In recent months, our press has been filled to the brim with pieces about weapons of mass destruction — nuclear weapons in particular. The Iranian program to build such weapons was front-page news just today; the North Korean program has been on front pages for weeks; and the Iraqi program that wasn’t quite well, you know. I thought, though, it might be worth highlighting the sorts of nuclear pieces that we don’t tend to see as much of, starting with a horrifying report from Jalal Ghazi of Pacific New Service on the looting of the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s former nuclear program. You would have thought, given the explanations the Bush administration offered us for our second Iraq war, that one set of places certain to be quickly seized and tightly guarded would have been those well-known and much visited nuclear facilities, but guess again
Then, while our military was asleep at the Iraqi nuclear wheel, the most recent issue of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists details just how asleep our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (and implicitly our whole new homeland security bureaucracy) has been at the domestic nuclear-plant wheel. Or rather, to emphasize the positive, while we’ve allegedly gone abroad to stop terrorists from bringing the sorts of radioactive materials that may now be missing from Tuwaitha here, at home the NRC has been preparing each of our nuclear power plants, functionally a pre-emplaced dirty bomb, for a terrorist assault by three (possibly now five) five terrorists armed with nothing more serious than rifles. Planes or boats not in your lifetime, it seems.
At least, as James Sterngold, staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle recently pointed out, our men in research and development are never asleep at the wheel. Quite the opposite, they’re driving full speed through the long, dark night, responding to our nuclear-proliferating planet, it turns out, with plans for whole new realms of nuclear weapons — and all that needs to happen is for Congress to repeal one teeny-weeny, nasty little amendment that’s been on the books for a while and but read on. Tom
Nuclear Looting
Iraqi Scientist Sees Widespread Contamination
By Jalal Ghazi
Pacific News Service
May 06, 2003Arab media are reporting widespread contamination near Baghdad after U.S. Marines broke seals on containers holding radioactive materials in a nuclear research plant. The containers were later looted by Iraqis and are being used for domestic purposes.
While American experts say there is no telling what may have been looted from a nuclear research facility in Baghdad, an Iraqi nuclear engineer who was one of the founders of the facility says he has witnessed the spread of nuclear contamination firsthand.
The U.S. Central Command acknowledges that the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center — the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s former nuclear program, with hundreds of buildings covering an area of 120 acres — was looted.
PNS contributor Jalal Ghazi ([email protected]) monitors and translates Arab media for New California Media and WorldLink TV.
Arab media are reporting widespread contamination near Baghdad after U.S. Marines broke seals on containers holding radioactive materials in a nuclear research plant. The containers were later looted by Iraqis and are being used for domestic purposes.
While American experts say there is no telling what may have been looted from a nuclear research facility in Baghdad, an Iraqi nuclear engineer who was one of the founders of the facility says he has witnessed the spread of nuclear contamination firsthand.
The U.S. Central Command acknowledges that the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center — the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s former nuclear program, with hundreds of buildings covering an area of 120 acres — was looted.
PNS contributor Jalal Ghazi ([email protected]) monitors and translates Arab media for New California Media and WorldLink TV.
To read more of Ghazi click here
The NRC’s Dirty Little Secret
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still unwilling to respond to serious security problems
By Daniel Hirsch, David Lochbaum & Edwin Lyman
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
May/June 2003, Volume 59, No. 3, pp. 44-51For a quarter of a century, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) kept its dirty little secret: Despite the fact that a successful attack on a U.S. nuclear plant could cause thousands of illnesses and deaths in the surrounding area, and despite the clear increase in terrorist threats over that same period, the commission continued to require the country’s nuclear power plant operators to maintain only a minimal security capability.
The NRC has not required nuclear facilities to guard against an assault by more than three attackers–and never with the help of more than a single insider. In addition, for purposes of planning security, the NRC assumed that the three attackers would act as a single team, armed with nothing more sophisticated than hand-held automatic rifles.
To read more of the Bulletin’s detailed report click here
U.S. debates reviving banned nuclear option
More aggressive policy to counter global threats
By James Sterngold
San Francisco Chronicle
May 6, 2003Ten years ago, Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., co-sponsored a widely supported piece of legislation that seemed an enlightened coda to the Cold War.
After the military had eliminated most of its smaller, tactical nuclear weapons, Spratt’s amendment codified the leap by prohibiting the development of any more of these low-yield warheads.
In a remarkable sign of the times, a congressional committee will debate on Wednesday the repeal of the so-called Spratt-Furse Amendment, under a proposal by the Bush administration.
Further, the White House is pushing in next year’s defense authorization bill for funds to design a new generation of bunker-buster nuclear warheads and to increase the readiness of the underground site in Nevada where the weapons were once tested, which could lead to the end of a decade-old test ban and send ripples around the globe.