Culture Clashes: A weakness plaguing American emotional posture is that we hate to face deadlocks and stalemates. We as a people too often dread to hear "No," let alone say it. Our adversaries know this well. At the state level, they use this trait to lead us through endless dances of delay -- buying themselves much time to pursue aggressive plans while playing on our desperation for sudden, miraculous breakthroughs. They dangle a carrot, throw us some crumbs, and we fall for it repeatedly. At the sub-state level, our enemies use our craving for quick and low-cost closure, for easy answers built on short attention spans, to break our resolve and undermine our faith in our own leaders.

Iran's nuclear weapons program is one unpleasant example. Last week, Iran invoked "American influence" as a reason to maybe stop cooperating with inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency. Then, on Friday, Iran put off a scheduled inspection visit until late April. The excuse? March 20 was the start of Iran's New Years holiday. One wonders why the Iranian government hadn't looked at a calendar sooner. On Saturday -- that's right, the very next day -- Iran refused to let inspectors into their country altogether, indefinitely. It seems they didn't like the phrasing of a U.N. resolution that criticized their ongoing attempts to make fission bombs.

Meanwhile, discussions with North Korea on their nukes continue going in silly yet frightening circles. A year ago, the best intelligence estimate was that North Korea had made enough plutonium in its nuclear reactors to have maybe half a dozen working atomic weapons in one year. Woops! That would seem to suggest they might have some nukes right now -- again, just look at a calendar. Yet the five nations aligned to try to halt North Korea's weapons program, in all that time, could barely agree on their own working methods. A consensus was reached at last on the text of an offer from the president of South Korea for energy aid in return for disarmament. This "victory" was largely one of wordsmithing among countries none of whom increased their control over North Korean nuclear weapons by one iota. North Korea has not renounced its willingness to sell atom bombs to terrorists. Meanwhile, the president of South Korea was impeached for unrelated reasons. The agenda and schedule for future talks with North Korea are, to put it politely, in disarray. North Korea broke an agreement signed with the United States in 1994, and now staunchly refuses to make the first concession on any new treaty.

Iran and North Korea act like petulant children playing with fire indoors. But like many petulant children, their conduct begs for a good, sharp spanking that never actually comes. And all the while, those reactors keep cooking up more plutonium, their processing plants keep on processing it -- and the uranium purification centrifuges whirl on in demonic circles of their own; they're whirling right now as you read this.

A more clear-cut double whammy case study in the uselessness of appeasement when faced with nuclear-wannabee rogue states would seem hard to find. Pre-emption, though unattractive, must remain a viable option in U.S. policy, because nuclear blackmail, once started, is rather hard to stop. Neither the sternest diplomatic protest note, nor any retaliatory second strike, can possibly undo the damage once mushroom clouds sprout on American soil. We'd be fools indeed to think the surviving two-thirds of the original Axis of Evil don't have every intention to obtain their own stockpiles of atom bombs -- yet their politicians and envoys, with very different cultural imperatives than ours, keep on playing us and the UN as fools.

Separative Work: Discussions of building atom bombs fueled by uranium emphasize with troubling regularity the whole long journey from raw ore to weapons-grade purity. Naturally occurring uranium contains the key isotope used in bombs, U-235, in a proportion of only 0.7%. To make a practical fission weapon, that purity needs to be raised to about 90%. Half a dozen different processes exist for achieving this enrichment. The most worrisome method, alluded to above, is a cascade of special centrifuges: This technology is at the heart of the illicit nuclear flea market allegedly run for years by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a physicist instrumental in developing Pakistan's A-bomb arsenal. Libya and North Korea were among Dr. Khan's good customers. Iran might or might not have been, but Iran does own centrifuges and earlier UN inspections found traces of U-235 enriched to 36% and even 90%.

At the start of the nuclear age, Manhattan Project scientists developed the concept of "separative work." Basically, separative work units (SWUs) measure the effort and energy input needed to enrich U-235. The number of SWUs required to go from unenriched ore to weapons grade is considerable. Less separative work is involved in getting the U-235 purity up from 0.7% to the lower enrichment level called "reactor grade." Reactor grade uranium means it will serve well to fuel the controlled chain reaction in a nuclear power plant's core. Older standard references consider reactor-grade purity to be about 3.5% U-235, vastly below the level needed for making any bomb.

But there are two serious catches here. One is that the way the physics works, the more pure the U-235, the fewer SWUs are needed to make it even purer. Over half of the separative work required to get bomb fuel has already been accomplished in producing commercial 3.5% reactor fuel. This isn't good news for the non-proliferation community, especially since centrifuge installations are pretty easy to hide, and reactor-grade fuel is too easily smuggled or stolen.

The other catch is that some modern designs of power plant reactor use fuel refined to much higher purity than 3.5%. (One reason is the more enriched the fuel rods going in, the less often the reactor needs to be shut down for refueling -- a long and very expensive process whose output is nuclear waste.) Reactors that use 20% enriched U-235 are not uncommon. Some standard Russian designs use U-235 enriched to 36% -- the same enrichment level found in trace samples in Iran. U-235 at 20% already has 90% of the SWUs invested that are needed to obtain bomb fuel by starting from scratch with ore. U-235 at 36% purity has undergone 96% of the separative work required to go from ore to bomb.

Conclusion: The deductions here seem inescapable. Any nuclear power plant fuel-supply infrastructure, no matter how innocent, is always subject to pilferage and thus is in fact a dual-use technology. Any sub-state or rogue state seeking to purify U-235 -- the easiest material from which to make an atom bomb of Hiroshima-sized yield (ten or twenty kilotons) -- gets a huge head start by diverting some of the world's large supply of reactor grade fuel. Bad actors with a functioning centrifuge cascade could have weapons grade uranium with only a tenth or a twenty-fifth of the time and effort predicted by textbook conventional wisdom and popular thought. If the end-user of the reactor fuel is bent on aggression, then "Atoms for peace" is a contradiction in terms. Security must therefore be urgently strengthened throughout the global chain-of-custody of nuclear materials.

For entities known to be supportive of terrorist groups and state terror, all nuclear reactors, their fuel pellets, and their waste (which includes plutonium) must be considered as contraband right along with enrichment hardware and bomb parts. If this doctrine of "Give it up, now" appears to create a caste system of haves and have-nots, that's precisely what non-proliferation is all about. Prompt voluntary shut-down and surrender of said contraband, or pre-emptive invasive inspection and seizure by international regulatory bodies, are civilization's only acceptable outcomes -- because they're the only survivable ones.

What if the perps don't surrender, and the international bodies keep dithering? Is it worth diplomatic strain with so-called friendly countries to apply unilateral U.S. muscle to keep Pandora's Box locked tight? Is it worth the risks of further conventional expeditionary combat, or lightning-fast Special Operations raids, to neutralize A-bomb makers who'd otherwise gladly target your family?

Don't answer now. Just think about it. Answer late some night as you're lying awake in the dark when your own bad dreams seem most real.

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com