Nuclear Security Summit Research Articles

DEVELOPMENT OF A BIOLOGICAL AEROSOL DETECTOR USING LASER-INDUCED FLUORESCENCE AND A PARTICLE COLLECTION SYSTEM

A real-time biological aerosol fluorescence detector was designed for monitoring aerosols in the atmosphere. The operating principles of the current biological aerosol monitoring system (BAMS) include the measurement of optically determined single particle properties, two fluorescence bands, and a scattering signal. Furthermore, the development of an algorithm to significantly increase the biological aerosol discrimination is described, which uses the results of the experimental evaluation of a number of aerosols in an evaluation chamber in the laboratory. The detector was applied to seasonal pollen, Asian dust, seawater environment, industrial zones, and residential areas in Korea. Applications of the device include all aspects of biological aerosol monitoring, including use as a biological agent trigger and as a hazardous environment monitor. The detectors were used in various laboratories as an ambient biological aerosol monitor and in various fields as a fast biological threat agent trigger in the 2010 G20 Seoul Summit and 2012 Nuclear Security Summit.

Outline of Nuclear Industry Summit in Conjunction with Hague Nuclear Security Summit and Industry’s Efforts

オバマ米大統領のプラハ演説での提案により開催に至った核セキュリティサミットは，オランダのハーグで第3回が開催された。この政府レベルの核セキュリティサミットのサイドイベントとして，実際に核物質を扱い管理する原子力産業界のセキュリティサミット（核セキュリティ産業界サミット）がアムステルダムで開催されたことから，核セキュリティ産業界サミットの概要とサミットを通じた原子力産業界における核セキュリティに関する取組について報告する。

What Happened to the Soviet Superpower’s Nuclear Arsenal? Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit

Twenty years ago Russia and fourteen other newly-independent states emerged from the ruins of the Soviet empire, many as nations for the first time in history. As is typical in the aftermath of the collapse of an empire, this was followed by a period of chaos, confusion, and corruption. As the saying went at the time, “everything is for sale.” At that same moment, as the Soviet state imploded, 35,000 nuclear weapons remained at thousands of sites across a vast Eurasian landmass that stretched across eleven time zones. Today, fourteen of the fifteen successor states to the Soviet Union are nuclear weapons-free. When the U.S.S.R. disappeared, 3,200 strategic nuclear warheads remained in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, most of them atop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that stood on alert, ready to be fired at targets in the U.S. Today, every one of the nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus has been deactivated and returned to Russia, where they were dismantled and the nuclear material in the warheads blended down to produce fuel for civilian reactors. Strategic nuclear weapons are nuclear warheads aimed at an adversary’s nuclear weapons, cities and military infrastructure. Typically, they are large in yield and heavy. Of greater interest to terrorists, however, were the former U.S.S.R’s 22,000 tactical nuclear weapons with smaller yields and shorter ranges. These were designed primarily for battlefield use, with some small enough to fit into a duffel bag. Today, all of these have also been returned to Russia, leaving zero nuclear weapons in any other state of the former Soviet Union. Former Czech president Vaclav Havel observed about the rush of events in the 1990s: “things have changed so fast we have not yet taken time to be astonished.” Perhaps the most astonishing fact about the past twenty years is something that did not happen. Despite the risk realistically estimated by former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in 3 What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal? Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit December 1991, two decades have passed without the discovery of a single nuclear weapon outside Russia. This paper will address the question: how did this happen? Looking ahead, it will consider what clues we can extract from the success in denuclearizing fourteen post-Soviet states that can inform our non-proliferation and nuclear security efforts in the future. These clues may inform leaders of the U.S., Russia, and other responsible nations attending the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit on March 26-27, 2012. The paper will conclude with specific recommendations, some exceedingly ambitious that world leaders could follow to build on the Seoul summit’s achievements against nuclear terrorism in the period before the next summit in 2014. One of these would be to establish a Global Alliance Against Nuclear Terrorism.

THE HUMAN DIMENSION OF NUCLEAR SECURITY

The Nuclear Security Summit in Washington of April 2010 mentioned the importance of the human element in contributing to nuclear security. Its documents referred to the improvement of a security cu...

