Last
week’s Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul was a further demonstration of
Asian countries’ growing importance on the emerging issue of nuclear
materials security. But while these states are becoming vital for
preventing nuclear and radiological materials from falling into
terrorists’ and criminals’ hands, the region faces some key tests of
will.
For a start, there’s the problem of the sheer volume of dangerous
nuclear material that exists. Individual countries normally don’t
publicize the size of their nuclear material holdings, but the world’s
estimated stockpile of fissile material is sufficiently large to make
approximately 100,000 nuclear bombs. Roughly 1,600 metric tons of HEU
and 500 metric tons of plutonium have been produced around the globe for
both civilian and military purposes, while manufacturing a simple
(although inefficient) Hiroshima-type atomic bomb requires as little as
50 or 60 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium by some estimates, and
less than half that amount to ...
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