On Eve of Nuclear Security Summit, Faster, Broader Global Effort Needed to Secure All N... - 0 views
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Securing the Bomb 2010 highlights impressive progress: the United States has helped remove all highly enriched uranium (HEU) from nearly 50 facilities around the world; security and accounting upgrades have been completed at 210 of the weapons-usable nuclear material buildings in Russia and Eurasia of an estimated total in the range of 250; 19 countries have removed all weapons-usable nuclear material from their soil - with four countries having done so between President Obama's Prague speech and early 2010.
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Still, the threat looms large. Terrorists are seeking nuclear weapons, and the materials needed to make them are still housed in hundreds of buildings and bunkers in dozens of countries -- many in urgent need of better security. There have already been 18 documented cases of theft or loss of plutonium or highly enriched uranium, along with incidents that provide striking evidence of security weaknesses -- including a 2010 break-in by unarmed peace activists at a Belgian base where U.S. nuclear weapons are reportedly stored and a 2007 armed attack on a South African site housing hundreds of kilograms of HEU.
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According to the report, the greatest risks are in Pakistan, whose small and heavily guarded stockpile confronts immense threats from both insiders theft and outsider attack; Russia, which has the world's largest nuclear stockpiles in the world's largest number of buildings and bunkers, security has improved dramatically but still has important weaknesses, and which faces substantial threats, particularly from potential insider thieves; and HEU-fueled research reactors around the world, which often have limited stocks of nuclear material, but generally have the weakest security measures in place.
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