the government of Russian president Vladimir Putin has refused to provide needed information on the case – or even to acknowledge that some of the country’s nuclear explosive materials are missing.
Three identical incidents
Western concerns are based on a simple trail of evidence that officials have until now kept secret: Three times since 1999, identically packaged containers of highly-enriched uranium have been seized by authorities outside of Russia — in Ruse, Bulgaria, in May 1999; in Paris in July 2001; and most recently here in Chisinau. In each case those holding the uranium said it was part of a larger cache, available to a buyer for the right price. That claim, while unproven, is considered credible by experts who have studied the three incidents.
Confidential forensic analysis by U.S. and French nuclear scientists — worthy of a “CSI” episode — has shown that these materials came from the same stockpile. Officials say they believe all were produced in the early 1990s at a sprawling Russian nuclear facility known as the Mayak Production Association, located in Ozersk, in the Ural mountains, roughly 900 miles (1,400 km) east of Moscow. The facility, which produced the fuel for Russia’s first nuclear warheads and for its naval nuclear reactors, is still one of the country’s “closed cities,” where access is tightly regulated.
The similarities between these three seizures make them the most worrisome unresolved instances of illicit trafficking in authentic, bomb-grade materials anywhere in the world, according to more than a dozen government officials and independent experts interviewed for this article, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic.
While seven of those involved in the smuggling have so far been prosecuted in Bulgaria, France and Moldova, officials say they are just low-level members of a shadowy international ring with Moldovan and Russian connections, all working for a person or persons whose identity remains cloaked.
Intelligence professionals — who say they put the issue of nuclear smuggling near the top of all their priorities — explain that this is a hard target to hit. Their principal ambition is to catch the thief and the buyer, but so far they have seen only middlemen.
But evidence collected from the probes of these three incidents indicates that a weapons-grade cache of nuclear material has been “in the wild since the mid-1990s,” a knowledgable U.S. intelligence official said. It’s widely thought to be no longer in Russia, and to possibly have passed through multiple hands, the official added, explaining that the 2011 Moldovan case is what helped solidify this assessment.
The basis for international worry, several officials explained, is the potential for all or part of this nuclear-materials cache to wind up in the hands of a terrorist buyer who could transform it into a viable weapon, using technical information about nuclear bomb designs that has leaked long ago into the public domain.
The FBI has privately discounted Moldovan claims that radioactive materials seized in more recent smuggling incidents here were being sought by the Islamic State terrorist group. Still, American worries about the 2011 Chisinau case were heightened by the presence in the Moldovan capital at the time of the deal of a potential buyer from Sudan, where Al Qaeda tried to obtain some uranium in the early 1990s and remains active, officials here and in Washington said.
With so many nuclear explosives held by governments around the world, US officials have long worried about the possibility of a terrorist-engineered nuclear or radiological blast within the United States. Multiple federal agencies have held almost 1,400 drills in cities around the country over the last decade to train local police and emergency personnel in how to behave after such a nightmare unfolds, according to a spokeswoman for the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Asked at a March 2014 nuclear security summit in the Netherlands whether he thought Russia’s assertive foreign policy was the number one threat to the United States, President Obama replied that “I continue to be much more concerned, when it comes to our security, with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”
According to a 2004 Department of Homeland Security guidebook to disaster response, even a relatively small nuclear detonation — comparable to 10,000 tons of TNT, or about half the force of the blast that levelled Nagasaki — would kill hundreds of thousands of people, contaminate 3,000 square miles (7,800 sq km), and cause billions of dollars in damages, while leaving an urban area a mile (1.6 km) in diameter a smoking wasteland.
The nuclear smuggling capital
Besides making the arrests in 2011, Moldovan police detained three people who they said were trying to smuggle depleted uranium in Aug. 2010, and last year the FBI helped investigate a group that tried to smuggle low-enriched uranium – neither of which can be used in a nuclear bomb. This year, further arrests were made in a case involving cesium, a radioactive, but not explosive, material.
Experts say Moldova’s repeated role in nuclear smuggling is unsurprising, since cross-border crime is much more prevalent in poorly governed or fractured states.
Roughly the size of Maryland with about two-thirds the population, it is one of the poorest former Soviet republics. Filled with rolling fields and tiny villages, the country is squeezed between Romania and Ukraine and brushed by the Danube River. The capital of Chisinau, a brash and dusty place, shows signs of fast economic growth that has benefited only a sliver of its citizens. BMWs and Lexus sedans share the streets with hordes of tiny taxis and Soviet-era streetcars, and pensioners line the sidewalks peddling soaps, samovars and women’s underwear.
