Year
2002
Abstract
Vast quantities of nuclear weapons and materials are poorly secured and vulnerable to terrorists. The Office of International Material Protection and Cooperation combats terrorism by cooperating with Russia and other international partners to improve the protection, control and accounting of their nuclear weapons and materials. In response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, the President and Congress have provided the material protection, control and accounting (MPC&A) Program with additional funds to accelerate and expand on this important work. The MPC&A Program has undertaken a comprehensive review to identify ways to accelerate current security upgrades and to evaluate new threats to determine what expanded set of security upgrades the MPC&A Program should support. This paper will provide an overview of the results of those various efforts. The largest focus of the MPC&A Program is on the acceleration of security upgrades at Russia’s Nuclear Sites. The MPC&A Program has accelerated the installation of security upgrades at Russian Navy, MinAtom, and Civilian nuclear sites; provided emergency upgrades to improve the survivability and response times of Russian Protective Forces; provided additional trucks and railcars for the secure transportation of SNM; developed a formal agreement to expand the successful Material Consolidation and Conversion (MCC) pilot program; and accelerated the installation of nuclear detection equipment at border crossings through the Second Line of Defense (SLD). In addition to its traditional mission, the MPC&A Program is expanding to address emerging threats. The MPC&A Program has begun to install equipment to secure and detect radiological materials that could easily be used with conventional explosives to spread contamination – a dirty bomb; expanded the role of the Nuclear Assessment Program (NAP), for assessing nuclear extortion threats and the illicit trafficking of SNM, to include radiological threats and forensic analysis; begun to explore MPC&A upgrades outside of Russia; and begun installing systems to monitor MPC&A operations to ensure effective threat reduction.