Nuclear Insecurity in the Post-soviet States

. Dr. William C. Potter is the Director of the Program for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. This essay is his prepared testimony submitted to the Subcommittee on International Security, International Organizations, and Human Rights of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs on June 27, 1994. Thank you very much Mr. Chairman and members of the committee for the opportunity to present testimony on the subject "Internat ional Organized Crime and Nuclear Security.” My remarks focus specifically on the possible diversion of fissile material in the former Soviet Union and its export abroad. In my testimony before this committee last September, I was able to report that most of the sensationalist accounts of black market activities involving nuclear materials of NIS origin had not been substantiated. There was no hard evidence, for example, that nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon components, or significant quantities of weapons-grade fissile material had been smuggled out of the successor states. Although I believe that those earlier evaluations remain essentially correct, I doubt if that will remain the case much longer. My growing pessimism is due to: (1) credible reports--for the first time--that weapons-grade plutonium may have been smuggled out of Russia; (2) evidence of serious deficiencies in the national safeguards system in Russia and the other successor states which possess nuclear assets; and (3) growing pressures in Russia to subordinate the objective of stringent export controls to those of hard currency exports and personal profit.