Reports of nuclear material being smuggled out of Russia are alarming U.S. officials and scientists, who say Iraq, Libya and Iran could build atomic bombs if they laid their hands on it.
"There could be enough in circulation for big trouble," says David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security Studies. "But we don't know if we're seeing the tip of the iceberg or the whole thing."
"This is a matter that is serious and ought to be treated with a great deal of urgency by all governments," says State Department spokesman Mike McCurry. U.S. officials in Moscow officially conveyed the concern on Tuesday, he said.
Germany reports more than half a pound of 87% pure plutonium 239 arrived on a flight from Moscow last week. It was confiscated by police posing as buyers willing to pay $250 million. It was the fourth, and largest, seizure of nuclear material in Germany in the past four months, all of it attributed to Russian sources by German officials.
William Potter, of the Monterey, Calif., Institute of International Studies, says far more material may have been smuggled than has been caught.
This latest seizure and one back in May of "super-pure" material are particularly troubling, he says, because they suggest high-level complicity.
"This isn't a bunch of amateurs," agrees Albright.
Russia has tons of leftover plutonium, enough for 40,000 to 50,000 nuclear bombs, and an accounting system U.S officials say is so loose that tons go unaccounted for. The other former Soviet states of Belarus, Ukraine and Khazakstan also have stockpiles.
Because only a few pounds of plutonium are needed for a bomb, U.S. officials are pressing the Russians, who publicly deny any problem, to redouble security.
The New York Times reports today that U.S. weapons experts say the plutonium seized in Germany is not of the purity found in military weapons, indicating Russian military officials may be right in saying security around their stockpiles is still tight.
But the seized material, probably intended for a nuclear-power reactor, the Times says, can still be used to make a powerful nuclear bomb.
To a rogue nation seeking atomic weapons, creating the nuclear core is the toughest part. Usually, it takes tens of thousands of people years of work to manufacture the highly radioactive ingredients.
But John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists says a few hundred of the right people - scientists, machinists and engineers - could quickly construct a bomb if they had the raw materials.
"It ain't going to be six guys in a garage who are going to slap this together in the back of a van," he says. But a nation like Iraq could do it, he says.
The publicity surrounding the seizures may be an attempt to show smugglers that they are more likely to get caught in a "sting" than to get rich. But with thousands of people who worked in Russia's nuclear program facing the lure of easy wealth, the task of perfectly protecting the stockpiles is formidable. And it must be near perfect.
"Even if we have a system that is 99 and 44/100ths percent pure . . . we're still talking about a few Hiroshimas between friends," Pike says.
