UMass Magazine Online

Spring 2005

Departments

Features

There Goes the Neighborhood

Fab Four

The Gravest Danger

The Wonderful World of Disney

Cooking Lessons

Feature

The Gravest Danger
Be glad that Charles Curtis is working to secure nuclear materials worldwide.

—Ray Bert




	The origin of the Nuclear Threat Initiative can be traced to CNN mogul Ted Turner’s dismay upon learning that 10 years after the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia still had thousands of nuclear weapons on high alert and were running regular nuclear exercises—an unreasonable risk, he felt, for two nations at peace. From left to right: Curtis, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana (Senate Foreign Relations Committee and NTI board member), Sam Nunn, retired four-term senator from Georgia, and Ted Turner.

CHARLES CURTIS ’62 IS THE sort of man who looks like he was born to do important work. With measured demeanor, and dignified bearing, you might guess that he’s an ambassador, or perhaps a judge.

It’s not surprising then that Curtis is president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a Washington, D.C.-based charitable organization dedicated to reducing the threats from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In fact, it’s something of a relief that a man of his character has been entrusted with the job.

Yes, Curtis has style—and substance too. He served during Bill Clinton’s first term as undersecretary, then deputy secretary, of the Department of Energy, where he worked to secure the former Soviet Union’s nuclear stockpiles. He was serving as executive vice president and CEO of the United Nations Foundation when Sam Nunn came calling.

NTI was founded in January 2001 by CNN mogul Ted Turner and Nunn, a retired four-term U.S. senator from Georgia. They wanted to explore the feasibility of funding a philanthropic foundation that would work to reduce the danger from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons worldwide. Nunn, familiar with Curtis from his work under Clinton, asked Curtis to conduct a six-month study to determine if a private organization could make a difference.

“This was a legitimate threshold question,” Curtis says, “because nuclear issues are very closely held within the policy boundaries of governments, and to address them requires the resources of government.” But NTI’s nascent leadership—today, a bipartisan, multinational, multidisciplinary assemblage of luminaries—concluded that they could fill a void when, “for policy reasons or because of the ponderousness of the appropriations process, the government would not be able to act quickly.” Rather than focusing on research, holding conferences, and publishing books and articles, NTI takes direct action.

Examples include Project Vinca, in which NTI aided in the removal of two and a half bombs’ worth of vulnerable highly enriched uranium from the Vinca research reactor near Belgrade. NTI committed five million dollars to support spent fuel management and reactor decommissioning, a critical element in gaining consent from the government of Yugoslavia to remove the material.

NTI also works on the “human capital” side of the prevention equation, supporting efforts to reemploy former weapons workers in Russia and elsewhere, reducing the chances that they will end up working for terrorist groups.

Keeping our nation and the world safe from perhaps the gravest danger we’ve ever known is a high-stakes job; when Curtis needs a break he reads mysteries (“I stay away from anything to do with my field”) and escapes to a rented farmhouse in Virginia with his wife, Rochelle. He also recently took time to speak with UMass Amherst about his work.

How did the September 11th attacks, which occurred nine months after the foundation’s founding, affect NTI’s work?
Charles Curtis: We thought when we set up originally that the largest part of our mission was going to be to increase public awareness of what we saw was a significant gap between the threat that nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons presented, and our response to that threat—between the stated policies of our government and other governments, and the actions taken internationally to address these dangers.

September 11th dramatically increased public awareness that there is an abiding danger here that represents the number one security threat to the United States and indeed to the world. More of our mission since then has been to reinforce that awareness and to get government to act more urgently. Governments see this as an important thing to do, but they haven’t seen this as an urgent thing to do.

It is interesting that during the recent presidential campaign, during which there was ample disagreement between the candidates, the one issue that they agreed on was that the greatest threat to the United States was an attack by a terrorist with a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon. We also really now have significant international agreement. Our problem at NTI, and our nation and the world’s problem, is to match this consensus judgment with deeds, with concrete actions.

In grand terms, we think our mission is to reduce towards zero the risk of use, by accident or intention, of a weapon of mass destruction anywhere in the world. Not only would that be a nation-staggering event, not only would there be a potential for a great loss of life, but as we are now an intertwined global economy, its ripple effects would spread throughout the world, introducing havoc into the international economic system. And that havoc would result in proportionally greater adverse effects for the weaker nations. So every nation has a stake in addressing this issue.

How difficult is it for you personally to deal with these downright scary issues every day?
CC: I came to this somewhat late in my career. But once you pick this up, it’s very, very hard to put it back down. It is genuinely the most important matter that I have ever worked on. It is preoccupying; it has preempted all of my other interests and my “career path.”

And it weighs on you. It is hard to deal with, because it is a matter of such importance that one always measures one’s accomplishments and actions as being insufficient to the task. You have to try to compartmentalize it. It’s like oncologists; they have to find a way of separating themselves from their patients, otherwise it becomes too difficult.

My wife, who is also a UMass graduate, works for the National Cancer Institute as a researcher at National Institutes of Health. I used to kid her because we would go to dinner parties, and as soon as someone found out that she was a cancer researcher, the conversation immediately turned to cancer and terminated many dinner parties over the years. Well, now with my job we don’t even get to the appetizers before the conversation has gone rather dark. We’re not exactly a fun couple, I guess. [He smiles a little ruefully.]

