High Radioactivity and Low Security

["Gerry Blackwood" <gpblackwood@justice.com>]

High Radioactivity and Low Security



Scattered across remains of U.S.S.R. are materials to make 'dirty

bombs'





February 14, 2004

By Douglas Birch

Sun Foreign Staff



SOKHUMI, Abkhazia - It's the stuff from which nightmares are made.



Ignoring the ominous graffiti scrawled on the rusting steel doors

- "Radiation! Danger!! Stop! Cancer!" - three men broke into a

masonry bungalow at a medical research institute here in May

2002. They fished seven lead-lined capsules out of a containment

pool.



The thieves took the containers, shaped like coffee cans, back to

a garage, stripped the lead out of at least one, and planned to

melt down the metal to make shotgun pellets.



But these were not ordinary canisters. Lerry Meskhi, head of

nuclear and radiation safety for the former Soviet republic of

Georgia, said they contained a small but potent amount of cesium

137, emitting about 33,000 curies of radioactivity - enough to

cause radiation sickness or death.



The three thieves quickly fell ill. Abkhazia's de-facto

government - rebels who led a successful revolt against Georgia

in 1993 - had the cesium moved to the ruins of a nearby physics

institute for safer storage.



But the danger posed by this deadly cache, and thousands of

others like it scattered through the former Soviet empire, has by

no means disappeared.



When the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes collapsed, Cold

War fears of mutual annihilation were replaced by fears that

Soviet-era stockpiles of plutonium and highly enriched uranium

could, through bribery or theft, fall into the hands of rogue

states or terrorists.



But those fears now extend to relatively common radioactive

materials, including those used in medical research, agriculture

and navigation devices.



Cesium 137 and these other common materials can't detonate. But

an ounce or so - the weight matters less than the level of

radioactivity, measured in curies - could be used to make a

"dirty bomb," a conventional high-explosive salted with

radioactive matter.



Frightening, costly



Such a device would have no more explosive power than a

conventional bomb. But it would spread a cloud of radioactive

particles that could cause additional injuries or deaths. It

would certainly trigger panic.



A recent study by the U.S. National Defense University in

Washington, D.C., estimated that the cleanup after detonation of

one large device in Lower Manhattan would cost $40 billion.



No one has ever used a dirty bomb. But after the defeat of the

Taliban in Afghanistan, U.S. troops scouring caves used by

al-Qaida discovered the blueprints for one. Justice Department

officials said in June 2002 that they had foiled a plot to use

such a device in a major American city.



The radioactive ingredients for a dirty bomb can be found in just

about every country in the world. But nowhere, it seems, are more

of them kept under poor security than in the former Soviet Union.



And probably nowhere in the wreckage of the U.S.S.R. is the

material less secure than in Abkhazia and other rebel-controlled

bits of post-Soviet states where corruption is endemic, the rule

of law weak and smuggling a mainstay of the economy.



If the three Abkhazian thieves had known what they had, they

might have tried to smuggle the cesium to Turkey with a shipload

of lumber. Or tried to carry it in a car through Georgia and

south toward Iran.



In recent years, hunters and farmers in Georgia have stumbled on

radioactive devices scattered through the countryside. They have

used the hot cores to make hot water or keep them warm while

camping in the mountains. This month, the Georgian government

said it had found tiny amounts of cesium 137 at 30 gasoline

stations across the country, used to measure the level of gas in

tanks.



Abkhazia is a breakaway part of Georgia where separatists routed

government troops in the fall of 1993, after a civil war that

killed 10,000 people.



Today Abkhazia is one of four ethnic enclaves - the others are

Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh and Trans-Dniester - to claim

independence. Most have become havens for smugglers and criminal

groups.



With its palm-fringed beaches, orange groves and sunny

Mediterranean climate, Abkhazia seems like a dreamy refuge from

the world of war and terrorist threats. That appearance masks a

different reality.



The country is carved up among four criminal gangs who smuggle

everything from timber and hazelnuts to hashish and stolen cars,

according to a draft report by American University's

Transnational Crime and Corruption Center. Kidnapping and

assassination are common. Police are ineffective.