"Defector," "Refugee," or "Migrant"? North Korean Settlers in South Korea's Changing Social Discourse

IntroductionOn February 27, 2012, following lawmaker Park Sun-young's2 eleven-day hunger strike highlighting the human rights issue relating to Korean repatriation, the South Korean Parliament passed a resolution urging China to discontinue the practice of returning Korean border crossers. This action has triggered intensified international attention toward the human rights of Koreans, with the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs subsequently approving the extension of the Korean Human Rights Act, last reauthorized in 2008, until 2017. The British deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, also applied symbolic pressure on Korea and China by meeting Korean settlers during a visit to South Korea for the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit in March. Given the climate in South Korea as it faces two major elections amidst growing uncertainty across East Asia in the wake of the emergence of the Kim Jong-un regime following the death of Kim Jong-il in December 2011, it is perhaps not surprising that the Korea issue is being revisited in 2012. In the bitter competition between the two opposite camps (conservative versus democratic) in the run-up to the two elections in the South, the renewed attention to the Korean issue has been used to reframe existing indicators that distinguished positions within the remnants of the Cold War legacy-especially those that capitalized on fostering anti-North Korean sentiments. Aligning with domestic circumstances, the United States has added its voice by pressuring Korea and China in the language of human rights, foregrounding humanitarian imperialism, the salient feature of Western discourse in international affairs and post-Cold War policy,3 as a prominent component in the geopolitical matrix of East Asia. Consequently, contrary to the dominant tendency of previous years, 2012 sees Korean border crossers and arrivals in the South reconstructed as purely victims of human rights violations and political refugees. This paper brings this changing understanding and naming of Korean arrivals within the transient social discourse of South Korea into question, and argues that specific eras separate and interpellate Korean arrivals through different names and roles depending on the particular and interests of the time. Such interpellation instrumentalizes the figure of the migrant in the process of stabilizing South Korean society.North Korean arrivals to the South have been defined and understood in various ways over time: from heroic figures to economic migrants. Given the systematic and ideological confrontation following the 1953 separation, strong Cold War ideology governed the two Koreas and produced those people that, to either side, would be labeled as defectors. The number of Korean arrivals to the South was 607 for the period between 1953 and 1989, resulting in their rarity being highly valued and fully utilized by the South Korean government in the ideological war. However, the number has dramatically increased since the mid-1990s, coinciding with the gradual replacement of the Cold War era by a post-Cold War ideology across the Korean Peninsula. From 1990 to 1993, only 34 Koreans came to the South, but the next five years (1994-1998) saw 306 new arrivals, with the figure radically increasing over the subsequent three years, reaching 1,043. From 2001 onward, more than 1,000 Koreans arrived each year, with the total number peaking at 23,000 in 2011.4 This circumstantial change has led to their redefinition from the North's soldier to a variety of different names such as defected ethnic Korean, North Korean refugee, defected Korean resident, and more recently North Korean migrant.5Following the trajectory of this name giving, this article identifies three different historical stages in the processes of situating the Korean arrivals' position in South Korean social discourse. …

Possibility and Limitation of Global Nuclear Security Governance : Focusing on the Korea’s Role in the Second Nuclear Security Summit

Possibility and Limitation of Global Nuclear Security Governance : Focusing on the Korea’s Role in the Second Nuclear Security Summit

North Korea Conundrum Overshadows Nuclear Summit

Talks at the Nuclear Security Summit were overshadowed by North Korea's plans to launch a rocket that the United States and others assert would be a long-range ballistic missile test in violation of U.N. sanctions.

How can countries ensure that the Nuclear Security Summit does not lose momentum and become just another gathering?

In 2009, President Barack Obama announced from Prague’s Hradcany square that “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security” was nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, and world leaders listened. A year later, 47 of these leaders responded to Obama’s call “to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years” when they gathered in Washington, DC, for the first Nuclear Security Summit. Since then, nearly 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) have been removed from 10 countries. And both Russia and the United States have worked hard on HEU destruction efforts—48 metric tons and 7 metric tons, respectively. In March, 50 nations are taking part in the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit. But how can these countries ensure that the momentum toward a global nuclear security culture isn’t lost, and the Seoul summit does not devolve into just another gathering? Three authors explore this question: from the United States, Sharon Squassoni; from Turkey, Mustafa Kibaroglu (2012); and from India, Rajiv Nayan (2012). The authors are nuclear security experts and members of the Fissile Materials Working Group, which publishes a monthly column at www.thebulletin.org.

How can countries ensure that the Nuclear Security Summit does not lose momentum and become just another gathering?

