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The United States cannot fully account for more than 16,000 kilograms tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that it has shipped to 27 "friendly" countries in recent decades, and it lacks any coherent policy to track down the materials, a Government Accountability Office report concluded late last week.

In fact, according to auditors, the country's atomic accounting is so shoddy that the International Atomic Energy Agency—the same agency sent to search for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction—could potentially find the United States in violation of its international anti-proliferation treaty obligations.

Even as it has fretted about Iranian nuclear proliferation and alleged Iraqi purchases of yellowcake uranium from Africa, the United States has lost track of enough fissile material to make hundreds of nuclear warhead cores.

At issue are bilateral agreements the US holds with 27 nations, from France to Taiwan, for the transfer of American nuclear materials—fuel, reactors, and reactor components—for "peaceful civilian purposes." (It's even conceivable, though not easily determined, that US material may have been present at the Marcoule nuclear plant in France where an explosion killed one worker Monday.)

Although the United States has a database, the Nuclear Materials Management and Safeguard System, to track the transfers, the GAO found that the '50s-era system is more or less useless today: Most of the bilateral export agreements give the US no official power to supervise what happens with the uranium, plutonium, and other materials they fork over. Hence much of the material leaves American sight, and officials simply take the other nations' word that the stuff has ended up in a civilian reactor.

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