Could this be Washington?
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Nuclear terrorism is probably a far greater threat than the
danger of a missile attack on the United States, but no effort
is being made to detect fissionable material being smuggled
into our country, and the Bush administration has slashed
funding for efforts to help other nations like Russia safeguard
their own nuclear materials.
Now that the cold war has ended, there are over 6 million
pounds of bomb-grade plutonium and uranium left in the
world, and most of it isn?t even kept in secure military
installations.
Radioactive materials are missing, border controls are almost
non-existent, monitoring equipment doesn?t work and
smugglers are common. It?s only a matter of time before a
terrorist group acquires the materials for the ultimate
blackmail.
A small nuclear bomb, containing only a few pounds of
plutonium or U-235 could destroy the Capitol, the White
House, the Supreme Court and the Pentagon all at the same
time. If Congress and the Supreme Court were in session and
the President and Vice President in Washington, our
government would end.
Right now, such a bomb could be moved into Washington with
ease, and there are no contingency plans that would enable
state governors to reconstruct the federal government.
According to Friedrich Steinhausler, a physicist from the
University of Salzburg in Vienna, terrorists don?t even have to
get enough material to make a nuclear bomb. They could
steal radioactive isotopes from unprotected research and
medical facilities with ?relative ease? and combine them with
conventional explosives, or simply spread them through the
ventilation system of an airport, office building or shopping
mall. ?Such a potential future scenario emphasizes the low-
tech terror of ?mass disruption? rather than ?mass
destruction,?? Steinhausler says. He believes that up to 100
countries may be storing radioactive materials that are not
properly safeguarded.
Working with colleagues at Stanford University, Steinhausler
studied the nuclear security in 11 countries: the U.S., China,
Germany, Austria, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Israel, Brazil,
Kazakhstan and Bangladesh. The study reveals gaping holes
in their ability to detect nuclear smuggling, flaws in their
audits of radioactive materials and serious shortages of
trained staff, equipment and resources.
None of the countries has any radiation monitoring equipment
on its unfenced borders, including the U.S. One of the
countries has no monitoring equipment on any of its borders.
A quarter of the countries do not keep registers of
radioactive materials that may have been lost from
laboratories and hospitals and half knew about the existence
of unlicensed nuclear material. A third of the countries have
had nuclear materials stolen from licensed sites in the past 10
years. Ian Ray, a forensic nuclear scientist from Germany,
estimates that only 5 to 10 percent of the illegal traffic in
radioactive materials is detected.
The British government has admitted that terrorists could
easily make a crude atomic bomb from fuel produced at their
new nuclear plant in northwest England that runs on MOX, a
mixture of plutonium and uranium oxide.
The plant was built in 1996, but has never been started up
because of doubts that it is economically viable. British
physicist Frank Barney has written a confidential report
showing how easy it would be to make MOX fuel into a bomb.
The expertise needed is less than the skill used by the
Japanese cult that produced sarin nerve gas for release into
the Tokyo subway system in 1995. He feels it would
be ?sheer irresponsibility? for the government to allow the
plant to open, since theft of the pellets would then become
a ?terrifying possibility.?
The British Nuclear Fuels Laboratory points out that MOX
would be difficult to steal, because it always travels under
armed guard and says the security arrangements ?are
mature, comprehensive and robust.?
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