BASIC REPORTS

NEWSLETTER ON INTERNATIONAL SECURITY POLICY

OCTOBER 2004 NUMBER 86

• NATO's Troubling Secrecy, by Alasdair Roberts
• Trident Missile Damaged at Submarine Base, by Glen Milner
• The OSCE takes on the MANPADS Threat, by Jurjen van der Vlugt
• Transatlantic Plutonium Shipments and their Wider Impliactions, by Dave Andrews
  

NATO'S TROUBLING SECRECY

Alasdair Roberts

There is good news for non-governmental groups who want to track the evolution of NATO policy on security cooperation: it has adopted a set of guidelines on transparency. The guidelines are contained in an unclassified paper titled 'Public Disclosure of NATO Documents', which has been circulated to all NATO governments.

There is also bad news. If you ask your government for a copy of these guidelines, you will be refused. If you live in the United Kingdom, and wait until the new Freedom of Information Act comes into force in January 2005, you will still be refused. NATO's rule is that no document sent through its channels can ever be released to citizens, legislators or journalists without its consent, even if the document is unclassified. And NATO will not give its consent, because in its view there is no "official purpose" that would justify the release of such information to such people.

This is symptomatic of a much larger and more serious problem. On similar grounds, NATO has refused to allow member states to disclose another unclassified document, "Security Within The North Atlantic Treaty Organization", which for a half-century has given direction to governments on the steps they must take to protect information shared within the alliance.

This policy dictates how governments will respond to requests for information under national laws, such as the UK or US Freedom of Information Acts. It also sets the standards that govern whether individuals receive the security clearance needed to work in key parts of the public service. These are important subjects, which touch directly on the civil liberties of individuals in every NATO member state.

Under NATO rules, documents may be classified if its disclosure would be "undesirable to the interest of NATO." The fact that these two documents are unclassified tells us something about the actual sensitivity of their contents. The fact that these documents are nonetheless inaccessible tells us something about the draconian quality of NATO's approach to the question of transparency.

Around 1998, NATO began a major overhaul of its policy on the handling of shared information. The public knows nothing about this review, because NATO said nothing about it. Between 2001 and 2003, I made several requests under Canada's Access to Information Act for documents that might show what issues were of concern to Canadian government officials during this review. Thousands of pages of material were withheld, on the argument that disclosure of Canadian government documents might incidentally reveal the content of NATO documents, which are absolutely protected against disclosure.

At the time, the Canadian government was undertaking a public review of its twenty-year-old Access to Information Act. The officials running that review said nothing about the contemporaneous review of the NATO policy, even though the two subjects were linked. Furthermore, the government refused to indicate what positions it had taken in the NATO review, or to reveal the details of the policy to which it eventually agreed. The government has completely escaped domestic accountability for its decisions.

This is not a peculiarly Canadian predicament. We can assume that British government officials participated in the same NATO review, making commitments on the handling of shared information that were completely at odds with the aims of the Freedom of Information Bill that was then being debated in Parliament. Secrecy enabled British officials to hide the contradiction, and escape public accountability for their decisions as well.

The impact of NATO policy has recently been felt throughout Central and Eastern Europe, as countries attempted to meet NATO requirements for accession to the alliance. Nations that had recently celebrated the opening-up of government after the collapse of the Soviet Union were, by the end of the decade, going in the other direction, so far as information policy was concerned: all of the accession countries adopted new state secrets laws designed to allay NATO concern about the protection of shared information.

In many countries, the adoption of these laws was highly controversial. Non-governmental organizations and legislators launched constitutional challenges against new secrecy rules in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania. It was clear that governments were being driven by NATO's expectations; citizens asked, quite reasonably, what those expectations were. Some wondered whether their governments were exaggerating NATO requirements in order to roll back new freedom of information laws. It was impossible to address these questions when the relevant NATO documents were themselves inaccessible. Courts proved reluctant to question secrecy rules which, it seemed, were uncontroversial in the older NATO states.

Citizens in western Europe have recently had their own encounter with the impact of NATO rules. In Summer 2000 Javier Solana, the Secretary General of the Council of the European Union, announced a revision of policies on the handling of Council documents which allowed easier classification of documents and broadened the circumstances in which documents could be withheld under the Council's code on access to information.

The decisions outraged advocates for greater openness in the EU; the International Federation of Journalists complained that Solana had executed a "summertime coup" against transparency. It was not known until later that Solana (himself a former secretary-general of NATO) had at the same time finalized an agreement on information-sharing with NATO. The restrictions on EU policy had been introduced to conform to NATO requirements.

NATO rules have been exerting similar constraints on the national policy of its member states for years. In late 1955, for example, the British government announced its intention to adopt tighter standards for the granting of security clearances, giving more weight to evidence of "sexual perversion" - that is, homosexuality - and affiliations with suspect political organizations. British officials publicly characterized the new rules as distasteful but necessary.

This may have seemed purely a matter of domestic policy, but the British government was actually bound by clearance rules that had been adopted in the first version of "Security Within The North Atlantic Treaty Organization" earlier that year. The NATO clearance rules in force at that time were not publicly disclosed by NATO until 2002. A half-century after the fact, we can see that the NATO rules essentially replicated clearance standards drafted by the Eisenhower government in 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era.

It might be thought that the NATO rules on security clearances have changed over the years. They probably have; but it is difficult to say. We have no right to see the document that contains the current clearance standards.

We have also learned recently that NATO rules have a broader reach than we might have expected. In 2001, the British government released a secret agreement on information-sharing with the United States which it had negotiated four decades earlier. Under the agreement - which is still in force - the two governments promised to follow NATO standards in the handling of all sensitive information shared between them. A 1962 Canada-US agreement - also kept secret for forty years - includes a similar commitment.

Citizens in NATO member states are now bound by secrecy rules that were drafted in a very different era - when the public had different expectations about participation in matters of defence and foreign policy, when none of its member states had yet adopted a national right-to-information law, and when the threat posed to the western alliance was more profound and immediate. All of these circumstance have changed - but the regime that governs the handling of shared information remains unchanged in important respects.

This is an increasingly untenable position. In his recent book 'From Empire to Community', Amitai Etzioni argues that security cooperation is likely to intensify even further; indeed, he suggests that we can already see the emergence of a "new global architecture" in which intergovernmental cooperation is deepened and institutionalized. If he is right - and there is much evidence to support his case - we need to attend carefully to the rules that govern access to information about the conduct of governments within that architecture.

The current trend is to entrench and extend NATO-style restrictions on transparency. This will have the effect of disenfranchising legislators and citizens, denying their right to participate in the formulation of policies that have a profound effect on their liberties and security.

* Alasdair Roberts is Director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, a research center of the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, in the United States. A Canadian, Professor Roberts is a widely-published specialist on transparency issues. His website is http://www.aroberts.us. His next book is Blackouts: How Secrecy Persists In The Information Age.

TRIDENT MISSILE DAMAGED AT SUBMARINE BASE

Glen Milner

There is no weapon system in the US arsenal with the operational risks of a Trident submarine. The amount of explosive material, in the form of solid rocket propellant, alongside the radiological material within the nuclear warheads, tightly packed in a confined vessel, should ensure that safety measures are paramount. On November 7, 2003, a missile handling crew at Bangor, Washington damaged a Trident I (C-4) missile on the USS Georgia (SSBN-729) in a missile handling operation at the Explosives Handling Wharf on Hood Canal.

All missile-handling operations at the Strategic Weapons Facility, Pacific (SWFPAC) were stopped for nine weeks until Bangor could be recertified for handling nuclear weapons. The top three officers at SWFPAC were dismissed.

The incident occurred during the routine offloading of two of the twenty-four missiles on a Trident submarine for inspection after each patrol. During the operation, a ladder is placed inside the missile launch tube, allowing a technician to attach a lift fitting to the missile. The missile is then hoisted into a loading tube on top of the submarine.

On November 7, the handling crew took a break after making the missile ready to lift, leaving the access ladder in place. The sailors returned and began the hoist. A nine-inch hole was made in the nose cone as the missile was lifted. The ladder came within inches of a nuclear warhead.

Each Trident C-4 missile is 74 inches in diameter, 34 feet long, and weighs 73,000 pounds. Each missile can carry up to eight W76, 100-kiloton nuclear warheads.

Each US Trident submarine carries 24 missiles. The rocket propellant in one submarine loaded with C-4 missiles has the Net Explosive Weight equal to 1,788,000 pounds of TNT.

Numerous studies conducted in the 1990's by Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Navy show the primary concern in a Trident missile handling operation is the accidental detonation of the rocket propellant in the missile. If this were to happen, dispersed plutonium from the nuclear warheads could spread to surrounding areas.

The US Navy did not inform local government agencies about the accident at Bangor. The story was first made public on March 7, 2004 by retired Navy officer Walter Fitzpatrick on his website, www.jaghunters.blogspot.com, dedicated to the reform of the military justice system. Several days later, front page articles appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Times, and the Bremerton Sun.

The U.S. Navy refused to discuss the missile accident at Bangor. Pamela Sims, spokeswoman for the Navy Strategic Systems Programs in Washington, D.C., stated, "We can't discuss the presence or absence of nuclear weapons aboard our installations. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to discuss any nuclear weapons-related incidents at SWFPAC."

Kitsap County Sheriff Steve Boyer reported that his office was not notified of the incident. Phyllis Mann, who as director of the Kitsap County Emergency Management Division works with the Navy and monitors Navy incidents, said no county or state records show an accident was reported. "Based upon our relationships with the bases, we would expect to be notified if there was a public safety health threat," Mann said. She added that if the missile was damaged, but nothing was released, reporting of the incident was not required.

Two Washington congressmen met with Rear Admiral Charles Young, director of the Navy's Strategic Systems Programs on March 18. Following a closed-door briefing, Congressman Jay Inslee stated the Navy "needs to find a better way" to notify Congress and the public about accidents such as the November 7, 2003 incident at the SWFPAC. Congressman Inslee and Congressman Norm Dicks stated they were seeking a revision of the Navy's "neither confirm nor deny" directive to allow discussion of nuclear issues. Inslee later said he was "stunned at some repeated failures to follow procedures."

Canadian politicians sought the same information as their U.S. counterparts. On March 12, Libby Davies, a member of Canada's national parliament from Vancouver stated, "If something happens in Bangor, we're the ones upwind. Nuclear fallout knows no border." Davies said, "The whole issue of transparency in government is fundamental to our democratic system."

Following the November 2003 incident, the Navy immediately shut down missile handling operations at SWFPAC. After corrective measures were implemented, SWFPAC then failed a weeklong nuclear weapons acceptance inspection (NWAI) on December 16. Captain Lawrence Lehman, who led the 40-man inspection team, was ordered to relieve Captain Keith Lyles on December 19.

SWFPAC is the West Coast base for approximately 1,600 Trident W76 and W88 nuclear warheads. On January 9, 2004, it passed a second inspection, ending the nine-week shutdown. The Navy stated the halt in missile handling operations had not hindered the mission of the Navy's Trident Pacific Fleet.

The Navy has never publicly acknowledged this missile accident. Two heavily redacted pages concerning the dismissal of Captain Lyles at Bangor were released with a response to a January 6, 2004 Freedom of Information Act request. An e-mail message dated December 18, 2003 from Rear Admiral Charles Young stated, "Öthe overriding reason for the continued decertification status was the inability of the leadership/supervision team to direct the correct actions when these deficiencies occurred on the floor."

At the time of the accident on the Explosives Handling Wharf at Bangor, the Navy was facing litigation, Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, et al. v. U.S. Department of the Navy, over the possibility of a similar type of accident in which substantial environmental damage might occur. A coalition of five environmental and peace organizations filed the lawsuit in federal District Court in June 2001, citing the U.S. Navy for its failure to disclose and review the environmental impacts associated with transporting and handling the Trident II (D-5) missile at Bangor. The lawsuit, against the Navy's upgrade to the larger D-5 missile at Bangor, is currently before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Recent responses to several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show other problems at Bangor and with the Navy's handling of ballistic missiles.

A FOIA request filed in January 2001, requesting documents describing accident assessments for the Trident missile system, was filed in federal court in 2003. As a result of the lawsuit, Milner v. U.S. Department of the Navy, the Navy was forced to release a document titled, "Trident II (D-5) Missile Accident or Incident Special Safety Review (June '86)."

The Navy's 1986 missile safety study disclosed a total of 53 "incidents" prior to 1986. Sixteen of the identified "incidents" were classified by the Navy as "potentially serious events; incidents which had the potential to cause nuclear material dispersal." Additional information received through the Freedom of Information Act show the Navy's safety studies of the Trident missile system may be flawed.

Safety studies of the Trident missile system have been conducted through a process of fault tree analysis, in which every hazardous event in deployment operations is identified and analyzed. Based upon analysis by Lockheed Martin and the Navy, the probability of an accident leading to the dispersal of plutonium is less than the acceptable number of "one in a million." The analysis, however, is dependent upon correctly identifying every causative event that could lead to a catastrophic failure.

While issues such as tornadoes and crane failure were considered in the safety reviews, no mention was made of missile technicians leaving for coffee break and forgetting the ladder in the missile launch tube. A number of other causative events, such as falling objects and electrical fires, were not studied because the chances of such an event at the Explosives Handling Wharf at Bangor were considered too remote.

Another FOIA request from 2001, concerning actual accidents or mishaps involving Trident missiles, brought the release of several documents from the Bangor Submarine Base safety office. In May 2001, a trailer containing a Trident C- 4 rocket motor became disconnected from its truck. Another document showed a cover pulled off the side of a Trident first stage rocket motor at Bangor in November 2001 in a scenario that the Navy had thought was not possible. The report concluded, "...we need to understand how the contact could have happened...

In recent months, little has been reported from the U.S. Navy and other U.S. government agencies on the missile accident at Bangor in November 2003. A new FOIA lawsuit is expected to be filed for more information in September, which may further show the risks involved with Trident missile handling operations.

* Glen Milner lives in Seattle, Washington and is a member of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington. Please see http://www.gzcenter.org.

THE OSCE TAKES ON THE MANPADS THREAT

Jurjen van der Vlugt

With their attractiveness to would-be terrorists, man-portable air defense systems, or MANPADS, is one of the remaining weapons issues that is still garnering the attention of officials for more concerted action in multilateral arms control forums. The spread of these surface-to-air shoulder-fired missiles has become one of the focal points in the fight against terrorism because these weapons constitute a serious threat to military as well as civilian aviation.

Insurgents in Iraq have reportedly used MANPADS against US helicopters and an Israeli civilian aircraft was targeted in Mombasa, Kenya, in November 2002. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is addressing the MANPADS threat by advocating more multilateral controls, assisting in destruction of excess stockpiles, and working towards greater airport security.

The Wassenaar Arrangement on export controls for Conventional Arms and dualuse Goods and Technologies is considered one of the key multilateral forums for addressing the MANPADS problem and many officials see it as a basis upon which the OSCE can work to promote those export controls. At Wassenaar's meeting in December 2003, its 33 members adopted an updated version of 'Elements for Export Controls on MANPADS' (a more limited version was in existence since 2000). The revised 'Elements' contains detailed commitments by member states to take national measures regarding transfers, stockpile management, technological developments and information exchange.

At their June 2004 summit at Sea Island, Georgia, the G-8 countries advocated that the Wassenaar Elements be adopted more widely to become an international standard. Indeed, the OSCE's Forum for Security Cooperation (FSC) adopted the Wassenaar Elements a few weeks before the Sea Island Summit.

This decision by the FSC, which according to Dutch OSCE-delegation member Robert in den Bosch will be submitted to OSCE Ministers later this year, is primarily a political one, as it does not have the legal force of an international treaty. However, his colleague in the Netherlands Foreign Ministry, Onny Jalink,†told BASIC†that the 19 EU member states that are also participants in the Wassenaar Arrangement are legally bound by Wassenaar's export control†provisions because the EU has adopted regulations covering the export and transfers of dual use goods and technology. These regulations take into account commitments under the Wassenaar Arrangement and†are directly applicable within EU member states.

But the MANPADS decision may be expected to affect the other 36 OSCE countries as well. In the political-military field the OSCE has an established record in conventional arms control, most notably as the facilitator for the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe and the Vienna Document. As far as implementation and monitoring is concerned, the OSCE has established a practice where political accountability is not a free ride.

Best known for its impact on human rights, the OSCE has been said to restrict the national sovereignty of its participating states. Annual follow-up meetings and implementation meetings have tried to take governments to task. In the political-military field, this task is now performed by the AIAM, the Annual Implementation and Assessment Meeting, and by the ACRS, the Annual Security Review Conference.

Over the last few years, the OSCE has focused on Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW), resulting in the adoption of a wide-ranging document in 2000. The SALW Document contains seven information exchanges: national marking systems; manufacture control procedures; export policy; procedures and documentation; control over brokering; destruction techniques and procedures.

The first of these information exchanges was conducted in June 2001. In February 2002, the FSC convened a Workshop on Small Arms and Light Weapons that reviewed implementation of the OSCE Document on SALW. The workshop provided a set of recommendations for the way forward. It is planned to conduct such workshops on SALW on a regular basis. Last year the OSCE decided to include MANPADS in its annual information exchange on SALW.

In November 2003, the FSC adopted a Document on stockpiles of conventional ammunition. Apart from setting norms for stockpile management and defining surplus indicators of conventional ammunition, the document also sets out a practical mechanism for assistance in destruction of surplus ammunition.

According to Diana Marvin of the US State Department, things have really started to move: "First Belarus, and later Ukraine, Russia and Tajikistan have submitted proposals for the destruction of weapons and ammunition as OSCE projects".

Based on the information submitted under the SALW Document, these proposals are discussed with countries that are willing to sponsor these destruction projects, and assessment teams visit the countries concerned. In the case of Belarus for instance, destruction of considerable numbers of MANPADS is now foreseen under the project. Initially, the focus was on ammunition. Thus, the recent decision on MANPADS export controls is not an isolated event. It is supported by stockpile management and control and by destruction efforts.

A third track of OSCE activity with regard to MANPADS is airport security. The 2004 Small Arms Survey estimates that there may be about 100,000 complete MANPAD systems in the world's inventory. While it is unknown how many MANPADS may be in the hands of terrorist organisations, if one civilian airliner were to be shot down in a terrorist attack, it could cause unprecedented damage to the airline industry and could kill hundreds of people at once, all while permitting the attacker(s) to escape unseen and remain anonymous. The OSCE's Action against Terrorism Unit (ATU) has taken the initiative to organise a workshop with counter terrorism specialists and airport security specialists, as well as MANPADS and civilian aviation specialists.

The workshop was the first ever of this kind. According to Brian Woo, the head of the ATU, the meeting has resulted in practical recommendations to increase airport security. "The concrete results of our January workshop included several OSCE participating States undertaking immediate actions to develop contingency plans to protect their airports and civil aviation against a MANPADS threat should such a threat arise in the future. There can be no 100 percent protection against such an attack, but what experts provided to national civil aviation officials at the January workshop was practical guidance as to how an airport assessment should be done and what countermeasures could be undertaken. Since much of this guidance is law enforcement sensitive, I am not able to share them publicly. However, we have distributed to government officials of all 55 OSCE participating States a law enforcement sensitive CD that contains this information. "

The OSCE's multi-track approach to curb the threat posed by MANPADS illustrates that in today's world, multilateral arms control is still possible. With nonstate actors in play, agreements between governments should be flanked by measures that actually limit the accessibility of weapons systems as well as opportunities to use them; hence the OSCE's efforts to introduce technological assistance and coordination of protective measures. And while this system is not foolproof, it may be a promising step forward.

* Jurjen van der Vlugt is an independent researcher and writer from The Netherlands. He now lives in Washington, DC.

TRANSATLANTIC PLUTONIUM SHIPMENTS AND THEIR WIDER IMPLICATIONS

Dave Andrews

Two UK registered ships mainly owned by BNFL, the 'Pacific Pintail' and the 'Pacific Teal', left the Charleston Naval Weapons Station in South Carolina on 20 September carrying one of the most contentious nuclear cargoes of recent times. On board one of the armed ships was between 140-153kg of weapons-grade plutonium from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The other ship was to act as escort.

The plutonium was en-route to Cherbourg for fabrication into mixed uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel at the Cadarache and MELOX facilities in Southern France. The fabricated MOX fuel will be returned to the United States as four Lead Test Assemblies (LTAs) for use in the Catawba Nuclear Power Reactor as part of the US programme for the disposition of surplus weapons- grade plutonium.

The origins of the shipment lie in the ending of the Cold War and the thawing of relations between the United States and Russia during the 1990s. Subsequent reduction and dismantling of nuclear weapon arsenals has resulted in a need to manage and dispose of a large excess (around 50 tonnes each) of surplus military plutonium in order to reduce the risks of its theft or diversion whilst at the same time signalling the permanency of the weapons reduction.

In 1994 the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on International Security and Arms Control recognised that the existence of this surplus plutonium constituted a "clear and present danger to national and international security." It advocated the adoption of the 'Spent Fuel Standard' for excess military plutonium in order to make it "roughly as inaccessible for weapons use". Steps beyond the spent fuel standard were also necessary, however, for long term disposal as the 'protective' radioactivity of spent fuel decays over time and thus the difficulty of extracting the plutonium declines substantially over the decades.

In later years the US Department of Energy (USDOE) modified the spent fuel standard to that of making the excess plutonium as "inaccessible and unattractive for weapons use" as the growing stockpiles of reactor-grade plutonium in civil spent fuel. This recognised that whilst weapons-grade plutonium was preferable for military purposes, states such as the US and Russia could produce weapons from reactor-grade plutonium.

