Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

facing unexpected problems on another front. Hoping to drive up the price of uranium, and thus make commercial enrichment development more appealing, the AEC in 1973 had announced it was going to limit the amount of enrichment supplies that U.S. and foreign utilities could obtain. The immediate beneficiaries of the decision, however, were not the Americans, but the Europeans, who, with the U.S. stranglehold on nuclear supplies broken, began enticing Third World customers with offers not only to build nuclear plants, but to supply the fuel that would run them.

By 1974, European concerns were taking away business from American suppliers in half a dozen countries, including Iran, where European manufacturers were awarded contracts for two nuclear reactors GE and Westinghouse had counted on supplying. A similar situation developed in Brazil, where Bechtel and Westinghouse had been assiduously wooing the government for three years in anticipation of building that country’s first nuclear plants. So eager was Bechtel for the Brazilian business that the company had even arranged financing for the project from the ExportImport Bank, a triumph much hailed by Henry Kearns at the 1971 Decatur House press conference. But in the final stages of negotiation, the Brazilians, frustrated that they could no longer look to the United States for nuclear supplies, began to backpedal, threatening to give the business to a German firm. W hat good were its nuclear plants, a Brazilian official complained to Bechtel, if the Americans couldn’t supply the fuel to run them?

After all its effort, Bechtel had no intention of losing out to the Germans, especially not with an estimated $8 billion in nuclear work pending. The trouble was that Bechtel couldn’t ensure nuclearfuel delivery until its planned enrichment plant at Dothan, Alabama, was in operation. In March 1974, Bechtel, at a critical impasse, devised what turned out to be a disastrous solution: it offered to build Brazil a nuclear-enrichment plant of its very own.

The Brazilians were still mulling Bechtel’s proposal when, on May 18, the Indian government, using plutonium produced by the Tarapur reactor and heavy water obligingly provided by the Nixon administra-ciently unsettled by the incident to take his family into hiding. As a result of the suit against Bechtel, Parks received a settlement from the company in 1987. Throughout the incident, Bechtel maintained that the harassment of Parks consisted of the company’s not allowing him to use Bechtel’s office equipment and support staff to run his own outside company in violation of Bechtel’s rules and common business practices.

202

NUCLEAR ECLIPSE

tion, detonated an atomic bomb at the bottom of a 107 -meter-deep shaft in the Rayartham Desert.

As nuclear explosions went, the Indian bomb was hardly more than a firecracker. All the same, it had a megaton impact. “A psychological barrier had been broken,” wrote one nuclear historian. “The Indian test appeared to be the first step toward a new age of nuclear chaos. It now seemed that anyone might build a bomb: desperately poor nations, mad dictators, even political terrorists. “9

Nowhere were the repercussions more severe than in Washington, where Henry Kissinger tried unsuccessfully to conceal American involvement by claiming that it was the Canadians who had supplied the Indians with heavy water, not the United States. Kissinger’s clumsy attempt at deception succeeded only in enraging Congress, which thereupon temporarily shelved the administration’s proposal for commercial nuclearfuel enrichment. In August came another blow when the nuclear industry’s chief cheerleader, Richard Nixon, was forced from office. By the end of the year,