NRG SECURITY SAFEGUARDS - THE WRONG PATH?

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this, the 19th Annual Meeting of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Man- agement. Twelve years have elapsed - and much fissionable material has been processed - since I last was privileged to address the INMM at your 7th Annual Meeting back on June 14, 1966, in Columbus, Ohio. In preparing for today's discussion, I retrieved from my files my prepared remarks of twelve years ago and was sur- prised to see how much of that talk would be applicable today. At that time I commented on the increasing public atten- tion being given to the problems of safeguards and nuclear mate- rials management as they related to the growth of the civilian atomic power industry in the United States and abroad, and ob- served that members of your Institute, who had been laboring in this field for years, must have been somewhat surprised by the extent to which the national and international spotlight was beginning to be focused on your activities. Today that spotlight is many more times intense. Hardly a day goes by that the news media do not print or broadcast a \"Special\" alleging the possibility that fissionable materials have been illegally diverted.