WASHINGTON - Sometime this fall, the federal government will quietly start spending $200 million to buy 36 million pounds of depleted uranium, a radioactive metal, and slash it in warehouses around the country.

  Whatever for?

  Depleted uranium is used to make armor-piercing bullets. But the Defense Department says it never asked that the metal be stockpiled: In fact, in an effort to stop the purchases, it plans to release a currently classified report saying it doesn't need the stuff.

  The Energy Department, meanwhile, is so overloaded with the raw material from which depleted uranium metal is made that it sometimes gives it away. The agency has enough to supply ammunition needs for 100 years of wartime. "It's crazy - there's no shortage" of depleted-uranium metal, says Thomas Cochran, a nuclear expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

  So why is the government planning to stockpile it? Mainly because a small company in Concord, Mass., Nuclear Metals Inc., recruited powerful lawmakers, the Army's ammunition command and the Energy Department's nuclear weapons complex to get the purchase written into law. The metal will be added to the National Defense Stockpile, a $9.6 billion collection of 91 materials that are supposed to be so scarce they need to be squirreled away in case of war.

Help for Industry

  The war chest is designed to prop up the U.S. military during battle, but it has hardly ever been used that way. It regularly props up suppliers instead. "The stockpile is what's good, had and sickening about Washington," says Robert Dale Wilson, who headed the National Critical Materials Council under President Reagan. "It can be used to ball out an undeserving company, or to save an industry that's really important."

  Nuclear Metals Inc. is probably the only company in the world to stake its future on the fate of depleted uranium, the material cast off when uranium is enriched to make nuclear-reactor fuel. Officials of the company make no apologies about using political pressure to fill what they contend is a defense need. "Our government responds to pressure," says Nuclear Metals' chairman, George Matthews. "Is that wrong? What's the other way to do things?"

 Indeed, in many ways, the story of the planned depleted-uranium purchase is the tale of how the stockpile has been built since its start in 1946. Some of the stockpiled materials have military value, such as cobalt, but others are essentially obsolete, like the 90 million pounds of asbestos or the 32,000 pounds of opium. The opium was acquired from India after World War II to make drugs to treat radiation sickness in case of nuclear war.

Hoarding Jewels

  Nearly every purchase has a political and corporate sponsor. In 1952, North Dakota's congressional delegation and Bulova Watch Co. persuaded the U.S. to build a factory in Rolla, N.D., to make jewel bearings used in watches and instruments. (Remember "23 jewel" watches?) The need for such bearings fell drastically with the arrival of digital timepieces. but the plant, owned by the government and managed by Bulova (now part of Loews Corp.), keeps churning out jewels anyway.

  Government contractors must buy any jewel bearings they need from the plant, says a report by the Pentagon's Inspector general, even tough the plant charges at least five times more than commercial vendors. The stockpile then buys the plant's extra production. As a result, the U.S. now has 78 million jewel bearings in storage, an 84-year supply. The Pentagon Inspector general recommends shutting the plant. But there are no other domestic suppliers, and the Defense Logistics Agency, which runs the stockpile, defends the factory as an "Industrial asset."

  Then there's bauxite. In the early 1980s, the U.S. bought two million tons of it for the stockpile to prop up the Jamaican economy. It built seven-story mesas of the stuff in Texas and elsewhere, now inhabited by rattlesnakes and irrigated so grass will grow on the mounds and they won't blow away. After the U.S. smelting industry hit hard times, the stockpile awarded a $53 million contract to turn some of the bauxite into aluminum.

Blocking Sales

  The stockpile is able to sell material, within limits. But Congress can veto any proposed sales, which it often does when lobbyist for minerals companies protest. The stockpile would like to sell much of its silver and all of its tin. But legislators and mine owners from Idaho have been able to block many proposed stockpile sales of silver. Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, working through the State Department, have strictly limited sales from the billion-dollar tin hoard.

  Depleted uranium was never among the materials in the strategic stockpile, but Nuclear Metals set out a few years ago to change that. The company got its start as a spin-off of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology metallurgy project during the World War II Manhattan Project. It turns depleted uranium hexafluoride crystals, the residue of nuclear fuel production, into a metal that is denser than lead and as hard as steel. It shapes the metal into polished spears, about four to 20 inches long, which become the heart of tank-killing ammunition.

  The publicity traded company grew six-fold from 1977 to 1983, reaching record annual sales of $58 million, as military spending on depleted uranium surged. But ammo inventories filled up and competition rose, and the company's sales dropped and then stagnated at around $45 million a year. Then it came up with the idea of getting the National Defense Stockpile to buy depleted uranium metal, perhaps $20 million worth of it a year. And it started enlisting support.

  Energy Department officials were enthusiastic. Ron Hultgren, a uranium enrichment manager at Oak Ridge, Tenn., says the agency backed the plan in hopes of unloading some of its own monumental load of depleted uranium crystals, which Nuclear Metals turns into metal. The department has some 705 million pounds of the crystals, a stash that grows 15 million pounds a year as more fuel is processed. It is happy to give it away or sell it for a few pennies a pound.