In 2009, President Barack Obama announced from Prague’s Hradcany square that “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security” was nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, and world leaders listened. A year later, 47 of these leaders responded to Obama’s call “to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years” when they gathered in Washington, DC, for the first Nuclear Security Summit. Since then, nearly 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) have been removed from 10 countries. And both Russia and the United States have worked hard on HEU destruction efforts—48 metric tons and 7 metric tons, respectively. In March, 50 nations are taking part in the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit. But how can these countries ensure that the momentum toward a global nuclear security culture isn’t lost, and the Seoul summit does not devolve into just another gathering? Three authors explore this question: from the United States, Sharon Squassoni (2012); from Turkey, Mustafa Kibaroglu (2012); and from India, Rajiv Nayan. The authors are nuclear security experts and members of the Fissile Materials Working Group, which publishes a monthly column at www.thebulletin.org.

How can countries ensure that the Nuclear Security Summit does not lose momentum and become just another gathering?

In 2009, President Barack Obama announced from Prague’s Hradcany square that “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security” was nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, and world leaders listened. A year later, 47 of these leaders responded to Obama’s call “to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years” when they gathered in Washington, DC, for the first Nuclear Security Summit. Since then, nearly 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) have been removed from 10 countries. And both Russia and the United States have worked hard on HEU destruction efforts—48 metric tons and 7 metric tons, respectively. In March, 50 nations are taking part in the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit. But how can these countries ensure that the momentum toward a global nuclear security culture isn’t lost, and the Seoul summit does not devolve into just another gathering? Three authors explore this question: from the United States, Sharon Squassoni (2012); from Turkey, Mustafa Kibaroglu; and from India, Rajiv Nayan (2012). The authors are nuclear security experts and members of the Fissile Materials Working Group, which publishes a monthly column at www.thebulletin.org.

Multilateral cooperation and the prevention of nuclear terrorism: pragmatism over idealism

The second Nuclear Security Summit on 26–27 March 2012 in Seoul provides an important opportunity to gauge international consensus on the threat posed by nuclear terrorism, and to evaluate progress in the development of multilateral cooperative efforts to prevent it. However, the ‘nuclear security’ agenda has long been complicated by the complexity of the issues it covers and diverging perceptions of the risks and threats in this area. Further complications involve the politics that have constrained the development of formal cooperative approaches and the patchwork nature of the existing multilateral policy architecture. While the Summit is unlikely to go very far in mitigating these complications, it will nonetheless provide impetus to multilateral efforts to strengthen the international regulative framework in this area and, in the process, to develop the norm of nuclear security. Beyond Seoul several priorities stand out. Nuclear safety and nuclear security need to be approached in a more balanced way by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and it must also be allowed to adopt a more joined-up, and less stove-piped, approach to nuclear governance across the safeguards, safety and security fields. Developing countries that are concerned by growing demands for strengthened nuclear security arrangements need greater reassurance from those proposing them that these will not undermine their rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue civil applications of nuclear energy. Greater progress also needs to be made in universalizing the key nuclear security conventions and their amendments, and attention should be given to how momentum and high-level political buy-in to the nuclear security agenda can be maintained in the future both as part of, and beyond, the Nuclear Security Summit process.

Steps toward increased nuclear transparency

While there is no doubt that some information on nuclear weapons must remain undisclosed, excessive nuclear secrecy hinders progress toward the twin goals of improved nuclear materials security and the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide. With the March 2012 Nuclear Security Summit afoot and the 2015 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in sight, now is the time for nuclear weapons states to implement new transparency measures such as declaring additional information regarding the capabilities, size, and purpose of weapons stockpiles and fissile materials, and providing the means to verify a larger portion of those declarations. Increased transparency can reduce uncertainty, build trust, establish baselines for future reductions, and place political pressure on other states possessing nuclear weapons to take similar steps. Because they possess the vast majority of nuclear weapons and fissile material in the world, the United States and Russia should lead the way by creating a model for declarations, including non-deployed and nonstrategic weapons. Declarations of nuclear weapons and fissile materials could be verified bilaterally, through new multilateral agreements and a multilateral inspections agency or by expanding the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Some transparency actions can be taken immediately, either unilaterally or reciprocally. Increased transparency can provide short-term benefits for some states and establish a foundation for additional bilateral and multilateral nuclear arms reductions. Transparency can be embraced by non-nuclear weapons states and states with nuclear weapons outside of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty without undertaking new treaty obligations.

The Emerging Nuclear Security Regime: Challenges Ahead

Several measures are being initiated by the international community to secure sensitive materials. Al Qaeda's open interest in acquiring nuclear weapons and the rise of terrorist activity in nuclear-armed Pakistan have triggered a global interest in the need to secure nuclear weapons and materials. In April 2010 President Obama invited some key countries and international organisations in Washington to frame a new regime for nuclear security. The emerging regime includes some older initiatives as well as some new mechanisms, and it must address a number of issues. These range from defining nuclear security threats to finding the right kind of institution promoting nuclear security. The enthusiasm for the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit will depend on how the participating countries and the international community deal with these challenges.

