Matthew Bunn: U.S. Must Press Efforts to Improve Security of Nuke Materials

Some 25,000 nuclear weapons lie in the arsenals of at least nine countries, but the highest-probability danger the world faces is not a full-scale war. It is, rather, that a small group of terrorists could grab just enough highly enriched uranium from a poorly guarded site and assemble a crude device that could nevertheless devastate a city. The U.S. Congress and the administration of President George W. Bush must pay greater attention to this threat, nuclear security expert Matthew Bunn said at a AAAS briefing on Capitol Hill.

More than 2,300 tons of separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU), enough to make over 200,000 nuclear weapons, are scattered around the globe in dozens of countries, said Bunn, senior research associate at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Many of those sites are poorly protected, he added. Bunn addressed Senate staff members in Washington, D.C., on 4 October, in conjunction with release of the sixth annual joint report of the Kennedy School's Project on Managing the Atom and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Securing the Bomb 2007. Bunn is the author of the report; the briefing was organized by the AAAS Center on Science, Technology and Security Policy.

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