Why is Pretoria so jealously guarding it fissile material?

In the early hours of 28 July 2012, three people, one of them an 82-year-old nun named Megan Rice, broke into the Y-12 Nuclear Security Complex near the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Y-12 is where all of America’s highly enriched uranium (HEU) – for making nuclear weapons – is made or stored: about 400 000 kg of it, according to The New Yorker magazine.

Rice and two others from the Plowshare anti-nuclear activist group managed to cut through three fences, paint slogans and splash blood on the football-field-sized building housing the Y-12 arsenal before a few of the 500-odd security guards finally arrived to arrest them. This demonstration by Plowshare – one of many over the last 35 years – was designed in part to show that America’s nuclear weapons were not secure from theft by terrorists. Which it did.

ISS Today: Syria: Seizing the international moment

Noel Stott, Senior Research Fellow, Transnational Threats and International Crime Division, ISS Pretoria

As Russia, the United States (US) and Syria edge closer to a final agreement and a possible United Nations (UN) Security Council resolution
on how best to deal with the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict, it may be wise to step back and consider the enormous potential that a more holistic approach could provide. Such an approach could fundamentally alter the current global discourse on weapons of mass destruction (WMD).