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White House Moves Into Danger Zone on Plutonium
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White House Moves Into Danger Zone on Plutonium
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by Stephen Handelman
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NEW YORK - A few years ago, before Washington worried about rogue nuclear missiles, it worried about rogue nuclear bomb makers.
The end of the Cold War left the world swimming in bomb-making expertise and surplus stocks of plutonium. The U.S. and Russia together harbored an estimated 300 metric tons of military plutonium alone, much of it in decommissioned warheads.
(One metric ton is enough to make 200 nuclear bombs similar to the one that pulverized Nagasaki.)
There have, of course, been no "accidents," so far. And the few verified incidents of nuclear smuggling haven't justified the scare headlines of the early 1990s.
So, time to relax, right? The Bush administration apparently thinks so.
Last week the administration leaked word that it was considering abandoning an agreement with Moscow to eliminate 68 tons of plutonium from existing nuclear weapons - 34 tons on each side - by 2007.
The deal had been struck a little over a year ago by former U.S. president Bill Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin after more than five years of backroom bartering and study by officials of both nations. The plutonium would be disposed of either by turning it into fuel for civilian reactors or by immobilizing it through mixing the material with radioactive waste and embedding the mixture in glass "logs."
Either way, it required a lot of money - as much as $8 billion (U.S.) for the entire program - and the U.S., along with European allies, was expected to underwrite a portion of Russia's costs.
Money, if you believe the administration, is the principal reason the program is likely to be history. "There's no philosophical shift that says suddenly we're perfectly fine with surplus plutonium laying around - we're not," an official told The New York Times last week.
But the new administration is cutting corners where it can. Last May it signaled that it would cut spending on other key nuclear non-proliferation programs, such as retraining Russian military scientists and bolstering security and safety at Russian nuclear military installations.
Some of these programs haven't lived up to the hopes invested in them. (The less-than-committed guards at many of Russia's once impregnable nuclear storehouses are an open secret.) But others have: With better pay and increased scientific exchanges with the U.S., Russian nuclear experts are demonstrably less tempted to be recruited by labs in places like Iran.
Nevertheless, the White House claims it needs to go back to the drawing board. One idea being floated: developing better American reactors to burn plutonium more efficiently.
But that could take years and it's left some nuclear experts scratching their heads in confusion.
"The administration appears ready to spend more in one year to try and defend against a North Korean missile that does not yet exist than it is willing to spend over 20 years to eliminate thousands of weapons' worth of plutonium in Russia and the U.S.," commented the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
However, Washington's turnabout makes sense if you consider another priority on this administration's agenda: energy.
After years of declining use of nuclear energy, Bush analysts have elevated fission power plants to a key position on its must-have list for American energy security.
Building nuclear reactors that can reprocess waste plutonium is attracting keen interest. The idea was roundly rejected 20 years ago by previous administrations on the grounds that it would encourage nuclear proliferation.
But nonproliferation is evidently no priority for this administration. The nuclear test treaty is dead in the water and this week Washington signaled it was ready to resume relations with India after the chill caused by the dueling Pakistan-India bomb tests three years ago.
Apparently, the mood in Washington is that treaties and sanctions do little to restrain would-be nuclear powers, so why bother?
Russia, noticeably, couldn't be happier. It signed on to the plutonium agreement reluctantly to begin with and made it a key condition that Moscow would be able to use its military plutonium for energy use.
Under the terms of the Putin-Clinton deal, either country can terminate the plutonium program if there's no mutual agreement on financing by March, 2002. That will probably happen.
"It suits Russia perfectly well that an invaluable source of energy will be left alone," wrote Moscow analyst Yekaterina Kats last week.
If the U.S. similarly accepts military plutonium as an "invaluable" energy source, that would lower the bar against using plutonium generated by civilian reactors - about 1,400 metric tons in the world now and counting.
That's enough for 30,000 Nagasakis.
Stephen Handelman's column appears every second Tuesday in the Toronto Star.
Copyright 1996-2001. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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