第三单元英美报刊选读.doc

Unit Three Nuclear Proliferation and Environmental Protection Text A Formula for Terror The former Soviet arsenal is leaking into the West, igniting fears of a new brand of nuclear horror1 By Bruce W. Nelan On a sunny afternoon in central Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic, two private security guards and a trading-company executive strolled along a quiet street. They were expecting to meet a middle-aged man from St. Petersburg. In exchange for $1 million, they would hand over a 20-cm by 20-cm metal container holding highly radioactive material. But as the traders and their client were about to make their open-air swap2 in mid-August, 15 police officers rushed out to grab them. The police seized the 59-kg case emitting gamma radiation.3 Until a specialized laboratory can examine the material, the police cannot be sure what it is or where it was stolen from, but they believe it is dangerous and illicit. This is the second major case of nuclear theft that Vladimir Kolesnik, the deputy chief of St. Petersburg’s organized-crime department, has thwarted since last May. “The problem,” he says, “is that security standards have slackened, and virtually everybody who has access to4 nuclear materials could steal something.” The first symptoms of the nuclear plague are spreading into Europe. After years of scares and false alarms?almost all the supposed bomb-grade goods on offer turned out to be fraudulent?German police have in the past four months uncovered four cases of smuggled nuclear material that could actually be used to make an atom bomb. The biggest haul came on Aug. 10, when Lufthansa Flight 3369 from Moscow landed in Munich with 350 grams of atomic fuel aboard.5 As it happened, so was Victor Sidorenko, Russia’s Deputy Minister for Atomic Energy, whose agency supervises Moscow’s stocks of fissionable materials.6 The lead-lined suitcase was carrying MOX?mixed-oxide fuel for reactors but perfectly usable in a bomb since it contained plutonium enriched