It's a lucky trick that my utter bafflement over why this administration does not sink $50 million into locking down loose nuclear materials overwhelms the total terror I'd otherwise submit to:
On September 9, 2004, a division of Halliburton dispatched from Russia to Houston, via air freight, a diagnostic tool used in oil fields which contained eighteen and a half curies of americium-241. (A curie is a measure of radioactivity.) That much americium, a Department of Energy official said, “would make a pretty nasty dirty bomb.” The tool passed through Amsterdam and Luxembourg and then cleared Customs at John F. Kennedy International Airport on October 9th, where it was supposed to be picked up by a freight company and sent on to Houston. But the shipment disappeared. Nobody at Halliburton, which relied in part on outside shipping contractors, noticed that it was missing until February 7th. Halliburton's Radiation Safety officer contacted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's operations center the following day. The F.B.I. immediately sent agents to search for the missing tool, according to documents and statements later obtained by the staff of Representative Edward J. Markey, of Massachusetts. By using surveillance-camera footage at Kennedy, the agents tracked the shipment to a warehouse outside Boston, where the americium had been trucked by mistake and set aside. A subsequent N.R.C. inspection of Halliburton found that workers in the company's shipping department were “often unaware of the specifics of the routing of each shipment” of radioactive materials.[...]
Because of their widespread availability and their potency, the isotopes of greatest concern are cesium, cobalt, and americium. There are, for example, several hundred irradiation machines in the United States that employ large amounts of cobalt and cesium, and thousands more of these machines are scattered around the world under light control—Ethiopia has at least one, and Ukraine has at least a hundred. Investigators in Markey's office, searching the Web, found one such machine, with its entire stockpile of cobalt, available for free, provided that a customer would haul the material away; the machine was in Lebanon.
Between 1994 and 2005, there were 61 cases of lost or stolen radioactive isotopes that could be useful to a bomb maker. There are Gammator machines -- 1960's era gizmos filled with dangerous amounts of cesium and distributed to schools to promote nuclear understanding -- missing. There are 54,000 licensed batches of radioactive isotopes for use in civil or medical technologies. And this is all only in America, and only since 1994. Forget what happens when you start trying to peer through Russia's opaque and incomplete record keeping.
Meanwhile, estimates suggest that a crash program to lock down loose materials -- both internationally and domestically -- would cost in the nighborhood of $10 billion. We spent $1 billion. And I don't, of course, have to remind you how much we're spending in Iraq...
