4 - Wednesday, March 17, 1993 - North Shore News Nuclear black market the real news bomb THE SAME day the news broke about the bombing of the World Trade Centre Tower in New York, a small item appeared in the back pages of most dailies, reporting that 440 pounds of uranium had gone missing frem a Lithua- nian power plant. According to the papers, the missing radioactive material was enough to build about 10 nuclear bombs. Had the stolen material been plutonium instead of uranium, that would have amounted to enough stuff to fashion 25 bombs. In fact, a single ounce of plu- - tonium would be enough to force the evacuation and (if it was released in the form of a nuclear fission explosion) the abandon- ment of a city the size of Van- couver for years, perhaps decades. If 440 pounds of uranium can be lifted, what guarantee is there that plutonium can’t be grabbed too? : Since the end of the Second World War, various national and international atomic power authorities have been assuring us that the safeguards against such an incident are adequate. ' Obviously that’s no longer the case — even if it ever was. And, incidentally, it wasn’t. I predict, at this point, that it is simply a matter of time before one terrorist group or another manages the not-all-that-daunting feat of assemoling an atomic bomb. : ; Instead of some target like the. World Trade Centre merely sus-’ taining smoke damage anda wrecked underground parking lot, there’s going to be a huge crater and enough fallout to make ats entire city uninhabitable. In the wake of the Lithuanian uranium disappearance Russian energy officials admitted that ‘lax discipline” in military installations had resulted in at least three rob- ‘RE / r 44 We remain the world’s largest exporter of uranium... 99 beries at uranium-producing in- stallations. Russian police have arrested several gang members — usually poorly paid employees of the in- stallations — attempting to smug- gle radioactive materials out of the Commonwealth of Indepen- dent States (the former Soviet ° Union). Last autumn, a group of 60 Russian nuclear defence plznt technicians were stopped from boarding a plane bound for North Korea, which is reported to al- ready have enough material for at least one nuclear weapon, plus an extended-range Scud missile. ‘R. James Woolsey, the new director of the CIA and a former arms-control negotiator, estimates that more than 25 countries may have or may be developing nuclear weapons. That’s terrifying enough in itself, but the real danger, at least so far as those of us in North America are concerned, is that any one of the two dozen groups that phoned in to take credit for. the World Trade Centre bombing will soon get their hands on enough plutonium to wreak havoc in the name of some fanatical na- tionalist or religious cause or other. . My own intimate experience with the possibility goes back to June 1976, when, as head of Greenpeace, | was offered, Bob STRICTLY PERSONAL through a third-party in- termediary, precisely one ounce of plutonium. My colleagues and I debated ac- tually building an atomic bomb. Not only did it appear we had the expertise within our own ranks, but we were able to study detailed blueprints for the design _ Of a crude nuclear weapon, which had been released by a radical British group at the Stockholm Conference of the Environment in 1972. In the end, preoccupied with mounting an anti-whaling cam- paign, ard, indeed, aware that should we build such a device, we ‘lacked the security to assure that it wouldn't be graboed from us by some less altruistic group, we opted to reject the offer. I settled for presenting an af- fidavit to the United Nations Habitat Forum then being staged at Jericho Beach, stating “that | was able to verify through my personal connections in other en- vironmental! groups in France, England and the United States that the group who were offering me the plutonium were totally credible and were offering the plutonium on their faith that the Greenpeace Foundation would deliver it up to the proper United Nations authorities.”’ The next day, then-justice minister Ron Basford expressed “*extreme concern’’ about the ex- istence of a plutonium black mar- kei. Shorthy afterwards, the locks were changed at all installations harboring radioactive material across the country. i volunteered to sit down with a representative of the External Af- fairs Department to tell him what I could about the issue, and, of course, was subjected to repeated grillings by the RCMP, who pass- ed this item along with my file to the CSIS when it was set up. Other than that, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing happened. Seventeen years later, the tiny amounts of radioactive material that were available on the under- ground black market have mushroomed to entire 20-foot- long crates. The warning I gave then — “If you can toss a bomb into a pub in Ireland it won’t be long before you can toss a nuclear bomb into London’? — has come much, much closer to reality. Fanatics or madmen willing to attack a target like the World Trade Centre would, without doubt, be willing to use nuclear weapons, if they could get their hands on them, The miracle, really, is that it hasn’t happened yet. Canada, as has been che case since the days of the Manhattan Project when we supplied the uranium for the bombs that even- tually fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is in the very thick of the international trade in radioac- tive materials. We.remain the world’s largest exporter of uranium, which is routinely shipped to nuclear weapons countries, including Russia, where it is enriched and can be stockpiled for weapons use. Oh, and did you know that , under the U.S.-Canada Free Trade deal, the Americans now have unrestricted access to Cana- dian uranium, which already ac- counts for most of the depleted weapons-grade uranium in the U.S. stockpile? Have a nice day. 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