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How to Steal a Nuke
1.5k Plays1 year ago
In this episode, we talk to Vitaly Fedchenko on nuclear security.
Vitaly Fedchenko is a Senior Researcher with the SIPRI Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme. He has worked at SIPRI since 2005 and has 20 years of experience in nuclear security research and nuclear security assistance program implementation. He received a Master’s degree in nuclear materials protection, control and accounting in 2002. Between 2005 and 2015 Vitaly consulted for and helped implement Swedish government’s nuclear security assistance programs. Vitaly has been focusing on a discipline contributing to nuclear security, called nuclear forensics, since 2006 and is a member of the Nuclear Forensics International Technical Working Group (ITWG). Since 2009 Vitaly has been a contributor to the work of the IAEA Division of Nuclear Security in drafting regulatory documents on nuclear forensics and nuclear security, developing and delivering training courses on nuclear forensics, and contributing to advisory missions. Vitaly is an author of multiple publications on nuclear forensics, including the book The New Nuclear Forensics: Analysis of Nuclear Materials for Security Purposes (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2015).
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. In each episode, we'll sit down with leading experts to discuss dangerous activities.
Content Overview
00:00:13
Speaker
From assassinations and airliner shootdowns through to kidnappings and coups, we'll examine each of these threats through the lenses of both the Dangerous Act to seek and to conduct these operations, and the agencies around the world seeking to stop them. In the interest of operational security, certain tactical details will be omitted from these discussions.
00:00:34
Speaker
However, the cases and threats which we discuss here are very real.
Meet the Hosts
00:01:05
Speaker
I'm Louis A. Prisant, the founder and co-editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica. I'm a researcher in the field of intelligence and espionage with a PhD in intelligence studies from Loughborough University. I'm an adjunct professor in intelligence at Science Pro Paris and in my day job I provide geopolitical analysis and security focused intelligence to private sector corporations.
00:01:26
Speaker
I'm Simon Schofield, co-editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica. I'm also deputy director of the Human Security Centre, a think tank in London where I research security issues relating to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
Guest Introduction: Vitaly Fedchenko
00:01:40
Speaker
So today we're going to be discussing how to steal a nuke. And joining us to do this is Vitaly Fedchenko. Vitaly is a senior researcher with the CIPRI Weapons of Mass Destruction Program. He's worked at CIPRI since 2005, and he has 20 years experience in nuclear security research and nuclear security assistance program implementation.
00:01:59
Speaker
Vitaly received a master's degree in nuclear materials protection control and accounting in 2002. Between 2005 and 2015, Vitaly consulted for and helped to implement the Swedish government's nuclear security assistance programs.
00:02:14
Speaker
Vitaly has been focusing on a discipline contributing to nuclear security called nuclear forensics since 2006 and is a member of the Nuclear Forensics International Technical Working Group.
Vitaly's Career Journey
00:02:25
Speaker
Since 2009, Vitaly has been a contributor to the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Division of Nuclear Security in drafting regulatory documents on nuclear forensics and nuclear security, developing and delivering training courses on nuclear forensics and contributing to advisory missions.
00:02:41
Speaker
Vitaly is an author of multiple publications on nuclear forensics, including the book, The New Nuclear Forensics, Analysis of Nuclear Materials for Security Purposes. And I'll make sure we put a link to that in the show notes. So Vitaly, thank you very much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. So that's a very interesting background. So I'm really curious, how did you get into your line of work? This is a field I think many people don't probably think, you know, don't realize exists.
Understanding Nuclear Security
00:03:08
Speaker
So how did you find yourself working in the nuclear security world?
00:03:12
Speaker
My bachelor's degree is actually in nuclear engineering. So I was studying nuclear reactors design and things that are connected to that. And then at the university where I was at that time, there was this program, a master level program funded by the United States Department of Energy.
00:03:34
Speaker
It was called nuclear materials protection control and accounting and that sounded intriguing. Let's say that time for me. So I looked into that and ended up defending my master's degree in that program.
00:03:50
Speaker
That program, well, the name of it is kind of a mouthful because the name of nuclear security didn't really exist then. Nuclear security is something that has been defined a few years after I got my master's diploma. So probably if that same program were to exist a few years later, my master's diploma would have been a nuclear security. But at that time, it had a
00:04:16
Speaker
a bit more of an unwieldy title of nuclear materials protection control and account. So once
Nuclear Forensics Discovery
00:04:25
Speaker
I got that master's degree, I started looking into this topic further. And a few years later, I was invited by Cipri to contribute to their work, which I did on and off for a couple of years. And then since 2005, I was offered position at Cipri
00:04:45
Speaker
to do exactly that, to look into nuclear security of, at that time, it was former Soviet Union states. And I assisted Swedish government, Swedish nuclear regulator in their work in providing technical assistance to former Soviet Union states in essentially keeping their nuclear and other radioactive materials under control. When one thing led to another,
00:05:15
Speaker
I remember in 2006, I was on a business trip to Islamabad, Pakistan, and it was at that time, in that location, internet wasn't really a thing. Smartphones weren't really a thing.