Nuclear security after Fukushima

Among the many ramifications of the nuclear accident at Fukushima in March 2011, one of the less discussed has been the impact on the agenda for the Seoul 2012 Nuclear Security Summit (NSS). The first summit, held in Washington in 2010, focused exclusively on preventing nuclear terrorism – that is, stopping terrorists acquiring enough fissile material to make a nuclear bomb. No nuclear summit so soon after Fukushima would look credible if it ignored the issue, and the South Korean government has said that nuclear safety will be on the 2012 agenda. But for some experts, it is crucial that the subject of reactor safety does not distract governments from work to prevent terrorists getting hold of nuclear material, since an act of nuclear terrorism could be even more damaging than a Fukushima-style accident.

Policy or Posturing

On 6 April 2010 the long-awaited nuclear posture review report was released, fulfilling a promise from as the White House blog proclaimed.1 A year earlier, in Prague, President Barack Obama had pledged that the United States would take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons. On the 40th anniversary of the entry into force of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty in March 2010, Obama pledged that the forthcoming review would move beyond outdated Cold War thinking and reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons in US strategy.2 The administration clearly saw the review as a key element of the positive narrative regarding US nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament policy that it wanted to convey prior to the Washington nuclear security summit in April and the nonproliferation treaty review conference in New York in May. Now that these major multilateral events have successfully been held and the anniversary of the review's release has passed, it is worth considering its real impact on the international strategic environment. Did the review represent a genuine reform of US nuclear policy or was it more of a public relations exercise designed to position the US favourably in the context of a major meeting of the nonproliferation treaty parties? This article will consider the review from an international perspective, and in particular how its content responds to the obligations of states party to the treaty and the decisions of its quinquennial review conferences. The review, as an authoritative policy statement of the world's leading nuclear power, was addressed to a foreign as much as a domestic audience. The nature and timing of the review was intended to influence states active in international nuclear affairs in a manner coincident with US policy objectives. Issued a month before the opening of the May 2010 review conference of the nonproliferation treaty, and after a decade of difficulties for this core international security treaty, the nuclear posture review was undoubtedly going to have an impact on the perceptions of participating states as well as on the atmosphere of the conference itself.Despite the timing of its release and its deployment as a public diplomacy vehicle in the lead-up to the US -hosted nuclear security summit and treaty review conference, the nuclear review was nevertheless very much a home-grown product. It had domestic roots as a congressionally mandated review of all aspects of US nuclear weapons policy and posture, as well as the related infrastructure of the nuclear weapons complex. An early decision was taken to issue the review solely in an unclassified form, thus ensuring full transparency of the results to the public, both domestic and foreign. The Obama administration was not going to repeat the mistake of the previous administration, which conducted a classified nuclear posture review in 2001 and saw excerpts of it leaked, including controversial text on nuclear deterrence and preemption that provoked international consternation. The 2010 review was designed to be viewed as a progressive statement on US nuclear weapons policy that would complement the administration's foreign policy aims of strengthening the treaty and enlisting international support in shoring up the global nonproliferation regime. At the same time, it was also meant to send a reassuring message to US allies and partners who rely on extended deterrence that American commitments are as solid as ever. Finally, it was intended to placate various domestic constituencies with vested interests in the continuation of nuclear forces and the associated nuclear weapons complex. Given the inherent tensions, if not downright incompatibility, among these various aims, it is not surprising that in the end the review delivered a rather mixed message to the international audience.The salient issues of the review from an international perspective were the definition of the role for nuclear weapons in US strategy; the nature of the security assurances the US was prepared to give to non-nuclear weapons states; what action the US would take on outstanding nuclear disarmament commitments; what would be done to strengthen nonproliferation and nuclear security; and how the US would approach relations with other nuclear weapons-possessing states. …

The Promises of Prague versus Nuclear Realities: From Bush to Obama

Contrasting the nuclear guidance documents and public statements of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations reveals significant differences in American nuclear policy, but also surprising continuities. Bush's aim was never disarmament, but rather extending the life and potential role of American nuclear weaponry. An evaluation of the guidance documents that developed this approach, and major development programmes like the Reliable Replacement Warhead, shows that the Bush strategy was an attempted quiet revolution that foreshadowed a new nuclear era in which the former ‘weapon of last resort’ became a usable and necessary war-fighting device. In contrast, Barack Obama promised significant changes in American nuclear policy. In his April 2009 speech in Prague, Obama offered a vision of a transformed international security context and the goal of total nuclear disarmament. Although he made eventual nuclear disarmament the central goal of American nuclear weapons policy, Obama stopped short of change on critical issues that have lingered since the Cold War. A moderate NPR and New START Treaty, together with pragmatic developments at the Nuclear Security Summit and the 2010 NPT Review Conference, as well as on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, indicate that the role of nuclear weapons in American security policy has changed less than is widely assumed. Obama has pursued a policy of nuclear balance, with incremental steps toward disarmament accompanied by measures to retain American primacy and nuclear options.

