Formula for Terror

By Bruce W. Nelan

On a sunny afternoon in central Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic, two private security guards and a trading-company executive strolled along a quiet street. They were expecting to meet a middle-aged man from St. Petersburg. In exchange for $1 million, they would hand over an 8-in. by 8-in. metal container holding highly radioactive material. But as the traders and their client were about to make their open-air swap in mid-August, 15 police officers rushed out to grab them. The police seized the 130-lb. case emitting gamma radiation. Until a specialized laboratory can examine the material, the , police cannot be sure what it is or where it was stolen from, but they believe it is dangerous -- and illicit. This is the second major case of nuclear theft that Vladimir Kolesnik, the deputy chief of St. Petersburg's organized-crime department, has thwarted since last May. "The problem," he says, "is that security standards have slackened, and virtually everybody who has access to nuclear materials could steal something."

The first symptoms of the nuclear plague are spreading into Europe. After years of scares and false alarms -- almost all the supposed bomb-grade goods on offer turned out to be fraudulent -- German police have in the past four months uncovered four cases of smuggled nuclear material that could actually be used to make an atom bomb. The biggest haul came on Aug. 10, when Lufthansa Flight 3369 from Moscow landed in Munich with 350 grams of atomic fuel aboard. As it happened, so was Viktor Sidorenko, Russia's Deputy Minister for Atomic Energy, whose agency supervises Moscow's stocks of fissionable materials. The lead-lined suitcase was carrying MOX -- mixed-oxide fuel for reactors but perfectly usable in a bomb since it contained plutonium enriched to 87%. A Colombian and two Spaniards were arrested. While the Germans made it clear that they did not suspect Sidorenko of any involvement in the case, they had no doubts that it was the deputy minister's country from which the dangerous stuff had come. It was, said Bavarian Interior Minister Gunther Beckman, "the biggest-ever plutonium find in Germany, and probably the world."

Two days later, at a railway station in Bremen, a 34-year-old German man was arrested trying to peddle a sample of plutonium to a journalist acting for the police. The seller had only a very tiny amount, .05 gram, but of such startling purity that experts said it probably came from a top-of-the-line Russian nuclear laboratory. Senior officials in Moscow reacted defensively, insisting that all their plutonium was accounted for and safely under guard. The accusation from Germany, blustered Deputy Atomic Energy Minister Yevgeni Mikenin, "is a provocation of the purest water."

The world's first notice that weapons-grade plutonium was on the open market came in southern Germany last May, when 6 grams were found in a garage owned by a German businessman who had been arrested for counterfeiting. That was followed in June by recovery of less than a gram of highly enriched uranium -- probably fuel from a nuclear-powered submarine -- in Landshut. Even if all + this smuggled booty were put together, there would not be enough for the smallest and crudest atom bomb, which in the hands of inexperienced makers would take about 8 kg of plutonium.

Even so, the emergence of a black market for the essential material of mass destruction is a historic and nightmarish challenge for the world. It makes the threat of nuclear proliferation far more urgent and increases the number of characters who could do it themselves. "We've crossed a threshold. You smuggle small amounts of the stuff often enough, and you've got a bomb," says Leonard Spector, director of the nonproliferation project at Washington's Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The arrival of these nuclear samples on the German market is a red alert, raising immediate questions about what is happening in other countries and who the potential users might be. If such snippets are on sale in Germany, what larger deals might be going undetected elsewhere? If bomb-grade plutonium is finally on sale, will a rogue state or terrorist group step up to buy enough to build a bomb?

Such fears have a foundation: the world has seen terrorism continuously evolve to new heights of ingenuity and depravity. This week Carlos the Jackal is in jail in France, and North Korea is using the threat of nuclear weapons to try to extort billions from its neighbors. Their juxtaposition in the news, linking the worst of 1970s-style terrorism with the brazen threat of irresponsible nuclear ambitions, shouts a warning of a different sort of terror, still indefinable but extremely frightening. The combination of brutality and fanaticism with nuclear weapons could bring about disasters almost too chilling to contemplate.

The old wave of terror, personified by Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, is ebbing. "Carlos," says Paul Wilkinson, an expert on terrorism at St. Andrews University in Scotland, "symbolized a terrorism of the extreme left which has almost died out in Europe." Carlos and his Soviet, Marxist and leftist Palestinian allies represent failed ideologies. The inheritors today are nameless Islamic extremists from Hizballah, Hamas and their sponsors -- everyone thinks first of Iran as chief sponsor -- who see themselves as the force of the future in the Middle East. While their cause is the same -- derailing the peace process and destroying Israel -- the Islamists do not need a secular professional like Carlos.

Nuclear weapons in the hands of extremists willing to use them would produce terrorism of a wholly new magnitude. The central logic of terrorism is to maximize horror and shock, producing a blaze of publicity and attention for the cause it represents. By that measure, the crudest of fission bombs set off in a modern city, vaporizing entire blocks, would make the crimes of Carlos and his ilk rank as little more than pinpricks.

