Word: gramming
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...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...
Some Russian officials continue to deny that their facilities are the source of the leaks into Germany. "Not a single gram of plutonium-239 is missing from storage," a spokesman for the Federal Counter-Intelligence Service insisted last week. "Our storage system is as reliable as a bank vault," claimed Alexander Rumyantsev, director of the Kurchatov Institute, a leading nuclear laboratory in Moscow...
...persuade people they have built a bomb. "The problem now," says Richard Guthrie of the Verification Technology Information Center, a nonprofit group in London, "is blackmail. If someone says he's built a bomb in a basement somewhere, how does a government react when that person produces a gram or so of weapons-grade material to prove the threat...
...fourth seizure in a widening scandal traced to ex-military contacts in the former Soviet Union. Last weekend police arrested other couriers who arrived on a flight from Moscow. They were carrying more than 10.6 oz. of plutonium-239, a substance so toxic that a few millionths of a gram can kill. Another seizure netted 4 kg, the largest amount ever discovered in private hands. Though German analyses reportedly show that all the plutonium came from the former Soviet Union, red-faced officials in Moscow today denied it, claiming "no leak" had been detected. Unconvinced, Chancellor Helmut Kohl plans...