Harvard Kennedy School

The appalling events of September 11, 2001 require a major international intiative to strengthen security for such materials and facilities worldwide, and to put stringent security standards in place. This paper recommends a range of specific steps to upgrade security at individual facilities and strengthen national and international standards, with the goal of building a world in which all weapons-usable nuclear material is secure and accounted for, and all nuclear facilities secured from sabotage, with sufficient transparency that the international community can have confidence that this is the case. These steps will cost money, and accomplishing them will require sustained political leadership and reconsideration of a range of past policies and approaches. But the costs and risks of failing to act are far higher than the costs of acting now.

The appalling events of September 11, 2001, require a major international initiative to strengthen security for nuclear materials and facilities worldwide, and to put stringent security standards in place. This paper recommends a range of specific steps to upgrade security at individual facilities and strengthen national and international standards, with the goal of building a world in which all weapons-usable nuclear material is secure and accounted for, and all nuclear facilities are secured from sabotage, with sufficient transparency that the international community can have confidence that this is the case.

In considering how to reduce the contribution of the civilian nuclear energy system to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the future, it is important to examine what aspects of civilian nuclear energy have contributed to nuclear weapons programs in the past. Below, we provide a brief summary of the contribution of civilian nuclear energy to many of the known nuclear weapons programs of individual states (both successful programs and ones that were terminated short of acquiring nuclear weapons). 2 Three points should be kept in mind in considering this history: (1) while the availability of technology and expertise is important to a nuclear weapons program, the available data suggests that states' decisions on whether to move toward or away from nuclear weapons are more affected by a variety of security, political, and bureaucratic factors; 3 (2) safeguards and export control arrangements have been greatly strengthened since some of these events occurred, making it difficult for them to be repeated in the future (though at the same time, technologies have continued to diffuse); and (3) states seeking nuclear weapons have also acquired important technologies -from precision explosives to flash X-ray cameras to high-speed switches for setting off a bomb -from other civilian industries unrelated to nuclear energy.

The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union posed an unprecedented challenge: to keep tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium to make tens of thousands more, out of hostile hands. In this crisis, small groups of policy entrepreneurs launched major innovations to spur the nuclear complexes of the former rival superpowers to pursue their common interest in securing and dismantling nuclear stockpiles. Billions of dollars have now been spent pursuing these efforts, thousands of bombs' worth of nuclear materials have been permanently destroyed, and security both for thousands of nuclear weapons and for enough nuclear material for tens of thousands more has been substantially improved.

The danger that terrorists could get and use a nuclear bomb, turning the heart of a modern city into a smoldering ruin and sending aftershocks throughout the world, remains unacceptably high. Existing programs have made major progress in improving security for nuclear stockpiles in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, and in removing highly enriched uranium (HEU) from some vulnerable sites; the risk is certainly lower today than it would have been had these programs not been undertaken. But much more remains to be done. The obstacles to accelerated and expanded progress, arising from complacency, secrecy, concerns over sovereignty, political disputes, and bureaucratic impediments, are deep and real. Sustained high-level leadership will be needed to overcome them. But the next U.S. president will have an historic opportunity --to take actions that can reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism to a fraction of its current level in his first term. This paper outlines an agenda for action to achieve that objective, focused first and foremost on preventing nuclear theft, but also including measures to stop nuclear smuggling, prevent states from providing nuclear weapons and materials to terrorists, and disrupt the other elements of terrorist nuclear plots.

Policies for management of spent nuclear fuel should focus on those options that offer the best combination of low cost, low proliferation risks, low environmental impact, high safety and security, and high sustainability. Traditional PUREX reprocessing technologies are inferior to once-through approaches in most of these respects. Proposed new separations and transmutations approaches such as UREX+ and pyroprocessing are at an early stage of development, and moving quickly toward selecting particular technologies, carrying out engineering-scale demonstrations, and building commercial-scale facilities risks locking in to poor choices, repeating past mistakes. The higher cost of reprocessing and recycling, while small per kilowatt-hour, will amount to an additional tens of billions of dollars in the cost of managing U.S. spent nuclear fuel, which would have to come either from government subsidies lasting many decades (which might not be sustained), a major increase in the nuclear waste fee, or regulations that would effectively force private industry to build and operate uneconomic facilities; all of these options would cast additional doubt on private investments in new nuclear plants in the United States. Dry cask storage provides a safe, proven, low-cost approach to spent fuel management for decades, leaving all options open and making it possible to make better-informed decisions when technology has advanced and economic and political circumstances have evolved. The laudable goals of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership can be achieved without reprocessing and recycling. Indeed, the future of nuclear energy will be best promoted by making nuclear energy as safe, cheap, proliferation-resistant, and uncontroversial as possible, and recycling using the technologies available today or likely to be available in the near term points in the wrong direction on each of those counts.

This research focuses on the question why the East Timorese in exile after 1999 are suffering in silence. Today, many of them still live in temporary camps for more than a decade after East Timor referendum. Using Foucaultian approach in investigating the long period of history of the construction of the people in camps, and also the concept of reflexive sociology this research tries to explain the construction of victims within the trend of transitional justice in post Cold War period. The victims of structural violence are rarely recognised within the liberal human rights campaign. Following Arendt’s idea that the camp is the place where human rights and citizen right are not recognized, this research finds that Agamben’s argument that the making of camp itself is not separated from the juridical and disciplinary power is valid. Using historical narratives in three different settings Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia, Portugal, Portuguese Timor/Provinsi Timor Timor/East Timor this...

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