A.To find out how to design a bomb.B.To find out where ……
TEXT B
Tomorrow evening about 20
million Americans will be shown, on their television screens, how easy it is to
steal plutonium (钚) and produce "the most terrifying blackmail weapon ever
devised" -- a homemade atomic bomb.
They will be told that no
commercial nuclear plant in the United States -- and probably in the world -- is
adequately protected against a well planned armed attack by terrorists, and that
there is enough information on public record to guide a nuclear thief not only
to the underground rooms of nuclear plants where plutonium is stored, but also
to tell him how the doors of those underground rooms are designed.
The hour-long television programme, "The Plutonium Connection", makes its
point by showing how a 20-year-old student of the Masschusetts Institute of
Technology in five weeks designed an atomic bomb composed of plutonium and parts
from a hardware store.
The young man, whose identity is being
kept secret for fear he may be kidnaped by terrorists, is quoted as saying," I
was pretty surprised about how easy k is to design a bomb. When I was working on
my design, I kept thinking there’s got to be more to it than this, but actually
there isn’t. It’s simple."
The student worked alone, using
information he obtained from science libraries open to the public. The
television programme, produced for non-commericial stations across the country
by a Boston educational station, shows how quantities of other "secret"
information are available to anyone.
The Atomic Energy
Commission’s public reading room in Washington is described by the narrator as
"the first place a bomb-designer would visit when he was planning his plutonium
theft. On file there and freely available are the plans of every civilian
nuclear installation in the country."
The programme seems
certain to create enormous controversy -- not only over the lack of nuclear
safeguards, but also over the morality of appointing the student to design a
bomb and the wisdom of drawing attention to the ways that a nuclear thief can
work.
Even an official of Public Broadcasting System, which is
distributing the TV programme, confessed to uneasiness: "It’s a terribly
important subject, and people should know about the dangers, but I can’t help
wondering if the programme won’t give someone ideas."
"The
Plutonium Connection" explains, for example, that the security systems of
nuclear plants were all designed to prevent sabotage by perhaps one or agents of
some foreign power. But now this appears less of a hazard than the possibility
of an attack by an armed band of terrorists with dedicated disregard for their
own lives.
The programme discusses two major plutonium
reprocessing plants in the US -- one already operating in Oklahoma, one being
completed in South Carolina -- neither of which has more than a handful of armed
guards to supplement the alarms, fences and gun-detectors that Government
security requires. Both are in such remote areas that it would take at least 45
minutes for a sizeable force to be assembled, if there were an attack.
An official of the South Carolina plant -- a joint operation of Allied
Chemical, Gulf Oil and Royal Dutch Shell -- admits to television viewers that
the "system we’ve designed would probably not prevent" a band of about 12 armed
terrorists from entering.
Stealing plutonium is even easier,
the programme suggests. Despite constant survery of all materials on the list,
there are inevitably particles of plutonium unaccounted for -- about I lb a
month at the Oklahoma plant, owned by the KerrMcGee oil company, which in a year
adds up to enough to make an atomic bomb. It is suggested that stealing would be
even easier if instrument technicians were unscrupulous enough to alter their
measuring devices.
The television film also shows radioactive
fuel being transported to nuclear processing plants in commercial armoured cars.
As safety measure, US drivers of such cars are ordered to contact headquarters
by radio telephone every two hours. But the equipment is "cumbersome and
unreliable", and in difficult terrain there are radio black out areas.
The programmer ends with a warning from Dr. Theodore Taylor, a former
Atomic Energy Commission officer who has long contended that any person of
modest technical ability could make an atomic bomb: "If we don’t get this
problem under international control within the next five or six years, there is
a good chance that it will be permanently out of control."
Why would a terrorist go to the Atomic Energy commission’s public reading room
A.To find out how to design a bomb.
B.To find out where to steal plutonium.
C.To look at files of secret information.
D.To find out where to stem an atomic bomb.