Jeez

There's an article in the Times this morning that is pretty dang scary. Basically, an Eisenhower era program was sending many tons of highly enriched uranium around the world for research and energy purposes through the late 80s, and we never got it back. It's potentially enough weapons grade material for 1,000 bomb cores.

This stuff reminds you just how shockingly sloppy the nuclear establishment is in this country. You can plainly see it in the facility and waste issues which no one is willing to deal with, but less obvious are instances like this, what we might call proliferation by negligence. Instead of stepping up our nuclear material production, as the Bush administration has suggested, we need to get this under control now. And work on Russia while we're at it by fully funding the Nunn-Lugar program.

Despite rogue nuclear weapons being the single greatest threat to America today, we have still not made a commitment to ensuring that a bomb detonated on American soil could never contain fissile material or equipment from the U.S. or its allies. And right now, one can come up with an unnerving number of scenarios for how that could happen.