The United States could only account for 1,160 out of 17,500 kilograms of Highly-Enriched Uranium (HEU) -- weapon-usable nuclear material -- exported to 27 countries in response to a 1992 congressional mandate, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last week.[...]
The report recommended that the Department of Energy, Department of State and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission work to gain greater access to critical facilities where weapon-usable U.S. nuclear material is stored and keep inventories of the transfer, enrichment, reprocessing and storage of the nuclear materials.
[...]
The U.S agencies rejected the recommendations, claiming that keeping a comprehensive inventory would be costly, impractical and unwarranted, and that that International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards are sufficient to account for U.S. nuclear material overseas.
And besides, how could we seriously pretend that someone we want deposed has a stash of nuclear material waiting to become a mushroom cloud if we had precise records of where the stuff is?
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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