Word: uranium
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...never been out of the U.S. before, much less part of a hazardous clandestine operation. Suddenly, they were being whisked aboard C- 5 transports for the flight to Kazakhstan, the huge and barren former Soviet republic. Their mission: to pack more than 1,300 lbs. of highly enriched uranium into barrels for shipment back to the U.S. to prevent the material from falling into the wrong hands. They had only a few weeks to perform the delicate procedure. The harsh Central Asian winter was coming, and once it arrived, it would be difficult to fly out of the desolate Kazakh...
...plutonium and uranium are for sale on the illicit market...
...most aggrieved are the 100,000 workers employed in national nuclear plants and laboratories, whose salaries have slid to $100 a month -- or no pay at all for months at a time. So almost anything is for sale. Last year Russian police acknowledged thwarting 11 attempts to steal uranium from nuclear installations...
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...
...most powerful military presence in the gulf," says Mourad El-Desouky, a military expert at Al Ahram Strategic Studies Center in Cairo. "It wants nuclear weapons for deterrence and to intimidate its neighbors." He believes that the Iranians have the money to go shopping for plutonium and weapons-grade uranium from Russia's black market in Western Europe, and "it is realistic to think they are doing that...