NUCLEAR WATCHDOG WITHOUT BARK OR BITE

...Maybe once, twice in two and a half, three years I've had an instrument I've had confidence in, and put it up against something it could measure...

...The Administration's representative at the agency, Richard T. Kennedy, an Under Secretary of State and former member of the NRC, has told the Foreign Relations Committee that his evaluation of the agency is "generally positive...

...The inspector was driving to the Swiss nuclear power plant called Muehle-berg...

...It's then that we arrange ourselves around the table piled with papers, and Lumetti, adding page after page of closely typed numbers, comes up twenty-five grams short...

...In the meantime, with Markocrzy leading the way, Lumetti makes a sweaty climb to the IAEA's surveillance cameras, staring at the pool of spent fuel from a narrow catwalk that almost bumps the ceiling...

...the average delay is about sixty days...

...that none will have a temper tantrum and defy the rules by building a bomb and using it without discussing the matter first...

...The tool most relied on by IAEA inspectors is an ordinary set of binoculars...

...Engineers there were expecting us, and the plant manager was waiting patiently to shake our hands...

...At hjs invitation the others plug in more calculators, larger calculators...

...political quotas demand it...

...But almost from the moment it was announced, the Acheson-Lilienthal plan was scaled back to fit the hardening line of U.S...

...You don't understand this agency if you think of it as a technical one...

...I know what I'm going to say to them...

...Lumetti is a big, florid, friendly man, but he is woefully miscast for the role of inspector and enforcement officer...

...Each country then regularly reports to Vienna how much nuclear material is on hand...

...Really, I am confused," he says, the only person smiling...

...In reaching conclusions, he adds, "We are very careful...

...You should look at safeguards from the eyes of the man sitting at the desk in the Pentagon—and his counterpart on the other side," this administrator says...

...Like the rest of the staff, he was hired on the basis of a resume forwarded by his own government: There are no interviews...

...an inspector who doesn't know how much plutonium goes in cannot be certain if it all comes out...

...The architects of the complex, eager to patronize as many Austrian contractors as possible, standardized as little of the mechanical equipment as they dared...

...And the United States enthusiastically subscribes to this policy...

...And the U.S...

...How do you prove that a nation has not built a bomb...

...In the private view of IAEA officials, the remaining 10 per cent is best taken care of by spies and satellites...

...Maybe Lumetti was right about twenty-five grams, but the system does not allow him to be sure...

...In a letter to Congress, the commissioners said it troubled them that the agency could not detect a diversion in some types of plants—principally heavy.wa-ter reactors like the one under safeguards in Pakistan...

...The usual," says Lumetti...

...The satisfactions, he said, would be "pathetically inadequate" compared to the "immense and dreary task...

...One result is a false sense of confidence in its work, for the IAEA is a peculiar sort of accountant: It never sees all the books...

...It was our error...

...Hans J. Gruemm, the director of safeguards, says 200 such "discrepancies" turn up a year...

...Twenty-five grams of uranium would fill a few thimbles at most, and don't amount to much of a threat...

...There is probably no plant more cooperative with the IAEA than this squat concrete cylinder on a bank of the river Aar, on the only patch of level land in sight...

...Lumetti has it...

...On the other hand, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and several Senators have spoken more freely than ever before about IAEA's failures...

...State Department officials have been discussing a scheme to transfer export licensing from the NRC to State, which is considered more responsive to the daily whims of Presidential policymaking...

...But after spending a few hours with him on the job, I found his diffidence easier to understand: The agency sends him out unarmed and powerless...

...They know an item count doesn't make sense—but they make a great show of keeping a serious face, and so do I." If you believe the series of pamphlets produced and handed out by the IAEA, the agency and nations with nuclear fuels cordially negotiate agreements specifying precisely what the agency will do—where cameras will be, how many inspectors can visit, how long they can stay...

...Only a typing error...

...That approach divides the nuclear haves from the nuclear have-nots and feeds the larger division between industrialized and developing countries, the sellers and buyers of technology...

...yet through the agency they demand that all other nations be scrutinized...

...Sometimes the difference is due to legitimate, accidental losses...

...nuclear exports, has refused to endorse such a cheery view...