Since 1992, its territory has been split into two ethnically separate regions, dominated one by Romanian and the other by Russian and Ukrainian speakers. Russian troops have been stationed for decades in the second of these regions, known as Transnistria, a sliver of land on the eastern bank of the Dniester River, over the opposition of the central government.
Like other fragments of the former Soviet empire occupied by Russian troops, Transnistria is a haven for smugglers, particularly of cigarettes, arms, and prostitutes. It has its own flag, displaying a hammer and sickle, but isn’t recognized as a country by any member of the United Nations, including Russia.
The Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol, is where Galina Agheenco — who picked up the blue bag containing the uranium from the former policeman and passed it to a friend — lived with her husband Alexander, 58, a mustachioed Russian former military colonel, according to officials here. An English-language slide presentation about the incident prepared by the Moldovan Ministry of Internal Affairs calls Alexander the “leader of the criminal group” involved in the nuclear smuggling incident.
His ambition, a Moldovan Supreme Court ruling in May 2014 said, was to sell a total of one kilogram of highly-enriched uranium for roughly $36 million, in a deal plotted on Skype, on mobile phones, and in emails — many of which turned out to be monitored by the government. The actual material offered prior to the police raid was one-hundredth of that amount.
But Col. Gheorghe Cavcaliuc, a soft-spoken, young Moldovan police official who heads the special operations division, said in an interview here that efforts by the police to learn more about Alexander’s activities and connections have been stymied. An arrest warrant for him is still unfulfilled, five years later, and officials here say they heard he fled from Transnistria to Russia. Attempts by the Center for Public Integrity to obtain his response to the allegations against him were unsuccessful.
Col. Gheorghe Cavcalius, head of Moldovan police official who heads the special operations divisions. Moldovan General Police Directorate
“We sent several requests to the Russian Federation for information about him, but we didn’t get any answers,” Cavcaliuc said.
Washington hasn’t fared any better. The U.S. Embassy here “does not maintain liaison relationships or active, ongoing contacts with Transnistrian law enforcement and/or security service personnel,” a December 2009 State Department cable released by Wikileaks said.
Galina Agheenco, whose Lexus GS330 car had Transnistrian plates, was detained on the day of the incident and served three years in prison. But the former policeman who brought her the uranium, and was charged in the case, returned to Transnistria when he was released by a court pending trial, defying a judge’s order, according to the Moldovan police report. Chetrus, meanwhile, was freed from prison last December and is appealing his sentence.
The two other cases involving identical samples of nuclear explosives — in France and Bulgaria — also had Moldovan connections, according to investigators here.
Nuclear explosive materials in a van and a trunk
The 2001 Paris case arose from a tip given to the police there that a 36-year old Frenchman with a criminal record, Serge Salfati, was trying to find a buyer for 30 kilograms ( 66 pounds) of highly-enriched uranium – more than enough for a skilled bomb-maker to produce a nuclear explosion. He was using genuine samples weighing a total of 5 grams as a lure.
A special police squad checked for radiation in Salfati’s apartment and garage, but found nothing. Their detectors then got a hit from a van he used, and so they arrested him and seized a lead container containing the samples.
The plane carrying the uranium to Paris flew to Charles de Gaulle airport from Chisinau, said Ionel Balan, Deputy Director of Moldova’s National Agency for Regulation of Nuclear and Radiological Activities, in an interview here.
The Bulgarian case ,two years earlier, arose when a man driving over a bridge at a Danube River crossing to Romania aroused the suspicions of a border guard, who searched his vehicle. The guard found a receipt, written in Cyrillic, for the purchase of “uranium 235,” and then, after pulling apart an air compressor in the trunk, found a lead container inside with that label on it. The man, Urskan Hanifi, told police he bought the material in Moldova and was headed back there after failing to find a buyer for it in Turkey, according to media accounts and a U.S. government report.
Cavcaliuc said he is convinced that a single group stands behind each of the three smuggling cases, and that a larger cache of material could be hidden in Transnistria. “In all three cases, there was the same container, the same chemical components [of the uranium] and traffickers from the same country, Moldova,” he said.
A unmarked plane carrying FBI agents
But no one knew any of this immediately. When the lead canister seized in 2011 was initially brought to the Moldovan government’s rudimentary police laboratory, Balan, a biochemist, expected it to be a hoax and so he handled it without gloves or a smock. He found the inside wall had been coated with about an inch of paraffin wax, and inside it was a small glass ampoule shaped like a tiny harpoon, containing a blackish powder.
He used a snub-nosed radiation detector to take two readings, and then he consulted a dog-eared copy of a nuclear materials guide published by Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States and used worldwide as a reference manual: “And immediately, I understood this was not simple or natural uranium, it was enriched uranium.”
