Eurasia Insight:
GEORGIA'S URANIUM SCANDAL: WHY RUSSIAN-AMERICAN NON-PROLIFERATION COOPERATION MATTERS
Richard Weitz: 2/02/07
A EurasiaNet Commentary

The recent uranium smuggling incident in Georgia underscores the potential non-proliferation threats existing in the breakaway regions in the South Caucasus and the other “frozen conflict” regions of the former Soviet Union. Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s weak law enforcement and porous borders, which permit easy transit with neighboring Russia, as well as the Republic of Georgia, facilitate trafficking in nuclear materials and other forms of contraband.

For this reason, Georgia had long been a priority of international, especially American, nuclear non-proliferation projects. Besides the lack of effective political authority in the two separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, foreign governments have been concerned about the level of corruption in Georgian law enforcement agencies, the growing strength of transnational criminal organizations in the South Caucasus, and the republic’s pivotal location at the crossroads between Europe, Russia, Asia, and the Middle East.

Since the early 1990s, concerns about the situation in Georgia have led several US government agencies to undertake initiatives to curb radiation smuggling into and through the republic. Since 1998, for example, the US Department of Energy has allocated $130 million under its counter-smuggling Second Line of Defense Core program. The SLD-Core program provides radiation detection equipment and training primarily to Russia and, more recently, other former Soviet republics like Georgia. Since 2002, the Energy Department has also been in charge of maintaining radiation detection equipment provided earlier by other US government agencies. As part of its International Counter-Proliferation Program, the US Defense Department has provided a range of training and equipment related to border security and law enforcement to Georgia and other former Soviet republics.

The State Department’s Export Control and Related Border Security Program has provided radiation detection equipment and other counter-smuggling support to 30 countries, mainly in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The State Department also supplied Georgia and other countries with radiation detection equipment under the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Fund, which ceased operations in 2001. Until funding ended in 1999, the fund provided Georgian border guards and customs officials with 137 radiation pagers and other assistance through a special Georgia Border Security and Law Enforcement program. This unique initiative, which underscored American concerns about nuclear trafficking through the country, aimed to foster the strengthening of Georgia’s border security, especially against nuclear smuggling.

Funding for these initiatives has declined in recent years, as the United States, like many other countries, has placed greater emphasis on multinational approaches towards non-proliferation programs. National governments have found that cooperative projects, supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency and other international and non-governmental organizations, can reduce duplication of effort, exploit synergies, and share costs better than single-state projects. Russia has also become a more important non-proliferation actor, as its increasing financial resources have enabled it to become less of a recipient and more of a partner.

The Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction initiative serves as an important mechanism for multilateral threat reduction projects in Georgia and the other former Soviet republics. Launched at the 2002 G-8 Summit, the Global Partnership provides for enhanced coordination of national programs aimed at limiting the proliferation of dangerous chemical, biological, and nuclear agents. The United States has pledged $10 billion to the initiative over a 10-year period, and the other G-8 members have promised a comparable amount. As part of its Global Partnership contribution, the Russian government has pledged to spend $2 billion on threat reduction activities during the 10-year period.

The more than dozen governments now participating in the Global Partnership continue to direct most of their funding towards dismantling Russia’s nuclear submarines and eliminating its chemical weapons, reflecting Russian and European environmental priorities. The recent smuggling incident highlights the need to extend greater support to nuclear security projects in the South Caucasus and other non-Russian regions. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Despite the advent of the Global Partnership, the United States and Russia remain the most important countries supporting nuclear non-proliferation projects. Many of their efforts to limit the amount of vulnerable nuclear material in the former Soviet bloc have occurred under the auspices of the US Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), launched in May 2004. GTRI aims to identify, secure, and dispose of stockpiles of vulnerable civilian nuclear and radiological materials and related equipment throughout the world.

The initiative has four core elements. The Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors program funds efforts to convert the cores of targeted civilian research reactors worldwide, many of which are Soviet-built, to use low-enriched uranium rather than HEU, or highly enriched uranium, fuel. The International Radiological Threat Reduction program involves identifying and securing nuclear materials and related equipment not addressed by earlier, pre-GTRI activities. Under this program, Russia and the United States collaborated with the International Atomic Energy Agency to secure radiological material from many sites in the former Soviet Union.

Policy makers and analysts sometimes nickname the other two elements “global cleanout” or “take-back” programs. Funded by the Department of Energy, they encompass efforts to repatriate Soviet or Russian and US-origin HEU from foreign countries. The removal of Soviet-supplied HEU from vulnerable locations began in November 1994 with Project Sapphire. Under this operation, the governments of the United States, Russia, and Kazakhstan jointly moved 581 kilograms of HEU from the Ulba Metallurgy Plant in northern Kazakhstan to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The next multinational repatriation project, Operation Auburn Endeavor in April 1998, involved a British-American-Georgian initiative to remove HEU nuclear fuel from the IRT-M research reactor in Mtskheta, Georgia, to the Dounreay Nuclear Complex in Scotland. (Russia declined to participate).

Thanks to the widespread recognition of the need to curb nuclear proliferation, Russian-American collaboration under GTRI has been able to overcome bilateral political tension. From January to April 2006, for example, the two countries worked in secret with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the government of Kazakhstan to transfer 63 kilograms of HEU from a research laboratory in Uzbekistan to a secure Russian reprocessing facility, despite the sharp deterioration in US-Uzbek relations the previous year. [For additional information see the Eurasia Insight archive]. This successful repatriation effort shows that similar Russian-American collaboration in the case of Georgia remains possible despite the recent war of words between Moscow and Tbilisi over uranium smuggling.

Editor’s Note: Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.