Nuclear Technology

I cannot help but call the attention of your readers to the implications of your editorial “A Way Out of the Nuclear-Power Jitters” (July 7). Might we be sending the wrong message to those Third World countries scrambling around the globe in search of nuclear weapons, if the U.S. Department of Energy picks a civilian reactor technology to produce tritium for nuclear warheads?

Yet that is precisely the dangerous course you would have DOE follow in selecting the modular, high-temperature, gas-cooled technology for a new weapons reactor. Use of this reactor would demonstrate how to use an electric generating plant to produce nuclear weapons material. Subsequent commercialization of the gas-cooled technology for sale abroad has the potential of increasing the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation--just at the time when President Bush is considering measures to stop Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

Thus far, virtually all non-communist countries with access to nuclear technology have specifically chosen to separate their nuclear weapons program from their nuclear power programs. The world is well-served by this practice. If we undermine this non-proliferation policy, we do so at our own peril.

JOEL I. CEHN, Oakland