Uranium is the far better choice. It emits only a lukewarm level of radiation. With a thin lead sleeve, it can be smuggled through those few border checkpoints that are equipped with working radiation detectors. It can also be molded into the same pellet-and-cup shape of the Hiroshima bomb with relative ease and for a low cost. The core of the first nuclear weapon built in China was lathed by a single technician in one night with ordinary machine-shop equipment. This was more than forty years ago, and the physics have not changed, even as the tools can now be ordered over the Internet. The uranium, once acquired, can be melted and shaped mostly by gadgets procured through Home Depot, with little or no danger to the craftsman.
“It’s sadly not difficult,” said the weapons expert Ashton B. Carter before a U.S. Senate committee in 2006. “You know that the United States had no doubt that ours would work, our very first one. . . . Any knuckle-head who has enough highly enriched uranium can make it go off.”
The craftsman would be only one member of the team. There would have to be at least one physicist knowledgeable of the exact designs, as well as an explosives expert to gauge the correct speed of the uranium bullet fired into the core. A 1977 study by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment said an atomic bomb could be produced by just two determined experts for a cost that in today’s dollars would be about $3 million, accounting for salaries and materials costs. The Harvard professors Peter Zimmerman and Jeffrey Lewis have written that a more realistic bomb staff would consist of about nineteen members and have a budget of $10 million. The finished weapon could be hidden in an enclosed truck or a shipping container and taken to its target under the cover of normal harbor or highway traffic.
This is the easy part, as the “secret” to constructing an atomic bomb has been more or less public knowledge since the end of World War II. The hard part is finding enough uranium to make a core. As one expert put it to me, “The biggest challenge is not the design. It’s the material.” He was talking about a chunk of uranium roughly the size of a football. It must be highly enriched—stripped of almost everything but the angry atoms of U-235—and such cargo is best acquired from the shell of a decommissioned weapon, most likely from the former Soviet Union.
Making it independently is out of the question. That would require an industrial effort on the level of Oak Ridge. This bootleg uranium won’t be coming from a nuclear power station, as the uranium would likely be in the form of pellets and fuel rods that already have been radiated and would be fatal to their handlers. Stealing the highly enriched variety from a weapons stockpile is “by far the most direct shortcut for actors seeking nuclear explosive capabilities,” concluded two Swedish experts in a 2005 briefing.
The stuff has gone missing many times. In 1951, three boys in the prairie town of Dalhart, Texas, discovered a black rock lying near the railroad tracks. It was weirdly heavy—thirty pounds—though only about the size of a hamburger. The boys found that it made colorful sparks when they pounded on it with a hammer. The editor of the local newspaper believed it might be a meteor and sent it off to the University of New Mexico for testing. The rock turned out to be highly enriched uranium, apparently stolen from the laboratory at Los Alamos. An even bigger chunk of it was discovered in a nearby junkyard. If slammed together correctly, these two pieces would have leveled everything within ten miles. How they found their way to the Texas panhandle was never disclosed. The year before, a research scientist named Sanford Simons was arrested in Denver after the FBI found a glass vial of plutonium and several pieces of uranium tucked inside a dresser in his suburban home. “I just walked out with it,” he told a newspaper. He said he just wanted “a souvenir” of his work, but he served eighteen months in jail for the stunt.
Those who work in the nuclear business are understandably sensitive about such incidents, which are classified under the rubric of MUF, or “materials unaccounted for.” Uranium is transported in many forms—raw ore, yellowcake, hexafluoride, metal oxide, ceramic pellets, fuel rod assemblies—and at every step there is potential for carelessness. In 1969, a bottle of enriched uranium gas went missing and sat ignored in a freight storage room at Boston’s Logan Airport before somebody finally tracked it down. The Nuclear Fuel Services Corporation’s plant at Erwin, Tennessee, may have set the record for the sloppiest oversight of fissile materials. It admitted in 1979 that it could not locate up to about 20 pounds of highly enriched uranium, and a later investigation determined that as much as 246 pounds of uranium and plutonium had gone missing over the years. It may have been caught in the network of pipes and tanks like so much crusty residue, or leaked away as a gas. It may also have never existed at all, the ghost result of miscalculations about exactly how much was passing through the enrichment cascade. Or it may have been stolen by an insider using the “salami trick” of many tiny pilferages that add up to a significant theft. Operators at the Erwin plant, which fabricated submarine fuel for the U.S. Navy, were unable to explain the loss.
