Much needed momentum toward securing the world’s vulnerable nuclear material is building.

And not a moment too soon.
 
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need to scoop up and lock down nuclear weapons—and, quite importantly, the material used to build various types of dangerous nuclear devices—has been one of the world’s greatest security challenges. Early moves and successes were impressive. Particularly an American program, created by the Nunn-Lugar Act and known as Cooperative Threat Reduction, which has destroyed thousands of nuclear warheads and secured tons of nuclear material in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. But the effort overall is far from complete.
 
Today more than three dozen countries have at least small amounts of highly enriched uranium (HEU), only some of which is in nuclear weapons. Even more countries are home to a variety of other potentially dangerous radioactive materials. And these materials are a tempting target for black marketeers, extortionists, and worse.
 
Most troubling may be the fact that we aren’t even sure where much of this material is. “Indeed, there is no current, accurate, consolidated global inventory of HEU in civilian use that would allow states to prioritize their activities in this sphere,” according to a 2009 report from the Nuclear Threat Initiative. The challenge, therefore, is large but, experts tell us, not insurmountable—especially if we act soon. The Stanley Foundation is committed to finding the best ways to tackle this problem with multilateral action and US leadership.
 
Throughout his campaign and into his presidency, Barack Obama has included this challenge as a top policy priority. “So today I am announcing a new international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years. We will set new standards, expand our cooperation with Russia, pursue new partnerships to lock down these sensitive materials. We must also build on our efforts to break up black markets, detect and intercept materials in transit, and use financial tools to disrupt this dangerous trade,” said Obama in an April 2009 speech delivered in Prague.
 
In this issue of Courier, former Energy Department official Kenneth N. Luongo lays out the concrete steps the United States and others must take to make President Obama’s vision a reality. The issues Luongo outlines are likely to form much of the agenda of the international nuclear security summit hosted by the United States in April 2010.
 
Like many of the challenges facing the 21st century, this one will require many nations working together. A relatively new tool for international cooperation on this front is United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540. It mandates that all countries “...implement a rigorous set of controls to prevent the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons—including securing potentially dangerous materials, strengthening border security, and developing national export and trans-shipment controls over ‘dual use’ items,” writes Brian Finlay of the Henry L. Stimson Center. And in an online extra for Courier, Michael Kraig, senior fellow at the Stanley Foundation, looks at how Resolution 1540 offers a significant opportunity to keep the building blocks of weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of nonstate actors.
 
Finally in these pages, we get a firsthand look at ongoing efforts to lock down one of the world’s largest stockpiles of nuclear material. Kazakhstan follows only the United States and Russia in the quantity of highly enriched uranium it possesses. And two of our foundation staff members, Sean Harder and Christina MacGillivray, travelled there to see how the international community has come together to help Kazakhstan meet this critical challenge.
 
As we work to strengthen this global effort to secure vulnerable nuclear materials, the foundation is well aware that the problem may seem overwhelming. Sometimes the fear of all things nuclear might cause people to retreat into the false security of isolationist policies and greater military responses. But such approaches will not bring about lasting answers to problems that can be solved.
 
As President Obama said near the end of his Prague speech, “We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also a cowardly thing to do. That’s how wars begin. That’s where human progress ends.”