Experts urge U.S. to buy out Russia's uranium

WASHINGTON -- A group of foreign policy experts is urging the United States to buy $1 billion more of highly enriched uranium from Russia in an effort to prevent it from being smuggled to rogue nations such as Iran or Iraq, or terrorists.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a leading Washington foreign policy think tank, said U.S. efforts to keep Russia's nuclear weapons materiel away from rogue nations or terrorists may fail without increased government money and attention.

"The possibility that the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and proliferating states is all too real,'' the report said.

The group said a theft of several kilograms of highly enriched Russian uranium or plutonium "could allow a rogue state or terrorists group to acquire a nuclear capability, posing a severe threat to the international community."

The 117-page report said the United States Washington must consolidate the more than 1,000 tons of plutonium and uranium now scattered in 300 buildings and 50 sites across Russia.

Since 1992, the Energy Department has spent $1.2 billion to protect and reduce Russian nuclear materiel and help Russian nuclear scientists find jobs. Administration sources said in the fiscal 2001 budget to be released on Monday President Bill Clinton asks for more money for the nonproliferation effort.

But an author of the report, Matthew Bunn, termed the additional funding as "woefully insufficient."

"For the cost of one B-2 bomber we might get all the excess bomb uranium in Russia blended to a form that could never again be used in weapons,'' Bunn said. "It is clear already that the atmosphere for sensitive nuclear cooperation is much worse today than it was in 1992 and 1993."

A B-2 bomber is estimated to cost $2 billion.

In San Diego, a conference on bioterrorism was warned that within a decade terrorists will likely attack the United States with the small pox or anthrax viruses. "We are a long way away from being even modestly prepared," said D.A. Henderson, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies. "But we're doing a lot more now than we did 12 months, or even six months ago."

But Margaret Hamburg, who helps direct a bioterrorism initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the government has addressed the problem.

"People shouldn't go to bed at night worrying about it," Ms. Hamburg said on Friday.