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Radiological Weapons I: U.S. Efforts Failing to Stop Smugglers The United States has poorly coordinated and administered its programs to provide detection devices to other countries for preventing smuggling of nuclear and radioactive materials, congressional investigators said in a report expected to be released today (see GSN, June 25). “It’s a pretty damning report,” said Senator Pat Roberts (Kan.), ranking Republican on the Senate Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. The report from the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, notes that no U.S. agency coordinates programs to provide assistance to 30 countries — particularly Russia, former Soviet republics and Central and Eastern European countries — to buy detection devices and provide training. The State and Energy departments run two programs each, and the Customs Service, the FBI and the Coast Guard also have programs. Without overall coordination, different agencies have duplicated activities and provided equipment of differing quality, the report says. “The current multiple-agency approach … is not, in our view, the most effective way to deliver this assistance,” the report says, according to the Washington Post. “We believe the development of a government-wide plan is needed.” Even within departments, there is sometimes lack of coordination, according to the report. The two Energy administrators that run the department’s two programs do not communicate with each other, even though they fund the same equipment, the report says. U.S. agencies also fail to follow through and investigate how countries use assistance, the report says. The Defense Department said earlier this year that often countries have never used certain U.S. equipment, have used other U.S. equipment only to impress visiting U.S. officials or have stopped using equipment once it needed new batteries or repairs. Despite the many problems in other countries, U.S. attempts to implement detection and security measures on its borders are sometimes worse, according to the report. Customs told congressional investigators that it has 4,200 pager-sized radiation detectors for 7,500 inspectors but plans to provide all inspectors with a detector by September 2003 (see GSN, June 13; Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post, June 26).
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