The nuclear disarmament movement has long faced a daunting question: how do you eliminate nuclear weapons when several nations still produce and stockpile fissile material – the essential and difficult-to-obtain ingredient for making more nukes? Even if a country totally dismantles its nuclear arsenal, its ability to quickly rebuild remains intact so long as sufficient stocks of fissile materials are retained.

Nuclear disarmament efforts in the past have focused largely on reducing warhead counts and delivery systems. But a more effective and lasting solution requires addressing fissile materials themselves. The fact that nuclear weapons could easily be rebuilt if they were destroyed would not be true if making fissile materials from scratch was required all over again, by far the most difficult, expensive, and hard-to-conceal part of building nuclear weapons.

What Is Fissile Material?

Fissile materials are rare substances able to independently sustain a nuclear chain reaction. The two primary types are:

• Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU): HEU is uranium enriched to at least 20%. To clarify, natural uranium has two primary forms: uranium-235 and uranium-238 (U235 and U238).

U235 can be used by itself to build nuclear weapons, while U238 cannot. But U235 accounts for less than 1% of natural uranium, and U238 for more than 99%. So uranium undergoes an ‘enrichment’ process to increase the percentage of U-235. Weapons-grade HEU contains at least 90% U235, but the Hiroshima bomb worked fine with just 80%.

• Separated Plutonium: This is plutonium created in nuclear reactors as a byproduct, then chemically separated from the spent reactor fuel. A highly fissile material used in the Nagasaki bomb and the primary pit of thermonuclear weapons today.

Without at least one of those materials, nuclear weapons cannot be built. Yet the world still has about 1,240 metric tons of HEU and 560 tons of separated plutonium – enough to build over 100,000 nukes. Most is held by the United States and Russia, but significant stocks exist in China, France, England, India, Pakistan, and Israel, with North Korea and now Iran possessing smaller amounts.

Why Fissile Material Matters

For countries with nuclear weapons, fissile materials represent the ability to quickly rebuild their arsenal if they ever dismantle their nukes.

For non-nuclear states or would-be nuclear proliferators, fissile materials are the greatest barrier against building a bomb.

Those factors explain why preventing the spread of fissile materials has been a top priority for the global non-proliferation regime – and why controlling possession and production of fissile materials can be the key to verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons. 

The FMCT: A Long-Awaited Treaty

The international community has discussed some form of Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) for decades. In particular, the Conference on Disarmament (CD) has been negotiating details for banning weapons production of fissile materials for thirty years.

Ending production of fissile materials would naturally lead to diminished stocks over time – a de facto freeze on building more nuclear weapons while deeper disarmament agreements were crafted.

But negotiations stalled. Disagreements arose over details like verification measures, whether existing stocks should be included, and how compliance was ensured. Pakistan resists the idea, China doesn’t like it, and Israel says it will never agree under any circumstances.

Despite extensive support from the United Nations, the Conference on Disarmament has made little headway. But even if they did reach an agreement, only future production has been discussed so far. Existing stocks are more sensitive to consider.

Beyond the FMCT

Of course, completely eliminating fissile materials is not an option in a world where nuclear power requires them as well. But they should still be managed and controlled, considering the destructive power they possess.

Issues of national security understandably arise when it comes to physical possession of fissile materials, but that concern can be managed by expanding the International Atomic  Energy Agency (IAEA). What is required is the political will to do so.

The IAEA is an independent arm of the United Nations established to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy and discourage its military use. A major responsibility is inspecting civilian nuclear power plants to ensure that fissile materials are not diverted for unauthorized military use. Its 2025 annual budget is projected to be about $500 million.

An Old Idea

Which leads to reconsideration of an old idea. In 1953, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech at the United Nations called Atoms for Peace. In it, he proposed that fissile materials were too dangerous to be monopolized by individual nations and should be brought together under transparent international control. Decades later, IAEA Director Mohamad ElBaradei suggested the same thing.

The idea took off, with America, Russia, and several other countries demanding action. Support even came from unexpected sources, like $50 million in seed money offered by businessman Warren Buffett. The time for international control of fissile material had finally arrived, it seemed.

But America and Russia killed it. Instead, they suggested that fuel be supplied to everyone, but only if they gave up their long-standing treaty rights to an independent nuclear fuel cycle of their own. Both countries said they would supply fuel to any nation that agreed, but would not forego possession or manufacturing of fissile materials themselves.

That was a shortsighted and serious mistake. All fissile materials should be under international control by formal treaty if we value our future, with harsh penalties for countries caught possessing or manufacturing them without authorization. The IAEA would make the ideal enforcement agency to ensure compliance.

The IAEA

But doing so requires increasing the IAEA’s annual budget a hundredfold to at least $50 billion, which may seem excessive to some people. Yet America’s 25% share would be $12.5 billion – barely enough to cover yearly expenses for its existing nuclear program. Or just enough to pay for 18 of the 100 new B-21 Raider strategic bombers the US is currently building. And that doesn’t count another $130 billion for new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines or $140 billion for the new LGM-35A Sentinel ICBMs now in preproduction development.

In fact, the world spends almost $300 million a day on nuclear weapons! That’s over $12 million an hour! Will anyone say that $12 million an hour could not be spent in better ways?

Complex Negotiations

So what could $50 billion for the IAEA do? Not much without the political will to act that was mentioned earlier.

Controlling fissile materials requires the cooperation of nations. Complex negotiations are necessary to work out details like how nuclear power plants are secured, who fabricates their fuel, how that fuel is transported and stored, how nuclear-powered warships are refuelled, and a host of other considerations.  

Perhaps the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification could help. This is a group of 25 nations tasked with studying methods for verifying nuclear disarmament since 2014. Their decade of insight would be invaluable.

But the most powerful force that can be harnessed against nuclear weapons and unwanted fissile materials is people. Surveys and studies consistently show that a large majority of people everywhere want nukes gone. Properly organized into voting blocs, those people can provide their leaders with the political will they may lack – or else.

This approach may seem questionable at first, but it does have two significant advantages: It bypasses the usual political realities an,d it has never been tried before. In any case, our situation with nuclear weapons is so critically grave that something must be done to change it – and done soon. The alternative is unthinkable.

A Path Forward

At Our Planet Project Foundation, we believe the future depends a great deal on what we do today. Nuclear weapons cannot exist without fissile materials, and every step we take to secure them brings us a step closer to a sustainable world. Even if universal nuclear disarmament is not immediately achieved, less material for nuclear weapons is automatically a good thing.