A pledge to track uranium fades

WASHINGTON -- Four years after the leaders of the world's eight largest economies vowed to raise $20 billion over 10 years to prevent terrorists from obtaining nuclear materials, only $3.5 billion has been donated -- and far less has been used to secure enriched uranium, the key ingredient of a nuclear weapon.

Hundreds of tons of uranium remain at loosely guarded facilities across Russia and the former Soviet Union, and in nearly 40 other countries, according to specialists. And the need to secure the material has grown: In April, Russian police arrested a foreman in a nuclear plant for attempting to sell 22 kilograms of uranium.

At the annual meeting of Group of Eight leaders in Russia last week, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin -- calling nuclear terrorism the ``greatest threat we face today" -- announced a new effort to train other countries to track, secure, and intercept nuclear materials that may be sought by terrorist groups.

In a joint statement on Saturday, both leaders vowed ``to expand and accelerate efforts that develop partnership capacity to combat nuclear terrorism on a determined and systematic basis."

But the communiqué made no mention of the 2002 initiative, while the issue of securing nuclear materials was near the bottom of the agenda at this year's summit, below energy cooperation and a slew of foreign-policy crises. The low priority demonstrates that the international effort to lock down vulnerable weapons materials has been strong on rhetoric but weak on action, according to the authors of two extensive new assessments.

``A dangerous gap remains between the urgency of the threat of nuclear terrorism and the scope and pace of the US and world response," according to a report titled ``Securing the Bomb," by Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier of Harvard University. ``That gap has been narrowed in recent years . . . but much more needs to be done."

A scorecard of the G-8 initiative prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies likewise shows a decidedly mixed record, according to coauthor Robert Einhorn, formerly assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation in the Clinton administration.

The report cites statistics from the G-8 Working Group as showing that only $3.5 billion has been collected from donor countries. Partly as a result, less than half of the estimated 1,300 tons of weapons-usable nuclear material in Russia has been secured, even though the material is concentrated at a few large sites.

At the same time, there remain 165 nuclear research reactors around the world containing varying quantities of enriched uranium, many of them with few security measures in place, the report said. Key biological weapons sites of the former Soviet Union remain off-limits to international inspectors. Approximately 39,000 tons of Russian chemical weapons -- a grim legacy of the Cold War -- need to be destroyed. No programs exist to inventory or destroy the intact small nuclear devices, known as tactical nukes, left over from the Soviet arsenal.

Many specialists fault the G-8 for dropping the ball.

``The facts are that preventing nuclear terrorism is being treated as an important but not an urgent matter," former US senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, cochairman of the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington, said in an interview. ``On a scale of one to 10 . . . the G-8 should be given a 10 for rhetoric, seven for pledges, and a two for progress on addressing the most urgent issues. Most of the pledges have not turned into programs or actions."

The G-8 members -- Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- vowed in 2002 to raise $20 billion over the next decade to prevent terrorists from developing or acquiring weapons of mass destruction or hiring unemployed weapons scientists.

In announcing the new initiative, the G-8 leaders pledged to ``work in partnership, bilaterally and multilaterally, to develop, coordinate, implement, and finance, according to their respective means, new or expanded cooperation projects."

As of mid-2005, the initiative had received pledges of $17.5 billion, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies report, which is based on data compiled by the G-8. The United States has pledged $10 billion, while other pledges range from as little as $225,000 from the Czech Republic to as much as $1.1 billion from Italy.

Still, only a small portion of the pledges -- $3.5 billion -- has actually been given, and half of that was provided by the United States. The donations, specialists said, fall far short of what's needed.

``There needs to be more effort put into this," said Igor A. Khripunov, associate director of the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia. ``It has fallen off the radar."

G-8 officials, in Russia for the summit, did not respond to requests for comment. The United States, for its part, maintains that it is making significant strides of its own, building on the efforts begun after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Despite complaints about its slow pace, the US program has been more successful than the G-8 effort at destroying Cold War-era weapons arsenals, including old nuclear submarines and chemical munitions.

The National Nuclear Security Agency, which is part of the Department of Energy, last week completed a two-year program to move highly enriched uranium from the Krylov Shipbuilding Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, to the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dmitrovgrad, where it will be ``downblended" to a less dangerous form and used to fuel Russian nuclear power plants.

Nevertheless, the Russian government has proven increasingly difficult to deal with, according to US government officials and specialists.

``There is a lot of misinformation out there about what is being done and how quickly it is being done," said Julianne Smith, a spokeswoman for the nuclear security agency. ``This stuff is very complicated. There is difficulty dealing with the Russians. It is not as easy as saying `go do this.' They are a sovereign nation."

A major worry is the availability of highly enriched uranium, which most scientists believe could be easily used to design a crude nuclear bomb that could kill hundreds of thousands.

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies scorecard, Russia has declared about 500 tons of excess, highly enriched uranium, but only 30 tons per year are being turned into the safer, low-enriched form through the G-8 initiative. At that pace, the materials will not be secured until 2013, the report said.

``Plans are needed to accelerate current blend-down efforts and substantially increase the . . . stockpiles targeted for downblending," the report says.

And the challenge goes far beyond Russia, according to the Harvard report.

``In the rest of the world, there is even less good news," it states. ``At many sites around the world, weapons-usable material remains dangerously vulnerable to either outsider or insider theft, even though many countries have strengthened their nuclear security rules since 9/11."

It added: ``Civilian facilities such as research reactors often have little more security than a night watchman and a chain-link fence. Pakistan's stockpiles remain an urgent concern; while heavily guarded, they face immense threats, from armed remnants of Al Qaeda to nuclear insiders with a proven willingness to sell nuclear weapons technology."

One of the coauthors of the CSIS report, Michelle A. Flournoy, believes the G-8 effort needs to realign the various ongoing projects with the original rationale of the initiative: reducing the risk of nuclear terrorism.

``We could have gotten much further down this road than we have," she said.

Nunn, whose organization funded the two studies, said he remains puzzled at the apparent low priority in the United States and elsewhere given repeated statements that nuclear terrorism poses the gravest security threat.

Nunn, a Democrat who coauthored the original US program to secure nuclear materials, said one explanation may be that the United States has focused on punishing countries with nuclear programs such as Iran and North Korea -- and not on preventing deadly materials from being sold or purloined.

``All the energy gets put into states and not the bread and butter of securing the actual materials," Nunn said. ``Acquiring weapons and material is the hardest step for terrorists to take but the easiest step for us to stop."

Nunn said in a statement yesterday that Bush and Putin keep saying the right things, but ``as we have seen in the past, there can be a big gap between words and deeds, a big gap between pledges and programs, and a big gap between goals and accomplishments.

``Presidents Bush and Putin have charted the course. Now every day, every week, every month for the rest of their terms in office, they must assign clear responsibility and demand accountability from their respective governments."

Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.