When measured against such incidents, the theft of fuel rods in the Democratic Republic of the Congo starts to look less like corruption and more like a routine happening. Indeed, the trade in stolen uranium is almost as old as the nuclear age. Just one year after Hiroshima, U.S. intelligence agents managed to infiltrate a speculative black market in uranium among several merchants in Shanghai. A nearby mine was rich in uranium crystals, and local entrepreneurs—mindful of recent headlines—were selling them for $5 a pound. More recently, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia was caught with sixty-six pounds of illicit uranium after a raid in March 2008. Experts said the guerrilla organization was not trying to build a bomb, but merely hoping to sell the uranium for a profit.
The closest thing to a police blotter the world has for incidents such as this is kept at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, an ugly collection of Y-shape buildings next to the Danube River on the eastern edge of Vienna, Austria. The United Nations located several of its ancillary offices there in the 1970s because the real estate was cheaper than in Switzerland. The buildings were teeming with asbestos and recently had to be stripped to the pillars. They also now harbor a number of electronic listening devices. It is widely assumed that certain offices are bugged by member states looking for information about the nuclear capabilities of rivals; the espionage is said to get especially thick during negotiations.
In the squeaky-floored lobby, golf shirts and key rings are for sale bearing the legend ATOMS FOR PEACE, a coinage of Dwight Eisenhower’s that reflects the somewhat schizophrenic mission of the agency. The IAEA is charged with promoting nuclear power throughout the world, while at the same time it is responsible for detecting the unauthorized uses of uranium and plutonium, and untangling riddles such as Rocco Martino’s Italian Letter and Iran’s level of technical prowess at Natanz. And all of this is supposed to be done (as its staff is fond of pointing out) on an annual budget that is less than that of the Vienna police department.
I went to the IAEA on a mild January day to see Richard Hoskins, an American who manages the agency’s Illicit Trafficking Database, a compendium of the sixteen known incidents since 1993 that involve stolen quantities of plutonium or uranium, especially the bomb-grade variety known as highly enriched uranium, or HEU in the parlance of weapons inspectors. Hoskins’s job title is senior staff member in the Office of Physical Protection and Material Safety in the Safeguards department. He told me that the sixteen incidents certainly represent an undercount because the agency has no investigatory capabilities of its own. It must rely on the willingness of its member nations to pass along reports from their own law enforcement agencies, and they are not always willing to do so. For one thing, police are genetically bred to hoard information. The admission of a nuclear crime may also be regarded as a diplomatic embarrassment to a member state.
“They are under no obligation to report anything,” Hoskins told me. “We can cajole and plead and do everything short of offering money. It may reach us in days or months or
years.” While explaining this limitation to me, another IAEA official quoted Stalin’s dismissive remark about the power of the Catholic Church: “How many divisions does the pope have?”
I asked Hoskins how much of the smuggling was going undetected, and he said the best estimates put it at about 80 to 85 percent—roughly on par with the percentage of cocaine that makes it through international waters or airspace on the way into the United States. “One of the worries we have is that we’re only catching the dumb guys, and the smart guys aren’t getting caught at the border,” he told me. “Organized crime will do things a lot better than the amateurs we pick up.”
Reading through Hoskins’s list of incidents brings home the essential bathos of the exercise. Those who seek to discover and prevent crimes with uranium are in the unenviable position of trying to prove a negative. The promiscuous spread of uranium during the cold war means that nobody will ever be able to prove conclusively that a group somewhere does not have its hands on some for an apocalypse project. There is simply too much uranium around. Too much is out of sight. The list is a peephole at best, rendered in passive language; brief headlines with no narrative so as not to offend the member state giving up the information, and so each incident is like a dot. The effect is therefore impressionistic: May 10, 1995—“Tengen-Wiechs, Germany: Plutonium was detected in a building during a police search.” March and April 2005—“New Jersey, U.S.A.: A package containing 3.3 grams of HEU was reported lost.” December 14, 1994—“Prague, Czech Republic: HEU was seized by police in Prague. The material was intended for illegal sale.”
