No, this is not a Litvinenko post…or at least not primarily. Recently, the Georgian ex-KGB said it had caught a Russian smuggling highly-enriched uranium into Georgia, who was nailed in a sting operation where Georgian agents posed as representatives…

“But, if we are to assume that Russia has kept tight control of its nuclear materials… then where does all this radioactive material that people (quite often Russian people) keep trying to sell actually come from?”

I think it’s the same as that wonderful bimbo question: “When we lose weight, where does it go to?”

I imagine that components are sold by con-men. Like Litvinenko and Scaramella, for example. Polonium can be a nuclear trigger. But it has many legitimate industrial uses as an anti-static material for use in recording and photography. This isn’t even black market fare.

I think the problem, Andy, is that the article you quoted is seriously flawed.

By the way, just to clarify, I don’t really think there are any actual nuclear weapons going missing – just (some of) the material that is needed to build them. Nor am I all that optimistic that a terrorist organisation could turn any material that they did manage to get their hands on into anything more than an extremely crude ‘dirty’ bomb.

Finally – I’ve slightly revised the post above to remove an errant half-sentence and correct a spelling mistake.

thanks

Many Russian scientists believe that the Chernobyl accident happened because Russia was short of warheads. At the time, the US threat was such that power plants were turned over to the military.

Russians see the threat from the increasingly warmongering US as something very serious. Why do you write a piece that suggests Russians are ‘stoopid’ ?. They are perfectly able to read newspapers and to comprehend that Bushco wants ‘regime change’ again.

For the record, Andy, nuclear weapons decay fast and need constant refit and rebuild to be effective. The issue the Litvinenko issue reporting has avoided is that Polonium is a relatively ‘old fashioned’ trigger with a short half life. One of its possible uses would be to refit an outdated device – perhaps something that went walkabout in the drunken Yeltsin years. But even that – or whether something so old would still work – is speculation.

And you think the black market has the technology, resources, protective clothing, laboratories, weapons handling facilities and so on necessary to even entrepreneur this stuff?

Well, if you believe that, pick up a ‘buy one nuke, get one free’ offer in the rinuk. Oh, and give us a hand while we put in the back of the Lada.

It’s nonsense and you know it. For anyone in the market for weapons, there’s loads of conventional stuff that’s brand new, guaranteed to work with no risk involved.