His readings also indicated some of it had decayed, “a clear indication that this sample was old and not fresh.”
Word of this result quickly reached Washington and, shortly afterward, an umarked private jet landed at the Chisinau airport, secretly carrying FBI agents. They scooped up the canister and its contents and flew them back to the United States.
The samples were taken to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where US nuclear weapons have been designed since the 1950s and a group known as the Forensic Science Division specializes in analyzing foreign materials, using a classified library of radioactive particles collected by US officials and intelligence sources all over the globe.
According to Moldovan authorities, a preliminary report by the division, entitled “Results for Moldovan HEU Sample,” concluded that the uranium was produced in Russia and eerily similar to the materials seized a decade earlier in France and Bulgaria.
They did not provide details, but US officials said the isotopic signature, along with other evidence, pointed directly at Russia’s Mayak plant as the origin.
Patrick Grant, one of the lead Livermore investigators, declined to discuss the Moldovan case, but said in an interview that the findings in the Paris case “correlate very well” with those of the uranium seized in Bulgaria. In a 2014 textbook for nuclear forensic scientists, Grant and several colleagues wrote that the ampoules seized in Bulgaria resembled those used to preserve samples from specific production runs at Russian nuclear processing plants. Each of these plants, he said, might have dozens of such samples on its shelves.
Matthew Bunn, a nuclear security expert at Harvard who wrote a classified study about Russian fissile material stocks during the Clinton administration, said such samples would be relatively easy to steal. “You could easily imagine a room full of hundreds of samples… and someone sweeping them into a suitcase and walking out,” he said.
A chaotic moment at Russian nuclear plants
The apparent age of the purloined materials is not reassuring. The Livermore team fixed the time of the Bulgarian sample production as Oct. 30, 1993, plus or minus one month — a time when Russian political turmoil and economic problems had by many accounts seriously weakened security at the country’s nuclear installations.
At some facilities, security guards and scientists alike were not paid, and morale plummeted. Moreover, “they didn’t have seals, badge systems, or a computerized database” that showed how much explosive material they had and where it was, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In 1994, a machinist at the Elektrostal Machine-Building Plant, a nuclear fuel production facility 36 miles (57 km) east of Moscow, told police he carried six and a half pounds (3 kg) of weapons-grade uranium out of the front gate, hidden in a pair of protective gloves. He gave the material to a relative, a butcher in St. Petersburg, who stored it in a jar in his refrigerator while he and two friends – a pipelayer and an unemployed man – hunted for buyers at open-air markets.
That same year, a Elektrostal metalworker named Vladimir Luzgachev smuggled out another 3.7 pounds (1.7 kg) of enriched uranium in a bag of apples. He was not arrested until June 1995, when Russia’s Federal Security Service learned of his efforts to find a buyer.
Both of those episodes occurred several years after the Federal Security Service arrested a group of nuclear workers for involvement in the theft of 41 pounds (18 kg) of nuclear explosive material from an unnamed facility in Chelyabinsk province, where the Mayak Production Association and three other major plants are located.
Viktor Yerastov, then chief of the Nuclear Materials Accounting and Control Department for the Ministry of Atomic Energy, said in the Winter 2000 edition of Russia’s Yaderny Kontrol (Nuclear Control) magazine that if successful, that theft “could have inflicted a significant damage to the state.” A 2002 CIA report to Congress separately quoted him as saying the amount stolen was “quite sufficient material to produce an atomic bomb.”
No accounting of what was stolen years ago
Washington’s anxieties about a potential radioactive “dirty bomb” or nuclear blast on US soil have always been centered around the risk that explosive materials — more than a bomb’s mechanical workings — could fall into the wrong hands. “In the nuclear business, it’s all about the materials,” said Anne Harrington, deputy administrator at the National Nuclear Security Administration, in an interview last year. “You can make widgets, pieces and parts, but without the material you don’t have an improvised [nuclear] device.”
Although roughly two dozen countries have enough nuclear explosives to make a bomb, Russia’s materials have long been the chief Western concern. Of the roughly 20 documented seizures of nuclear explosive materials since 1992, all have “come out of the former Soviet Union,” Harrington separately told the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Strategic Forces in April 2015. “We see a lot of former Russian military, former Russian intel… involved in nuclear trafficking,” a US intelligence official said in an interview.
Officials say that’s why Washington has spent about $4 billion over the past 25 years to help that country tighten control of the weapons-usable materials inside its vast nuclear complex. Russian nuclear facilities have made progress, they say, particularly in improving training for security personnel, installing new physical barriers and upgrading related sensor technology. New nuclear security regulations came into effect in 2012, and a civilian oversight group was created to ensure their implementation.
