Loose nukes

That judgment had already begun to change before the events of this fall. The rise of a new generation of terrorists, their goals unclear, their commitment total, their address unknown, saw to that.

A state such as Iraq is dangerous enough. But at least the US has some understanding of its weapons programs. A nation has assets and infrastructure that presumably even a leader such as Saddam Hussein might be loath to expose to US retaliatory attack.

Al Qaeda and its ilk are different. "The problem is, we can't target them like states," says Kimberly McCloud, a researcher at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Then add new opportunity to this equation. It's possible that South Africa could be the source of weapons material. Pakistan might be a proliferation danger, too, considering it is a nuclear-capable state with long-standing Taliban ties.

But it is Russia and the former republics of the Soviet Union that are the "Home Depot" of fissile material, in the words of one expert. The collapse of the Soviet Union threw its nuclear programs into a chaos from which they have yet to completely recover.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the closed cities where the USSR's nuclear weapons were produced changed from islands of prosperity to sinkholes of poverty. The human misery this created - especially in the early years - led some scientists to attempt desperate actions. In 1992, a large group of ballistic-missile experts from the closed city of Miass tried to reach North Korea, apparently to work in Pyongyang's intercontinental-ballistic-missile projects. Authorities caught them as they sat in a plane at Moscow's Sheremetievo-2 airport, waiting to take off.

Russian authorities insist that their estimated 30,000 actual nuclear warheads have remained under adequate control at all times. But the same cannot be said for its military and civilian fissile material.

Over decades, the Soviet Union produced enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium to produce some 70,000 nuclear weapons. This was scattered at perhaps 100 sites throughout the territory of the former USSR. In the early '90s, some research sites were protected by nothing but padlocks and weeds. Dedicated scientists at times had to improvise defenses. When civil war broke out in the former republic of Georgia in 1992, scientists at one institute in Tbilisi took turns guarding 10 kilograms of weapons-grade HEU with sticks and garden rakes.

Much of this material was later moved to Britain for safekeeping. A cache of similar uranium elsewhere in the former republic met a different fate. In 1993, scientists at the Sukhumi research center in the Abkhazia region of Georgia piled cinder blocks around a building containing 2 kilograms of HEU, and fled oncoming fighting. A Russian team entered the abandoned building four years later, and found the material gone.

The Abkhazia affair remains the only confirmed case of missing weapons-grade fissile material in the world. To this day, no one knows where this HEU is. "It may be in the hands of the Abkhaz separatists, or it may have been stolen by or sold to others," says Matthew Bunn, of Harvard's Project on Managing the Atom.

Overall, there have been 14 confirmed, significant cases of trafficking in fissile material from the former Soviet Union, according to the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

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