Iranian students rally in support of the country's nuclear program outside the Uranium Conversion Facility in Isfahan.
Πηγή: SFGate
By Joel Brinkley
Dec 3 2011
American diplomats are pushing North Korea to shut down its uranium-enrichment plants so that nuclear-disarmament talks can resume. And as Pakistan grows less stable with every passing week, the United States is urgently devising plans to secure that state's nuclear weapons should the government lose control.
Meantime, several federal agencies in charge of America's bomb-grade nuclear materials reacted with sneering disregard to a government auditor's report this fall that no one is monitoring large quantities of highly enriched uranium, enough to make hundreds of nuclear weapons. The United States loaned the material to dozens of countries for research projects decades ago.
The State Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy "are satisfied with the status quo on this issue," Eugene Aloise, director of nuclear security and nonproliferation for the Government Accountability Office, told me. The GAO published his report. "In our view, they have a pre-911 mentality regarding securing of this nuclear material."
In 1993, the last time the United States tried to find all of the highly enriched uranium it had loaned out, it "was able to verify the location of 1,160 kilograms out of an estimated 17,500 kilograms of U.S. (uranium) remaining overseas," Aloise's report said. Despite that startling shortfall, no one has bothered to look since. Roughly two kilograms of the highly enriched uranium are needed to make a bomb.
Over the past 40 years, the United States has signed nuclear-cooperation agreements with 27 nations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia and has loaned them nuclear materials for peaceful research purposes.
One of those countries was Iran, a close ally until the revolution in 1979. There's no record to show that the nuclear material was ever returned after the ayatollahs took control, a senior official said - raising the unprovable but distressing possibility that American nuclear fuel served as the seed for Iran's nuclear-weapons program.
At the time, Iran's revolution seemed an aberration. But the world has undergone dramatic change since the 1970s and '80s, when most of the material was loaned. Now, in fact, uprisings and protests are spreading around the world.
Today, Islamic fundamentalists dream of acquiring a bomb. And with Osama bin Laden dead and al Qaeda's relevance waning, how better to regain notoriety than to set off a nuclear weapon in some Western city? Aloise's report suggests it would be far from impossible for al Qaeda to acquire the enriched fuel it needs from American stores loaned out long ago.
Federal investigators have already discovered several security lapses by nations holding American uranium. But when the GAO was preparing its report, the State Department was more concerned about embarrassing the countries guilty of these unspecified lapses than drawing attention to this frightful problem. The final report made no mention of these security failures.
In theory, the United States strives to inspect each site holding nuclear materials once every five years. In fact, the GAO found that 21 of the 27 nations holding bomb-grade materials are not visited even that often, and security inspectors have never visited 12 of the sites. The report did not name the countries.
Even when Energy Department officials do visit some of the countries, sometimes they are told that the inspection is an infringement of national sovereignty and sent away.
Aloise visited one country that did accept a security inspection. Previously, it appears, the only impediment to acquiring the uranium there had been a couple of locked doors. On the advice of the U.S. officials, the (unnamed) government built a security fence around the building, installed video surveillance and stationed an armed guard outside the nuclear lab's front door.
How many other nations holding American bomb-grade uranium keep it behind nothing more than a locked door? We don't know.
In a TV interview last year, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she considered allowing weapons of mass destruction to fall into the hands of international terrorists "the worst of nightmares and the biggest threat faced by the United States today."
But responding to Aloise's report, Clinton's department remarked that implementing the GAO's recommendations to better secure bomb-grade material would "diminish U.S. influence overseas to advance our national nonproliferation objectives and cost jobs at home." The Department of Energy said, in effect, that closer monitoring would cost too much and not be worth the trouble.
These misguided bureaucrats had better wake up - before it's too late.
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