washington

A high-powered Washington panel has sharply rebuked the Clinton administration for dragging its feet on the disposal of plutonium from surplus US nuclear warheads.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies says that the administration has failed to get the disposal programme under way at home, and to win agreement for similar efforts in Russia.

A report from the centre calls for a formal agreement between the United States and Russia to ensure that plutonium ‘pits’ — or cores — from thousands of nuclear warheads rendered surplus by arms-control agreements are processed into safer shapes, and then disposed of.

But the panel of senior scientists, engineers and former diplomats who drew up the report are especially angry with the US administration for failing to make disposal a higher priority. “At the moment, there is more leadership in Russia on this than there is in the United States, ” says John Taylor, a consultant at the Electric Power Research Institute in California, and chairman of the panel.

Senator Pete Domenici (Republican, New Mexico), who chairs the committee allocating the disposal programme's budget at the Department of Energy, co-chaired the panel and endorses its conclusions.

“This issue has not received the appropriate level of interest in the Clinton administration, ” says Domenici, who warns that Russian weapons components could fall into the hands of terrorists if inaction continues.

The report says that both the United States and Russia should press ahead immediately with converting the pits into less dangerously shaped blocks of plutonium, in advance of disposing of the plutonium itself.

The United States is building a prototype facility to do this at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, using a dry process based on hydrogen gas. But a full-scale facility is not due to come on line until 2005.

The report attributes the overall slow progress to a lack of commitment from senior administration officials. “There presently is little or no serious leadership within the US government⃛ to move the programme forward, ” it says.