The Great Proliferator: Uranium from US supplies floats around unmonitored

Western nations are hurriedly collaborating to tighten sanctions on Iran after the United Nations released documents that left little doubt the country is trying to produce nuclear weapons.

American diplomats are pushing North Korea to shut down its uranium-enrichment plants so that nuclear-disarmament talks can resume. And as Pakistan grows less stable with every passing week, the United States is urgently devising plans to secure that state's nuclear weapons should the government lose control.

Meantime, several federal agencies in charge of America's bomb-grade nuclear materials reacted with sneering disregard to a government auditor's report this fall that no one is monitoring large quantities of highly enriched uranium, enough to make hundreds of nuclear weapons. The United States loaned the material to dozens of countries for research projects decades ago. 

The State Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy "are satisfied with the status quo on this issue," Eugene Aloise, director of nuclear security and nonproliferation for the Government Accountability Office, told me. The GAO published his report. "In our view, they have a pre-911 mentality regarding securing of this nuclear material." In 1993, the last time the United States tried to find all of the highly enriched uranium it had loaned out, it "was able to verify the location of 1,160 kilograms out of an estimated 17,500 kilograms of U.S. (uranium) remaining overseas," Aloise's report said. Despite that startling shortfall, no one has bothered to look since. Roughly two kilograms of the highly enriched uranium are needed to make a bomb. More