Word: germanic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first symptoms of the nuclear plague are spreading into Europe. After years of scares and false alarms -- almost all the supposed bomb-grade goods on offer turned out to be fraudulent -- German police have in the past four months uncovered four cases of smuggled nuclear material that could actually be used to make an atom bomb. The biggest haul came on Aug. 10, when Lufthansa Flight 3369 from Moscow landed in Munich with 350 grams of atomic fuel aboard. As it happened, so was Viktor Sidorenko, Russia's Deputy Minister for Atomic Energy, whose agency supervises Moscow's stocks...
...days later, at a railway station in Bremen, a 34-year-old German man was arrested trying to peddle a sample of plutonium to a journalist acting for the police. The seller had only a very tiny amount, .05 gram, but of such startling purity that experts said it probably came from a top-of-the-line Russian nuclear laboratory. Senior officials in Moscow reacted defensively, insisting that all their plutonium was accounted for and safely under guard. The accusation from Germany, blustered Deputy Atomic Energy Minister Yevgeni Mikenin, "is a provocation of the purest water...
...world's first notice that weapons-grade plutonium was on the open market came in southern Germany last May, when 6 grams were found in a garage owned by a German businessman who had been arrested for counterfeiting. That was followed in June by recovery of less than a gram of highly enriched uranium -- probably fuel from a nuclear-powered submarine -- in Landshut. Even if all + this smuggled booty were put together, there would not be enough for the smallest and crudest atom bomb, which in the hands of inexperienced makers would take about 8 kg of plutonium...
...could do it themselves. "We've crossed a threshold. You smuggle small amounts of the stuff often enough, and you've got a bomb," says Leonard Spector, director of the nonproliferation project at Washington's Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The arrival of these nuclear samples on the German market is a red alert, raising immediate questions about what is happening in other countries and who the potential users might be. If such snippets are on sale in Germany, what larger deals might be going undetected elsewhere? If bomb-grade plutonium is finally on sale, will a rogue state...
...help prevent that, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl sent intelligence coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer to Moscow on Saturday to talk with President Boris Yeltsin about ways to tighten controls over nuclear stocks. "We have to tell our Russian friends," said Kohl, "you must guarantee that these possibilities for theft are reduced as much as possible...