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Introduction: Reducing Excess Stockpiles
With the end of the Cold War, both the United States and Russia were left with thousands of nuclear weapons and hundreds of tons of nuclear material they no longer needed. These huge stockpiles will pose serious proliferation and arms-reduction-reversal risks as long as they remain in readily weapons-usable form. As former Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Victor Mikhailov once said, Real disarmament is possible only if the accumulated huge stocks of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium are destroyed.[1] Yet progress in accomplishing that objective has been modest, to date.
Recognizing the reality that their nuclear stockpiles vastly exceed their post—Cold War military requirements, both the United States and Russia have dismantled thousands of nuclear warheads, designated hundreds of tons of their fissile material stockpiles as being excess to their military needs, and pledged that this material will never again be used in nuclear weapons. The United States has designated 52.5 tons of plutonium as excess, along with 174.3 tons of HEU, for a total of just over 225 tons of excess fissile material.[2] Russia has designated "up to" 50 tons of plutonium and 500 tons of HEU as excess.[3] The United Kingdom has also declared more than 4 tons of plutonium excess.[4]
Unfortunately, both the United States and Russia are still retaining many thousands of assembled nuclear weapons, and stockpiles of weapons-usable nuclear material far larger than those declared excess. The stockpiles of nuclear material still reserved for military use are easily enough to support a rapid return to Cold War levels of armament, and to pose enormous risks of theft. Current programs designed to ensure that excess material is never again used in weapons can make a major contribution to the goals of ensuring the irreversibility of nuclear disarmament and preventing nuclear proliferation but only if they represent a first step toward dealing with much larger portions of the U.S. and Russian fissile material stockpiles in the future. As arms reductions proceed, these stockpiles should be reduced in parallel to roughly equivalent levels in the United States and Russia, suitable to support whatever agreed warhead levels remain, but not large enough to permit a rapid return to Cold War levels of armament.
Reducing stockpiles of plutonium and reducing stockpiles of HEU pose far different challenges. HEU can be blended with other uranium isotopes to make low-enriched uranium (LEU), which cannot sustain an explosive nuclear chain reaction, and which has substantial commercial value as the fuel for most of the worlds nuclear power reactors. Russia is already blending 30 tons a year of its HEU to LEU, for sale to the United States, under the HEU Purchase Agreement a project which provides hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Russia's hard-pressed nuclear industry, while serving as the source of the fuel for 10 percent of the electricity used in the United States. By contrast, nearly all combinations of plutonium isotopes can be used in nuclear weapons, and plutonium mixed with uranium can be separated back out again using unclassified chemical processes so a simple blending process cannot address plutonium's proliferation hazard in the same way.[5] Moreover, because of the safety and security hazards plutonium poses, making reactor fuel from plutonium is more expensive than the fuel is worth, even if the plutonium itself is free and so disposition of excess plutonium, rather than paying for itself and generating a handsome profit, as HEU does, will inevitably require a substantial subsidy.[6] As a result, initiatives to reduce HEU stockpiles have made substantially more progress to date than have efforts to reduce plutonium stockpiles.
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HEU Purchase Agreement Under this agreement, Russia is destroying 30 tons of HEU from dismantled nuclear weapons each year, blending it to proliferation-resistant LEU reactor fuel for sale to the United States. Despite many delays and difficulties in implementation over the years, this is the largest and most successful U.S.-Russian cooperative effort to reduce security risks posed by nuclear weapons and materials. At a single stroke, this arrangement gives Russia a financial incentive to dismantle thousands of nuclear warheads, destroys enough potentially vulnerable nuclear material for thousands of nuclear warheads, creates jobs for thousands of Russian nuclear workers, and provides hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the hard-pressed Russian nuclear complex all at minimal net cost to the U.S. taxpayer, since the material is resold for commercial reactor fuel. |
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U.S.
HEU Disposition The United States is also blending its excess HEU for use as commercial reactor fuel, with over 30 tons of HEU blended down by the end of 2002. |
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Russian Plutonium Disposition The United States, Russia, and other donor states are working together to launch a program to burn Russia's excess weapons plutonium as reactor fuel, beginning toward the end of this decade. |
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U.S.
Plutonium Disposition The United States also plans to convert most of its excess weapons plutonium into reactor fuel, on a timescale roughly parallel to that in Russia. |
Warhead reductions. One item clearly missing from this list of initiatives is reductions in nuclear warhead stockpiles. Unfortunately, while both the United States and Russia have pledged themselves to dismantle thousands of warheads (under unilateral-reciprocal initiatives from 1991-1992), the fact is that no arms control treaty to date has required warhead dismantlement, there is no verification of the warhead dismantlement that is taking place, and no U.S. assistance has gone directly for warhead dismantlement. The HEU Purchase Agreement, as just noted, gives Russia a financial incentive to dismantle warheads in order to get the HEU from them for blending and sale to the United States and the warhead transportation security program funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (described in Warhead Security) provides funding to transport warheads to dismantlement facilities, but there is as yet no actual cooperation on warhead dismantlement. Russian officials have generally judged such cooperation to be too sensitive, and the United States is currently planning to keep most of the assembled warheads it still has.
