BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, Nov. 29 -- The arrests of three men who allegedly tried to sell contraband uranium for $1 million show how a shadowy black market for nuclear components has survived despite tightened security at nuclear facilities worldwide, experts said Thursday.Some guessing going on, on the part of those nuclear experts: "probably not as dangerous" and "may even have been." Nothing is certain, it seems.
Slovak police said the material, believed to have originated in the former Soviet Union, was highly dangerous and could have been used in a radiological "dirty bomb" or other terrorist weapon.
U.N. and independent experts suggested the uranium may not have been anywhere near that lethal. But officials tracking the illicit global trade in radioactive materials said the arrests underscored the risk of nuclear substances falling into terrorists' hands.
Should that happen, "the consequences would be so catastrophic. The world would be a different place the next day," said Richard Hoskins, who supervises a database of stolen, missing, smuggled or unauthorized radioactive materials for the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In 2006, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency registered 252 reported cases -- a 385 percent increase since 2002.
[...]
[N]uclear experts who were shown police photographs of radioactivity readings contended that the material probably was not as dangerous as authorities believe. They said police confused a scientific reading of the material as dealing with its "concentration" of uranium-235, when in fact it was just a "confidence" level of the machine to give an accurate reading. They suggested it may even have been natural uranium -- a common and nonlethal element.
So, what DO we know?
(1) When the Soviet Union fell, nuclear facilities were abandoned and fell into disrepair.
(2) On more than one occasion, Al Qaeda has stated its desire to use nuclear weapons against us infidels.
(3) Security measures to find these loose nukes cannot be 100% successful all the time.
In other words, time is our enemy.
I have no idea if you check past articles for comments, but I will say that the recent NIE shows what we don't know and is damned worrying.
ReplyDeleteBuried deep in my post on the Red Mafia is a look at the internal disorganization of Russia post-USSR to present and how the Red Mafia operates there. I would say that there is every likelihood, going past 50/50, that the Red Mafia has had its hands on refined nuclear material (even purified material, thus beyond yellowcake and well into the nuclear fuel/weapons cycle) and that much of that has gone into the underground economy. The NIE basically puts forth that it has low confidence in its ability to track that community.... Not what I would call a 're-assuring' assessment.