‘Dust’ in the Wind

Rhetoric versus Science

“… the fate of Iran’s stockpile remains a mystery, two months after the United States began a war meant to prevent Iran from ever building an atomic bomb.” -The New York Times, April 29

Have you seen how President Trump, when talking about Iran’s capacity for making an atomic bomb, refers to enriched uranium as just so much “dust”?

It’s one more example - maybe the gravest example, in my view - of his unfitness to hold the government’s highest office. Iran’s enrichment of bomb-grade uranium has been Trump’s paramount justification for attacking Iran more than three months ago - eliminating Iran’s capacity for making one or more nuclear bombs.

Yet, on this matter so vital to the survival of life on Earth, Trump seems as unread and under-prepared as he was about Iran’s capacity to lock up all shipping through the vital Strait of Hormuz. It was a shocker for the White House, when Iran so quickly did precisely that.

Recent reporting from The New York Times brings together what is known - and much that still remains unknown - about the true status of Iran’s nuclear materials and its capacity to produce a world-threatening atomic device:

“Much of the uranium is believed to be stored so far underground that even powerful U.S. bunker-buster bombs may not be able to destroy it. A raid by U.S. forces to retrieve the uranium would carry enormous risks, including from the material itself, which could become highly toxic if it were to leak and be exposed to moisture.”

Trump so casually refers to this critical material as “dust” when talking piecemeal to the public about his aims and purposes with the Iran attack. That word - dust - seems designed to trivialize and dismiss the gravity of the threat. Read another good Times explainer here…

First, it would not involve dust. In nature, uranium occurs as a mix of three radioactive isotopes: uranium 238, uranium 235 and uranium 234, which are differentiated by the number of neutrons in their nuclei. This mix undergoes slow radioactive decay but is not prone to fission, the atom-splitting chain reaction that powers nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Enrichment involves concentrating the uranium 235. The process typically starts with the conversion of uranium oxide into stable gaseous uranium hexafluoride, or UF₆, followed by a centrifuge technique that separates the three isotopes by mass. Enrichment up to about 5 percent makes uranium fissile enough for nuclear power, while enrichment of at least 20 percent is the absolute minimum needed for weaponry.

Whatever its current level of enrichment, Iran’s nuclear material appears, in fact, to have gone missing. Important detail. Trump had proudly announced last year that Iran’s nuclear bomb-making capacity had been “obliterated.” According to later news reporting, not so much.

The words “obliterate” and “oblivious” have a common Latin etymology. Both share a fundamental meaning of “wiping away” as in eliminating and also just forgetting. Is part of this administration’s language sleight of hand intended to make us oblivious to an essential nuclear bomb component that has gone missing in the desert?

“Dust” sounds so trivial, right? So unimportant? (Feeling safer now?)

Tennesseans especially, owing to our mid-20th Century history, should be acutely aware of anything involving nuclear materials. The enrichment of uranium at the government’s K-25 plant (FYI, it’s still called that over at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory) was the original purpose of the “secret city” in the technically elaborate (and successful) ‘Manhattan Project’ that ended World War II in the Pacific theatre - and why it all had to be kept so deeply secret.

(My friend Ray Hill, columnist and author in Knoxville, has a new biography out on US Senator Kenneth McKellar, Tennessee’s longest-serving member of Congress. It was McKellar who, as chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, helped FDR find and keep hidden a couple billion dollars in government money for the top-secret Manhattan Project. In return, McKellar negotiated placement of the K-25 operation at Tennessee.)

Oak Ridge thus became the site of the elaborate US uranium-enrichment machinery in the early 1940s with great risks of radiation exposure to thousands of workers. One of them was my father’s father.

I never learned my grandfather’s precise job description - I was only four years old when he died - but I remember my grandmother telling me later how he could tell her nothing at all about the work he was doing in Oak Ridge. In our family papers, the only documentation of my grandfather’s service is a commemorative certificate. It was signed by the Secretary of War and dated August 6, 1945: The day Hiroshima was destroyed.

Scary stuff then. Scary stuff now.

If President Trump won’t take any greater care to understand what he’s talking about, Tennessee’s members of Congress ought to go over to the White House tomorrow morning and educate him on the point.

I’m not holding my breath for news of such a courageous visit. (Senator McKellar died in 1957.) But somebody, please, hold Trump to account on this one deadly dangerous subject, if nothing else.

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