USING BILATERAL MECHANISMS TO STRENGTHEN PHYSICAL PROTECTION WORLDWIDE

The international community is reacting far too slowly in upgrading pre-9/11 physical protection standards to cope with post-9/11 threats. Almost three years after the attacks, the effort to amend the International Convention on Physical Protection is proceeding at a glacial pace, and even if ultimately successful, the amended Convention will lack mandatory standards and international enforcement provisions. It is also unlikely that the IAEA's physical protection guidance document, INFCIRC/225/Rev. 4, issued in June 1999, will soon be revised to take into account the far greater threat of nuclear terrorism known to exist today. The United States physical protection system, although far from ideal, is among the most rigorous in the world. NRC and DOE requirements for Category I physical protection are considerably more stringent than the measures contained in INFCIRC/225/Rev. 4. For example, NRC requires that Category I licensees deploy tactical response teams to protect special nuclear material from theft, and test the teams' skills and protective strategies through periodic force-on-force exercises. In contrast, INFCIRC/225/Rev. 4 neither mandates that Category I facilities deploy armed responders to defeat external assaults, nor requires full-scale performance testing to demonstrate that the facilities can be protected against credible threats. After 9/11, both NRC and DOE upgraded physical protection requirements, including more challenging design basis threats, more restrictive access controls, more robust protective force responses, increased levels of performance testing and more rigorous qualification and training of armed responders. Thus the gulf between US standards and INFCIRC/225/Rev. 4 has grown even wider since the Al Qaeda attacks. The United States should seek to ensure that a high standard of nuclear material protection is applied uniformly throughout the world. However, United States bilateral nuclear cooperation agreements require only adherence to the most recent (yet now obsolete) revision of INFCIRC/225. This paper will explore mechanisms that the United States could use to bypass the paralysis of the international community and enforce physical protection standards for US-obligated materials and facilities worldwide appropriate for the post- 9/11 era.