WHO ARE THE SELLERS? Beyond terrorism, if significant amounts of plutonium are beginning to flow from Russia, they could make the development of nuclear weapons much easier for states that up to now have found bomb programs too expensive and technically beyond their capabilities. Countries such as North Korea and Pakistan, which have some plutonium of their own, as well as countries such as Iran and Libya that would like to, might begin to look seriously at what is on offer in the new marketplace. "There is already far more bomb-quality nuclear material in Germany than the authorities can imagine," said Russian atomic expert Vladimir Chernosenko, who was one of the officials charged with cleaning up the Chernobyl nuclear accident. "If economic conditions in Russia do not improve soon, there will be an outflow organized from the highest echelons."

To help prevent that, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl sent intelligence coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer to Moscow on Saturday to talk with President Boris Yeltsin about ways to tighten controls over nuclear stocks. "We have to tell our Russian friends," said Kohl, "you must guarantee that these possibilities for theft are reduced as much as possible."

Some Russian officials continue to deny that their facilities are the source of the leaks into Germany. "Not a single gram of plutonium-239 is missing from storage," a spokesman for the Federal Counter-Intelligence Service insisted last week. "Our storage system is as reliable as a bank vault," claimed Alexander Rumyantsev, director of the Kurchatov Institute, a leading nuclear laboratory in Moscow.

Conditions in Russia more closely resemble a bazaar than a bank. Industry and most sectors of the economy are tottering; workers are mostly unpaid. Poor people are inventive, goes a Russian proverb, and the poorer they are the more inventive they become. Among the most aggrieved are the 100,000 workers employed in national nuclear plants and laboratories, whose salaries have slid to $100 a month -- or no pay at all for months at a time. So almost anything is for sale. Last year Russian police acknowledged thwarting 11 attempts to steal uranium from nuclear installations.

Other attempts may have succeeded, as nuclear workers grew increasingly desperate. At Krasnoyarsk-26, a factory producing weapons-grade plutonium, employees mounted a protest last month, demanding salaries that had not been paid since May. Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin then had to rush to Arzamas-16, where nuclear warheads are being disassembled, to head off a similar kind of unrest.

What makes the disarray so frightening is the staggering amount of dangerous radioactive material all over Russia. Experts there say the old Soviet weapons complex produced more than 140 metric tons of plutonium. The stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, which can also be used to make bombs, total about 1,000 metric tons.

Under strategic-disarmament treaties with the U.S., Russia is dismantling about 2,000 warheads a year, recovering shiny, fist-size spheres of plutonium called pits -- the elemental core of a bomb -- which it is putting into storage. A purchaser who acquired one of these would have the key ingredient of a bomb. Over the next 10 years, the U.S. and Russia will take 100 metric tons of plutonium out of warheads, and their nuclear-power industries will produce an additional 110 tons. By then there will be enough plutonium in storage worldwide to build 42,000 atom bombs.

Some Western estimates put Russia's current stock of plutonium at 200 tons. The military weapons, including all those pits, are still under tight security -- as far as anyone knows. But other forms of plutonium are scattered all over the country in research institutes, laboratories, reprocessing plants, shipyards and power stations, where security is believed to be lax and accounting is unreliable.

With big money presumably to be made in the plutonium trade, some thefts will be inside jobs. Deputy Interior Minister Mikhail Yegorov told Western officials at a conference in Germany that he believed the 6 grams of plutonium found in that country in May had been stolen by officials of the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry. In other cases, Russian gangsters will step in and bribe or coerce those with access to fissionable materials to steal them.

When FBI director Louis Freeh visited Moscow last month, he told cadets and faculty of the Russian Police College that "one criminal threat looms larger than the others: the theft or diversion of radioactive materials in Russia and Eastern Europe." Organized-crime groups, he warned, would try to obtain such materials "to be offered for sale to the highest bidder." The Russian daily Izvestia makes the same judgment. It reported recently that more than 5,500 criminal gangs were operating in Russia, and "the lion's share of their operations involve stealing fissionable nuclear materials and smuggling them out."

WHO ARE THE BUYERS? The rise of this illegal commerce suggests that there are serious bidders out there. But there is no evidence indicating who they are. Three of the four samples of weapons materials that turned up in Germany were purchased by undercover agents in sting operations designed to trap the sellers or their couriers. Indeed, in the Bremen episode, the defendant's lawyer claims that his client too is a police operative. There have been rumors in Germany, but no proof, that the 6 grams found in May were acquired for a foreign government, possibly Iraq or North Korea. In fact, there is no evidence yet that anyone in Germany was buying or prepared to buy nuclear material except the police.

