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By Marilyn Berlin Snell
"The biggest threat facing this country is weapons of mass
destruction in the hands of a terrorist network."
— George W. Bush, presidential debate, September 30, 2004
Three decades ago, a brilliant young Pakistani metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan managed to steal highly classified nuclear secrets while working in Amsterdam. It was a theft that would first shake Pakistan's Chagai Hills test site, and ultimately the rest of the planet.
Working for a firm that contracted with Urenco, a Dutch-German-British company that provides uranium-enrichment services to nuclear power plants, Khan had access to Urenco's secret blueprints and manuals. He learned how to enrich uranium in centrifuges to make fuel for nuclear power plants but also for weapons. He took what he learned back to Pakistan, enriched uranium at the Dr. A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories, and helped his country build its first nuclear bomb.
Last year, Khan confessed to selling his nuclear know-how not only to Pakistan but also to North Korea, Libya, and Iran. The New York Times called his handiwork "the largest illicit nuclear proliferation network in history." Khan and the global nuclear black market he spawned are directly responsible for the current standoff over Iran's plans to build a centrifuge uranium-enrichment plant. The United States has charged that the facility, based on Urenco blueprints, is not for peaceful purposes but for building nuclear warheads.
Now Pakistan has put Khan under house arrest, but the company that allowed the world's worst nuclear-security leaks is prospering. U.S. energy companies have invited Urenco to build the same type of uranium-enrichment plant in New Mexico that Iran wants, using a technology so dangerous that the United Nations has proposed a worldwide five-year ban on it so that better safeguards can be implemented. Nonetheless, powerful politicians and company executives are pushing for approval of the United States' first centrifuge uranium-enrichment plant, while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - the agency responsible for licensing such facilities - is ignoring both Urenco's past and the UN's concerns about the technology's future. The plant's boosters are perilously out of step with a world fundamentally different from the one that existed when the NRC was created from the Atomic Energy Commission 30 years ago. Like cold war-era schoolchildren crouching under their desks for a duck-and-cover drill, believing that somehow a little wood and metal would protect them in a nuclear attack, they are relying on a licensing process that ignores the grave reality of 21st-century threats.
When the first atomic bomb was detonated at New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range in 1945, there was a blinding burst of light followed by a deep growling roar as the explosion mushroomed skyward. The genie loosed that humid July morning - "a great new force to be used for good or for evil," Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, of the Manhattan Project, called it - has since circled the globe, with the development of nuclear power succeeding nuclear weapons.
In addition to the United States, there are now six other documented nuclear states: Russia, China, France, United Kingdom, India, and Pakistan. North Korea's status is uncertain, and Israel is thought to have nuclear weapons but has not admitted it. Several other nations, including Iran, are feared to possess the technology to build nuclear bombs. (Before the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq was also a threat, as was Libya, until it handed over its technology to the United States last year.) Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda have called the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction a "religious duty."
Though the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has helped reduce nuclear arsenals and the further spread of nuclear weapons, it is today being tested as never before. One problem with Iran's proposed enrichment facility is that, unlike the older, gaseous-diffusion technology to enrich uranium, centrifuge plants can be much smaller and use much less energy, making them harder to detect. Centrifuge plants, of which there are only a handful worldwide, can also be easily and covertly retooled to produce weapons-grade uranium, the key component in nuclear warheads. Once you have the centrifuge equipment in place, says Ivan Oelrich, an expert on proliferation for the Federation of American Scientists, all you have to do is "adjust the piping of the centrifuges" to further enrich fuel-grade, which contains 3 to 5 percent of the uranium isotope 235, into bomb-grade, which is 90 percent U-235.
The "dual use" potential for centrifuge uranium-enrichment facilities is the basis for a 1983 call by the prestigious Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for a worldwide, permanent ban on centrifuge technology. But the technology continues to be attractive to the nuclear power industry. The two gaseous-diffusion plants operating in the United States use massive amounts of electricity. With the much more efficient centrifuge technology, costs of nuclear-reactor fuel production could come down exponentially.
If price and efficiency were the only factors, centrifuge uranium-enrichment would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, according to Matthew Bunn of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, it's also "the technology of choice for the determined nuclear cheater and people with few scruples."
Continued
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