Interpreting Radioactive Debris
00:05:31
Speaker
I could probably get connected to internet.
00:05:35
Speaker
I don't know, half an hour a day if I would go to some special location at the hotel and I didn't really have much to do. It was Ramadan time and I basically was maybe confined to the hotel is a strong word but I wasn't really leaving the hotel much and I ended up spending on that business trip
00:05:56
Speaker
something like three weeks there. And during those three weeks, what happened was PRK tested their second nuclear device. And so I was obviously reading about it. I was downloading articles about it and reading about it. And I had a lot of time on my hands to do that and to think.
00:06:15
Speaker
about these subjects and what happened there was one topic in particular was very interesting is how can you tell something about the nature of that device from the radioactive fallout. Basically radioactive debris if you collect them from the atmosphere many kilometers away, what information can you read in that debris?
00:06:38
Speaker
And once i started thinking about that i realize that there is a whole field of nuclear forensics out there which does exactly that it's analysis of nuclear and other objective material for the purpose of extracting some kind of information out of it that you can then use for purpose of well.
00:06:58
Speaker
something related to international security, let's say. So I started looking into that as well. And at the same time, well, I remember I after three weeks in Islamabad, I went directly to a conference at IAEA. And I met my boss there. And I said, well, this is something I'm interested in. And I want to do that. And my boss was kind enough to say, well, if this is what you want to do, go and do it. Just don't forget to fundraise.
00:07:27
Speaker
So that's how I got into all of this. And then later, through nuclear forensics, I started working with the International Atomic Energy Agency and helping their work in nuclear security of something called material outside of regulatory control.
Defining Nuclear Terrorism and Security
00:07:45
Speaker
Given this is a relatively new field based on what you're saying, let's start with some definitions. What do we mean when we talk about nuclear security, and then I imagine there are subsets about things like nuclear terrorism? Let's start maybe from nuclear terrorism first.
00:08:02
Speaker
So there is a description of what nuclear terrorism is that is given in an international convention called international convention for the suppression of acts of nuclear terrorism.
00:08:17
Speaker
Ixant for short. So those people who are interested in legalese and the description of nuclear terrorism in that language, they are welcome to look into that convention at the very beginning of that convention. There is a description, but basically, if you boil it down to sort of human language, there are four separate scenarios that are considered to be potential nuclear terrorism scenarios.
00:08:47
Speaker
So first scenario is when let's say a non-state actor steals or somehow obtains or maybe even given by some state a nuclear weapon that was produced by some state and uses that or threatens to use it for its purposes.
00:09:06
Speaker
The second scenario is similar only in this case, we're talking about a non-state actor, terrorist group, for example, dealing what is called fissile material, or direct use material, basically material that can be readily used in a nuclear explosive device of some sort.
00:09:30
Speaker
So stealing that material and producing improvised nuclear device, that would be a second scenario of nuclear terrorism. Third scenario is essentially the same thing, only a radioactive material instead of a fissile material. And the difference there is that radioactive material as such is not something that you can use to produce a nuclear yield with.
00:09:58
Speaker
So let's put it this way. All fissile material is radioactive, but not all radioactive material is fissile. So the universe of fissile materials is smaller, and it's kind of included into the universe of radioactive material, or rediactifisotopes.
00:10:16
Speaker
So the scenario where a terrorist group, again, for example, collects somehow a bunch of radioactive material sources and uses it to somehow, let's say, harm people or extract some kind of gain for themselves.
00:10:31
Speaker
That is a third scenario of what is considered to be a nuclear terrorism. And finally, an attack by a non-state actor on a nuclear installation is a fourth scenario. So these four scenarios are kind of the main ideas what nuclear terrorism can be about.
00:10:50
Speaker
Now, to be clear, nuclear terrorism is something that by definition is something that is only non-state actors can do. The accent in particular excludes actions of nation states from its purview.
00:11:11
Speaker
So that's nuclear terrorism as far as nuclear security is concerned there is a definition we can discuss that is given by the ia is an official definition but basically what it is you can say is a defense against nuclear terrorism so nuclear security is an area where you.
00:11:30
Speaker
work to prevent, detect and respond to some kind of criminal or intentional unauthorized act that would involve radioactive material of some sort or nuclear material or some kind of nuclear facility
00:11:48
Speaker
then you would want to detect, prevent, or respond to these actions. So that is a definition of nuclear security. Again, simply put, it's a defense against nuclear terrorism.
00:12:02
Speaker
Thank you Vitaly for that very detailed answer in the definitions. I think just to summarise for the audience, so the four potential scenarios you've laid out there are the potential for obtaining or stealing a nuclear weapon, the stealing the materials to make a weapon,
00:12:20
Speaker
the stealing other radioactive material that couldn't be used to make a weapon, and then there's attacks on infrastructure related to nuclear power. So based on those four scenarios, are any of those more likely to happen than others?
