A shipment of bomb-grade uranium arrives in Scotland. Is there more where that came from?

By BARRY HILLENBRAND /LONDON

he jumble of nearly 600 small rods and tubes looked like washing machine spare parts. But the shipping manifest painstakingly listed the pieces: 73 ek-10 rods weighing 8 gm each, 29 irt-2m tubes at 24 gm each, 83 ivv-2 rods at 4.2 gm each. The entire collection weighed a total of 5.1 kg, not much more than a laptop computer, and was compact enough to tuck comfortably into an ordinary-sized rucksack.

But despite its small size and innocuous appearance, the little trove was accorded extraordinarily intense attention and security last week. The pieces were made of highly-enriched uranium, the stuff of nuclear bombs. It had been stored in a decommissioned nuclear research site outside Tbilisi in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The U.S. Air Force flew the material under armed guard to Britain where it was tucked away for safekeeping at a nuclear facility in Dounreay on the isolated northern tip of Scotland. The transfer made the world a slightly less dangerous place because the cache, though small, could serve as a starter kit for terrorists or a rogue state intent on building a nuclear bomb. Iraq spent billions of dollars attempting to acquire facilities to produce highly enriched uranium of the kind Georgia had sitting in the dusty storeroom of its nuclear research center. "Two guys with machine guns could have seized the facility with no problem and walked off with half the uranium you need for a well-designed bomb," says Matthew Bunn, assistant director of the science, technology and public policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former White House adviser on nuclear arms.

Finding a safe haven for Georgia's uranium was no easy matter, and highlights the difficulties of protecting the stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium scattered around in crumbling and under-utilized nuclear facilities in republics of the former Soviet Union. In 1996 the Georgians first approached the Americans for assistance in getting rid of a small uranium stockpile. The nuclear material had been obtained from Moscow for use in a research reactor which closed in 1991. "We want to dispose of this material," said President Eduard Shevardnadze at the time. "But we cannot do it on our own."

The Americans were willing to help. There was a precedent for the effort. In 1994, the U.S. airlifted 590 kg of weapons-grade uranium out of Kazakhstan to the United States. But transferring the Georgian material to the U.S. would have required an acrimonious court battle with environmentalists which could further compromise the security of the uranium by making its existence and whereabouts widely known. In January 1997, the Russians said they would be willing to take Georgia's uranium--for a price. "They demanded a new this and a new that," says Bunn. "We were suspicious that they were trying to turn this into a profit-making operation." The cost and delay was too much for the Americans to handle and so Washington turned to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who proved accommodating. Blair told the House of Commons that it was important for Britain to do its part in limiting nuclear proliferation. Some of the material, he said, would be reprocessed in the Dounreay facility for medical use.

Not everyone in Britain was eager to be as helpful as Blair. "We have a government which thinks that Dounreay, which is a totally decrepit plant, is a convenient dumping ground for nuclear waste," said Alex Salmond, a Member of Parliament and leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party. But protests were short-lived and not very spirited. Environmental activists made no effort to disrupt the transfer of the uranium on its 160 km journey from a Royal Air Force base at Kinloss to Dounreay. The shipment posed little new threat to the safety of the Scottish environment. In reality, only four of the rods, weighing 800 gm, were highly radioactive and dangerous. "This is a trivial amount when compared to the 30,000 tonnes of irraditated fuel being reprocessed elsewhere in Britain," says Frans Berkhout, a nuclear expert at the University of Sussex. Most of the Georgia shipment was made up of unirradiated uranium which can be handled safely without protective equipment--precisely why it is such an attractive target for terrorists.

Locking the uranium behind the security fences of Dounreay was a victory in the battle against nuclear proliferation, but the war is far from won. No one knows for sure how many small civilian nuclear research centers, as vulnerable as the one in Georgia, are sprinkled around the republics of the former Soviet Union. Washington has counted at least 30 which are in need of improved security. The U.S. is spending $137 million this year to provide equipment and expertise for some of these centers and will complete the job of protecting all the known sites by 2002. The hope, of course, is that terrorists will not get to them first.

--With reporting by Andrew Meier /Moscow and Chandrani Ghosh /Washington

Documented Stocks of Weapons-Grade Uranium

Country	Metric tonnes
Russia	1,050
U.S.A.	645
France	24
China	20
U.K.	8
South Africa	0.4
Pakistan	0.2
Other Countries	2.4
Civilian Institutions*	20
TOTAL	1,770

*Mainly research reactors, universities Source: Albright, Berkhout and Walker Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996 World Inventories