BOSTON: The international community should step up its fight against the smuggling of nuclear materials to prevent their falling into the hands of extremists, US scientists say.

“Nuclear trafficking is certainly a trans-boundaries, international enterprise,” said David Smith, a nuclear physicist for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, part of the nuclear security administration in the US Department of Energy.

“Since 1992, approximately 16 cases had been reported involving the seizure of plutonium, highly-enriched uranium,” he said.

Smith spoke on Saturday — alongside other experts — at the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) being held this weekend in Boston.

In all, there were 1,080 cases of illegal trafficking in nuclear and radiological materials discovered around the world between 1993 and 2006, according to Anita Nilsson, a representative of the UN nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who called for broader international cooperation on the issue.

Nilsson also said these materials, put together, would not have been enough to manufacture a nuclear bomb, and that most of the smuggling incidents involved amateurs.

“We believe it is absolutely imperative for the international community to evaluate and assess each and every one of these cases of trafficking to understand the commerce of nuclear smuggling,” Smith said.

“I think it’s absolutely imperative that we also engage with the Russian Federation. That will be a challenge, it started that way, (but) I think it’s absolutely vital.” Smith called for using sophisticated technologies allowing experts to analyse the nature, usage and origin of nuclear or radiological materials.

These very technologies should permit scientists to quickly track the origin of radioactive materials used in a nuclear device after its explosion.

The technologies, developed during the Cold War, have taken on new importance as the potential risk of extremists obtaining fissile materials to make a nuclear or radiological bomb has become real.

Between 35 and 50 scientific nuclear investigators currently work for laboratories run by the US Department of Energy, but half of them will retire in 10 to 15 years, explained Michael May, a physicist at Stanford University in California.

And there are few younger specialists to replace them while related university programmes are losing their steam, he warned.

May heads a group of 12 scientists who on Saturday released a report calling on US politicians to act fast or face a diminished US capacity to fight nuclear material smuggling.

“There is an urgent need for more nuclear detectives, armed with science PhDs and instilled with the instinct of an investigator,” he told reporters.

“Presently available trained personnel are highly skilled, but there are notenough of them to deal with an emergency, and they are not being replaced.”

—AFP