...Others have the expertise but the wrong politics: Soviet inspectors have waited in Vienna for as long as nine months between assignments for lack of countries willing to admit them...

...They are twenty-five grams short because the wrong number was recorded—although no one knows where...

...The scientific system of safeguards—its special cameras and accounting checks—turns out to be altogether human and fallible...

...The amount of nuclear material is only "estimated roughly" by the agency, which concedes that it's probably enough for 6,000 bombs...

...The IAEA has, in fact, become the agency that makes nuclear commerce possible...

...At the other eight, the agency had to accept the operators' word about how much plutonium was there and, in effect, whether any was missing...

...Precise measurements—the heart of safeguards—are impossible...

...If the Administration has its way, at least one large commercial reprocessing plant will open in the United States, joining those being built or on the drawing boards in Great Britain, France, India, Argentina, and Brazil...

...From 1956 to 1976, the IAEA sponsored fellowships for the study of reprocessing, the chemical procedure that extracts plutonium from spent reactor fuel...

...Lumetti has added the numbers three times, and each time they have come up short...

...Important U.S...

...In reality, the basic reports from each country arrive late, so that the agency is never sure how much material exists...

...The safeguards system is designed around hopes that nothing will go wrong...

...It does its work by a combination of inspections and excruciatingly difficult accounting checks intended to detect whether nations are secretly diverting plutonium or enriched uranium for the manufacture of nuclear bombs...

...All of those nations begin bargaining from positions of strength, making agreements of any kind more difficult to negotiate...

...I'm used to precision...

...Agency headquarters are two curving towers within a new United Nations complex along the Danube which is large enough to have its own subway stop...

...At most nuclear power plants, including the reactor at Muehleberg, the agency installs cameras to detect the removal of spent fuel between inspections...

...At the time, the Israelis said they feared Iraq was developing nuclear weapons despite periodic inspections by the IAEA...

...Since the Eisenhower Administration, U.S...

...I put the film here...

...I feel very uncomfortable as a scientist," says John Womack, a former inspector who returned to the United States last year in frustration...

...Lumetti, singing to himself, carries a small aluminum suitcase containing a tube connected to a box with a tiny red screen...

...For lack of time, much of an inspector's job has been reduced to a counting game a child could play: Taking an inventory of spent fuel usually consists of aiming the binoculars at the rods in a cooling pool and simply counting...

...The IAEA's record at reprocessing plants is dismal...

...The agency has operated almost entirely out of public view for more than twenty years, answerable to governments but somehow never to their publics...

...An IAEA inspector is the only element in the control process who can ask questions face to face...

...Officials in Vienna insist that this work is as precise as a surgeon's, that the confidentiality of the numbers is defended at all cost, that the sanctity of the information gathered here is such that the inspector can't trust the smallest part of his job to an outsider...

...So far, the trip was much like the IAEA itself, which is supposed to keep track of nuclear materials and prevent the spread of nuclear weapons...

...This should be the IAEA at its best, tirelessly unraveling records to pinpoint the location of the most minute amount of nuclear material...

...There is no part of the nuclear fuel cycle more desired by countries anxious for a potential source of energy, no better place to get material for a bomb, and no system more difficult to police...

...The Baruch Plan left the essential details to negotiations which ultimately produced nothing mutually acceptable to the Soviet Union and the United States...

...Markocrzy smiles...

...Surely the mistake is his...

...It was to be a real safeguard against nations that might try to exploit the new technology for military ends...

...Nuclear Watchdog Without Bark or Bite BY ROBERT RUBY The international 'safeguards' agency has neither the competence nor the clout to curb proliferation The inspector from the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived in a rush and then, because he was tired, he overslept, so we were late and a little frazzled leaving the hotel in Bern...

...They call out the numbers as if this were bingo, but the sum is still twenty-five grams short...

...The credibility of safeguards turns out to be based more on the inspector's presence, on what he could do, than on what he does...

...So far all have been resolved...

...Traditionally, the agency has offered the have-nots technical aid to make safeguards seem worthwhile— training programs and studies of energy needs...

...A second American attraction to safeguards has been the matter of security...

