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Uzbeks block Central Asia's nuclear corridor
America pours cash and training into Uzbekistan to stop transfer of nuclear materials
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SINCE Sept. 11, security upgrades at nuclear power and training facilities in Uzbekistan have been stepped up, just as the massive Nuclear Threat Reduction program in Russia has received a new life and hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding from a Bush White House that before Sept. 11 was skeptical of the program.
"The whole world is concerned about this stuff," says Bekhzod Yuldashev, head of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Tashkent and president of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences. Uzbekistan is a "pivotal transit point," and will become more critical, he says, as work progresses on a highway linking Paris with Shanghai.
On a recent afternoon, as Uzbek customs officials watched a long-haul truck pass through the scanner, the alarms sound. The detection device is so sensitive that, in this case, it picked up higher than normal natural radiation levels in a load of marble construction materials. False alarm.
Similar US and European-funded equipment including an array of hand-held and smaller, belt-clip detectors are used at the airport in Tashkent, and elsewhere.
"Don't you worry in America, because we deeply understand the danger of radiation and weapons of mass destruction," says Col. Jalilov Sadridin, an Uzbek customs official standing over the computer. "This is the first line of our struggle in this region, because Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan lost control of their nuclear materials. There are so many sources."
How confident is Colonel Sadridin that Uzbekistan with help from US and European donors and the UN International Atomic Energy Agency can stop such smuggling? "One hundred percent," he replies.
The radiation detectors alone can't stop smuggling. They are not designed, for example, to detect bribes to border control officials. But a Western diplomat in Tashkent says that the cooperation of Uzbekistan which never had a nuclear weapons capability under Soviet rule, but sits at the heart of Central Asian transit routes is "extremely" important.
The problem for Uzbekistan is transport of nuclear materials from north to south, the opposite of the path for drugs traveling from Afghanistan along the so-called "northern route" through Central Asia to Europe.
"We have nuclear neighbors, Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and India," says Mr. Yuldashev. "Uzbekistan plays an important role. Transit [of all goods] is very intensive."
Uzbeks are proud of their track record. A customs museum in Tashkent illustrates successes that in the past decade have netted 30 tons of drugs such as opium and heroin traveling north to Europe, and 70 tons of precursor chemicals traveling south to Afghanistan, for Taliban labs to turn opium into heroin.
Photographs show the ruses: plastic sacks stuffed with heroin immersed in jugs of tomato paste; a car being shipped whole in a container full of household goods and a drive shaft crammed with heroin.
"We are trying our best," says Sadridin. "The US is helping us to do that."
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