Nuclear Terrorism Scenarios
00:12:34
Speaker
Are there different risks associated with these different scenarios? And how would you rate them in terms of the probability and what we should be most concerned about? So I think there are a lot of
00:12:48
Speaker
words there that need to be disentangled a little bit. First of all, when we're talking about risk, usually the word risk is a compound of a probability of some event and the cost of that event.
00:13:06
Speaker
and a cost in a broad sense. So if something insignificant is very likely to happen, you wouldn't consider that a particularly risky situation because you don't really care. The cost for you of that particular thing going wrong is so low, you're not alarmed, you don't really worry about it.
00:13:29
Speaker
So, in case of nuclear terrorism and the different scenarios of nuclear terrorism, what we are talking about is
00:13:38
Speaker
is these two components here. The probability of something and the cost or the outcome, the magnitude of outcome that event can bring. And so if you're in that frame of mind, you can kind of grade it yourself from these four scenarios. You can say that, OK, stealing a nuclear weapon is probably difficult.
00:14:03
Speaker
But if that were to happen, the consequences of that would probably be quite high. So therefore, the risk is a compound of these two. And then it's probably somewhat easier to obtain nuclear material than an already made nuclear weapon. But then
00:14:23
Speaker
you have to do a lot more to get to the same magnitude of consequences with that. So again, that defines your risk. Rejective material, if we go through a third scenario, are much more ubiquitous than facile materials. Obviously, they're everywhere in hospitals and so on and so forth.
00:14:42
Speaker
So just because of that it is probably easier to obtain them but the consequences again would not be as drastic as they would be in terms like for example if somebody obtains a radio made nuclear weapon. And finally attacks on nuclear installations and until very recently until the well-known events in Ukraine this was rather
00:15:07
Speaker
It wasn't something that people were discussing too much or too often, and obviously this has changed now, and a lot of specific things within nuclear security would now have to be thought again about. And so to round this off, the risk, as I described it, is sort of a textbook. So when I was studying nuclear security before it was called nuclear security, this is how they would explain risk to us.
00:15:36
Speaker
I'm now thinking that there is also a social component to it, and it's sort of the third thing you have to put into that equation. And that is kind of a social tolerance of the risk. For example, if you simply look at, let's say, energy production, and you look at the unit of energy produced by, let's say, nuclear power, and let's say coal,
00:16:02
Speaker
the risks for, let's say, health of workers and health of the population associated with
00:16:07
Speaker
that same unit of energy produced from coal would be higher than that same unit of energy produced by nuclear power, just because accidents, when they happen in the nuclear power production, they're much more rare. At the same time, in the coal industry, that's the other way around, they are more ubiquitous, but somehow it's not so socially alarming.
00:16:34
Speaker
So when we're talking about risks we should also look into how public is prepared to accept them or to be alarmed about them so that's i guess what i wanted to say so getting back to your question about what's more likely.
00:16:51
Speaker
If you're talking about probabilities without the consequences, then in my mind it's pretty clear that the most probable scenario is involving radioactive material.
00:17:05
Speaker
simply because Rejective Materials are, like I said, everywhere and they're used for all sorts of purposes and so on. And then I would say that going from there, Fissile Materials are harder to obtain and Weapons are harder still.
00:17:24
Speaker
Attacks on nuclear installations, like I said, is a separate discussion and recent events definitely show that there needs to be more thinking done about that. So yeah, I would say this is my ranking.
00:17:40
Speaker
So let's go through it in order of reverse difficulty, I suppose. So you've said stealing a nuclear weapon is a fairly difficult thing. I would imagine they're kept in very secure locations. So let's say you woke up tomorrow and you decided you wanted to be a James Bond villain or something. How would you go about stealing a weapon? What are the places that would be targeted in this context?
Challenges of Nuclear Theft
00:18:05
Speaker
Well, I wouldn't. I have better things to do.
00:18:08
Speaker
So one one thing is what I guess people could worry about is an insider threat. So in situations where, for example, there is, let's say, let's imagine a country X, which has some amount of nuclear weapons and there is a serious social instability in that country that has been caused by by something much larger than, let's say, a breakup of the Soviet Union was such a such an event.
00:18:38
Speaker
or something similar, mass riots, something of that sort. Then you have to start worrying about control over these weapons and who is actually giving orders. You have to start worrying about insider threats and loyalty of people who protect this thing.
00:18:58
Speaker
And then the separate worry is, well, nuclear weapons, like you said, are protected very well. But it did happen in the past that they were somehow lost or dropped or inadvertently transported from A to B without the military realizing that this is happening and so on. There have been, for example, submarines that sank with nuclear weapons on board and so on.
