Word: chiles
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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...
...fact that one of the most dangerous materials known to man came to find itself in Chile is the result of one of the great gambits of the 20th century. In the mid-1950s, as the international community became seriously concerned about nuclear proliferation, states that had nuclear weapons offered the world a bargain: they would give countries HEU in exchange for an inspection regime that could verify it would be used only for peaceful research and not weapons. Atoms for Peace, as the U.S. called the program, became the founding principle of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA...
...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 pursuing nuclear weapons rather than concentrating on struggles in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "The worst day of my week is Friday," he said. "Every Friday I receive a one-hour intelligence briefing, and I come away sobered. I assure...
...Could the Chilean HEU have fallen into terrorist hands? The afternoon before the earthquake, Paul Simons, the U.S. ambassador to Chile, pointed out that local criminal gangs ship Bolivian cocaine to the U.S. from Chilean ports and that "we recognize that Chile and its ports could be used as a funnel for other illicit materials." At the time, of course, he could not know that four days later a bomb's worth of HEU would be on its way to one of those ports - and in the middle of a national catastrophe...