Project Vinca: Lessons for Securing Civil Nuclear Material Stockpiles

PHILIPP C. BLEEK

Philipp Bleek is a graduate student at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He was previously an analyst with the Arms Control Association in Washington, where his portfolio included strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, nuclear testing, and threat reduction efforts in the former Soviet Union. Bleek recently published “Tactically Adept, Strategically Inept: Reflections on the 1999 Campaign to Ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty” in the 2003 Kennedy School

Review.1

By late afternoon the nuclear fuel, containing sufficient highly enriched uranium (HEU) for several nuclear bombs, had been loaded onto a canvassided flatbed truck.2 The technicians and scientists were shepherded into a nearby building.3 For the next dozen hours, they waited under heavy security, with strict orders not to contact friends or family and perhaps accidentally leak information about the impending transport.4 Then,in the early morning hours of August 22, 2002, at a time kept secret even from participating American nuclear scientists, the transport operation began.5 Project Vinca, a multinational, public-private effort to remove nuclear material from a poorly secured Yugoslav research institute,was entering its final phase.Project Vinca is a compelling story of high-stakes diplomacy involving, in the words of one key official,“three countries, an international organization, a couple U.S. agencies, several institutes in each of the countries involved, [and] a private organization in the U.S.”6 The operation to remove vulnerable nuclear material from the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences outside Belgrade,Yugoslavia, is a nonproliferation success story. But its real impact may be measured in the years to come, because Project Vinca has the potential to inform broader “global cleanout” efforts to address one of the weakest links in the nuclear nonproliferation chain: insufficiently secured civilian nuclear research facilities.7

Understanding Project Vinca holds the key to designing an effective program to remove nuclear material stockpiles from the most vulnerable civilian facilities worldwide. The operation illustrates both the challengesand the opportunities faced by any viable cleanout effort.It also helps to explain why efforts to address this urgent threat have made relatively little headway, even after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on New York and Washington so glaringly exposed the United States’s vulnerability to those who wish it ill.The lessons of Project Vinca fall into four broad categories: international politics, bureaucratic politics, required capabilities, and the role of nongovernmental actors. In the international context, the Vinca case highlights the extent to which dealing with vulnerable nuclear material stockpiles hinges on persuading countries to cooperate and hence requires occasional engagement from the most senior U.S. officials.

[ For more, see ...http://www.antic.org/Slucaj_Vinca/IAEA_Vinca-HEU-remo103bleek.pdf ]