International Atomic Energy Agency

With the onset of the Cold War in the early 1950s, the United States sought to change the image of atomic energy from a force of awesome destruction to one of peace and prosperity.

That idea that the world should benefit from peaceful applications of nuclear energy was the center piece of an initiative launched by President Dwight D. Eisenhower that became known as "Atoms for Peace."

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in December 1953, Eisenhower proposed a nuclear strategy that would harness the peaceful applications of atomic energy for countries around the world. Eisenhower reached out to the Soviet Union, saying the time had come for the "two atomic colossi" to work together to build a more peaceful world. Otherwise they were "doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world."

At the core of Eisenhower's plan was a new international atomic energy agency, to be set up under the auspices of the United Nations. According to historian John Krige, Eisenhower called on the major powers, notably the United States and the Soviet Union, to "make joint contributions from their stockpile of normal uranium and fissionable materials" to the new agency. The nuclear material would then be allocated for medicine, agriculture and, above all, "to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world."

The program was also a product of Cold War rivalries, notes Krige. "It was an effort to win hearts and minds and make sure that countries like India, or Iran or Israel, that wanted nuclear technology would get it from the U.S. and not be tempted to get it from the Soviet Union." Krige says the plan also opened new markets for big U.S. corporations such as General Electric and Westinghouse.

Author Catherine Collins describes Atoms for Peace as a "nuclear Marshall Plan which would promote the safe and peaceful uses of atomic energy and at the same time monitor the use of it, so it couldn't be diverted to weapons programs."

Collin notes a p.r. element at work. When the initiative was announced, the United States was engaged in a major build-up of its nuclear arsenal which included controversial tests of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific. "There was grooving concern both inside the U.S. and internationally about the impact of these nuclear tests," says Collins. "So they used Atoms for Peace as a sort of distraction." Atoms for Peace allowed the great powers to maintain their nuclear monopoly while promoting the idea that nuclear energy could transform the global economy and pull developing countries out of poverty.

Krige and other historians have noted the positive legacy of Atoms for Peace. The program was successful in creating the International Atomic Energy Agency, and a web of safeguards which the IAEA imposes on member states. The initiative also planted the seeds for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the cornerstone in global efforts to contain the spread of nuclear weapons.

However, in some ways Atoms for Peace backfired. Several countries that received training and technology transfers through Atoms for Peace eventually used that knowledge platform for illicit weapons programs. India, Pakistan, South Africa and Israel all received direct or indirect support through Atoms for Peace. Each of these countries later built secret nuclear weapons stockpiles.

Collins writes that the chairman of India's atomic energy agency called Atoms for Peace the "bedrock on which India's nuclear program was built."

Oleg Khintsagov left his apartment in southern Russia in February 2006 with 80 grams of highly enriched uranium stuffed in his pocket and a plan to make a million dollars. After slipping past border guards in neighboring Georgia, he traveled to the capital, Tbilisi, to meet a buyer who claimed he was from "a serious Muslim organization." If the buyer was satisfied with the bomb-grade quality of this small sample, Khintsagov promised up to three more kilograms.

The "serious Muslim organization," however, turned out to be a Georgian government agent: While casting about for a buyer on previous trips, Khintsagov had become the target of an elaborate sting operation that involved the FBI, the US Department of Energy and police in the Republic of Georgia. He was arrested, tried in secret and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.

The story of Oleg Khintsagov encapsulates the threat from smugglers secreting nuclear material across the porous borders of the former Soviet Union. This type of nuclear smuggling is a staple of Hollywood films and is often cited as the most dangerous source of nuclear proliferation.

But the Khintsagov case illustrates something else: that nearly all reported smuggling cases of fissile material involve low-level figures and only minute amounts of radioactive material—nowhere close to enough fuel to make a bomb.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Moscow lost direct control over a vast nuclear weapons infrastructure. In 1992, in response to the perceived threat from this material getting into the wrong hands, the International Atomic Energy Agency created the Illicit Trafficking Database to track incidents of nuclear smuggling.

Today, when one imagines the threat posed by nuclear smuggling, it is the cases in this database—many of them widely reported by the press—on which those fears are based. Khintsagov was one of the most recent* smuggling incidents reported on the database. We conducted a review of what those cases tell us about the threat from smuggled plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the essential ingredients of a nuclear bomb. Our review suggests that the cumulative total of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium seized by law enforcement since 1992 is not enough to manufacture one bomb.

Of 18 cases listed on the database, only 13 actually involved smuggling. The remainder were: two cases of missing material from nuclear power facilities, in Japan and New Jersey; radioactive material, including highly enriched uranium, stored in a bank vault in Lithuania; and two cases from Germany, one involving scrap metal contaminated with trace amounts of uranium and the other an apparently accidental theft of a vial containing .001 gram of plutonium.

Of the 13 smuggling incidents, none of the individuals arrested have been linked to a larger terrorist or rogue state smuggling network, according to William Potter, one of the leading experts on the status of the former Soviet nuclear facilities and director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies .

The bulk of cases—9 out of 13—occurred in the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, between 1992 and 1995. No incidents were reported to the IAEA between 1996 and 1998. Since 1999, reports have been less frequent and involved smaller quantities of fissile material than previously.

"There's been a lull in nuclear smuggling activity," says Potter. "The question that is important to address is: Is this apparent lull a function of more effective security or simply the rise of more clever nuclear smugglers, and decisions by governments not to report incidents to the IAEA?"

Potter and other experts we consulted identified additional common characteristics of those cases on the IAEA list:

Most of the uranium seized has not been enriched enough for use in weapons. Only three cases involved uranium enriched to more than 90 percent, the critical level for use in a nuclear weapon. Four other cases involved tiny amounts of plutonium, a fissionable material that results from the enrichment of uranium, and also has either energy or military application.

Since 1992, seizures by law enforcement amount to 3.3 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium and 370 grams of plutonium—which cumulatively are not enough to manufacture one bomb. That requires at minimum some 25 kilograms of uranium enriched to 90 percent or eight kilograms of plutonium, according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Arrests in at least five, or nearly 40 percent, of the incidents were made as the result of sting operations by Georgian, Russian, German and U.S. law enforcement--creating what Rensellaer Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, calls "an artificial market for nuclear material."

All experts concede that what we don't know, of course, is how many smugglers have evaded interception. As Lee, who has been studying the nuclear and narcotics black markets for more than 20 years, puts it: "By definition, successful transactions are not going to come to light. They're going to remain in the shadows. What we don't know, what we don't see, is what worries me most."

* The only more recent case occurred in March 2007, when a steel tube in Germany—part of a load of scrap metal—was discovered to contain a trace amount of highly enriched uranium.