Interdicting illicit nuclear transfers: Some progress since 2001
In addition to legal frameworks, several multilateral initiatives have been created in recent years to improve international coordination in preventing nuclear terrorism. The Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT), launched in 2006, seeks to coordinate international efforts to detect, investigate, and respond to proliferation by nonstate actors.
Alongside the efforts of the GICNT, many countries are developing a comprehensive detection mechanism to monitor trafficking in nuclear material and related financial transactions. The U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), established in 2003, today involves more than ninety-eight countries in developing the best practices, joint training exercises, and information-sharing activities to improve multilateral interdiction efforts.
Although often cited as a flexible approach to coordinating the international response to proliferation, PSI does not grant any legal authority for ship-boarding or interdiction beyond the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty and various bilateral agreements. India and China, which do not participate in PSI, have questioned the legality of its interdictions. PSI also cannot interdict ships of nonmember states unless master consents to being boarded are allowed, such as Iran and Pakistan. Whether the 2003 interdiction of a ship supplying nuclear materials to Libya was the direct result of PSI activities, for example, is still disputed.
Analysts have also criticized the PSI for being a club of developed economies and not addressing the problem of increasing independence among a growing number of developing countries and nonstate actors from the controls enacted by the traditional supporters of the nuclear establishment. Others have pointed out that the initiative is limited by having neither an independent budget nor coordinating mechanisms, and does not provide a legal framework in which to lock in long-term, verifiable, and irreversible member state commitments. However, as a sign that progress may be forthcoming, the United and States and China jointly installed a nuclear radiation detection system at the Yangshan port in Shanghai in December 2011. Two years earlier, the U.S. Navy was also able to successfully pressure a North Korean vessel—which many suspected to be carrying illicit nuclear weapons materials destined for Myanmar—to return to port by tailing the ship in open waters.