00:19:25
Speaker
In the US, this whole area is called broken arrows. So the listeners to this podcast can easily Google that term broken arrows, nuclear weapons, and there is plenty of literature and books describing these things. So in terms of protecting against theft, I would be thinking mostly about these two big areas I just described.
00:19:52
Speaker
And looking at the second scenario, would it then be possible if it's much harder to obtain a ready-made nuclear weapon? What about the scenario in which terrorists perhaps kidnap a scientist and get a hold of fissile material and build their own nuclear weapon?
00:20:08
Speaker
So this scenario that you describe, again, let's split it a bit because there are two components there. There is a scientist and then there is material, right, from which that scientist is supposed to build a web. First of all, again, for those listeners who are kind of interested in thinking about these things, there has been a novel published in 1970s, which I believe is still available on Amazon.
00:20:33
Speaker
It was called The Gadget by Nicholas Freeling, which exactly describes this particular scenario. The whole novel is just about that of a scientist who has been kidnapped and made to do this. So I would say that the scientist here is not really the most important part of the equation. It's the material that's much harder to come by than the scientist.
00:21:02
Speaker
And if you think about this historically, the first weapon that was dropped called Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, that particular device wasn't even tested before. So the Trinity test that was done by the United States concerned a device made of plutonium, and it was much harder to make from the engineering perspective, and so on and so forth.
00:21:32
Speaker
But as far as highly enriched uranium is concerned, as soon as you have that material, it's
00:21:39
Speaker
it's considered to be not that difficult from the engineering perspective to produce an improvised nuclear explosive device. And as an illustration of that idea that it's not that difficult, I bring you this historical example of little boy that was made, produced by the United States and used in combat without first testing it.
00:22:05
Speaker
So getting back to this question about a scientist being kidnapped, I wouldn't worry about, if I would be a terrorist, I would not worry about scientists that much. I would first and foremost worry about the material, how to obtain that.
00:22:24
Speaker
And therefore protection against nuclear terrorism, nuclear security is talking about securing the material first and foremost. Securing scientists is kind of, it's a separate discussion in nuclear security.
00:22:40
Speaker
On the topic of nuclear materials theft, where would you find these kind of materials?
Historical Thefts of Nuclear Materials
00:22:49
Speaker
How would you go about locating them if you were a terrorist group? Is this something that's happened in the past? Do we have any history of nuclear materials being stolen? Yes. In the past, it did happen. There are incidents of nuclear material missing.
00:23:09
Speaker
fissile material missing that were discovered. A lot of those cases happened in the early 1990s. Maybe we can even put a link later to the whole table where these scenarios are listed. We have a publication about that.
00:23:30
Speaker
But essentially, there is a host of cases that has happened in the early 1990s associated with the breakdown of the Soviet Union. And at that time, what happened was the Soviet Union was using facile materials in quite a number of different applications, in quite a number of different locations.
00:23:52
Speaker
And because it was Soviet Union, the security of that material was kind of guaranteed by the whole structure of the state where everything was so tightly controlled. And when Soviet Union collapsed, we had a situation where that control disappeared. So there was
00:24:16
Speaker
article in 1990s, I believe it was Chicago Tribune or something like that, with the title of potatoes were guarded better than fissile materials in the Soviet Union, because that whole security structure disappeared together with the Soviet Union. And second problem that happened at the same time, then, was that people who used to work with this material, and there was a lot of such people,
00:24:43
Speaker
suddenly lost basically their sources of income. They probably weren't necessarily bad people, all of them.
00:24:51
Speaker
probably most of them were decent people, but they were put in a completely impossible situation where they had to feed their kids and things of that nature. And the third thing that has happened is that for whatever reason, there were articles in the press which were basically creating the impression that nuclear material and fissile material in particular is very valuable and is extremely easy to sell on a black market.
00:25:20
Speaker
So these three factors combined resulted in at least some cases where people were trying to take that material, let's say, home and try to smuggle it and so on. So those cases are documented and we can provide the link.
00:25:36
Speaker
And looking at the three scenarios together, so getting a hold of a weapon, getting a hold of fissile material, and getting a hold of radiological material, would it be possible for a terrorist group or really any non-state actor to bypass the whole structure of stealing or buying from the state and look at a black market? Is there a black market in nuclear materials, fissile materials, or even nuclear weapons?
00:26:03
Speaker
Well, not that I'm aware of. I definitely never heard of a nuke being on a black market or anything like that. I did hear that there are people out there on the dark net and things of that sort looking for rejective material to poison their boyfriends or girlfriends or something of that nature, because somehow they decided that this is a good way of going about it.
00:26:34
Speaker
As far as I'm aware, security services are monitoring these kind of searches. And I am not an expert on this, but I do believe there were persecutions of that kind. I don't think people were actually buying actual material. It's more about people, again, hearing that somehow this is a good way to go about things.
