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Video Interview

Note: The opinions presented are not necessarily those of the Government of Canada.

An Overview of Nuclear and Radiological Security

3:12

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An Overview of Nuclear and Radiological Security

My name is Dr. Nicole Evans. I’m originally from Kamloops, British Columbia. I started working for the Global Partnership approximately a year and a half ago.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Russia inherited vast quantities of nuclear and radiological materials which could be used to construct nuclear weapons and also dirty bombs. When the Soviet Union collapsed, along with it collapsed many of the security systems that were in place to protect these dangerous nuclear and radiological materials against theft. This was bad enough, and scary enough, but when 9/11 happened, it demonstrated to us that terrorists were willing to kill on a massive scale. And that made the fact that these nuclear and radiological materials were left vulnerable and exposed to theft, that much more dangerous.

And that is when Canada started the initiative to form the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. The focus for our program, which is nuclear and radiological materials, is Russia, because that is where the vast majority of the vulnerable nuclear and radiological materials are. We run four main areas in the nuclear and radiological security program. The first and most important one, and where we are on our way to now, is our physical protection program. What “physical protection” means is that we are putting physical security in place to make sure that nuclear materials that could be stolen and used by terrorists to make a Hiroshima-type or even more sophisticated nuclear device cannot leave the premises of the nuclear facilities.

So we are on our way out right now to a facility called PNPI, which is the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute. It is a research institute within the Russian Academy of Sciences. They are doing a lot of really important research, but in the course of doing their research they have these nuclear materials that are weapons grade. And what that means is that if these materials are stolen they could be used to make rudimentary or sophisticated nuclear devices, a Hiroshima-style bomb.

The kind of stuff that we are doing with our first contract—our first implementing arrangement, as we call it at this facility—is that we are putting in some access systems, meaning systems that will help control access, who is getting into the site. We are also “hardening” various buildings around the target (the target is where the nuclear materials are located), and hardening means even such basic things as putting bars in the first four windows, so that people can’t climb into the windows to get into the building where the target is located. So that is the kind of physical security work that we are doing at this site. Some of it is sophisticated, some of it is not, but all of it is crucial.

Last Updated:2006-10-20

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