...Lumetti is talking like a baby: "I take the film...

...As we move around the plant, a staggering amount of time is consumed changing into protective overalls and hats, back into street clothes, then back again into overalls...

...If the reports show an inconsequential amount of uranium as missing—well, in this little room we're all friends: The reports must be wrong...

...It also promised an "urgent, in-depth" review of measures to prevent information from leaking out again...

...So goes the work of the IAEA, a diplomatic exercise of approximation rather than precision, a matter of coaxing a country to allow an inspector to take a few imperfect measurements in a hurry...

...David Lilienthal, writing in 1946, foresaw some of the difficulties that would confront an international control agency...

...As a chemist who came from Italy's atomic energy commission, Lumetti is typical of most inspectors except for the fact he has worked at the IAEA for thirteen years—triple the average...

...He is never alone...

...Markocrzy, the technical manager at Muehleberg, is asking Lumetti what he plans to do...

...C...

...In 1946, Presidential adviser Bernard M. Baruch proposed that the United Nations create an International Atomic Development Authority that would be confined to controlling "dangerous" nuclear activities...

...The inspection is over...

...Even if all the figures agree, an inspector may find a jammed camera or some inexplicably blurred photos...

...He is apologetic...

...I was here because, according to the agency, every other country had refused to admit me, complaining that I would be interfering with work at the plants...

...A discrepancy of a few grams usually can be resolved, but no one knows what to do should tens of kilograms be gone...

...And the agency operates without the ability to demonstrate whether its systems work...

...We leave the plant for a lunch paid for by the utility—a lunch that doesn't end until almost 3 p.m...

...There was swift reaction to Richter's testimony from Vienna and Washington...

...In 1980, IAEA inspectors conducted all of their scheduled inventories at only three of those plants...

...He has a job full of uncertainties, of not being able to pinpoint a typing error because there are other items to check, because this happened near the end of an exhausting day, because another inspection begins near Baden early tomorrow, because, after all, twenty-five grams is no big deal...

...Part of its character is to be a little rushed, a little late, and remarkably generous toward the nations which are its clients...

...I feel very stupid sometimes, just counting them," Womack says, "but that's all I have time to do...

...With some irritation, Carlos Buechler, a senior IAEA official, says no one should really expect the agency's findings to be better than ambiguous...

...How enthusiastically a former inspector named Roger Richter learned after Israel attacked the Osiris research reactor in Iraq last June...

...Recently, however...

...Argentina plans to open a reprocessing plant of its own design sometime this year...

...Everyone is shaking hands...

...The inspector's job, according to the agency, is not to reach conclusions...

...Kurt Imhof, an official from the Swiss energy office in Bern, sits beside him...

...I service the cameras, I check the seals...

...In reports mailed to Vienna, the fuel fabricator told the agency it shipped more fuel than Bernische Kraftwerke owns up to receiving...

...Gradually it becomes clear that the IAEA is only prepared for inspections that find nothing significantly wrong...

...The inherent uncertainties of the IAEA system are dizzying...

...We took maybe a half-hour too much...

...The agency immediately announced that Richter, who had already resigned, was being fired for "serious misconduct"—talking about the failings of safeguards...

...the raw materials of reprocessing can sometimes be seen, but they can never be precisely measured— the amount of plutonium in spent reactor fuel can, at best, be estimated with 10 per cent margin of error...

...The United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France developed nuclear technology—and nuclear weapons—without any outsiders sniffing around...

...When inspectors file their reports, their findings are bound to be at variance...

...From the IAEA's point of view, Switzerland is an ideal client—one that has always treated inspectors with respect...

...Traditionally, the United States has taken at face value the assurance of the agency's safeguards...

...Is not easy," Lumetti says...

...For less than the price of a large bomber, an agency member has a source of hard-to-obtain information—certified by an official stamp...

...Some of the agency's conclusions that nuclear material is accounted for are based on what the agency thinks it would find if inspections it cannot afford to make took place...

...How do you prove safeguards are the reason...

...foreign policy...

...Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richter said the agency could not have detected clandestine production of plutonium under some conditions, and went on to describe how inspectors in Iraq sometimes had to make their rounds by flashlight...

