SEOUL, South Korea — Material that can be used to make nuclear bombs is stored in scores of buildings spread across dozens of countries. If even a fraction of it fell into the hands of terrorists, it could be disastrous.
Nearly 60 world leaders who gathered Tuesday in Seoul for a nuclear-security summit agreed to work on securing and accounting for all nuclear material by 2014. But widespread fear lingers about the safety of nuclear material in countries including former Soviet states, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and India.
“It would not take much, just a handful or so of these materials, to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and that’s not an exaggeration, that’s the reality that we face,” U.S. President Barack Obama told world leaders at the meeting.
Building a nuclear weapon isn’t easy, but a bomb similar to the one that obliterated Hiroshima is “very plausibly within the capabilities of a sophisticated terrorist group,” according to Matthew Bunn, an associate professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based nonproliferation group that tracks the security of world nuclear stockpiles, said in a January report that 32 countries have weapons-usable nuclear materials. Some, including Russia and other former Soviet republics, have struggled to secure their stocks.
It’s unclear how nations will enforce the summit’s goal of securing nuclear material by 2014.
Although Pakistan’s small stockpiles of nuclear material are heavily guarded, the nation is believed to be prone to corruption by officials who may have sympathies to hard-line Islamic militants, Bunn said.
Despite New Delhi’s insistence that its nuclear materials are secure, the Nuclear Threat Initiative ranked India among the top five nuclear security risks, saying the government needs more transparency, more independence for its nuclear regulator and tightermeasures to protect nuclear material in transit.
India’s lax security was displayed in at least two incidents in recent years in which radioactive materials - from a hospital and a university laboratory - were discarded and later ended up in a scrap dealer’s shop.
Other recent nuclear scares include a suspected attempt by a crime syndicate in the eastern European country of Moldova to sell weaponsgrade uranium to buyers in North Africa. Officials in the country said that 2.2 pounds of highly enriched uranium remains in criminal hands and is probably in another country.
The investigation provided fresh evidence of a black market in nuclear material probably taken from poorly secured Soviet stockpiles.
Russia has dramatically improved its nuclear security over the past 15 years, Bunn said, but it has the “world’s largest stockpiles in the world’s largest number of buildings and bunkers” as well as corruption and a weak security culture and regulations.
North Korea and Iran are viewed with worry because of fears of nuclear proliferation.
But Bunn said both are “likely small parts of the nuclear terrorism problem.”
“North Korea has only a few bombs’ worth of plutonium in a tightly controlled garrison state,” he said. “Iran has not begun to produce weapons-usable material.”
At least four terror groups, including al-Qaida and Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo doomsdaycult, have expressed a determination to obtain a nuclear weapon, said Kenneth Luongo, co-chairman of the Fissile Materials Working Group, a Washington-based coalition of nuclear security experts.
In other developments, North Korea said Tuesday that it would press ahead with its plan to launch a satellite into orbit next month, rebuffing world leaders who told the country to cancel the launch or face additional sanctions and the loss of food aid.
Information for this article was contributed by Sam Kim and Nirmala George of The Associated Press and by Choe Sang-Hun of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 03/28/2012