In 2009, President Obama spotlighted nuclear territories as one of the top threats to international security, launching an international effort to identify, secure, and dispose of global stocks of weapons-usable nuclear materials - namely highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium. Since that time, three nuclear security summits have been held, along with scores of studies and workshops (official and unofficial), drawing sustained high-level attention to the threat posed by these materials. However, little attention has been given to incidences where sensitive nuclear materials actually went missing. This volume seeks to correct this deficiency, examining incidences of material unaccounted (MUF) for arising from the U.S. and South African nuclear weapons programs, plutonium gone missing from Japanese and British civilian production facilities, and a theft of highly enriched uranium from a U.S. military contractor in the 1960s that was used to help fuel Israel's nuclear weapons program. This volume also questions the likelihood that International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would be able to detect diversions of fissile materials, whether large or small, and the likelihood that a state could or would do anything were diversion detected. What emerges from this book is an assessment of how likely we are able to account for past MUF quantities or to be able to prevent future ones.

U.S. policymakers, military analysts, and international diplomats may be interested in the findings within this document that references the absence of fissile materials and the sensitivities that surround the countries with missing materials.

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About the Author: ABOUT THE EDITOR:

HENRY D. SOKOLSKI is the Executive Director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC). He previously served as Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy in the Department of Defense, and has worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Office of Net Assessment, as a consultant to the National Intelligence Council, and as a member of the Central Intelligence Agency's Senior Advisory Group. In the U.S. Senate, Mr. Sokolski served as a special assistant on nuclear energy matters to Senator Gordon Humphrey (R-NH) and as a legislative military aide to Dan Quayle (R-IN). He was appointed by Congress to serve on both the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism in 2008 and the Deutch WMD (weapons of mass destruction) Proliferation Commission in 1999. Mr. Sokolski has authored and edited a number of works on prolifera-tion, including Best of Intentions: America's Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation (Praeger, 2001) and Moving Beyond Pretense: Nuclear Power and Nonproliferation (Strategic Studies Institute, 2014).