00:26:59
Speaker
So yeah, I wouldn't say that this is not, however, to say that there is no such thing as illicit trafficking, or rather, there is no such thing as material outside of regulatory control.
Monitoring Nuclear Trafficking
00:27:15
Speaker
It definitely is. And for example, International Atomic Energy Agency has a database called now Incident and Trafficking Database that's operating since 1995, I believe.
00:27:27
Speaker
that collects information, official information from member states and puts it together and tries to analyze the trends in this kind of material outside of regulatory control. Most of that material is not associated with any kind of criminal activity. Things get lost, things get forgotten. But yeah, some of that, yes, some of that was associated with criminal activity for sure.
00:27:56
Speaker
Why was it associated with that? Was it just something that smugglers thought they could sell? Or was there actual demand? This is not something I'm familiar with, so I cannot comment on that. But material outside of regulatory control, including material that is being smuggled on purpose, definitely exists.
00:28:20
Speaker
However, it's not necessarily associated with nuclear terrorism. So I said nuclear security is protection against nuclear terrorism. There are cases where it's not necessarily associated with nuclear terrorism if we, for example, have illegal gambling.
00:28:38
Speaker
Recently there was a case reported by governments of Romania and Germany where they had a gambling community in one particular ethnic enclave in those countries where
00:28:56
Speaker
Rejective material was used to cheat in gambling and that involved basically a ball with small cards you were supposed to shake and guess which way they're up.
00:29:12
Speaker
And you would have rejected material on one side of the card and shielding, protecting the other side from radiation. So if you have a very primitive counter on your person when you're gambling, it will either be very vigorously or not so vigorously or not at all. And from that, you can decipher something about which way the card is up in the ball and therefore win some money.
00:29:42
Speaker
In one particular location, there were tens of thousands of euros won that way in within that particular community. That material was important to Europe. So it's nuclear smuggling textbook, but it was not really for any kind of terrorist purposes. It was just for illegal gambling purposes. There are a lot of different things out there, but maybe not all of them are related to terrorism.
00:30:11
Speaker
I'm really glad you brought up the topic of poisoning people with nuclear materials. And if you're interested in that topic, I really encourage you to listen to our episode on how to poison your enemies, which we recorded with Dr. Neil Bradbury earlier in the season. And that's a sentence that in the history of this podcast is probably the most likely to put us on a watch list. We've been discussing nuclear security threats with Vitaliy Fedchenko. After the break, we'll talk about how states keep nuclear materials safe.
00:30:46
Speaker
You have been listening to How to Get on a Watchlist, the podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. If you like this show, don't forget to check out our other content at Encyclopedia Geopolitica, which you can find at howtogettontawatchlist.com, where you can find our analysis on various geopolitical issues, as well as reading lists covering topics like those discussed in the podcast.
00:31:10
Speaker
Please also consider subscribing to the podcast on your streaming platform of choice, giving us a rating and joining our Patreon. So Vitaliy, given the scale of this threat, how do states stop this from happening? How do you do nuclear security?
State Implementation of Nuclear Security
00:31:37
Speaker
So if you again get back to kind of the level of regulations and international guidance documents that tell you how to do this, it's something that is called nuclear security regime that
00:31:53
Speaker
hopefully all countries have in some fashion. And that is basically, a regime consists of three things. It's legislative regulatory framework, laws and regulations essentially, that define how this regime works and how nuclear security should operate in that country. Institutions and organizations and obviously people who work in them who
00:32:19
Speaker
have their functions and have their responsibilities implementing this regime and what is called systems and measures, technical systems often.
00:32:31
Speaker
that do three things. They prevent something from happening, they detect if something did happen, and then if detection is correct, then they respond to what has happened. So prevention, detection and response is like three different areas where nuclear security operates. So let's talk a little bit about prevention. How does that work? What do you mean when you're talking about prevention?
00:32:59
Speaker
Prevention essentially means that you want your material to be kept under regulatory control.
00:33:07
Speaker
So at the IEA level there is this big distinction, material under regulatory control and material outside of regulatory control. And so ideally in the ideal world you have all of your nuclear and other reductive material in the first category and the second category is completely empty. In real world that's not necessarily the case and material outside of regulatory control does happen.
00:33:33
Speaker
So prevention is when you have things such as physical protection, guards, guns, gates, locks, and all sorts of things of that nature, as well as you have accounting of your material, meaning that you know how much of that material you have and where it is.
00:33:55
Speaker
And so you keep those systems very well, operating very well. And the whole point of them is to make sure that material that you have remains under regulatory control. You know where it is, you know how much you have. If you produce something, you know how much did you produce. If you sold something, you know how much you sold.
00:34:18
Speaker
This is not a trivial thing by itself. If you have been facilities, if you are operating on a scale of thousands of tons of something, it's a serious engineering task.
