The Y-12 National Security Complex may be known as the Fort Knox of Uranium, but the United States Bullion Depository, the real Fort Knox, in Kentucky, is guarded by federal officers. They are members of the US Mint Police, a law-enforcement agency that’s been in continuous operation since 1792. Their first loyalty is to the United States, not a multinational corporation. And Fort Knox is right next door to Fort Knox, an army base with thousands of soldiers. Nobody has ever broken into the bullion depositary, and none of its roughly 4,500 tons of gold have ever been stolen. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has 7,000 tons of gold in its vaults. The gold is stored deeply underground in Lower Manhattan and guarded by members of the US Federal Reserve Police. As the name implies, they are also federal employees. The location of the Federal Reserve’s gold vaults isn’t top secret. Tens of thousands of tourists visit them every year, and yet nobody has thus far returned to Liberty Street in the middle of the night and snuck back into the vaults.

A pound of gold is worth about $20,000. A pound of weapons-grade uranium, on the black market, could be worth at least a hundred times that amount. Logic would dictate that the more valuable commodity should be guarded more securely. And yet the laws of free enterprise have not been fully applied to America’s nuclear enterprise. The financial liability of the private contractors at nuclear-weapons sites is strictly limited by the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. If terrorists manage to steal weapons-grade uranium or plutonium from a Department of Energy facility because of a contractor’s mistakes, the firm responsible for the security breach stands to lose its contract. The United States could lose a city.

threat reduction

Sam Nunn was in Budapest when a group of hard-line Communists detained Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union, and attempted to seize power. Nunn worried about who was in control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. It was the third week of August in 1991. He was a Democratic senator from Georgia, a prominent member of the Armed Services Committee, and he’d long been worried about the theft or misuse of a nuclear weapon. During the 1980s, while others warned about the threat of a Soviet surprise attack, Nunn had come to believe that the risk of an accident, a terrorist act, or a foul-up with a nuclear weapon was a lot greater. A few days after the coup attempt in the Soviet Union failed, he flew to Moscow and saw the large crowds of demonstrators in the streets. Nunn got the sense that an empire was collapsing, that things were spiralling out of control. And that empire had about 30,000 nuclear weapons.