The world's most bibulous countries
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Each year the holidays promise friends, family, food-and often a rigorous
drinking regimen. But although Americans may be geared toward heavy
consumption, our counterparts abroad appear to be doing more sodden
celebrating. According to World Drink Trends 2004, published by Britain's World
Advertising Research Center, the United States ranks just twenty-sixth among
forty-five countries in per capita alcohol consumption. Here slow and steady
wins the race: big beer- and wine-drinking countries generally imbibe more
alcohol per capita than countries that favor liquor. Russians drink more
spirits than any other nationality-the equivalent of one 80-proof shot a day
for every citizen. But Russia ranks only fifteenth in overall drinking.
Americans on average throw back twenty-two gallons of beer a year, but the
United States lags in wine and liquor consumption. Here's how you'd have to
pace yourself to keep up with the world's heaviest drinkers. -NATHAN
LlTTLEFIELD
Who Marshals the Marshals?
In the aftermath of 9/11 one step toward increased security seemed a
no-brainer: more money and manpower for the Federal Air Marshal Service. And
sure enough, the United States has dramatically expanded its force of marshals
and increased the air-marshal budget more than a hundredfold, from $4.4 million
in 2001 to $545 million in 2003. How much safer this makes you feel probably
depends on whether you've leafed through a recent report from the Office of
Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, which evaluated
recent air-marshal hiring practices and conduct records. The report examined a
review of 504 job applicants, all of whom had been approved and were scheduled
to receive an offer of employment, and found that 161 had incidents in their
records that should have raised a red flag (including misuse of government
resources, and allegations of domestic abuse, drunk driving, or sexual
harassment). With this in mind, it's hardly surprising to learn that from February
of 2002 to October of 2003 there were 753 documented reports of misconduct by
air marshals on duty. Among the improprieties: falling asleep, testing positive
for drugs or alcohol, and having a weapon lost or stolen.
—"Evaluation of the Federal Air Marshal Service,"
Office of Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security
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Russia's Loose Nukes |
In its heyday the Soviet Union was an enthusiastic producer of both nuclear
weapons and the fissile materials required to make them. The Soviets were
notably less enthusiastic about securing and keeping track of those materials: although
weapons themselves were usually well guarded, the facilities housing plutonium
and highly enriched uranium were often neglected; most did not even have
theft-detection devices or security cameras. Fissile materials were typically
stored in cans with simple wax seals that could easily be broken,
counterfeited, and replaced. At the Mayak facility, outside the city of
Chelyabinsk, thousands of cans of plutonium-thirty tons' worth-rested on the
floor of a plain wooden building, unmonitored by any security cameras.
The map above shows the locations of fifty-one sites within the former
Soviet Union that today collectively house roughly 660 tons of weapons-usable
uranium and plutonium-enough to make as many as 70,000 nuclear bombs. The sites
serve a variety of purposes, ranging from civilian power generation and
academic research to military use.
Security at most of these facilities is better today than it was in the days
of the Soviet Union. Thanks to a series of well-publicized initiatives-most of
them led and funded by the United States-about 70 percent of the sites on the
map have received "comprehensive upgrades," meaning that modern
surveillance, theft-detection, and accounting systems have been installed, and
that the containers holding fissile material have been well secured. But these
sites hold just one fourth of the bomb-making material in the region. Most of
the weaponizable nuclear material is in locations that have received neither a
"comprehensive upgrade" nor even a "rapid upgrade," which
involves conducting a one-time inventory, bricking over windows, installing
radiation detectors at the main doors, and placing fissile material in
rudimentary steel cages.
In fact, some 350 tons of nuclear material in the former Soviet republics
rests in facilities that have yet to receive any upgrade at all. And according
to Securing the Bomb: An Agenda for Action, a report produced by Matthew Bunn
and Anthony Wier, researchers at 
Harvard
University, whose work was commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative,
less weapons-usable material was secured in the former Soviet republics in the
two years after 9/11 than in the two years before. Reasons for such plodding
progress are varied: a good number of the still unsecured sites are military
facilities requiring greater diplomatic finesse and more-intricate upgrade
procedures; few people have the proper skills and clearances to perform the
upgrades; and the United States is grudgingly shouldering most of the cost with
only modest help from its allies. At the current rate it will take at least
thirteen more years for all the former Soviet republics' nuclear materials to
be comprehensively secured.
Even after the materials have received security upgrades they remain
vulnerable to theft. At some of these facilities guards keep their weapons
unloaded (to prevent misfiring, they say); intrusion detectors are turned off
(because false alarms are "annoying," guards say); and supposedly
secured doors are propped open (to ease passage, guards say). Drunken fights
and shootings among security personnel are not uncommon. Since 1991, according
to confirmed reports, stolen weapons-usable materials have been seized eighteen
times in Russia and other countries, including France and Germany; most of the
materials are believed to have come from the sites on this map. In 2003 alone,
radioactive material thought to be purloined from former Soviet facilities was
reportedly discovered in China, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Thailand.
(Russian officials will often confirm that a theft has occurred, but not where.
Given the country's penchant for secrecy and obfuscation, there are probably
additional incidents we don't know about.)
The incidents noted on the map -all of which have occurred since 9/11-reveal
that although Russia may not have the malice of North Korea, the hubris of
Iran, or the political instability of Pakistan, its distressingly slow progress
in securing its nuclear-weapons fuel makes it perhaps the most attractive
option in the world today for terrorists seeking bomb-making material.-TERRENCE
HENRY