Combating Criminal Involvement in Nuclear Trafficking

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This two part grant was funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The purpose of this grant was to analyse the past, present, and potential future role of non-ideological criminals (including corrupt officials) in nuclear trafficking. This study brings to bear on this same topic both a criminological perspective and a legal perspective. The criminological perspective is the focus of this section of the study, which was drafted by Professor Louise Shelley. The legal perspective is the focus of the second section of the study, which was drafted by Professor Orde Kittrie.

Part I:   Combating Criminal Involvement in Nuclear Trafficking: a Criminological Perspective

There has been other excellent research conducted on the role of criminals, terrorists and corrupt officials in this trade.[1] But each of these nefarious actors has been studied separately.

The first phase of research for the criminological portion of the MacArthur project had two main objectives. First, to end the compartmentalization that characterizes analyses of the actors in illicit nuclear trade by examining the interactions among criminals, terrorists, corrupt officials, and seekers of illicit nuclear weapons. Second, to understand the business of terrorism and how this concept applies to the wmd trade, a business motivated not only by state ambitions and by ideology but also by money. The results of the first phase of the criminological portion of the MacArthur grant were published as chapter 8 (“Weapons of Mass Destruction and Crime-Terror Connections” in Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime and Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Therefore, the first stage of this research examined how the illicit nuclear trade functioned as a “Business of Terrorism.”

Part II: Examined the future trends in the illicit nuclear trade and the role that criminological insights can play in prioritizing policy actions in this area. This part incorporates the earlier insights that informed Dirty Entanglements, but also draws on new interviews, analyses of networks of global facilitators of this trade, and readings and analyses on Africa, the Middle East, China, and cybercrime. Extensive use has been made of the criminological and criminal justice literature that can help policy-makers analyze the criminal trade in nuclear materials in new ways. These criminological and criminal justice theories have not been applied to the problem of nuclear trade, either by criminologists or by policy-makers in the wmd field. Applying these concepts would help the counter-proliferation community establish priorities to counter future threats in the nuclear area.


[1]  Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Times Books, 2004); Matthew Bunn, “Corruption and Nuclear Proliferation,” in Corruption,GlobalSecurity,and World Order, ed. Robert Rotberg (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2009); Lyudmila Zaitseva and Friedrich Steinhäusler, “Nuclear Trafficking Issues in the Black Sea Region,” Non-Proliferation Papers, No. 39, April 2014.