  That bounty, though, represented a problem for Nuclear Metals' stockpile plans. If the U.S. government has a nearly limitless supply of depleted-uranium crystals, why should it stockpile depleted-uranium metal? The stockpile is reserved by law for materials "not found or produced in the United States in sufficient quantities" to meet an emergency.  Nuclear Metals turned to the Army Materiel Command, the military's ammunition buyer, for a rationale. Army officials say that in January 1989 the agency just happened to have started a study in which it touted the value of depleted uranium metal for ammunition and determined there could be a shortage during a long war because the U.S. has limited facilities to convert the crystals into metal. As a result, last July the Army agency recommended that the stockpile buy about 35 million pounds of depleted-uranium metal.

  But from the beginning, this assessment got twisted, politically. For the 125-page Army report also calculates that in an emergency, the Army could build new uranium conversion facilities to create metal from the surplus crystals for one fourth the cost of stockpiling the metal now.  New facilities, however, would have to come out of Army budgets, unlike stockpile purchases. They also wouldn't benefit metal makers looking to make sales. Stockpiling "was easier to rationalize," says John Mytryshyn, who oversees ammunition production for the Materiel Command. "The money was small enough, and it didn't come out of Army programs."

Pressing the Case

  Nuclear Metals jumped on the report to sign up lawmakers. It had already hired a lobbyist, Edward Kinghorn, who had learned the intricacies of stockpile politics as an aide to GOP Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Mr. Kinghorn and Nuclear Metals executives used the Army report to win support by key lawmakers from both parties for a quiet effort to get the purchase written into law before the Pentagon could decide whether it wanted depleted uranium. Nuclear Metals officials contributed $25,875 to congressional campaigns in 1989 and 1990. And to broaden its lobbying base, the firm said it would split the order with the only other U.S. producer of depleted uranium metal, Aerojet Ordnance Tennessee, a subsidiary of GenCorp Inc. Aerojet also lobbied with legislators.

  Last June, Sen Thurmond wrote to the undersecretary of the Army asking the plan to have the defense stockpile buy depleted uranium, which, he noted, was made by a Nuclear Metals subsidiary in his state. The other South Carolina senator, Democrat Ernest Hollings, along with Democratic Sen. James Sasser of Tennessee, led the effort to get the plan written into law. Aides to all three senators defend their stances as consistent with constituent service and U.S. defense needs.  Last fall Congress passed a defense appropriation bill that required the Pentagon to buy 36 million pounds of depleted-uranium metal, worth about $200 million, from U.S. companies over 10 years. There had been no public debate on the provision, which was tucked away in the back of the large bill.

  Nuclear Metals was thrilled; stockpile officials were stunned. "We didn't have an idea of where [the requirement] came from," says Kenneth Foster, deputy director of the Pentagon office that oversees stockpile policy. "It was like they were telling us to buy shoelaces; it just appeared." Mr. Foster says he learned of the provision when his secretary read through the appropriations bills and underlined anything that mentioned the stockpile.

Wrong Assumptions?

  Nuclear Metals hopes the recent Gulf War will bolster support for its plans. Depleted uranium metal was used in tank and A-10 aircraft ammunition and in tank armor. But it has a flaw that worries some: it can burn or flake, wafting clouds of uranium particles that are hazardous to breathe or ingest. The Army had to bury three tanks in a low-level-radiation dump after their depleted uranium ammunition caught fire during training exercises in Germany and Saudi Arabia. It also plans to bury some Iraqi equipment hit by U.S. depleted uranium shells. "We don't want someone accusing us 20 years later of causing some problems" through contamination, says a spokesman.

  Meanwhile, investigators hired by the Pentagon believe that the Army Materiel Command report on potential shortages was based on wrong assumptions. For example, it estimated the U.S. would need twice as much A-10 aircraft ammunition per month as the U.S. actually used in the Gulf War, even though the U.S. used the A-10s heavily. According to a classified report prepared for the Pentagon by the Institute for Defense Analysis, the U.S. would need only about one-fifth as much depleted uranium in a war as the Materiel's Command estimated. That would eliminate the need for stockpiling.

  This summer, the Pentagon expects to release an unclassified version of its latest depleted uranium report. If that falls to repeal the law requiring the U.S. to load up on depleted uranium, stockpile managers are preparing to buy their first batch in the fall. Nuclear Metals already is lining up lawmakers to press for the purchase. Says Robert Quinn, the company's vice president of sales:"We endlessly promote the value of depleted uranium in our society."

  WASHINGTON - The Pentagon asked Congress to repeal a requirement to spend about $180 million to stockpile depleted uranium, after a classified study said the U.S. already had enough of the material to last 300 years.

  A front page story in The Wall Street Journal gave details of how Nuclear Metals Inc., a small depleted-uranium processor in Concord, Mass., had quietly lobbied the Energy Department, the Army and Congress to add the stockpile provision. Depleted uranium is the material cast off when uranium is enriched to make nuclear fuel. After being processed into a metal, depleted uranium is used as the core of tank-killing ammunition and as tank armor.

  Wilson Tuffin, president of Nuclear Metals, said the material should still be stockpiled, so the U.S. "could respond quickly in an emergency." But a declassified summary of the Pentagon report said stockpiling wasn't necessary. The U.S. already had adequate supplies of depleted-uranium ammunition, the report said, and a 300-year hoard of depleted-uranium feedstock that could be processed into metal.

  The stockpile program would provide "a one-shot stimulus to the [depleted-uranium] industry," the report said. But the program would also "saddle" the stockpile with a material "that is not scarce, has no significant applications outside the military and is considered to be an environmental and health hazard."