But a senior intelligence official from the Bush administration who retains security clearances said that he was still worried about material stolen decades ago that may be “sloshing around” outside the walls of these facilities. “The real concern is that the material got out of these sites before we paid much attention” to securing them, he said in an interview, speaking on condition he not be named so he could discuss classified analyses.
This anxiety has been sporadically acknowledged by intelligence officials in the past decade. “We find it highly unlikely that Russian authorities would have been able to recover all the material reportedly stolen,” a National Intelligence Council report concluded in 2005, according to an excerpt read by then-Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia at a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February 2005.
Rockefeller asked then-CIA Director Porter Goss whether enough had vanished from Russia’s stockpile to build a nuclear weapon. “There is sufficient material unaccounted for so that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct a nuclear weapon,” Goss responded. Rockefeller also asked if Goss could assure the American people the missing material was not in terrorist hands. “No, I can’t make that assurance,” Goss said. “I can’t account for some of the material so I can’t make the assurance about its whereabouts.”
In November 2002, a senior Russian nuclear and radiation safety official, Yuri Vishnevskiy, affirmed that small quantities of nuclear materials, including highly-enriched uranium, had indeed disappeared from nuclear facilities. But Russian officials have been increasingly tight-lipped since then.
Former CIA director George Tenet, in his 2007 memoir, said that after hearing Al Qaeda was trying to buy Russian nuclear devices in 2003, an Energy Department intelligence official went to Moscow to seek information about “reports we had received of missing material.” But the Russians refused to provide details, Tenet wrote, and “in the final analysis, it was still a game of spy versus spy.”
To overcome some of this distrust, U.S. officials tried the following year to draw Russia into joint analysis of fissile materials seized in the Bulgarian incident, but had only limited success. Scientists at Livermore shared a half-gram of that highly-enriched uranium with Russia’s Bochvar All-Russia Scientific Research Institute in Moscow, and paid them $50,000 to do an independent analysis.
According to a report by Michael Kristo, a chemist at Livermore, Bochvar scientists “confirmed the analytical results” reached at his laboratory, including the fact that the sample originated at a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility. But Bochvar did not agree with Livermore that this meant it came from the former Soviet Union, and instead claimed “it could have been produced by any nuclear state possessing the appropriate facilites,” Kristo wrote.
“They’re very guarded and sensitive about the possibility that anything is missing,” a former senior Obama administration official said in a recent interview, echoing comments from many others in Washington. “They never told us” whether they investigated the 2011 Moldovan case or what they found.
The 2011 version of an annual CIA report on Russian nuclear security practices — the most recent one completed — reaffirmed that “we judge it highly unlikely that Russian authorities have been able to recover all of the stolen material,” and added that large uncertainties exist about more recent thefts and the current state of Russia’s safeguards.
Under Putin, Russia has steadily cut back its overall nuclear security cooperation with the United States, arguing that it no longer needs Washington’s financial or technical assistance to safeguard its own fissile material stockpile. “It just faded to a tertiary issue under Putin,” Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, said in an interview. This year, for the first time in its budget proposal to Congress, administrators at the National Nuclear Security Administration shifted all Russia-related nuclear security expenditures to other purposes.
Officials with Rosatom, the state-owned corporation that runs Russia’s nuclear energy and weapons plants, declined to be interviewed for this article. But Kirill Komarov, first deputy director of Rosatom, spoke briefly to a reporter for the Center for Public Integrity at Moscow’s AtomExpo nuclear exposition in June.
Asked whether a cache of stolen Russian nuclear materials might be held by someone with ill motives, Komarov was dismissive, calling it “a question out of spy plots.”
“You know very well that a very operational system of controlling nuclear materials has been established worldwide — none of them are out of control,” Komarov said, adding that these materials are not passed around like a box of matches among smokers. “Their movements are always strictly controlled,” he said.
Vladimir Rybachenkov, a former counselor on nuclear issues at the Russian Embassy in Washington and now an advisor to the Russian Foreign Ministry, similarly dismissed fears that there were caches of Russian-made nuclear explosive materials that smugglers were dipping into to peddle on the black market.
“Many things are being invented, you know, kind of illusions,” Rybachenkov said. “People like journalists like to write about things that they don’t know for sure. So it’s rumors — rumors and nothing more.”

