The Energy Bill's Gift to Terrorists - New York Times
The Energy Bill's Gift to Terrorists - New York Times:
"AN obscure provision of the energy bill signed into law this week by President George W. Bush demonstrates how, even in this era of heightened concern about terrorism, narrow commercial considerations can trump national security at the behest of one senator.
Despite widespread opposition - from the Bush administration, a majority of the Senate, leaders of the House Energy Committee, and nuclear regulators from the five preceding presidential administrations - Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico and chairman of the Energy Committee, included an amendment that guts restrictions on the export of highly enriched uranium, the same material used in the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
If terrorists obtained enough such uranium they could fashion a full-fledged nuclear weapon, not merely a 'dirty bomb' that would scatter radioactive waste. As the late Manhattan Project physicist Luis Alvarez noted in his memoirs: 'With modern weapons-grade uranium, the background neutron rate is so low that terrorists, if they had such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material onto the other half. . . . Even a high school kid could make a bomb in short order.'"