...If inspectors later find something different, the agency's director-general informs his governing board or goes directly to the U.N...

...Sellers and buyers of nuclear goods are eager to praise the safeguards, to reassure others that reactors-to-be (or enrichment and reprocessing plants) carry the agency's stamp of approval...

...He said it would start out employing some of the best physicists and engineers, people capable of imagining the worst in order to detect it...

...In their many safeguards reports, and in the course of dozens of interviews, agency officials never volunteer the fact that inspectors use binoculars to perform the work the agency presents as terribly specialized and complex...

...owned by a private utility, Bernische Kraftwerke, and is a nuclear industry showcase-H:he most reliable boiling-water reactor in the world...

...Officials clearly preferred keeping safeguards secret to tolerating voices demanding that they be improved...

...Its safeguards are used to cloak nuclear exports with legitimacy which those transactions otherwise couldn't claim...

...Alberto Lumetti is driving cautiously, taking the car down the switchbacks of the road on the way to Muehleberg...

...Imhof, the government man from Bern, has been through all this before and wears a knowing look...

...military assumptions collapse as soon as additional nations become nuclear powers...

...There is no threat of meaningful sanctions against any country which decides to get in the way of his work...

...To accommodate the fifty countries which accept nuclear safeguards, it sends inspectors only where and when they are welcomed...

...For some plants, the agency admits it wouldn't notice whether nuclear fuel was missing until enough to make several bombs had disappeared...

...We are watching Lumetti calculate the inventory of fuel...

...The diplomats and technicians in Vienna earnestly insist that as few people as possible know how they work...

...It's nice to have you here—to have you find something...

...At first I thought someone in Vienna had made a mistake...

...Washington has not spoken with one voice on the issue of safeguards...

...An us-versus-them mentality is of no use if a dozen other nations acquire nuclear stockpiles...

...He aims the tube at each fuel rod, and after a brief snowstorm the percentage of U-235 appears in numbers on the screen...

...Nor, according to a former inspector, does it regularly do "transit accounting"— checking to see whether plant B received what plant A claims it sent...

...This is a one-day inspection...

...Neither the board nor the Security Council is going to rely on our technical statements," he says...

...India subsequently used a small reprocessing plant to prepare for its nuclear blast in 1974...

...If safeguards need to be improved, he says, that's because they need to keep pace with commercial developments—new types of enrichment plants, larger processing plants— and not because safeguards now are notably deficient...

...It's my pleasure...

...In 1945, a committee led by Dean Ache-son and David Lilienthal proposed to create an international atomic energy agency that would be the sole operator of nuclear facilities around the world, running everything from uranium mines to reactors...

...The report will show there is no discrepancy," Lumetti says as the papers are cleared away...

...Safeguards are a religion for them, and dogma holds that for the system to work people must accept it on faith: Safeguards are founded on the hope that the risk of detection is the strongest deterrent against a country making its first nuclear explosive...

...The agency is too gentlemanly to spring surprises...

...The Administration says safeguards will somehow have to catch up...

...We spend an hour this way getting to the top of the containment building, where the utility stores newly delivered fuel...

...But he added that "the work itself, which would be largely policing and auditing and attempting to discover bad faith, would not be attractive to the type of personnel essential for the job...

...He apologizes profusely for imagined slights...

...The eleven most "sensitive" plants inspected by the agency are those handling plutonium that has already been separated from uranium—the form easiest to use in a bomb...

...At the agency this has come to mean that weaknesses should not be publicized—if nations know that the chance of detection is low, then the alarm system won't be feared...

...Nothing should be done without first telling Markocrzy...

...Security Council...

...To learn how the IAEA's safeguards work is to discover that even by the agency's own standards, they often fail...

...Although the agency says it has responsibility for eighty-six tons, more than fifty tons of that total have never been reported officially...

...But with IAEA's lack of political clout and its technical shortcomings, certainty is the one thing it can not provide...

...The inspector I joined in Bern was Alberto Lumetti, forty-six years old, Italian, an avid reader of Stendahl...

...endorsement of IAEA's work has been automatic—if only because nuclear commerce requires at least the pretense that the agency closely monitors the goods...

