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By shipping plutonium around the world, Britain is courting catastrophe
(George Monbiot, The Guardian, June 11, 2002)
At the end of this week, two British ships will pull into the port of Takahama to collect enough plutonium to make 17 atomic bombs. . . . The security of the shipment has been described by the definitive defence briefing, Jane's Foreign Report, as "totally inadequate". Britain and Japan are to launch, in the form of the two freighters carrying the material, a pair of floating dirty bombs, waiting for a detonator. And they are doing so for reasons that have nothing to do with economics and nothing to do with defence, but everything to do with a politics which is as mad and dangerous as their mission. . . . This programme can sustain itself only until the public grasps the two unavoidable facts of nuclear power. The first is that there is, as yet, no safe means of disposing of the wastes it produces. The second is that even if one were found, the monitoring and safe management of these wastes requires 250,000 years of political and economic stability. No government on earth can guarantee five. . . . To spread plutonium across an entire region, terrorists need only send a missile or boat like the one Bin Laden used to attack the USS Cole, equipped with the right explosives, into the side of one of the freighters. . . . Japan has insisted that the ships have no military escort.

posted by LoZo 9:58 AM