US state crimes related to nuclear weapons: Is there hope for change in the Obama administration?

Given the long history of US state crimes related to nuclear weapons and the aggressive unilateralism of the George W. Bush administration that compounded these crimes, the election of Barack Obama created a “hope” for “change” in American nuclear weapons policy. While it is too early to render any conclusive judgment, we offer a preliminary assessment of the Obama record with regard to nuclear weapons based on a number of significant policy statements made and official actions taken, including Obama's 2009 Prague speech, the signing of the new START agreement in April 2010, the administration's 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, the Washington DC Nuclear Security Summit, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference of 2010. Although the new administration has taken some steps to reduce the likelihood of the use or threat to use nuclear weapons, we conclude that under President Obama the US continues to be in violation of the solemn legal obligation to disarm as imposed by the NPT treaty of 1968. We also briefly note some of the structural and cultural factors related to the American empire that hinders any president from changing American nuclear weapons policy.

NUCLEAR SECURITY: NEW CHALLENGES, NEW ANSWERS

The ways of ensuring the security of nuclear materials and countering nuclear terrorism were the key issues of the two most significant nonproliferation events in 2010 – the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington and the NPT Review Conference in New York. What is the link between nuclear nonproliferation and security of nuclear materials? How different are the Russian and U.S. approaches to these problems? And how could contemporary Russia adopt the international experience? These and many other questions were addressed by the participants of the round table discussion: Professor, Head of the 12th Central Research Institute of the Russian Ministry of Defense Rear Admiral Sergey Pertsev; Deputy Head of the Department of Security and Disarmament of the Russian Foreign Ministry Oleg Rozhkov; Deputy Director of the Moscow Office of the U.S. Department of Energy Jon Shearer; Deputy Head of the International Cooperation Department of the State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom Alexey Ubeev; Director of ANO Aspekt-Conversion (Center for Cooperation in Conversion for Decommissioning of Weapons and Military Hardware) Evgeny Maslin; Consultant of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. (Moscow Office) Dmitry Kovchegin; Head of the Laboratory in the Nuclear Safety Institute (IBRAE) of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Antipov; Senior Vice President of PIR Center Lt. Gen. (rtd) Gennady Evstafiev; PIR Center President Vladimir Orlov.

FINDING A BALANCE BETWEEN ASSURANCES AND ABOLITION

This article analyzes South Korean views of the April 2010 US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and explores the review's impact on South Korean domestic political debates on policy toward North Korea and the credibility and value of the US-South Korean alliance. Despite specific concerns raised by individual specialists in South Korea, the contents of the NPR have not sparked significant public debate there and have enjoyed acceptance by the current government in Seoul—perhaps unsurprising, given the strength of the US-South Korean alliance. The article also explores the impact of the NPR on US-South Korean nonproliferation cooperation in the context of the upcoming negotiations between Washington and Seoul on a nuclear cooperation agreement and in the context of South Korea's decision to host the Nuclear Security Summit in 2012, a meeting that among other benefits will provide the two countries a unique opportunity to strengthen their collaboration on nuclear security issues and global nonproliferation policy.

Contributions of an International Nuclear Court to the nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament system

The need for a new international organisation dealing with nonproliferation and disarmament issues has been demonstrated in different international events. In the later Nuclear Security Summit of April 2010, a proposal to establish a nuclear court or tribunal was revealed as one of the concrete steps that may enhance nuclear security and counter nuclear terrorism. Most recently, the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament called for the establishment of a new international organisation to evaluate nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament efforts by countries. The International Nuclear Law architecture still contains some gaps; it lacks the presence of a comprehensive nuclear security convention, a convention on nuclear crime and criminals and the legal bases for countering illicit nuclear trafficking and deals. The establishment of an International Nuclear Court might be considered as a step for a comprehensive nuclear non-proliferation system, and surely it will contribute in filling the security-related gaps in International Nuclear Law.