Good luck shutting down the Iranian horn (Dan 8:3)

Shutting Down Iran’s Nuclear Smugglers

 

The Islamic Republic has for decades relied on the global black market to build its nuclear program. Can negotiators now design a plan for policing it?

• By Colum Lynch
• July 1, 2015

For 30 years, Iran scoured the international black market for raw materials for an atomic program built almost entirely with foreign supplies. International sanctions have made it more difficult over the last decade for Tehran to acquire nuclear components. But they have also had an unintended consequence: Iran now has one of the world’s most sophisticated systems for smuggling nuclear technology.

Tehran’s smuggling prowess presents yet another challenge for negotiators struggling in Vienna this week to clinch a landmark agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program. World powers are grappling with how to monitor Iran’s nuclear energy system — and give the Islamic Republic legal channels to purchase raw materials for its upkeep — without letting Tehran divert equipment to a secret weapons program.

Iran’s smuggling networks are as much a source of pride to Tehran as they are a point of anxiety for the United States and its allies. World powers have long feared Iran has moved closer to obtaining the means and resources to build a nuclear bomb, even as the Islamic Republic insists its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes.

“We are proud that we bypass sanctions because the sanctions are illegal,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani boasted during a news conference in Tehran in August 2014.
Iran has hidden its nuclear purchases behind a web of front companies, banks, and international middlemen that stretches from the United States and Germany to South Korea to China. Additionally, Beijing has resisted efforts to disclose the activities of Chinese traders that move the vast majority of illicit goods into Iran. And efforts to interdict the shipment of banned technology into Iran has largely stalled during the ongoing negotiations. Moreover, governments seeking commercial deals with Tehran essentially have stopped reporting Iranian violations, according to the June 2 findings by U.N. experts who are responsible for enforcing sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

In Vienna, negotiators have been drawing up plans for a so-called “procurement channel” — an import control system that will permit Iran to purchase approved materials for its nuclear program as part of a comprehensive nuclear pact. The initial June 30 deadline for those talks has been extended to July 7.

Some weeks, or months, after a final accord is struck, the U.N. Security Council will lift or suspend a raft of U.N. sanctions resolutions dating to 2006 that have prohibited Iran from enriching and reprocessing uranium. They also include a trade ban on arms, especially ballistic missiles. In their place, the council will adopt a new resolution endorsing the nuclear deal and spelling out its terms.
While the new resolution will suspend some financial and trade sanctions, it will retain some key measures, including those limiting the transfer of sensitive technologies and activities, according to an April 2 U.S. fact sheet that outlined the preliminary agreement with Iran. Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has assured Congress that any violations by Iran will result in the automatic reimposition of sanctions. China and Russia, she said, will not be able to stop it.
The new resolution will also set the terms for the procurement channel and empower international inspectors to scrutinize “the supply chain that supports Iran’s nuclear program,” according to the fact sheet. The purpose is “to prevent diversion to a secret program.” It remains unclear, however, whether the U.N. panel of experts, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), or even some other newly created unit will take responsibility for monitoring Iran’s nuclear trade.

Achieving such assurances will not be easy. Iran’s fragmented procurement routes could emerge as a “real headache” for international inspectors trying to prevent abuse, said Nick Gillard, a former Australian defense expert on nuclear nonproliferation issues who currently is mapping out Iran’s nuclear-buying activities as a researcher at King’s College London’s Project Alpha. Iran’s various defense and energy agencies, including the Atomic Energy Organization and its subsidiaries, as well as the armed forces and military logistics departments, each have their own procurement channels. “It’s not highly centralized,” he said. “The buyers for these programs don’t work in the same office.”
Because a final deal will let Iran operate a nuclear energy program, the Security Council will have to lift and reconfigure existing U.N. sanctions that prohibit Tehran from purchasing materials that could be used for enriching uranium. But that can only happen after Iran addresses a series of concerns over the scale and history of its nuclear program, dials back some of the most controversial activities at its nuclear facilities at Fordow and Arak, provides international inspectors access to military sites, and details its allegedly covert military effort to develop a nuclear warhead.

