Source
National Terror Alert Response Center
Since the end of the cold war, the United Nations has logged more than 800 incidents in which 
radioactive material has gone missing, often from poorly guarded sites. Who is taking it - and should we be worried?
A little before dawn on a recent summer morning, a convoy of three large blue lorries, a handful of police cars and a bus rumbled along the dual carriageway heading north out of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. Even if it had not been so early, the motorcade would probably not have drawn much attention. The lorries were unmarked, the bus carrying a few sleepy policemen was old and scruffy, while the lumbering shipment was big and slow enough to explain the escort and its flashing blue lights.
But for Bulgaria, and indirectly for the rest of us, the convoy’s progress marked an important transition - the departure of the country’s last remaining stockpile of High Enriched Uranium (HEU), the stuff of which nuclear bombs are made. It took two years of talks and preparatory work before the highly radioactive material - just over 6kg of spent fuel from a defunct research reactor - was fished out of the storage pools in which it had lain unused and largely forgotten for nearly 20 years. It was sealed in steel casks - custom-made by …koda, the Czech car manufacturer - and lowered into the three anonymous blue trucks.
Over the course of the morning of July 5, the convoy made its way over the mountains and down to the banks of the river Danube, where the containers were winched into a long, black barge bound for Ukraine. Ten days and a rail journey later, the HEU arrived in Russia, whence it had come nearly half a century earlier as a gift. In Chelyabinsk, just east of the Urals, it is to be reprocessed or blended down. I was permitted to witness its secret journey on condition that nothing was printed until the shipment reached its destination, and this small but massively lethal fragment of the cold war was made safe.
The operation was the latest in a series - part of an accelerating scramble to clean up the scattered legacy of nuclear profligacy. In the 50s and 60s, the US and Soviet Union exported HEU-powered nuclear reactors to their allies for power generation and experimentation. When the cold war finally came to an end, deals were done on dismantling the redundant weapons in the former Soviet republics. Under a programme called Megatons To Megawatts, one tenth of America’s electricity is generated from uranium from thousands of former Soviet warheads. The Russians blend down HEU in the warheads to Low Enriched Uranium (LEU), which cannot be used in bombs; the Americans transport it to nuclear power stations back home.
However, that still left thousands of kilograms of weapons-grade material, mostly HEU, in civilian reactors at power stations and universities around the world, some with no more security than a watchman and a padlock.
As the logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction recedes from the collective memory to be supplanted by the fears evoked by the September 11 attacks, nuclear terrorism has emerged as the number one threat to western security. The suicidal extremist driving a crude nuclear device into the centre of a major city is now the ultimate nightmare. George Bush and Tony Blair went to war in Iraq with the ostensible aim of preventing Saddam’s assumed nuclear stockpile falling into the hands of al-Qaida jihadists.
radioactive material has gone missing, often from poorly guarded sites. Who is taking it - and should we be worried?A little before dawn on a recent summer morning, a convoy of three large blue lorries, a handful of police cars and a bus rumbled along the dual carriageway heading north out of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. Even if it had not been so early, the motorcade would probably not have drawn much attention. The lorries were unmarked, the bus carrying a few sleepy policemen was old and scruffy, while the lumbering shipment was big and slow enough to explain the escort and its flashing blue lights.
But for Bulgaria, and indirectly for the rest of us, the convoy’s progress marked an important transition - the departure of the country’s last remaining stockpile of High Enriched Uranium (HEU), the stuff of which nuclear bombs are made. It took two years of talks and preparatory work before the highly radioactive material - just over 6kg of spent fuel from a defunct research reactor - was fished out of the storage pools in which it had lain unused and largely forgotten for nearly 20 years. It was sealed in steel casks - custom-made by …koda, the Czech car manufacturer - and lowered into the three anonymous blue trucks.
Over the course of the morning of July 5, the convoy made its way over the mountains and down to the banks of the river Danube, where the containers were winched into a long, black barge bound for Ukraine. Ten days and a rail journey later, the HEU arrived in Russia, whence it had come nearly half a century earlier as a gift. In Chelyabinsk, just east of the Urals, it is to be reprocessed or blended down. I was permitted to witness its secret journey on condition that nothing was printed until the shipment reached its destination, and this small but massively lethal fragment of the cold war was made safe.
The operation was the latest in a series - part of an accelerating scramble to clean up the scattered legacy of nuclear profligacy. In the 50s and 60s, the US and Soviet Union exported HEU-powered nuclear reactors to their allies for power generation and experimentation. When the cold war finally came to an end, deals were done on dismantling the redundant weapons in the former Soviet republics. Under a programme called Megatons To Megawatts, one tenth of America’s electricity is generated from uranium from thousands of former Soviet warheads. The Russians blend down HEU in the warheads to Low Enriched Uranium (LEU), which cannot be used in bombs; the Americans transport it to nuclear power stations back home.
However, that still left thousands of kilograms of weapons-grade material, mostly HEU, in civilian reactors at power stations and universities around the world, some with no more security than a watchman and a padlock.
As the logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction recedes from the collective memory to be supplanted by the fears evoked by the September 11 attacks, nuclear terrorism has emerged as the number one threat to western security. The suicidal extremist driving a crude nuclear device into the centre of a major city is now the ultimate nightmare. George Bush and Tony Blair went to war in Iraq with the ostensible aim of preventing Saddam’s assumed nuclear stockpile falling into the hands of al-Qaida jihadists.
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