00:34:33
Speaker
We will talk about response later, but response can also feed into prevention. For example, if your accountancy system on your facility for whatever reason failed, and you lost some of your material somehow, and you don't even know that you lost it, then if somebody finds that material later at the response stage and gets back to you and saying,
00:35:01
Speaker
We need to talk about your facility. Why is it losing material? That is also contributing to prevention in the sense that you know that things like that can happen. So directors of facilities hopefully are aware of that risk and take their responsibilities seriously because of that as well.
00:35:22
Speaker
Detection is something that usually invoked where serial is already lost. And by lost, I don't necessarily mean stolen. It could be just literally lost, fell off the truck. Cases like that do happen. There was one case fairly recently where in a rather large state, a rejected source was being transported.
00:35:49
Speaker
thousands of kilometers and it just fell off the back of the truck and then they were looking for it. And they did find it, but between the time it got lost and the time they found it, that material was outside of regulatory control. So detection usually happens in this kind of scenario. So we have big infrastructure around the world of detectors, essentially of different kinds.
00:36:18
Speaker
there are what they call portal monitors at many airports and you might have seen when you land somewhere and you try to exit the airport you might see sometimes either something that looks like an arc or maybe like a two flap columns and you have to pass through in between with your luggage usually
00:36:41
Speaker
That is a portal monitor that is basically measuring radiation. And if your luggage happens to be emitting something, then probably it's a material outside of regulatory control and there will be questions asked.
00:36:58
Speaker
So the same kind of detection is happening, for example, at the ports, at treatment facilities and things of that nature. As far as the response is concerned, that is something that usually involves, well, detection has happened for some reason.
00:37:18
Speaker
Then you want to obviously secure, well, safe, you render that location safe from the radiation standpoint and also secure obviously. And then you want to figure out ultimately
00:37:36
Speaker
How did this happen that this material that you have just detected got outside of regulatory control? Where was it lost? Where is it coming from? And so on and so forth. And in most countries, it's at least a requirement that this kind of cases would be investigated and probably prosecuted.
00:37:57
Speaker
So there is a whole dimension of forensics associated with this kind of cases where you don't just put material back under control, you also have to answer questions that are given to you by investigative authorities or a prosecutor or something similar depending on the legal system of your country.
00:38:24
Speaker
So if that happens, then that would be part of your response, investigation and prosecution. And that's where things like nuclear forensics come in.
Role of Nuclear Forensics
00:38:38
Speaker
So on the topic of nuclear forensics, I'm reminded of the scene from the Sum of All Fears, where a nuclear weapon goes off in the United States and a team is then deployed, and they're able to nail down exactly where the nuclear material involved had come from.
00:38:54
Speaker
Is that how it works in the real world? Is nuclear forensics that accurate? So first of all, let's just kind of think about what happens in that scene. So in that scene, there is an event. Then there is some kind of a rejective or nuclear material associated with that event. In case of a nuclear weapon, detection side is kind of automatic. If nuclear goes off, you know it happens.
00:39:24
Speaker
at least in the vicinity. So detection is done. Then you have the event. Then you have material that you somehow collect that you know is associated with that event. And then you do analysis of that nuclear or other reactive material in order to basically extract information available in that sample of that material.
00:39:52
Speaker
You can do it for many different reasons. You can do it for nuclear security purposes. For example, if you caught somebody or found some, let's say, fuel pellets somewhere and you analyze them in order to figure out where do they come from, that would be a nuclear forensics purpose.
00:40:13
Speaker
The same idea of analysis of nuclear material and then applying the information you extract from it for some kind of other international security purpose is used in applications such as, for example, like in this movie that would be called post-explosion forensics, which is a different kind of beast altogether.
00:40:36
Speaker
There are applications associated with non-proliferation with IAEA safeguards. It's a very standard procedure these days for the IAEA to take swipe samples at different locations in different countries and then analyze those swipe samples and see if micro-particles that they find there are consistent with declarations of different member states.
00:41:02
Speaker
And there have been cases where such an inconsistency was found and led to all sorts of discoveries in the proliferation domain.
00:41:14
Speaker
You have the same essentially idea where you analyze, it's called radio nuclei component of the international monitoring system of the comprehensive test ban treaty organization, where that organization is looking at rejective gases and rejective particles that could possibly be coming from
00:41:37
Speaker
nuclear weapons tests and that's a big system and a big international security application by itself. In the intelligence world there have been a number of published cases where one country would be interested whether or not a nuclear reactor of a different country is operating or what kind of
00:42:03
Speaker
are happening at this particular facility and so on. So there would be all sorts of samplings from waterways to clothing to whatever you can imagine, where that would be analyzed essentially for the benefit of intelligence organizations. And so that's a separate area as well. So in all of those cases,
00:42:32
Speaker
This analysis of nuclear or other objective material, you can call it differently. You can call it nuclear forensics as in the nuclear security world. You can call it nuclear intelligence or you can call it something else. The point is still the same. Taking a sample of something and trying to read information that would be useful for your application in some way.
