U.S. Nuclear Labs Lessen the Terrorism Risk

Your May 2 editorial, “A Ringing Nuclear Alarm,” deserves a sharp rebuke. The chance that nuclear material from a U.S. national lab will end up in a terrorist nuclear explosive is negligible compared to the likelihood that material will be stolen from facilities of the former Soviet Union, lost during future instability in Pakistan or Iran or sold by the current regime in North Korea to terrorists. Our national laboratories provide the science and technology to support cooperative activities to secure Russian nuclear materials, to detect clandestine production of nuclear materials and weapons, to search for hidden terrorist devices and to diagnose the origin should a device detonate in a U.S. or foreign city.

The labs’ nonproliferation missions cannot be accomplished without scientific and technical experts who are familiar with the methods for handling, processing and securing nuclear weapons materials. Laboratory experimental facilities remain vital to training these experts. It is right to design U.S. security systems to meet the largest credible terrorist threat and to push these systems during training exercises to find the limits where they fail. It is wrong to suggest that current security levels at U.S. national laboratories increase, in any measurable way, the global risk of nuclear terrorism.

Per Peterson

Chair, Dept. of Nuclear

Engineering, UC Berkeley