A security breach last month at a South African nuclear site reinforces the need for developing global standards to secure nuclear weapon-usable materials, a Harvard University researcher said yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 15).
The Pelindaba nuclear facility stores enough highly enriched uranium to make about two dozen nuclear weapons, yet its security system failed to prevent four intruders from entering key parts of the facility on Nov. 8, wrote Micah Zenko in a Washington Post commentary today. Zenko is a research associate at Harvard's Managing the Atom Project.
The four breached an electric fence, entered the site's emergency control center and broke into an electronically sealed room. They were filmed by security cameras, but were not detected during the incident because no security forces were monitoring the cameras, Zenko said.
Ultimately, the intruders spent 45 minutes inside the facility before shooting a person inside and fleeing. They remain at large.
During this time, at least three other would-be intruders attempted, but failed, to enter the facility at a different point on the perimeter. Three suspects were arrested 10 days later, Zenko said.
"The timing suggests a coordinated attack against a facility that contains an estimated 25 bombs' worth of weapons-grade nuclear material," Zenko wrote.
"Had the armed attackers succeeded in penetrating the site's highly enriched uranium storage vault, where the weapons-grade nuclear material is believed to be held, they could have carried away the ingredients for the world's first terrorist nuclear bomb," he added (Micah Zenko, Washington Post, Dec. 20).