WHIPS, CHAINS AND URANIUM

Swept away in the devastating maritime holocaust was the question of why a French ship in the English Channel was shipping uranium to the USSR. As readers may remember, the USSR enriches uranium (increases the fraction of fissile U 235 in non-fissile U 238 from 0.9% to about 3% so that it can be used to fuel light-water reactors) for a convenient price: a toll in the uranium, which stays behind to fuel Soviet reactors, and the depleted part to be bred into plutonium for Soviet warheads.

It might be thought that this is the result of the European penchant for forgetting the lessons of history, but the explanation is entirely different. The Soviets offered enrichment service to any country in the world in 1968, when the West rejected the offer. The man who made the Soviet dream come true was Jimmy Carter: after unilaterally abrogating the Non-Proliferation Treaty (in which the Haves guarantee the Have-nots full access to nuclear fuel and technology) and reneging on contracts with US allies in Europe and especially Japan, the rest of the Western World saw that there was one thing more unpredictable, unreliable and irrational than even the Soviet Politbureau: the American liberal establishment. By 1979 one half of the European Community's uranium was enriched in the USSR; by 1981, the Soviet share had increased to 61%, and the US, once the sole enricher of Europe's nuclear fuel, supplied no more than 16%. By now, Europe's two enrichment organizations, Eurodif (diffusion) and Urenco (centrifuge) presumably process the majority of Europe's needs.

It would be nice to give some of the credit for this US policy of self-mutilation to the then Vice President Walter Mondale; however, Carter probably did not consult with him on such matters, and I doubt that he could tell the difference between uranium hexafluoride and Whips and Chains, a pornographic magazine distributed out of a Manhattan warehouse owned by his would-be VP's husband.

[More: See Chapter on International Policy in Free Market Energy, reviewed below; Europe's enrichment data based on p. 418 of B. Goldschmidt's The Atomic Complex, Amer. Nucl. Soc., La Grange Park, Ill., 1982; on Mr. Z's warehouse, see "Ferraro's Firm Porn Link," Washington Inquirer, 7/27/84 (Box 28526, Wash., DC 20005)].