The Islamic Republic began its nuclear shopping spree back in 1985, when its Atomic Energy Organization bought designs for its first-generation centrifuges from a network led by the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, A.Q. Khan. In secret, Iran built a massive nuclear complex deep underground at Natanz; it was exposed for the first time by an Iranian dissident in 2002 and forced Tehran to acknowledge its uranium-enrichment program. The program since has steadily grown to more than a dozen facilities spread throughout the country. U.S. officials are confident that Iran now has the technical know-how to produce enough fissile material for one nuclear bomb in two to three months.

“You think about it: Since 2003 they have been able to manufacture altogether 25,000 centrifuges,” said Olli Heinonen, the IAEA’s former chief of safeguards who is now a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. In 2006, Iran had only 164 first-generation centrifuges installed in its enrichment plant in Natanz. Today, Iran acknowledges it has installed 19,000 centrifuges in nuclear enrichment facilities, including more than 1,300 more advanced centrifuge models. “Most of the raw materials for these centrifuges — high-strength aluminum, carbon fiber, and maraging steel — are probably imported,” Heinonen said.
“How successful has Iran been at this game? You have to give them credit — they have been very successful,” Gillard added.

Gillard estimated that Iran has easily spent more than a billion dollars in foreign purchases over the past 30 years. Project Alpha, he said, has compiled 330 cases of known Iranian efforts to acquire components for its nuclear program, with a confirmed estimate of $250 million in costs. The total amount of trade is impossible to know. But Gillard believes the $250 million is only a fraction — perhaps 20 or 30 percent — of Iran’s spending on nuclear imports.

“Most of Iran’s current nuclear infrastructure has been built with foreign help,” Ian Stewart, also of Project Alpha, wrote in an unpublished report titled “Iran’s Illicit Procurement Activities: Past, Present and Future.” “Building the nuclear power plant at Bushehr, for example, was started by Germans and finished by Russians,” Stewart added. “The United States built Tehran’s research reactor, and Russia helped develop a heavy-water production plant at Arak and a uranium mine at Saghand. The Saghand mine was finished with Chinese help.”

Recent years have witnessed scores of incidents in which Iranian-chartered ships carrying weapons or nuclear components have been seized in foreign ports. China and the United Arab Emirates have been cited as the main transit hubs for illicit goods destined for Iran, according to Project Alpha. It cited one estimate indicating that as much as 90 percent of ballistic missile and nuclear technology passes through Chinese ports.

International sanctions, which include a web of financial penalties, have scared off some of the most reputable suppliers that have sold Iran sensitive dual-use goods for fear of running afoul of American authorities. Dual-use items can be used for both military purposes and mundane industrial tasks.
The smuggling was also reportedly impeded by covert efforts to sabotage Tehran’s nuclear program, including through the assassination of Iranian scientists and the introduction of Stuxnet malware in 2010, which infected equipment at several facilities, including the one at Natanz.

The U.N. panel of experts has “documented a well-established, sophisticated effort to maintain” smuggling networks over the last four years for the illicit procurement of nuclear-related goods, said former panel member Jacqueline Shire. Because of the international sanctions, “Iran has been forced to use illicit channels for virtually all of its nuclear-related procurement,” Shire told Foreign Policy.
The panel’s June 2 report found that Iran has scaled back its nuclear activities since it began negotiating with world powers for an accord to ease the sanctions. It found no evidence that Iran has violated the terms of the Joint Plan of Action, which it signed in November 2013 with the United States and other major powers.

At the same time, however, Iran has continued to violate a range of sanctions on the export of ballistic missiles and conventional arms, the panel found, citing reports of alleged weapons transfers to Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, as well as to groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. “[S]ome Member States informed the Panel that, according to their assessment, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s procurement trends and circumvention technique remain basically unchanged,” the panel concluded. This April, Britain informed the U.N. panel of experts that it “is aware of an active Iranian nuclear procurement network which has been associated with Iran’s Centrifuge Technology Company (TESA) and Kalay Electric Company (KEC),” the June 2 report noted. KEC is subject to Security Council sanctions.
“Iran continues to demonstrate special interest in high-grade machine tools which could contribute to nuclear and missile activities as well as wider industrial applications,” the report concluded. However, it noted a potential “general reduction of procurement activities by the Iranian side” and suggested that some governments may have decided to hold off on reporting on Iranian violations “to avoid any possible negative impact on ongoing negotiations.”

