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.