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Uranium for Free For the past 14 years, U.S. teams like the one in Chile have been engaged in a race against terrorists to gain control of the global supply of HEU - the compound from which a nuclear bomb can be most easily fabricated. President Barack Obama has said preventing terrorists from obtaining an atomic weapon is his Administration's top national-security priority, and last year he vowed that the U.S. would secure all vulnerable nuclear material within four years. On April 12, in one of the year's most important international meetings, Obama will host more than...
Andrew Bieniawski was in bed when the earthquake struck. On Feb. 26, Bieniawski, the assistant deputy administrator for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), had arrived in Santiago, Chile, to join a group of scientists and nuclear engineers on a top-secret mission to remove a potential nuclear bomb from the country. Around 40 lb. (18 kg) of highly enriched uranium (HEU) - with enough latent energy to destroy a portion of a city - had already been inventoried, secured and made ready for transport to a highly secure facility in the U.S. Running ahead of schedule, Bieniawski had taken...
...Threat Is Real HEU is of particular concern because of the relative ease with which it can be turned into a mushroom cloud. The uranium bomb exploded over Hiroshima was never tested, so simple was its mechanism. Peter Zimmerman, former chief scientist of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says a group of terrorists in possession of HEU could build an atom bomb using readily available hardware at a cost of around $2 million; if detonated in a city, such a bomb could kill hundreds of thousands. In Chile, I asked Bieniawski if he felt confident that al-Qaeda was still...
...Graham Allison of Harvard University, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense who recently served on the Congressional Commission on the Prevention of WMD Terrorism, believes "it is more likely than not" that a terrorist will detonate a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city by 2014. Other experts, such as John Mueller of Ohio State University in Columbus, contend that such an estimate is greatly exaggerated. But Mueller, too, supports an HEU-elimination program. "There's no point having the stuff hanging around for no reason," he says...
...would go further and threaten nuclear war against any nation from which terrorists had obtained nuclear material - even if it was stolen. This, Allison said, would give urgency to the task of securing weapons and weapons-grade material. But there are obvious problems with that. Would the U.S. really bomb Russia if terrorists stole material from a factory there? With a nuclear security summit planned for next week in Washington aimed at reaching international agreement on efforts to secure vulnerable fissile materials, Obama obviously felt it more sensible to focus on intentional transfers rather than the potential for stolen weapons...