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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (169072)	8/15/2005 8:08:55 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The Energy Bill's Gift to Terrorists By ALAN J. KUPERMAN Austin, Tex. AN obscure provision of the energy bill signed into law this week by President George W. Bush demonstrates how, even in this era of heightened concern about terrorism, narrow commercial considerations can trump national security at the behest of one senator. Despite widespread opposition - from the Bush administration, a majority of the Senate, leaders of the House Energy Committee, and nuclear regulators from the five preceding presidential administrations - Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico and chairman of the Energy Committee, included an amendment that guts restrictions on the export of highly enriched uranium, the same material used in the Hiroshima atomic bomb. If terrorists obtained enough such uranium they could fashion a full-fledged nuclear weapon, not merely a "dirty bomb" that would scatter radioactive waste. As the late Manhattan Project physicist Luis Alvarez noted in his memoirs: "With modern weapons-grade uranium, the background neutron rate is so low that terrorists, if they had such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material onto the other half. . . . Even a high school kid could make a bomb in short order." The new law increases the likelihood of that nightmare scenario by allowing exports of bomb-grade uranium to foreign companies to rise to more than 100 pounds annually, thereby multiplying the odds that terrorists could steal enough for a bomb while the uranium is in transit to, or in storage at, foreign facilities. Why would Senator Domenici favor increasing exports of bomb-grade uranium that could lead to the perfect terrorist weapon? One reason may be that lobbyists claimed that foreign pharmaceutical companies need this type of uranium to produce medical isotopes that are re-imported to diagnose and treat thousands of American patients in the absence of a domestic producer. But in reality, these vital isotopes can be produced just as well with low-enriched uranium, which is not bomb-grade, as facilities in Argentina and Australia already do. The actual driving factor is money. Firms that produce isotopes in Belgium, Canada and the Netherlands for export to the United States want to avoid the expense and inconvenience of converting their production processes to use the safer uranium. But American law had barred export of bomb-grade uranium to them, except on an interim basis if they were in the process of converting to the safer alternative. Rather than responsibly complying with this antiterrorism statute, the foreign producers cynically tried to eliminate it - and succeeded, thanks to Senator Domenici's intervention. Although President Bush signed the energy bill under the pressure of spiraling gas prices, his Energy Department strongly opposed lifting the export restrictions. Its top official for nuclear nonproliferation, Paul M. Longsworth, warned last month that the provision "may undermine support of the U.S. highly enriched uranium minimization policy and nuclear export control system."... nytimes.com