Links
| Key Resources | |
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Matthew Bunn, Anthony Wier, and John P. Holdren, Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan (Washington, D.C.: Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Project on Managing the Atom, Harvard University, March 2003). |
| This new report assesses the U.S. budgets for programs to reduce Russian excess nuclear stockpiles (Download 538K PDF), examines how much has been accomplished in reducing nuclear stockpiles to date (Download 847K PDF), and makes recommendations for next steps (Download 443K PDF). | |
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Matthew Bunn,
"The Current Response: Reducing Excess Stockpiles,"
in The Next Wave: Urgently Needed New Steps to Control
Warheads and Fissile Material (Washington, D.C.:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Project
on Managing the Atom, Harvard University, 2000), pp.
57-73. Download 835K PDF |
| This portion of the report describes the plutonium and HEU disposition efforts that were underway as of early 2000. For a discussion of the quantities of material involved, see particularly the sidebar Enormous Excess Stockpiles And Still Larger Remaining Military Stocks, pp. 54-55. | |
|
Matthew Bunn, "Urgently
Needed New Steps: Reducing Excess Stockpiles,"
in The Next Wave: Urgently Needed New Steps to Control
Warheads and Fissile Material (Washington, D.C.:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Project
on Managing the Atom, Harvard University, 2000), pp.
98-106. Download 2.0M PDF |
| This part of the report describes a number of possible approaches to expanding and accelerating disposition of HEU and plutonium. | |
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U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Committee on International Security and Arms Control, Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994). |
| While now almost a decade old, this report continues to provide an excellent introduction to the management of excess stockpiles of plutonium and HEU, as well as a variety of aspects of securing stockpiles and building a transparency and monitoring regime for warheads and fissile materials. This report outlined many of the key criteria that are still being used to guide plutonium disposition programs (including the spent fuel standard), and called for further pursuit of two main approaches to disposition use of the plutonium as fuel in existing reactors, and mixing it with high-level wastes for immobilization and disposal. | |
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U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Committee on International Security and Arms Control, Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium: Reactor-Related Options (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1995). |
| This follow-up report provides more detail on specific reactor options for burning plutonium, and on the option of vitrifying excess plutonium with high-level reactor wastes. | |
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Robert L. Civiak, Closing
the Gaps: Securing Highly Enriched Uranium in the Former
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.:
Federation of American Scientists, May, 2002). Download 2.6M PDF |
| Provides a useful overview of possible approaches to accelerating HEU blend-down. | |
| Agreements and Documents | |
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Executive Office of the
President, Plan for Securing Nuclear Weapons, Material,
and Expertise of the States of the Former Soviet Union,
March 2003. Download 578K PDF |
| Section 1205 of Public Law 107-107, the FY 2002 Defense Authorization Act, required the President, in consultation with all the relevant agencies, to submit to Congress the administration's plan for eliminating the threat of unsecured nuclear weapons, material and expertise. Included in the plan are descriptions of programs to reduce weapons-grade material (such as the plutonium disposition program) beginning on page 14, along with summaries of the programs' accomplishments and key milestones, analyses of the their future and exit strategies, and summaries of recent funding. | |
| FOOTNOTES | |
| [1] | Address to the International Atomic Energy Agency, quoted by TASS, September 22, 1992. |
| [2] | U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Materials Disposition, Feed Materials Planning Basis for Surplus Weapons-Usable Plutonium Disposition (Washington, D.C.: DOE, April 1997). |
| [3] | Boris Yeltsin, Message from the President of the Russian Federation to the Forty-First Session of the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency, September 26, 1997. The actual Russian language was that "up to" these figures had "become available through the nuclear disarmament process" and would be "remove[d] gradually from military nuclear programs," with the pace of this "dependent both on progress with the dismantling of nuclear weapons pursuant to existing agreements on nuclear disarmament, and on the creation of the necessary storage facilities for the material released from military use." |
| [4] | The United Kingdom has declared 0.3 tons of weapon-grade plutonium, and 4.1 tons of non-weapon-grade plutonium excess to its military needs, along with 9,000 tons of natural or low-enriched uranium that had been held in military stocks for fueling military production reactors, and is placing these materials under EURATOM safeguards; they are available for IAEA safeguarding, but the IAEA has not chosen to safeguard it because no funding is available to do so. These are from declared total stockpiles outside of safeguards of 7.6 tons of plutonium, 21.9 tons of HEU, and 15,000 tons of natural and low-enriched uranium. All of the HEU is to be held in military stockpiles for use either as weapons or as naval fuel. See "Communication Received from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: United Kingdom Fissile Material Transparency, Safeguards, and Irreversibility Initiatives," INFCIRC/570, (Vienna, Austria: IAEA, September 21, 1998). |
| [5] | See discussion in Technical
Background. |
| [6] | See, for example, discussion in U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Committee on International Security and Arms Control, Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994). |
Written by Matthew Bunn. Last updated by Matthew Bunn on October 3, 2003.
The Securing the Bomb section of the NTI website is produced by the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) for NTI, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of and has not been independently verified by NTI or its directors, officers, employees, agents. MTA welcomes comments and suggestions at atom@harvard.edu. Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.