WASHINGTON -- Three leading experts on proliferation yesterday called for tighter international controls aimed at stemming the illicit trafficking of nuclear materials and know-how (see GSN, April 2).
(Apr. 7) -
Former top Pakistani nuclear scientist and proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan. A panel of experts said yesterday that increased international controls are needed to prevent similar trafficking of nuclear materials and expertise (Farooq Naeem/Getty Images).
Speaking at a two-day conference on nonproliferation, David Albright laid out a laundry list of global measures that in many instances have failed to prevent nations from acquiring, or nearly acquiring, a nuclear-weapon capability.
"What didn't work?" said Albright, president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security. For starters, he said, the ability of former top Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan to lead a clandestine nuclear network until it was uncovered roughly five years ago demonstrates that "what didn't work were export controls."
Laws governing sales of sensitive technology to foreign clients "didn't seem to bother or even worry most of these participants in the Khan network," operating from nations including Switzerland, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, Albright said. These countries had weak or nonexistent export controls; in the case of Malaysia, the absence of such laws continues even today, he said.
Additionally, states seeking a weapons capability have flouted International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, Albright said. The nuclear watchdog's nonproliferation measures involve inspections of fissionable material, nuclear facilities and related activities.
"Traditional safeguards were defeated by Iraq in the 1980s, and the IAEA launched a Herculean effort to strengthen safeguards in the 1990s," he said. "But many countries didn't implement them. And who were some of those countries? Libya [and] Syria -- the ones that figured that they could get away with it" (see GSN, April 7).
Another area of concern has been the failure of legal prosecutions for figures involved in the Khan network or other trafficking schemes, he said. Khan was placed under house arrest but has never faced prosecution, and many of his associates have similarly skirted serious penalties (see GSN, March 13 and Feb. 18, 2005).
"You need to create a deterrent" for individuals weighing whether to engage in nuclear smuggling, Albright said. "If you're going to spend some time in jail before your trial and that's it, [or] if you're going to have maybe part of the money you earned illegally taken away, you can live with that. And many of these people never went to trial."
Prosecutions have proven difficult to achieve because, in most cases, "these are transnational crimes being tried in national court systems," Albright said. That has posed thorny legal struggles for "very dedicated prosecutors" in South Africa, Germany, Switzerland and other nations in which traffickers have operated, he said. A huge hurdle has been compelling witnesses to testify, particularly when these individuals live in other countries, according to Albright.
He called for a global effort to define nuclear trafficking as a breach of fundamental international laws and norms.
"If you're going to go out and sell the wherewithal to kill hundreds of thousands of people, whether it happens or not ... that should be a crime against humanity," Albright said.
Another speaker on the same discussion panel at the conference, sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, voiced the perspective of the technical industry, where companies selling dual-use products have at times found themselves on the front lines of combating traffickers.
"In the last six months, I have seen a considerable increase of procurement attempts which -- as we are told by government authorities -- are for a nuclear program," said Ralf Wirtz, head of global trade control at Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum. The German company exports vacuum pump technologies with legitimate uses in green energy, semiconductor devices, refrigerators and air conditioners -- but also in uranium enrichment, he said.
Wirtz described one example in which a European company found that Iran appeared to be circumventing export controls to obtain parts useful for building centrifuges. End users such as the Persian Gulf nation appear to be employing middlemen -- otherwise-legitimate trading companies in China and elsewhere -- "which do not raise any red flags" at the vendors selling dual-use items, he said (see related GSN story, today).
"The procurement patterns have become smarter, with a tendency to make purchase attempts via legitimate end users, thus [they are] much harder to detect," Wirtz said.
The speakers agreed that remnants of the Khan network might continue to operate undetected and that similar -- if smaller-scale -- enterprises also could be active.
Albright called on the U.S. government to work more effectively with the technical industry to share information that could help track down and prosecute bad actors.
"What Ralf is talking about is companies sharing their own information with the U.S. government, without fear of being prosecuted for that information, or investigated," Albright said. He called such fears "a real problem" that must be resolved "in the short term" to make serious headway in cracking clandestine nuclear networks.
"I've seen it work in other countries where it provides just the kind of information you want to bust up these illicit trade operations -- the names of the trading companies, the names of the people, the phone numbers, their addresses," Albright said.
Such vital data "just sits unused in this country, and yet we are one of the major targets of proliferants," he added.
A third panelist, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen of Harvard University, expanded a bit on his call last week for the International Atomic Energy Agency to open its own intelligence unit on illicit nuclear activities. He and others have described bureaucratic and secrecy impediments that make it difficult for the U.N. agency to uncover hidden nuclear activities on an urgent basis.
"If we're serious about multilateralism [and] if we're serious about trying to improve the IAEA's efforts ... the go-it-alone model, which is essentially what we have, is fraught with a lot of peril," he said. "Think of how late in the process we caught the A.Q. Khan [network], the Libya program, the Syria facility, etc."
A longtime CIA intelligence officer and former director of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Energy Department, Mowatt-Larssen couched the need for IAEA intelligence capabilities in the context of a new approach toward nuclear weapons outlined by President Barack Obama in a major speech this week in Prague.
There is a "new paradigm" in which "the powers of state [are] transferred to the individuals" in the form of potential access to weapons of mass destruction and global communications, Mowatt-Larssen said. "As long as we've got extremism in the world and groups like al-Qaeda that have declared their intent to use those tools, we're at a much graver risk.
"And A.Q. Khan," he added, "essentially was ... the single most important light that's shining on ways that we can attack this problem and [find] new approaches in order to do it more effectively than we have in the past."