Securing Uranium From Former Soviet Facility in Bulgaria
An international team of nuclear specialists backed by armed security units swooped into a shuttered Bulgarian reactor and recovered 37 pounds of highly enriched uranium in a secretive operation intended to forestall nuclear terrorism, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
The elaborately planned mission, which was organized with the cooperation of Bulgarian authorities, removed nearly enough uranium to make a small nuclear bomb, the officials said. The material was sent by plane on Tuesday to a Russian facility where it will be converted into a form that cannot be used for weapons, they said.
It was the third time since last year that U.S. and Russian authorities have teamed up to retrieve highly enriched uranium from Soviet-era facilities in an effort to keep such material from falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue states. Experts worry that such caches of uranium scattered in obscure corners of the former Soviet Union and its satellite states represent one of the most vulnerable sources of fissile material for would-be bomb-makers.
"Proliferation of nuclear materials is a worldwide problem and requires a worldwide solution," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in a statement. "We must not allow terrorists and others with bad intentions to acquire deadly material, and the Department of Energy will continue doing its part."
Get the rest of this story from the Washington Post.
Matt's Chat
I think it was Howeird Dean, but it might have been John F.-ing Kerry, that said that the Bush administration wasn't doing anything about nuclear material from the former Soviet Union. Sounds to me like the administration is working internationally to secure as much of this stuff as they can. Here is the moeny shot:"We hope that you'll be seeing this more frequently," Paul M. Longsworth, the Energy Department's deputy administrator for nuclear nonproliferation, said Tuesday. In conjunction with the Russians and the International Atomic Energy Agency, U.S. officials have developed a schedule to recover all Soviet-originated highly enriched uranium and return it to Russia by the end of 2005 for safekeeping and conversion, Longsworth said.
So, Democratic candidates, now what do you have?
Mark's Remarks
Well, Matt, they will just put their hands over their ears and go on with their same old spew, or they will say, it was overdue, or it is not nearly enough, or any range of excuses or sidestepping. The Dim Hamsters will continue spinning on their little wheels, getting nowhere. Nowhere in terms of moving forward, nowhere in terms of a vision for America. Their vision is nowhere. They have none. They cannot stand it that things are turning around. They must watch the news anxiously for the latest casualty list or the latest small burp in events. Then they manufacture it into something huge. The Dimocratic Mantra: never let truth get in the way of smear.