In late 2014, the United States informed the U.N. panel of experts that “it had observed no recent downturn in procurement” since the nuclear talks had begun, according to a confidential November 2014 account described to Foreign Policy. The United States also said it had detected “an increase in procurement” for the heavy-water reactor at Arak, which world powers believe could be used to produce plutonium.

The United States did, however, cite a “relative decrease in centrifuge enrichment related-procurement” in recent months, according to the account. And Iran has permitted IAEA monitoring of the Arak facility, which would be rendered incapable of producing plutonium under a comprehensive nuclear deal.

Shire said Iran has shown a preference for smuggling in high-quality raw materials from established Western suppliers in the United States and Europe. But she said the sanctions have forced Iran to “settle for cheaper-made, less reliable substitutes by producers in Asia.”
One way Tehran has evaded sanctions, Shire said, is by purchasing low-grade components that are not adequate for a nuclear program — and therefore are not included on nuclear-control import lists of items restricted for sale to Iran. In such cases, Iran has had to “either make do with lower performance or possibly seek to modify the items after purchase,” she said.

A new Security Council procurement channel, then, would have to prevent Iran from using such tactics to evade the improper import of nuclear goods. Shire said governments would have to closely watch for goods that are not on lists of banned imports and be vigilant in monitoring proliferation-sensitive transfers to Iran.

Heinonen favors a highly focused control regime that prohibits a relatively small number of sensitive technologies from entering the country. They would include items that are absolutely vital to enrichment, reprocessing of uranium, or weaponizing a nuclear explosive. There is a fairly limited universe of companies that produce high-tech equipment capable of running a nuclear program, and soliciting their support in stopping smuggling is crucial.

“In the end, a nuclear control system can’t control everything,” Heinonen said, noting that the expansion of Iran’s oil industry will require a flood of dual-use materials entering the country. “If you end up trying to control every valve going into the country, it’s going to be a hell of a difficult job. You select some from the list of items that are really important, and then you can control it.”
In the past, Iran has outsourced key technical components for its nuclear program, including electrical control systems for centrifuges, which are made in Turkey and smuggled into Iran, according to Heinonen. He said this remains a key monitoring gap for nuclear inspectors. “You can do a lot outside the country and bypass export controls,” he said.

At the same time, Gillard and other nonproliferation experts say a decade of U.N. sanctions aimed at curtailing Iran has opened the door to the seizure of materials in foreign ports. “These measures have been an important restricting factor in capping the Iranian efforts,” Gillard said. “They have prevented the Iranians’ advanced centrifuge capability from really blossoming.”

Part of the challenge ahead will involve accommodating special interest groups in Iran, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, which has amassed enormous wealth through illicit smuggling and would be threatened by a properly implemented nuclear deal. Gillard said he believes the Revolutionary Guard would be “pretty savvy and flexible” in turning some of its business legit: “They will find ways to make money out of the new process.”

Politically, he said, agreeing on the procurement channel in the negotiations “should be a no-brainer.”
“The West wants to see an end to Iran’s procuring illicitly, and the Iranians want to obtain things from abroad,” Gillard said. “It’s in the interest of both sides to minimize violations.”
Yet he acknowledged that there will be immense difficulties in monitoring imports and noted “lots of avenues through which illicit procurement can occur.”

The even bigger challenge is in exposing nuclear technology that could be diverted to covert facilities that are not monitored by the IAEA. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei recently and publicly vowed to block inspectors from Iran’s most sensitive military sites, a condition that the United States and its European allies consider unacceptable.

Any violations uncovered at such sites must be punished, Heinonen said, either through sanctions or restrictions on certain imports. “If they are caught, there should be consequences,” he said.

Libya: The Fourth Nuclear Horn (Daniel 8:8)

Algeria concerned Al Qaida or ISIL could be smuggling uranium

Libyan yellow cake still available

Special to WorldTribune.com

CAIRO — Algeria plans to establish a network to monitor the flow of nuclear material along its borders.

Officials said the government has approved a plan to install equipment to inspect incoming goods for radiation. They said the equipment would be installed at border posts amid concern that Al Qaida or Islamic State of Iraq and Levant could be smuggling nuclear or radioactive material through Algeria to such states as Mali and Libya.

“They will be deployed at port and airport platforms for the monitoring of all product and equipment, which may introduce polluted materials and possibly may represent a radioactive source,” Algerian customs chief Mohammed Abdul Bouderbala said.

