Smuggling uranium into the United States? A cakewalk.
In a recent FP cover story, The Bomb in the Backyard, nuke experts Peter Zimmerman and Jeffrey Lewis showed that for just a few million dollars, terrorists could purchase highly enriched uranium on the black market and basic military supplies on the Internet and— voilà—have a nuclear bomb. To stop this nightmare scenario, U.S. border ...
In a recent FP cover story, The Bomb in the Backyard, nuke experts Peter Zimmerman and Jeffrey Lewis showed that for just a few million dollars, terrorists could purchase highly enriched uranium on the black market and basic military supplies on the Internet and— voilà—have a nuclear bomb.
To stop this nightmare scenario, U.S. border officials must be able to detect smuggled uranium at the border. That’s extraordinarily difficult, explains Steve Coll in a recent piece for the New Yorker, because, “unless it is being compressed to explode, highly enriched uranium is a low-energy isotope that does not emit much radioactivity.”
Undaunted, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has promised to shell out $1 billion on “next generation” monitors at port and border checkpoints in order to catch illicit uranium. But in its zeal to shell out some cash, DHS has conveniently overlooked the fact that its new detection monitors don’t really work.
A stinging new GAO report shows DHS essentially lying to Congress by asserting that its new monitors were 95 percent effective in detecting smuggled uranium. (Congress had insisted on seeing increases in operational effectiveness before cutting the check for new monitors.) But in truth, the new monitors detected uranium around 70 percent of the time. And when it came to “masked” or hidden uranium, the best new monitors worked only half the time.
So why the discrepancy between the actual and the reported figures? DHS explained to the GAO that “they relied on the assumption that they will reach that [high] level of performance sometime in the future.”
Because why have real results when you can make them up?
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