Can you imagine a world where the nuclear risk has been substantially reduced?
CC: [immediately] Sure. I think we are getting there; I think we will get there. The question is, will we get there before we have a catastrophic event? And shame on us if we can’t manage to marshal the resources and the diplomatic energy and focus required when this is such a well-understood danger.

But to do that you also have to address the demand for nuclear weapons by terrorists and states. That is going to require a more effective engagement and address of the grievances of various nations and peoples in the world. In particular, a more effective address to this virulent form of radical Islam that Al Qaeda represents. But it’s not just Al Qaeda. A lot of people cite Machiavelli as justification for a muscular foreign policy: It is better to be feared than to be loved. But they forget the next line: That it is even more important not to be hated. We don’t have good strategies for that, and we are not doing it well, if at all.

For example, we have a tremendous stake in improving the economic opportunity and lot of the people in the Middle East, yet the G-8 nations [an informal group of the seven largest industrialized democracies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—plus Russia] refused an initiative to invest in the economies of the Middle East. We just haven’t quite gotten to the realization that we have a security interest in doing what some too easily characterize as foreign aid. It is a security investment that we need to make in those societies. If their universities are turning out graduates with no jobs—large numbers of them year after year after year—that’s a prescription for real trouble.

You’ve said this is a big job, but a finite one. Is there one aspect of NTI’s mission that is harder than the rest?
CC: I think the hardest problem is going to prove to be the biological threat. When I talk about a finite job, I’m talking about nuclear. Some call a nuclear attack the ultimate preventable catastrophe, because we understand the problem. We know how to counter that threat. We don’t know how to counter the bio threat. It will prove, I think, to be the greatest security problem in the twenty-first century, because the advances in bioscience outstrip our ability to mount defenses against those advances.

But I don’t think you focus all your attention on the hardest problem, you focus your attention on the one that you know how to deal with. Scientists advise that if a terrorist group were to acquire highly enriched uranium in sufficient quantity, you have to presume that they could gain the capability of fabricating the material into a crude nuclear device. So the highest priority of all is to secure weapons and materials at their source, because the hardest thing for terrorists to do is to get hold of highly enriched uranium, plutonium, or the weapons themselves. It also happens to be the easiest thing for us to stop.

Senator [Richard] Lugar [R-Ind., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and an NTI board member] has said that every nation with nuclear weapons capacity must secure those weapons and give assurances to all other nations that what it has is free from theft and diversion to other nations or subnational groups.

But how do you reach across the boundaries of sovereign nations to have confidence in those assurances?
CC: It is going to require an unprecedented degree of international cooperation that will overcome differences on a range of other matters. The traditional prerogatives of the sovereign will have to yield somewhat to the interests of other nations in giving assurance of the security of these most dangerous weapons and capacities. It will probably be accomplished not by a system of regulation, but by sharing best practices, and with some form of transparency.

I don’t think you are going to be able to impose mandatory standards either as to the level of security or the means for achieving it, or for the access required to gain assurances. I think it’s going to be mostly voluntary and mutually reinforcing through leadership by the United States and Russia together, who are, after all, the custodians and the stewards of the largest weapons systems in the world; therefore, they have special responsibilities with respect to the security of those weapons and materials.

You can’t succeed without Russia’s active cooperation and leadership, but you also need China. And Israel. And Pakistan and India, as well as the other weapon states of the United Kingdom, and France.

And this is not even limited to those nations who have developed nuclear weapons. Civilian nuclear energy programs produce a byproduct waste that contains plutonium perfectly suitable to be fabricated into a nuclear weapon, particularly separated plutonium. So that involves countries like Belgium—not a nuclear weapon state, but they do have a large quantity of separated plutonium that is very dangerous. There are very broadly distributed quantities of highly enriched uranium or plutonium in some 40 nations at over 130 facilities around
the world.

[Brief silence as the enormity of the job and the threat sinks in.]
See, this is why we never get through the appetizers.

Glossary

Highly enriched uranium (HEU)
Uranium in which the naturally occurring Uranium (U)-235 isotope (0.7 percent) is increased to 20 percent or more. When used in nuclear weapons, U-235 is usually increased to 90 percent or more. HEU is used in nuclear weapons and in some types of research and submarine propulsion reactors.

Plutonium (Pu)
A transuranic element produced when uranium is irradiated in a reactor. It is used primarily in nuclear weapons and, along with uranium, in mixed-oxide fuel. Plutonium-239 is the most suitable isotope for use in nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapon–capable states
Those states not party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty but which have the ability to build nuclear weapons (India, Israel, and Pakistan).

Nuclear weapon states (NWS)
As defined by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the five states that detonated a nuclear device prior to January 1, 1967 (China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States).

Weapons-grade
Refers to nuclear material that is most suitable for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Crude weapons can be fabricated from lower-grade material.

Source: www.nti.org/f_wmd411/gloss.html

[top of page]

The Gravest Danger

The Gravest Danger: larger image