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report released this week by the Nuclear Threat Initiative calls on governments to address lax protection of military nuclear materials globally by bolstering physical security at nuclear facilities, sharing information on inventories and security procedures with international partners, and offering public commitments at next year’s Nuclear Security Summit on securing military materials. The report, prepared by representatives from the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, and Pakistan, notes that over 1,800 metric tons of weapon-usable nuclear material is stored across 24 countries, some at inadequately secured facilities. Moreover, international accountability mechanisms apply to only 17 percent of all weapon-usable nuclear materials – those used for civilian applications – while the 83 percent that consists of military materials fall outside of global security standards and agreements.
To address this security gap, the report recommends establishing training and procedures that develop security culture at facilities, regularly conducting facility vulnerability assessments and surveillance, bolstering cybersecurity measures, training nuclear facility protective forces, developing systems that track the transportation of nuclear materials, and minimizing the quantity of weapon-usable nuclear materials at facilities. The report also promotes unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral confidence-building measures. It encourages countries to unilaterally publish reports that account for the military material in national inventories, offer nonsensitive results of security incident investigations, and share information on physical protection procedures and nuclear security personnel training programs. NTI further urged countries to participate in international nuclear security peer reviews to exchange best practices and lessons learned, and to conduct joint military materials security training exercises. The report calls for the incorporation of military nuclear materials concerns into the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit. Participating countries could do this by offering consensus statements “reaffirming the responsibility of each state to develop and maintain appropriate effective accounting and physical protection of all nuclear materials,” it says.