"The distinction among official security and police forces,

criminals [and] various armed formations is totally blurred," the

report says.



During the war, the medical research institute in Sokhumi was

ransacked. But its radioactive cesium, used in leukemia research,

was untouched.



Theft and recovery



The institute's director, Sergei K. Ardzinba, resisted foreign

pressure to move the material to a more secure storage site. He

hoped, he said in a recent interview, to resume radiological

experiments one day.



After the theft and recovery of the cesium in May 2002, Ardzinba

relinquished the material. The rebel government moved it to a

vault at a former nuclear weapons lab called the Sokhumi

Institute of Physics and Technology. There, it was stored with

about 240 other samples of radioactive material.



Unfortunately, the Sokhumi physics institute has a poor record of

protecting nuclear materials. According to Western experts, in

spring 1993 it held between 1.4 and 4.4 pounds of highly enriched

uranium, suitable for a nuclear bomb. Sometime after that,

nonproliferation experts say, the uranium vanished.



Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there have been at least 18

reports of stolen plutonium or highly enriched uranium. But the

theft in Sokhumi is unique.



"It represents, to the best of my knowledge, the only confirmed

instance of missing or diverted highly enriched uranium or

plutonium that was not recovered," said William Potter, a

nonproliferation scholar with the Monterey Institute of

International Studies in California.



For several years after the war with Georgia, Abkhaz officials

barred international inspectors from visiting the physics

institute. Experts with Russia's atomic energy agency, Minatom,

finally gained access in December 1997. They found most buildings

vacant. Any highly enriched uranium was gone.



Abkhazian officials insist they haven't lost any nuclear bomb

materials. Anatolia I. Markolia, director of Sokhumi's physics

institute, says he has no evidence the facility ever had highly

enriched uranium. "Nothing went missing during the war," he said.



But most foreign experts believe otherwise. Valter G. Kashia, a

former researcher at the institute, said in an interview he

personally used 655 grams - 1.4 pounds - of highly enriched

uranium at the institute to test designs of nuclear-powered

electric generators for spacecraft. Kashia fled Abkhazia in 1992

and now lives in exile in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.



Abkhazia's security chief turned down requests to visit the

Sokhumi physics institute and see the vault where the radioactive

materials are held.



Lack of security



Nonproliferation experts say they think cesium 137 from the

medical research center is still safely stored there. But some

still worry about what might happen to the material.



"Even if [radioactive material] is under lock and key and

guarded, how reliable is that under the Abkhaz regime?" asked

Scott Parish, a proliferation researcher at the Monterey

Institute, who has been to Abkhazia.



Vilmos Friedrich, an official with the International Atomic

Energy Agency in Vienna, helps run that agency's program to clean

up radioactive materials in the former Soviet Union. Among the

most troublesome regions for regulators, he said, are those where

central governments have little or no control.



"Of course, where the political structure is not well

established, where smuggling and illicit trafficking of any kind

of materials is going on, there is much higher probability that

this illicit activity also includes radioactivity," he said.



Georgian authorities have caught several people attempting to

smuggle materials that might be used in a dirty bomb. Last May, a

taxi driver was caught headed for Tbilisi's main railroad station

carrying a trunk loaded with containers of highly radioactive

cesium 137 and strontium 90.



A month later, an Armenian man was arrested in a border town, on

his way south to the Armenian capital, Yerevan. American-supplied

radioactivity detectors set up at the roadside sounded an alarm,

and border guards discovered a 4.4-pound disc of uranium hidden a

shopping bag filled with tea.



Lt. Gen. Valeri Chkheidze, chief of the Georgian border guards,

said Abkhazia's long coastline on the Black Sea makes it

difficult to control what goes in and what comes out.



"Contraband is widespread," he said. "Drugs are being trafficked.

Where there is no control, it is easy to smuggle radioactive

materials as well."



http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.radioactive14feb14,0,2432108.story?coll=bal-home-headlines



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