Global Fissile Material Report 2009: A Path to Nuclear Disarmament

Verified warhead dismantlement. A critical verification challenge will be to ensurethat, once a state has declared its nuclear-weapon and component stockpiles, none oftheir contained fissile materials go astray before the fissile materials are converted tounclassified forms and placed under international monitoring pending disposition.Chapter 5 reviews and builds on a 1990s U.S.-Russian “lab-to-lab” project that attemptedto devise minimally intrusive approaches to verifying warhead dismantlement. Akey addition is the early selection by international inspectors at deployment and storageareas of a random sample of warheads and components of each declared type astemplates to provide radiation “fingerprints” for comparison with warheads and componentsdeclared later to be of the same types. This allows warheads to be identifiedwithout revealing detailed nuclear weapon design information. The chapter also findsthat the verification of nuclear-weapon dismantlement could be greatly simplified ifthe quantities and isotopic compositions of the plutonium and HEU in each type ofnuclear warhead were declassified.Disposition of HEU and plutonium stocks. Nuclear disarmament would release about900 tons of HEU and 150 tons of plutonium currently in nuclear warheads and the associatedproduction complexes. If the United States, Russia and the United Kingdomwere to follow France’s example and convert their naval-propulsion reactors to low-enricheduranium fuel, an additional 200 tons of HEU in naval reserves—enough to make8,000 nuclear weapons—could also be eliminated. Chapter 6 discusses the challengeof doing so.There is ample precedent for the disposition of HEU from weapons. In the 1990s Russiaand the U.S. together declared excess for military purposes about 700 tons of HEU.Almost 500 tons of this excess HEU, mostly Russian, has been down-blended to makelow-enriched uranium (LEU) to fuel nuclear power reactors and the rest will be. In contrast,none of the about 90 tons of weapon-grade plutonium declared excess by Russiaand the United States has yet been eliminated. Plans to use this plutonium to fabricatemixed plutonium-uranium oxide (MOX) for reactor fuel have made little progress whilecosts have dramatically increased in both states. It is time to suspend this effort andto consider alternative disposition options that would cover both current and futureplutonium declared excess. In the meantime, all excess HEU and weapons plutoniumstocks and associated disposition facilities should to be put under IAEA monitoring.This would establish a basis for arrangements that could apply to other weapon stateswhen they declare fissile material excess and dispose of it.Two hundred and fifty tons of separated civilian—but still weapon-usable—plutoniumalso have to be disposed of to make nuclear disarmament more irreversible. The UnitedKingdom, which owns about one third of this separated civilian plutonium, has justbegun to discuss how to dispose of it. The United Kingdom should end efforts to getits troubled reprocessing plant back into operation since success would only make itsplutonium disposition problem larger.Verification of a ban on the production of fissile material for weapons. A verifiableFissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) that ends all production of fissile material forweapons would be an essential building block for a nuclear-disarmament regime and islikely to be the first international agreement along that path. A detailed discussion ofboth the scope and verification of a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty was the centerpieceof Global Fissile Material Report 2008, with the main ideas of that report summarizedhere in Chapter 7. Global Fissile Material Report 2009