00:42:57
Speaker
The process works like this. First, once you obtain the sample, you, what they call, characterize it, which means you basically measure, take measurements. The second one, measurements, is what they do. They produce numbers, essentially. Maybe a picture. If it's, let's say, it's a scanning electron microscope, you would have a picture. Most of the time you get numbers. And numbers by themselves are not really meaningful. You have to interpret them in order to get
00:43:27
Speaker
you have to convert raw data into some kind of meaningful information. So you have interpretation stage where you take those numbers, you have your experts, you have your databases and things like that. And what you do, you look for what they call signatures. Signature is basically a combination of characteristics of a material in the sample that somehow is meaningful to you.
00:43:52
Speaker
So let's say if I'm having a sample of, let's say uranium oxide, and I see that in there there is uranium 236 in quite good amount, then I might surmise that that uranium somehow got irradiated in the reactor. That's my meaningful information.
00:44:12
Speaker
Would that be helpful for me or not depends on an application. If I find that material in a country that says that they never had any kind of reactor built, then I might ask them, okay, but how is that possible? Getting back to nuclear terrorism and forensics, you would have to have
00:44:36
Speaker
quite a good system set up for identifying those signatures and then maybe having databases to compare those signatures against.
00:44:45
Speaker
It's not always easy because it's not like with fingerprints or with DNA, even maybe DNA is a better account, for example, here where in the nuclear forensics world, the samples and the materials you have to analyze might be very different and they're not as precisely defined in form and composition.
00:45:12
Speaker
So it really depends on the situation quite a bit. It also depends on the questions you have to answer, because in some simple cases, you don't need much of a forensics. If you are a prosecutor or investigative authority, just ask you whether or not something is radioactive or not, or nuclear material or not.
00:45:35
Speaker
And they're not interested in any details because for their purposes, if somebody has been carrying nuclear material on their person, that's enough to put that person in jail and that's all they're interested about. They are not interested in learning where is that material coming from. And from a nuclear forensics perspective, that is a question you can answer whether or not this is nuclear material or not, you can answer very quickly.
00:46:01
Speaker
If you're asked more specific questions like where does this come from, then the level of complexity of course increases and you will need more time, you will need much more sophisticated analysis, you will need much more serious what they call nuclear forensic libraries.
00:46:23
Speaker
or other some databases or literature searches or whatever have you and that would be much more complicated and less sure. You would have to work harder to provide answers with good level of certainty when you talk about complicated scenarios like this. So I guess the answer to your question is it depends.
International Cooperation Challenges
00:46:49
Speaker
Staying on the topic of international cooperation in nuclear security, how does that work? In particular, I'm wondering, is there any hindrance on cooperation as a result of bad international relations? Countries don't want to give away too much information about their nuclear technology. How does that cooperation work?
00:47:10
Speaker
So I was talking about international cooperation and I said that international cooperation is something that IEA is requiring. And I talked about that part, so I guess that's fine.
00:47:22
Speaker
Then I started talking about, okay, so let's say I'm in a country X and I have some material being transported through my country illegally, let's say, and I intercepted it somehow. First thing I would ask myself is, how do I know that this is material actually not from, it's not from my own country?
00:47:45
Speaker
Is this material ours is a big question that every country is expected to be able to answer. That's not an easy question to answer if you are in a country that has a rich history in nuclear development and big nuclear fuel cycle. So just answering that question might be challenging sometimes.
00:48:10
Speaker
Then if it's not yours, then of course you might want to launch an investigation where it's coming from. And in that case, that same answer, you would ask your neighbor, is that your material or is it some material you have heard about?
00:48:28
Speaker
And of course, that answer would depend on your neighbour and on your relations with that neighbour. And, you know, nuclear security is the responsibility of individual states, which means there is no international... Let's say it may not always be the case that you would get an answer if you ask something like that. As far as cooperation is concerned,
00:48:57
Speaker
It is true that states would sometimes, or may at least in theory, consider that a certain information is something they would not particularly want to share, even though interests of nuclear security internationally maybe dictate otherwise. However, there is also a physics aspect to this.
00:49:20
Speaker
Nuclear fuel cycle is something that is rather, it's a big enterprise across the world, but at the same time it's a limited, it's big but limited. And so as an expert, you know which facility around the world more or less does what.
00:49:40
Speaker
Obviously, you may not be privy to small details, but in general strokes, you have an understanding that, OK, as far as, for example, uranium enrichment facilities are concerned, there is a limited number of them, and they all do enrichment in a certain way. And therefore, if you take a sample or somehow have a sample of uranium particles from engineering and physics,
00:50:10
Speaker
considerations, you can exclude some of them, for example. So even if your international cooperation is not properly fantastic,
00:50:20
Speaker
you can still exclude some potential sources of this material, again, reading information from the sample. Another thing that is often used is what they call age dating in nuclear forensics, which means the termination of the age of the material or the time since this material was last chemically purified.