When the first samples of low-grade nuclear material began to leak out of former Warsaw Pact countries in 1991, the German police sent special squads into the field to find them. Since 1991, German police have counted 440 cases of nuclear smuggling, and almost all have been stings. With so many agents posing as buyers, some skeptical officials wonder if they might be creating a demand. "There's no evidence of a real market for plutonium in Germany," says Bremen's chief prosecutor. He wonders whether "our interest in pursuing criminals is bringing danger into Germany."

Yet the spectacle of apparent amateurs in the plutonium business getting their hands on the real thing could bring serious conspirators onto the scene with big money. How big the money has to be is still unanswered because no deals outside police scams have come to light. Even so, the price of enough plutonium to make a bomb would have to be in the millions of dollars or tens of millions. It is doubtful that any terrorist group has that kind of financing. Even Hizballah, the extremist group most directly linked to a state sponsor, cannot expect to receive tens of millions for its own purchases from an Iran that is struggling to arm itself.

Nor is a radical state like Iran, Libya or Iraq likely to buy a bomb and hand it over to terrorists. "If you just spent $300 million on something," asks a State Department specialist, would you turn it over to a band of ( terrorists "or would you keep it for your own protection?" He also wonders if Iran could keep secret forever the transfer of a nuclear weapon to Islamic militants. Tehran would have to be certain it did not leave fingerprints on the deal, or the country could become the target of reprisals -- possibly nuclear. "God help the state that gave terrorists nuclear material," says the official. "The international community's response would be dramatic."

Yet the mere fact that plutonium is on the market could conceivably lend credibility to terrorist groups that might try to persuade people they have built a bomb. "The problem now," says Richard Guthrie of the Verification Technology Information Center, a nonprofit group in London, "is blackmail. If someone says he's built a bomb in a basement somewhere, how does a government react when that person produces a gram or so of weapons-grade material to prove the threat?"

While the ultimate terror would be a working bomb constructed by terrorists on their own, the much likelier catastrophe is a large purchase of plutonium by a country looking for a shortcut to a nuclear arsenal. "It's clear that the highest bidder is going to be a state," says Phebe Marr, an expert on Iraq at the National Defense University in Washington. A government with nuclear ambitions would want not just a single bomb but an arsenal or significant additions to an existing arsenal. One or two bombs could attract threats and retaliation from abroad. So an interested state would be in the market for tens or hundreds of kilograms of plutonium -- and that amount would be extremely expensive.

Experts in the Middle East suggest that only Iran -- in addition to Israel -- is believed to be actively pursuing nuclear weapons. In spite of its severe problems of debt and unemployment, the Iranian government has not reduced its spending on arms programs. "Iran wants to be the most powerful military presence in the gulf," says Mourad El-Desouky, a military expert at Al Ahram Strategic Studies Center in Cairo. "It wants nuclear weapons for deterrence and to intimidate its neighbors." He believes that the Iranians have the money to go shopping for plutonium and weapons-grade uranium from Russia's black market in Western Europe, and "it is realistic to think they are doing that."

WHO CAN CONTROL IT? Policymakers and scientists in the West hope to persuade the Russians to take steps that would head off the proliferation of weapons of | mass destruction. On this score, the U.S. has often talked a better game than it has played. In 1991 Congress authorized the Bush Administration to spend $400 million a year for three years to help the former Soviet republics keep nuclear materials and facilities secure. So far, in part because of congressional inaction, about $500 million of the first $900 million authorized has not been spent. Among the projects held up: a Pentagon- organized training course for border-control officials of the former Soviet Union.

The National Academy of Sciences looked at the plutonium piling up in the U.S. and Russia and this year recommended concrete steps to take it out of circulation. Since the outright destruction of plutonium is problematic and prohibitively expensive, the academy suggested mixing it with other nuclear wastes and molten glass, creating radioactive glass logs weighing an unusable two tons. These would be stored in deep holes. It also proposes combining plutonium with uranium to make reactor fuel, which after use will leave the plutonium locked into contaminated fuel rods.

The main problem with such ambitious ideas is that the Russians want no part of them. In general, there is enough suspicion left over from the cold war to make Russian nuclear officials determined to keep Americans from getting anywhere near their plutonium stocks. More specifically, the Russians view their plutonium as a national treasure, and they don't propose to do away with it.

Rather, they want to store their plutonium to use later as fuel in a new generation of breeder reactors, which they hope to have up and running in about 20 years. They intend to keep their tons of shiny plutonium warhead pits in storage until then -- even at a cost they estimate at around $2 per gram per year. The new reactors will be hugely expensive too, and the floundering Russian economy may not be able to afford them. Then the plutonium will be little more than an immense security problem, requiring protection against theft and diversion for about 25,000 years -- the half-life of plutonium. It would be better if the experts could get to work on a solution before the huge stockpile's still-small leaks turn into a flood that could engulf the world.

With reporting by Lara Marlowe/Beirut, Elaine Shannon/Washington, Bruce van Voorst/Bonn and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow