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Global Fissile Material Report 2009: a Path to Nuclear Disarmament

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Global Fissile Material Report 2009: a Path to Nuclear Disarmament Global Fissile Material Report 2009 A Path to Nuclear Disarmament Fourth annual report of the International Panel on Fissile Materials Fourth annual report of the International Panel on Fissile Materials Global Fissile Material Report 2009: A Path to Nuclear Disarmament www.fissilematerials.org © 2009 International Panel on Fissile Materials This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0 On the cover: the map shows existing and planned uranium enrichment and plutonium separation (reprocessing) facilities in nuclear weapon states. See pages 21–22 and 90–91 of this report for more details. Table of Contents About the IPFM 1 Foreword 2 Overview 4 1 Nuclear Weapon and Fissile Material Stocks and Production 8 2 Fissile Materials and Nuclear Disarmament 24 3 Declarations of Fissile Material Stocks and Production 32 4 Nuclear Archaeology 52 5 Verified Warhead Dismantlement 67 6 Disposition of Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 77 7 Verified Cutoff of Fissile Material Production for Weapons 87 8 Nuclear Power and Nuclear Disarmament 103 9 Societal Verification 114 Appendix A: Fissile Materials and Nuclear Weapons 124 Appendix B: Worldwide Locations of Nuclear Weapons, 2009 132 Endnotes 139 IPFM Members, Other Contributors and Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security 170 About the IPFM The International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) was founded in January 2006. It is an independent group of arms-control and nonproliferation experts from seventeen countries, including both nuclear weapon and non-nuclear weapon states. The mission of the IPFM is to analyze the technical basis for practical and achievable policy initiatives to secure, consolidate, and reduce stockpiles of highly enriched ura- nium and plutonium. These fissile materials are the key ingredients in nuclear weap- ons, and their control is critical to nuclear disarmament, halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and ensuring that terrorists do not acquire nuclear weapons. Both military and civilian stocks of fissile materials have to be addressed. The nuclear weapon states still have enough fissile materials in their weapon stockpiles for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. On the civilian side, enough plutonium has been sepa- rated to make a similarly large number of weapons. Highly enriched uranium is used in civilian reactor fuel in more than one hundred locations. The total amount used for this purpose is sufficient to make about one thousand Hiroshima-type bombs, a design potentially within the capabilities of terrorist groups. The Panel is co-chaired by Professor R. Rajaraman of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and Professor Frank von Hippel of Princeton University. Its members inclu- de nuclear experts from Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Professor José Goldemberg of Brazil stepped down as co-chair of IPFM on July 1, 2007. He continues as a member of IPFM. Short biographies of the panel members can be found at the end of this report. IPFM research and reports are shared with international organizations, national go- vernments and nongovernmental groups. It has full panel meetings twice a year in ca- pitals around the world in addition to specialist workshops. These meetings and work- shops are often in conjunction with international conferences at which IPFM panels and experts are invited to make presentations. Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security provides administra- tive and research support for the IPFM. IPFM’s initial support is provided by a five-year grant to Princeton University from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago. Global Fissile Material Report 2009 Foreword Over the past year, the importance of charting a new common ground for reducing and eliminating stockpiles of the key nuclear weapon materials—plutonium and highly enriched uranium—has grown. It is not merely that the Fissile Material Cutoff Trea- ty, which would stop all production of fissile materials for weapons, has returned to the top of the international nuclear disarmament agenda, with the United Nations Conference on Disarmament agreeing this year to begin talks on such a treaty. More important, the entire project of nuclear disarmament has undergone a renaissance. Notably, President Barak Obama called in his speech in Prague on April 5, 2009 for a world without nuclear weapons. The idea of not merely reducing the number of nuclear weapons but of eliminating them entirely is getting more serious consideration than at any time since President Truman proposed the Baruch Plan to the UN to achieve this end in 1946. It is in this new context, which is the focus of the present report, that the work of the International Panel on Fissile Materials is playing an indispensable role. Suddenly, people in government, in academia, and in society at large are asking, in more detail than ever before, what a world with very few or no nuclear weapons might actually look like. The difficult and still-important question of how to get to such a world is now accompanied by the perhaps even more difficult and even more important question of what precisely the arrangements in such a world would be and how these would work. The process of getting rid of nuclear weapons (if it really happens), after all, will take only a limited time; but the nuclear-weapon-free world will have to last forever. Harder than getting to zero will be staying there. The number of nuclear weapons in the world has declined from a peak of more than 60,000 at the height of the Cold War to about a third of that today. If current talks between the Obama administration and the Russian government are successful, these numbers will decline further over the next few years, to about ten thousand opera- tional warheads, including short-range and reserve warheads, plus perhaps another thousand in the arsenals of the world’s other seven nuclear powers, with further re- ductions to follow. As the number of weapons declines, the importance of materials increases, especially if governments are taking the new goal of zero weapons seriously. In such a world, the immediate fear of nuclear war wanes, and the fear of the return of nuclear weapons takes its place. Attention turns away from warheads and ballistic mis- siles and toward uranium enrichment and plutonium separation facilities, plutonium and tritium production reactors, highly enriched uranium stockpiles for naval reactors, civilian stockpiles of plutonium and the like. Global Fissile Material Report 2009 The 2009 Global Fissile Material Report, in conjunction with its predecessors, places dis- cussion of these matters, more comprehensively and in greater depth than anywhere else, on a solid technical foundation. It moves the debate out of the realm of slogan and heartfelt wish into the cool light of scientific reality. We come to understand that underlying the weapons systems is the more fundamental fact of nuclear technology and that underlying that is the root of the whole dilemma, the scientific knowledge that makes the weapons and materials alike possible. Since the fundamental knowledge is destined to survive even the abolition of the weapons, it is necessary to ask, as the experts who have written this report do in myriad ways, how, over the long run, we can live with it. The questions that then move to the fore are such matters as: By what exact routes might a cheater on an abolition agreement proceed to rebuild nuclear weapons? What safeguards might the world deploy to protect itself against such a cheater? What measures of verification can give warning of such an attempt? Which nuclear-power technologies lend themselves to cheating, and how might they be circumscribed or eliminated? We are invited to school ourselves in “nuclear archeology” (the history of nuclear production facilities, fathomed through isotopic analysis and other means), in the possible “mining” of nuclear wastes (the danger that a nation will process these wastes to obtain plutonium), and in the “stuffing” or crushing of the plutonium pits at the heart of nuclear weapons to disable them while they await dismantlement. Of course, acquiring control over fissile materials—by stopping their production for military purposes, by producing a detailed inventory (now woefully incomplete) of their existence, by inspecting that inventory—is not useful solely for abolition. It is also immediately useful for nuclear arms reduction and for reining in nuclear prolifera- tion. If the world’s grip on its fissile materials and technology were ever to become fully secure, then nuclear proliferation, especially to sub-national groups, would almost be a dead letter. There is no conflict here between the long and the short run. The infor- mation and recommendations presented in this report are therefore as immediately urgent as they are fundamental in the larger scheme of things. They are the guts of nuclear disarmament—a goal that this report represents with new clarity and brings closer to achievement. Jonathan Schell New York, September 2009 Global Fissile Material Report 2009 Overview The goal of complete elimination of nuclear weapons has returned to the center of international debate. It is a goal as old as the nuclear age. The first resolution of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946 called for plans “for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.” It was already understood that central to the challenge would be the control of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium, the fissile materials that had been used respectively in the bombs that had destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months earlier.
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