MIGHTY MOUSE

WILL THE ATOMIC GENIE GET LOOSE?

Remember the classic Peter Sellers comedy The Mouse That Roared? A duchy-sized
country, flat broke, decides that its best bet is to go for Marshall Plan-style
aid by attacking America and losing. But the plan backfires when it
accidentally takes prisoner one of our bomb builders and his football-shaped
doomsday device. After Sellers has gotten all the superpowers to make peace
with his tiny country and each other by threatening to use the bomb, it stops
working. Sellers and the scientist keep this a secret, maintaining peace with a
hollow threat of annihilation. Then, alone in its dungeon keep, the bomb starts
ticking again.

Funnier than the movie is that we now find ourselves in the same situation.
Right after detente and with START talks looking good, it seemed the existential
bummer of nuclear annihilation might pass. Then boom, Saddam's got the bomb,
the genie's out of the bottle, and we're scurrying for the shelters again.

Actually, the alleged Iraqi nuclear threat is the least of it. Proliferation is
slowly spreading everywhere. The real culprits are Western industrial states
where folks like Saddam get their nuclear toys, not the Third World guys. "The
Iraqi experience," says Paul Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute, "is
just another page in a lesson book no one's paying attention to." The heart of
the matter is the creation and use of highly enriched uranium and plutonium in
civilian reactors. These substances are so-called weapons grade; that is, you
can make an atom bomb from them. The scope of the problem is huge: Some experts
such as Leventhal estimate that by the year 2000 there will be up to 2,000 tons
of plutonium in existence. Compare that with the combined strategic stockpiles
of the U.S. and the USSR-200 metric tons in about 25,000 warheads.

Faced with this forecast, you'd think the administration, and everyone else,
would be at least idly talking about a global ban on atomic weapons-grade
material. They're not. Instead, here are three highlights of their plans for
the upcoming plutonium season:

• In 1992 we'll finally get rolling with the first shipments resulting from
the administration's 1988 agreement to let the Japanese reprocess up to 400 tons
of plutonium over the next 30 years. The Japanese will ship the stuff by sea to
France and back, France having one of the few reprocessing plants in the world.
Ironically, the same Beltway contractor, ERC, that did confidential studies
about certain aspects of this deal for the Department of Energy has also been
hired to help the Japanese get their plans approved. This irked some members of
Congress so badly that they asked the General Accounting Office to investigate.
According to government sources, the conclusions of the study will be: Having
people who did confidential work for the government also act as consultants
might look a bit unethical, but it was legal; since no actual documents were
turned over to the Japanese, no existing laws were broken.

• The DOE persists in its efforts to reopen the radioactively polluted Rocky
Flats weapons plant near Denver. This half-billion-dollar effort comes in spite
of the glut of thermonuclear warheads spawned by the recent treaties with the
Soviets that reduce our strategic stockpiles.

• The last administration budget zeroed out the funding for the Argonne Lab's
Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors (RERTR) project. The
project's aim is to create a safe civilian bombproof reactor fuel. But Congress
insisted on funding at least one of the project's key missions: helping other
nations adopt bombproof fuels.

For almost 50 years we've lived with the MAD (mutual assured destruction)
scenario. Now we live with The Mouse That Roared scenario. The only real value
of atomic weapons is in the certainty of the threat-not the use. Unfortunately,
the increasingly haphazard spread of weapons-grade material and the technology
needed to make atomic explosions has brought us to the existential brink with
its very uncertainty. We played out the mouse scenario with Iraq and won: They
had the raw material but no bombs. Next time, however, the mouse, some other
devilish nuclear club wannabe, may have real bombs--and roar.