00:50:46
Speaker
That's important because some countries open nuclear facilities at a certain date, close nuclear facilities at a certain date. And so if you have a sample that is very old and you know that this country only opened that facility, that does similar things 10 years after, then that's your exclusion right there. Oftentimes, international cooperation happens.
00:51:10
Speaker
Sometimes it might be difficult, but even in those cases, there are kind of technical approaches to how to diminish the uncertainty around those things. I realize this is a very general answer, but this is a very general problem. So I guess I would leave it at that.
Securing Nuclear Facilities
00:51:31
Speaker
So you mentioned the four scenarios and we've touched on three of them. But the fourth one, the attacks on nuclear energy facilities, how should a state or a security service go about securing such a site and preventing attacks on them?
00:51:46
Speaker
That is a very big and important question these days. And I would say that before the war in Ukraine, this topic was rather easy to answer on the basis of, let's say, regulatory documents issued by the IAEA. The kind of standard approach was that, okay, we have nuclear security
00:52:16
Speaker
which means we have non-state actors as potential perpetrators. And then security services do their thing and determine what is called DBT, Design Basis Threat, which is basically in the nuclear security world, threat is actually a person or a group of persons with malicious intent.
00:52:38
Speaker
So design basis threat is basically a description of a bunch of perpetrators and their capabilities. Let's say 10 people with rifles or 12 people with rifles and a car or something like that. And that particular GBT is communicated to the operator and the operator's job is to be prepared to basically delay attackers of that kind
00:53:08
Speaker
or below in strength until, so to speak, cavalry arrives. And that was something that was physical protection of nuclear facilities was doing.
00:53:22
Speaker
you would calculate, okay, we have this DBT and we have this facility and this facility has this number of windows and fences and doors and so on, and it would take this amount of time for these people to penetrate this zone at the facility and so on. So that is how it used to be done.
00:53:45
Speaker
What events in Ukraine demonstrated is that suddenly we have to think about threats beyond DBT. And that takes us into a different territory because, like I said, nuclear security is not designed to handle anything done by nation states. Nuclear security, again, is only something that is designed, developed
00:54:13
Speaker
Intended to handle actions of non state actors. So we are having the situation where from the nuclear security perspective.
00:54:26
Speaker
We have extraordinary events happening. And at the same time, during those extraordinary events, and by the way, those extraordinary events don't just include war, they also include things like pandemics and other mass events that we didn't really think about in nuclear security domain before.
00:54:49
Speaker
And the nuclear security personnel, nuclear security systems and measures have to operate during those extraordinary events and still do their job of preventing or delaying the attacks within the DBT. So essentially, if we have a war,
00:55:10
Speaker
It does not mean that nuclear facility personnel can just drop everything and go home because there is war. They still are expected to be able to do their work against threats within the DBT, which is a very, very, very new discussion. There is very little that is written about it in the International Atomic Energy Agency's guidance documents.
00:55:40
Speaker
This is something people are only starting to think about. There is some literature and I contributed a little bit to that literature myself. We don't know what the governments should do yet. This is just something that needs to be looked into and clearly events in Ukraine demonstrate that this is a very urgent matter.
00:56:05
Speaker
Vitaliy, we're talking about a pretty dangerous topic here and the question we like to finish on is what keeps you up at night? What is the night best scenario in your world? Well, all of the above is one answer.
00:56:20
Speaker
But another thing is that there are scenarios that we don't know about or we did not think about yet. Like if you would ask me before February last year what keeps me up at night, I would
00:56:38
Speaker
say something about material outside of regulatory control being collected by terrorist organizations. They probably, I would say that it wouldn't have been even necessarily a nuclear material, a radioactive material can do a lot of damage as well. So at that time, I thought that's what keeps me up at night. Even before, let's say I would give it that answer even before the pandemic. Then pandemic came and suddenly we're talking about that plus pandemic.
00:57:09
Speaker
So these are compounding kind of risks. And then what happened is another completely, I never thought I would be thinking about these things, but a nuclear security at the time of war and attacks on nuclear installations of the kind that are done by nation states, that just never occurred to me that I would be worrying about that.
00:57:34
Speaker
So, I guess at this point, after two big surprises in my thinking, pandemic and war in Ukraine, I would say what keeps me up at night is what's
Concerns on Unforeseen Threats
00:57:46
Speaker
next. What else am I missing here? Well, Vitaliy, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.
00:57:52
Speaker
You've been listening to How to Get on a Watchlist, where we've been discussing how to steal a nuke with nuclear security expert Vitaliy Fotenko. Our producer for this episode was Edwin Tran, and to our audience, as always, thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this show, please consider checking out our other content at Encyclopedia Geopolitica. We'd also appreciate it if you could subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, or support us on Patreon. Thanks for listening.
00:58:25
Speaker
you