After examining a broad range of over 30 different plutonium disposition technologies, the US officially adopted a hybrid approach in January 1997. This involved the manufacture and use of MOX fuel in existing civil reactors and the immobilisation of plutonium in glass or ceramic forms along with high-level nuclear waste.

In July 1998 the United States and Russia signed a joint agreement, initially for five years and renewable in five year increments, aimed at providing a cooperative, scientific and technical basis for decisions about plutonium disposition. In September of the same year both countries announced the intention to mutually and reciprocally disposition up to 50 metric tonnes of military plutonium each and begin negotiations on an intergovernmental agreement of mutual commitment.

The latter was signed in September 2000. Each country committed to dispose of 34 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium with a start date for the operation of facilities of 2007. Russia was to dispose of all of its surplus plutonium via the MOX route whilst the United States would continue its dual track approach, disposing of 25.6 tonnes as MOX and 8.4 tonnes by immobilisation. Both countries' programmes would require extensive preparation, construction of new and industrial scale facilities and a possible time frame of 20 years or more to complete. The Agreement further specified that US plutonium would not be dispositioned in whole or in part unless and until accompanied by a similar disposition of Russian plutonium. It also allowed for the use of Russian MOX made with weaponsgrade plutonium in reactors outside the country.

However, in January 2002, following a review of the disposition progamme and citing cost reductions as a key factor, the United States announced that it was dropping the plutonium immobilisation route. This despite the fact that the review had found that expanding the immobilisation option to cover all 34 tonnes of plutonium produced the option "with the lowest cost." The overriding factor behind this decision was the fundamentally different drivers behind the dispositon programmes in the United States and Russia.

For the United States the major motivation has always been nonproliferation and the risk of theft or diversion. Russia, on the other hand, viewed its plutonium as an energy resource for burning in future fast reactors as a means of establishing a plutonium economy, even with the risk of proliferation.

However, Russia did not have the economic resources to achieve its disposition programme let alone build new fast reactors. It is therefore dependent on the West, particularly the G8 countries, to provide the necessary funds and its programme currently lags far behind that of the United States. In order to keep the Russian plutonium disposition programme on track and complete it, therefore, the United States has had to forego the immobilisation option and pledge to provide, and seek further, huge subsidies to fund Russia's development of MOX.

Critics argue that pursuit of the MOX option by both countries will encourage the use of plutonium in civil nuclear power programmes elsewhere and may reverse long standing non-proliferation policies in the US. They also charge that it makes little sense to spend billions of dollars in aid creating a Russian MOX fuel industry where none currently exists, especially as under existing agreements Russia is able to seek further financial income by selling MOX for use in reactors outside the country.

Widespread use of MOX fuel would also have considerable proliferation implications arising out of the bulk handling of plutonium at fabrication facilities, the multiple locations at which the fuel would be located, the vulnerabilities associated with transporting the fuel over long distances and the relative ease with which plutonium can be recovered from fresh MOX fuel by straightforward chemical means.

Moreover, use of MOX fuel would not help the long-term situation in regard to the growing stockpiles of plutonium contained within spent nuclear fuel. For technical reasons MOX can only comprise around one-third of the core of most existing reactors. During burnup plutonium is naturally created in the non-MOX two-thirds portion of the reactor core. Only reactors burning 100% MOX would begin to reduce the inventories of plutonium in spent fuel on any meaningful scale.

The weapons-grade plutonium shipments of September 2004 are stated to be on a "one-time basis". Whilst this may be the current intention some factors could potentially bring about a change of view. The US programme itself has been subject to delay, with a construction start on the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) having slipped from FY 2003 to at least May 2005. Moreover, there has been a long running dispute between the United States and Russia over liability provisions for the Russian programme that has already led to the expiry of the 1998 Scientific and Technical Agreement and means no new contracts for plutonium disposition can be signed. Kenneth Luongo, executive director of the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council (RANSAC) recently described the situation as "very messy", and despite being underway for a decade the project hadn't "moved beyond the talking phase." The May 2005 start date on the US MFFF was contingent upon resolving the liability issue by 1 April 2004 but no settlement has yet been reached.

Russia has also had extensive discussions with European fabricators over the years. Continued delays in implementing plutonium disposition in both the United States and Russia could conceivably resurrect the option of using European facilities to help implement the programmes and lead to further plutonium shipments.

* Dave Andrews is a consultant to BASIC on plutonium and nuclear proliferation issues.