In a briefing on Dec. 22, Bouderbala said border posts would include customs units that specialize in detecting nuclear or radioactive material. He said the units would consist of officers trained in cooperation with Algeria’s Atomic Energy Commission.

“The project will result in the purchase of new screening equipment, which will be added to those set up at port and airport checkpoints, requiring qualified personnel for the use of these equipments,” Bouderbala said.

Officials said Al Qaida and ISIL were believed to be seeking to acquire nuclear equipment, including uranium. They said Algeria might serve as a waystation for smuggling efforts from Mali to Libya.
The project to track nuclear material has included the Algerian Army and police. Officials said the new customs units would significantly enhance border security.

“They will be bolstered particularly along the borders of Mali and Libya to deal with threats,” Bouderbala said.

Uranium Smuggled From The Russian Horn

MOLDOVA: 7 ARRESTED SUSPECTED OF URANIUM SMUGGLING

Russian uranium smuggled through Moldova

from AP 10 Dec 2014

CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) — Seven people have been detained in Moldova on suspicion they smuggled uranium and mercury in a metal container from Russia to be used in a dirty bomb, police said Tuesday.

House searches were carried out last week in the capital and two other towns and police confiscated 200 grams (7 ounces) of uranium-238 mixed with uranium-235, a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of mercury and an unidentified radioactive solid material. The material, smuggled by train, has a black-market value of 1.6 million euros ($2 million), police chief Ion Bodrug said.

Aided by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, authorities began investigating in January and a police officer was infiltrated into the group.

Those arrested are aged 32 to 75, belong to a criminal gang and have specialized knowledge in radioactive substances, authorities said. They have admitted their guilt, Bodrug said Tuesday.
Prosecutor Vladimir Mosneaga said the uranium had been transported on the train in a metal container specially adapted to diminish the effect of radiation.

“They had experience in the past with radioactive material and had certain links with other people,” Mosneaga said, without providing more details. Authorities gave no indication of the material’s eventual destination.

Police are cooperating with Ukrainian and Russian police to identify other gang members.

Five people were detained in June 2011 in Chisinau suspected of smuggling radioactive substances as they were attempting to sell a kilogram of uranium for 32 million euros. The buyers were believed to be in North Africa. The suspects were convicted and handed prison sentences of three to five years.

Uranium-238 can be enriched into the fissile material of nuclear warheads or converted into plutonium, also used to arm nuclear missiles.

Secretary of State Kerry, Aren’t We Just A Little Too Late?

US and Iraq Sign a Joint Action Plan to Combat Nuclear and Radioactive Smuggling
US Department of State (Press Release)

ISIS Steals Uranium From Iraq

On September 2, the Governments of the United States and Iraq strengthened their bilateral partnership to prevent nuclear terrorism by concluding an agreement to advance protection against nuclear and radiological smuggling. This “Joint Action Plan Between the Government of the Republic of Iraq and the Government of the United States of America on Combating Nuclear and Radioactive Materials Smuggling”, negotiated by the Department of State’s Bureau for International Security and Nonproliferation (ISN) and signed by Michael Koplovsky, Minister Counselor of Economic Affairs at U.S. Embassy Baghdad, and Dr. Mohammed Al-Janabi, Chairman of the Iraqi Radioactive Sources Regulatory Authority, expresses the intention of the two governments to work together to enhance Iraq’s capabilities to prevent, detect, and respond to nuclear smuggling incidents.

Following the signing of the Joint Action Plan at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the U.S. Government, via the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), presented the Iraqi Radioactive Sources Regulatory Authority (IRSRA) with radiation detection and identification equipment. Specifically, GTRI provided equipment and relevant training to IRSRA to locate, identify, characterize, and recover orphaned or disused radioactive sources in Iraq thereby reducing the risk of terrorists acquiring these dangerous materials.

The signing and donation of radiation detection equipment reflect the common conviction of the U.S. and Iraqi Governments that nuclear smuggling and nuclear and radiological terrorism are critical and ongoing global threats that require a coordinated, global response. Iraq’s central location and the challenging security environment it faces reinforce the urgency with which these problems must be addressed.

Iraq plays a central role in combatting proliferation of nuclear/radiological material, and this Joint Action Plan and border-security collaboration strengthens an already excellent partnership that will make the United States, Iraq, and the region more secure.

For more information about the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, please visit our website: http://www.state.gov/t/isn/.