A New Storage Regime
The following measures constitute a regime for intermediate storage of surplus fissile materials that serves the objectives noted earlier with minimum disruption to the process of dismantlement and storage:
1. Commitment to Non-Weapons Use. The United States and Russia should commit a large fraction of the fissile materials from dismantled weapons to non-weapons use. They should agree on the specific amounts.
2. Safeguarded Storage and Disposition. The preceding commitment should be verified by monitoring of the present and future sites where fissile materials are stored, and continued monitoring of the material after it leaves these sites for long-term disposition.
3. IAEA Involvement. Although such monitoring might begin bilaterally, the IAEA should be brought into the process expeditiously, in an expansion and strengthening of its nonproliferation role. The IAEA would monitor the amount of material in the storage site and safeguard any material removed from the site to ensure its use for peaceful purposes. Such safeguards would be an extension of the existing safeguards system. Bilateral monitoring would probably continue as well.
Financial or other incentives could be provided to Russia for putting the material into storage. Management, control, or outright ownership of the stores and the material in them might be transferred to other parties, such as an international consortium formed for that purpose. The material might even be physically relocated to some other country, possibly in return for cash, as in the case of the HEU deal. Such incentives would not obviate the need for, and are secondary to, prompt agreement on a storage regime along the lines recommended here.
LONG-TERM DISPOSITION
Categories, Criteria, and Standards
The technical options for long-term disposition of excess weapons pluto-nium can be divided into three categories:
• indefinite storage, in which the storage arrangements outlined in the previous section would be extended indefinitely;
• minimized accessibility, in which physical, chemical, or radiological barriers would be created to reduce the plutonium's accessibility for use in weapons (either by potential proliferators or by the state from whose weapons it came), for example, by irradiating the plutonium in reactors or mixing it with high-level wastes; and weapons that are storedion of HEU for naval reactors and tritium for nuclear stockpile maintenance would introduce some complications, but these could readily be addressed through careful design of the agreement and the monitoring system.