Now visiting professor at Stanford
Safeguarding fissile material from terrorists is one of today's greatest security concerns, and building a comprehensive safeguards systems and preventing nuclear terrorism is difficult.
Former Laboratory Director and Senior Fellow Sig Hecker discusses these issues in a paper, "Toward a Comprehensive Safeguards System: Keeping Fissile Materials out of Terrorists' Hands," published recently in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Hecker, now a visiting professor at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, describes the five characteristics of fissile materials, and also discusses safeguards in place, such as the nuclear materials protection, control and accounting system that was developed in the United States in the 1960s. He also talks about modern safeguards that combine physical protection with materials protection, control and accounting.
He then writes about what he described as today's six greatest threats. "These six threats represent the highest probability of theft or diversion of several tens of kilograms of weapons-usable plutonium or [highly enriched uranium] and these materials getting into the hands of terrorists. Once armed with such materials, terrorists will be able to build an improvised nuclear explosive device and detonate it virtually anywhere in the world," Hecker wrote.
Hecker was Los Alamos' fifth director, leading the Laboratory from 1985 to 1997. He came to Los Alamos as a graduate summer student and later as a postdoctoral appointee in the mid 1960s. Since stepping down as director, has a joint appointment with the Material Science Technology Division and former Nuclear Materials Technology Division offices.
Hecker has bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in metallurgy from Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. He has served on numerous boards, commissions and advisory groups both locally and nationally.
To read the paper, click here (Adobe Acrobat Reader required).
