NY Times article

[Stuart.Altman@dp.doe.gov]

The following article is from the N.Y. Times:

December 19, 1996
  
Road Mishap Puts Focus on Shipments of A-Bombs
  
By JAMES BROOKE
  
DENVER -- The Energy Department describes it simply as an "off-normal" 
event.  But it had all the drama of the opening scene of a post-cold-war 
thriller.  In the dead of night a month ago, a secret armed convoy crossed 
the lonely plains of western Nebraska, then slowed at the onslaught of an 
unexpected ice storm.  Laboring up a hill at 25 miles an hour, a 
tractor-trailer in that convoy skidded off the two-lane road and turned on 
its side, jostling its cargo of two nuclear bombs.  Then, for several hours 
before dawn Nov. 16, the Nebraska Highway Patrol closed traffic on Highway 
83 for several hours while a commercial wrecker righted the overturned 
18-wheeler.
  
Specialists swept the area for radiation leaks, and the bombs were gingerly 
transferred to another truck, which carried them the 250 miles back to 
Ellsworth Air Force Base, home of a B-1 bomber wing, near Rapid City, S.D.
  
The highway accident was the first in 13 years involving "sensitive nuclear 
materials" hauled by the Energy Department's Transportation Safeguards 
Division.  But it has focused a spotlight on daily secret shipments of 
nuclear weapons along the nation's roads.
  
Because routes and schedules of those shipments are kept confidential, the 
Energy Department, at least for now, is not confirming that bombs were 
carried on the truck that rolled over.
  
But the nature of the cargo was disclosed Monday by Sens. Jim Exon and Bob 
Kerrey of Nebraska, who have asked the Energy Department to explain why 
nuclear weapons were transported into an ice storm.  Nebraska Gov. Ben 
Nelson complains that he has no idea how many nuclear weapons are shipped 
through his state, and has asked the department to notify him of the timing 
of future shipments.
  
Given advances in bomb design, it is now virtually impossible for a U.S. 
nuclear weapon to explode by accident, said William Arkin, a nuclear 
affairs columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  Instead, "the 
major concern in an accident" is radioactive contamination through 
"dispersal of uranium and plutonium," Arkin said.
  
But Energy Department officials stress the agency's record of safety in 
transporting nuclear materials.  "Our trucks have traveled 80 million miles 
since 1975 without recording any personal injuries or major damages to the 
vehicles," said Al Stotts, spokesman for the department's office in 
Albuquerque, N.M., which oversees the Transportation Safeguards Division.
  
Last month's accident was the most serious of only four recorded in the 
last two decades, Stotts said, and it resulted in nothing more than 
scratches to the trailer.
  
Such trailers, which can carry up to two dozen bombs, are designed so that 
they can crash and burn without damage to their cargoes.  An Energy 
Department brochure says of them, "The thermal characteristics of the Safe 
Secure Trailer would allow the trailer to be totally engulfed in a fire 
without incurring damage to the cargo."
  
The drivers, called "nuclear materials couriers," are trained in 
counterterrorist tactics.  They are armed, and their cabs are bulletproof. 
Additional guards travel in escort vehicles, generally Ford or Chevrolet 
vans.  The convoys move at night and are tracked by satellite.
  
The United States stopped producing nuclear warheads in 1990.  Since then, 
a fraction of its arsenal -- about 9,500 bombs ? have been shipped, almost 
all by truck, to the Energy Department's Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, 
for dismantling.  Current plans call for trucking an additional 2,500 bombs 
to the plant for disassembly by the end of the decade.
  
Further, in its effort to reduce and consolidate the nation's plutonium 
stocks, the Energy Department has proposed shipping tons of plutonium from 
military sites around the nation not only to Pantex but also to the 
Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C.
  
Dismantling was not the apparent purpose of the trip cut short by the storm 
in Brownlee, Neb., last month, however. Those bombs are believed to have 
been on an 800-mile trip from Ellsworth to Pantex for routine maintenance.
  
"It is quite common and quite routine to have truck convoys on the highways 
going from military bases to Pantex," said Robert S. Norris, a senior 
analyst on nuclear weapons issues for the Natural Resources Defense 
Council.  "Right now there are probably convoys going from somewhere to 
somewhere, as there have been for the last 50 years."
  
Alarmed by the increase in road shipments that would result from the Energy 
Department's plans on plutonium consolidation, one group, the Nuclear 
Information and Resource Service, has adopted a slogan: "No Mobile 
Chernobyls."
  
Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company

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Perhaps this is why our new Sectretary of Energy is the present Secretary of 

Transporation...only joking...(?)

Stuart M. Altman
U.S. Department of Energy
Defesne Programs
stuart.altman@dp.doe.gov