A History of the Idea of Nuclear Security: 1945–2006

Abstract

This chapter traces the development of nuclear security in three phases as an independent construct separate from the broader idea of nuclear non-proliferation and control. If there is a discrete point in time when this process began, it is 1974–1975 when in the U.S. the concept of ‘safeguards’ gained prominence domestically and when the idea of ‘physical protection’ began to gel internationally in the IAEA. In the public consciousness McPhee’s 1974 book ‘The Binding Energy Curve’ about the physicist Ted Taylor, who lived a year in Vienna in the 70s, played an important role. Even though nuclear security was not part of the vocabulary then—the more prevalent term being physical protection—nuclear terrorism began to be talked about more openly in the backdrop of the Munich Olympics terrorist attack in 1972. There were two further significant inflection points in this development—the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the terrorist attacks of 2001. The former saw specific consolidation of the notion of international cooperation to prevent illicit trafficking of nuclear material and the spread of sensitive expertise while the latter saw the consolidation of the legal tripod of nuclear security—UN Security Council Resolution 1540, the Amended Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM) and the International Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism (ICSANT) as well as a set of policy measures targeted at non-state actors and their putative state sponsors. Programmes that started in the U.S. or were co-constructed with Russia played an important role in the consolidation of the idea of nuclear security. This is not dissimilar to the role played by the U.S. and converging Soviet and U.S. interests in consolidating the idea of nuclear non-proliferation in the 1960s.