Word: plutonium
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...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 or terrorist group step up to buy enough to build a bomb...
...SELLERS? Beyond terrorism, if significant amounts of plutonium are beginning to flow from Russia, they could make the development of nuclear weapons much easier for states that up to now have found bomb programs too expensive and technically beyond their capabilities. Countries such as North Korea and Pakistan, which have some plutonium of their own, as well as countries such as Iran and Libya that would like to, might begin to look seriously at what is on offer in the new marketplace. "There is already far more bomb-quality nuclear material in Germany than the authorities can imagine," said Russian...
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...
Other attempts may have succeeded, as nuclear workers grew increasingly desperate. At Krasnoyarsk-26, a factory producing weapons-grade plutonium, employees mounted a protest last month, demanding salaries that had not been paid since May. Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin then had to rush to Arzamas-16, where nuclear warheads are being disassembled, to head off a similar kind of unrest...
What makes the disarray so frightening is the staggering amount of dangerous radioactive material all over Russia. Experts there say the old Soviet weapons complex produced more than 140 metric tons of plutonium. The stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, which can also be used to make bombs, total about 1,000 metric tons...