...Across the table and next to me is George Markocrzy, a Hungarian, the plant's director of technical services...

...One false alarm, one erroneous accusation against a country with a plausible explanation for an inventory problem, could damage the agency more than a failure to detect a real diversion, so the prevailing attitude is extreme caution...

...The agency, in any case, doesn't have the resources to determine whether the material has been sent somewhere else...

...At that point, Lumetti has had three hours, at most, of actual working time...

...One of these was the reactor outside Baghdad destroyed last year by Israel...

...Making safeguards politically acceptable has always been the agency's major stumbling block...

...The Reagan Administration has an uncanny enthusiasm for reprocessing...

...Given its pitiful resources, the IAEA must assume that every nation, every national leader, is rational and moral...

...James L. Malone, the Assistant Secretary in charge of nonproliferation policy, has also circulated proposals to soften requirements that a country place all of its nuclear plants under safeguards before receiving further exports...

...He sees that for $20 million, $25 million, he gets 90 per cent assurance that material is accounted for...

...If he finds every camera stopped and every seal broken, his job is to fix or replace them...

...Based in Vienna, the IAEA was designed to be the world's atomic alarm system...

...On the one hand, the Reagan Administration has been playing down the importance of the IAEA, hoping nobody will notice how feeble is the security it provides...

...No one knows whether the agency could survive a conclusion that turned out to be wrong...

...Muehleberg is Robert Ruby is a staff writer for The Baltimore Sun...

...Sorry," says Markocrzy, smiling now...

...The agency is supposed to inspect forty-six research reactors that have enough fuel for at least one bomb each...

...It is political...

...According to the papers on the table, some slightly enriched uranium is missing...

...Senator Alan Cranston of California called the letter "a watershed event...

...Another official explains that to worry about every twenty-five grams of uranium is to misrepresent the agency's true function...

...The NRC, which licenses U.S...

...Even if every camera worked and every inspection went well, the agency still might not know if plutonium were missing, because it doesn't know how much there was at the outset...

...Sometime this year, the Administration probably will make sure no such letter is ever written again...

...Every bank of elevators comes from a different manufacturer, and the agency needs a half-dozen crews from a half-dozen companies to keep them all running...

...Markocrzy's interest grows by giant leaps until he moves to Lu-metti's side...

...It is said to be a bargain...

...Certainty is supposed to be the agency's stock-in-trade—the certainty that no nuclear material has gone astray...

...State Department described Richter as a "low-level, junior inspector," although his three and one-half years of experience were about average for the agency...

...If safeguards are to be tolerated, nothing should come as a surprise...

...But twenty-five grams have been lost, at least on paper, and have to be found...

...Lumetti, as usual, does a lot of his work sitting at a long table cluttered with papers, in a small, cramped office at the plant...

...Finally, in 1953, in the United Nations speech announcing the "Atoms for Peace" program, President Eisenhower proposed what became the IAEA in Vienna, contradictions and all...

...In 1980, inspectors saw all the fuel at only twenty of the forty-six plants...

...Here is an agency that last year spent more than two-thirds of its $88 million budget to promote nuclear energy and then used the leftovers to monitor the exact same technology...

...I hope we did not disturb you too much...

...I feel like I'm an actor on a stage...

...Some of this help, however, has boomeranged...

...Richter then publicly explained why that was a plausible fear...

...Within twenty he also is recording the numbers that will become confidential when they reach Vienna...

...I understand you have some new fuel elements...

...In an attempt to please as many of its members as possible, the IAEA has complicated its own operations in much the same way...

...I know what they're going to say to me...

...Within fifteen minutes he has taken over aiming the tube at the new fuel...

...But there simply isn't enough time for Lumetti to do it all by the book...

...And only rarely does anyone ask how much protection the safeguards really provide...

...The IAEA has suffered from this split personality since birth— promoting technology and then trying to control its use—although the Americans who conceived it had something quite different in mind...

...Some candidates for the job don't have the background they need, but are hired anyway because U.N...

...He announces there is a typing error...

...India and Argentina, neither a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty pf 1968, enrolled the largest numbers of students...

...But in an average year, more than twenty per cent of the cameras fail...