Nuclear mattersU.S. to spend $7.9 billion on nuclear nonproliferation
A multi-million dollar U.S. program is aiming to make safe the world’s bomb-grade uranium before terrorists can get to it; the U.S. government is so concerned at the threat of nuclear terrorism that next year the budget for making bomb-grade material secure worldwide will be increased by 67 percent to $558 million dollars
To the Warsaw motorists returning from their Saturday afternoon shopping trips, it looked like a nuclear emergency. Frantic policemen, some wearing ski masks and all armed with submachine guns, flashed their headlights and leant out of their patrol car windows, shouting and waving to make the traffic pull over and stop at the side of the road as helicopters clattered overhead.
Then a convoy of seven lorries rumbled past, armed police in the cabs and radioactive warning signs stuck on the shipping containers they carried.
The Daily Telegraph’s Nick Meo writes that the frightened-looking motorists and their families did not know it, but this convoy two weeks ago was not an emergency, and it was not an exercise. The cargo being moved through the Warsaw suburbs in a top secret operation was the stuff of nightmares.
The lorries carried enough bomb-grade uranium for terrorists to build eight nuclear devices, sealed inside thick metal flasks weighing five tons each to stop radiation leaking.
The shipment, at the beginning of a 3,500 mile journey to a Russian reprocessing plant where it will be made safe, was part of an effort to secure hundreds of tons of highly enriched uranium worldwide before terrorists can acquire it.
“The world is a safer place because of this shipment,” said Andrew Bieniawski, a senior official with the U.S. government’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative, as the convoy and its sinister-looking escort of Polish special forces police started off.
Meo notes that American intelligence officials believe that if al Qaeda could get its hands on a piece of highly enriched uranium (HEU) the size of a grapefruit, let alone a consignment as big as the Polish one, the destruction of a city like London, New York, or Washington would follow.
So far, such a nightmare has been confined to Hollywood thrillers, but the U.S. government is so concerned at the threat of nuclear terrorism that next year the budget for making bomb-grade material secure worldwide will be increased by 67 percent to $558 million dollars (£352 million).
The American effort, constantly expanded since the attacks of 9/11, is intended to deal with weapons-grade uranium in twenty-eight nations around the world, most of it the cold war legacy of the Atoms for Peace program when America and Russia shared nuclear secrets with their allies.
In the 1950s they helped spread civilian nuclear power plants and research reactors around the world, to win friends and help mankind benefit from
