Limiting the Spread of Weapon-Usable Fissile Materials.

This report examines the problem of rapidly accumulating weapon-usable fissile materials and proposes an agenda to help the United States and other countries manage these materials. Weapon-usable fissile materials come from both dismantled nuclear weapons and the spend fuel from civilian nuclear power plants. This report should be of interest to nuclear nonproliferation planners and analysts in the United States, the former Soviet republics FSRs, and other countries, and also to nuclear energy planners. The study started in October 1991. By June 1992, we had briefed our interim recommendations to planners and analysts in various DoD offices and also in the National Security Council, Livermore National Laboratory, and the nuclear industry. We also solicited reactions from public interest groups, particularly on the ramifications of our key recommendation that the United States purchase highly enriched uranium from the FSRs after it is diluted and also their weapon-grade plutonium. The present report incorporates the latest data on nuclear weapon dismantling and elaborates on the proposed agenda, but its basic recommendations differ little from the interium proposals.