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| Busted: A Slovak police photo showed one of the two captured shells that contained enriched uranium. AP |
An expanding EU confronts nuclear proliferation
The capture of nuclear materials in Slovakia last week raises security questions about borderless travel.
from the December 4, 2007 edition
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Overall, the IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database has recorded more than 1,200 incidents since its creation in 1993, with a 385 percent increase in incidents from 2002 to 2006. This leap, says the IAEA, is mostly due to improved reporting. And in only a fraction of these cases was the material radioactive enough to be a weapon ingredient.
"If some crackpot used sources in this way, this would be a weapon of mass disruption, not destruction," said an IAEA official in Vienna not authorized to speak on the record. "But it's not that there's suddenly a huge market and more bad guys getting into the act. There's been a kind of rising tide all around, with better control, inventory, detection, and interdiction."
Russia, which has tightened its controls somewhat, still remains a "focus of concern" for illicit material, according to a 2006 report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a Washington-based advocacy group.
The problem first emerged in 1991, as the Soviet Union's disintegration loosened Moscow's grip on its nuclear stocks. As NTI wrote, a once-effective security system "designed for a single state with a closed society, closed borders, and well-paid, well-cared-for nuclear workers was splintered among multiple states with open societies; open borders; desperate, underpaid nuclear workers; and rampant theft and corruption."
According to the NTI report, many facilities were only padlocked and few had special detectors at their doors to signal when highly enriched uranium or plutonium left the premises.
Yet in the years since, a stronger Russian economy, coupled with US and European assistance, has helped Moscow reassert its grip – somewhat.
Highly publicized incidents illustrate both the persistent problem and law enforcement's determination.
In this latest incident, Slovak and Hungarian police told local media they were following the trafficked uranium since August, until the suspects – two Hungarians and a Ukrainian – crossed from Hungary into Slovakia last week with plans to sell it for $1 million.
Slovak police said they suspected the radioactive material was likely from an ex-Soviet republic and enriched enough to make a "dirty bomb."
But as details trickled in, independent experts and United Nations officials questioned its potency, suggesting on Thursday it would take much more to wreak havoc.
"Uranium is not very radiotoxic," David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington and a former UN weapons inspector, told AP. "The net effect of dispersing half a kilo of uranium – who cares? Each person would get so little it would have no effect."
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