Something is known of this last affair. The uranium had been stored in two metal canisters in the backseat of a dark blue Volvo limousine parked on the street. Czech police acting on a tip confiscated the powdered uranium dioxide and arrested three men, one of whom was a nuclear physicist. The other two carried Russian passports. The uranium was presumed to have come from an enrichment facility in the former Soviet Union that made rods for navy submarines.
Though there has never been a complete accounting, there is known to be at least one thousand tons of enriched uranium stored in Russia, the fruits of Wismut and St. Joachimsthal—an amount equivalent to at least sixty thousand nuclear warheads. Much of it is located in warehouses near the once-secret city of Ozersk in the Ural Mountains, a place that functioned as the heart of Russia’s own Manhattan Project. During Boris Yeltsin’s freewheeling and anarchic presidency in the 1990s, the U.S. government paid for a secure disposal site in the city nicknamed the “Plutonium Palace” to house at least some of it.
The uranium cores of old Soviet weapons were pulled apart and shipped to the United States for conversion into a lower-enriched form that will provide 20 percent of the nation’s electricity needs through 2013. This was called the Megatons to Megawatts program, and the glut it created sent the global uranium trade into a decade-long depression. Every time you turn on the lights in America, there is a one in ten chance that the power is coming from an old Soviet warhead. Some of this material was destroyed. An official from the U.S. Department of Energy told me he witnessed blocks of highly enriched uranium set afire in a shielded chamber in a laboratory in Siberia. “I’ve stood in front of the glove boxes and warmed my hands on it,” he said. “It’s very beautiful to watch it burn.”
Yet nobody is sure how much of the remaining material is under competent guard and how much has vanished in the nearly two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union. Though the operations are better managed than they were in the wild days immediately after the collapse of the USSR, there are still reports of shoddy security behind the cordon at Ozersk—bomb fuel stored in plastic buckets, flimsy wire fences, and guards who like to drink on the job. The Harvard researcher Matthew Bunn, who produces an annual report called Securing the Bomb, cited a persistent lack of funding and attention from the Russian government toward locking down old weapons fuel, despite the obvious high stakes involved.
“Both Russian and American experts have reported a systematic problem of inadequate security culture at many sites—intrusion detectors turned off when the guards get annoyed by their false alarms, security doors left open, senior managers allowed to bypass security systems, effective procedures for operating the new security and accounting systems either not written or not followed, and the like,” he wrote. “The security chief at Seversk, a massive plutonium and HEU processing facility, reported that guards at his site routinely patrolled with no ammunition in their guns and had little understanding of the importance of what they were guarding.”
Stopping a burglary at these facilities represents the very best chance for stopping a terrorist group from wiping out an American city, just as kidnapping victims stand the best chance of escape in the first three minutes of their abduction. But getting away with a backpack full of uranium would be only the starting point. A thief would have a lot more work ahead before he would see a dollar of profit. Whoever managed to get a block of uranium out of this place would have to first move it out of Russia, and the most convenient route would be down one of the great smuggling thoroughfares in modern Asia, through a pass in the heart of the Caucasus Mountains and into the broken nation of Georgia.
In the video, the smuggler looks calm. He wears a skinny mustache and a black leather jacket and keeps a stone face after the men he has been negotiating with in the living room have shown him their badges and told him he is under arrest. He obligingly reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a plastic zip-top bag full of dark powder that looks like instant coffee crystals. Then he shakes it gently back and forth, as casually as if it were a bag of potato chips, to show the undercover officers what he has brought for them. Oleg Khinsagov, fifty-one, had been caught in the act of trying to sell four ounces of highly enriched uranium, with the promise that he could furnish lots more of it, hidden in his apartment back across the border in Russia.
The meeting in the shabby tenement in the city of Tbilisi had been a setup all along, and a tactical police unit had been waiting outside the door in case Khinsagov had tried to run into the bathroom to flush the uranium down the toilet. The meeting in January 2006 had been a sting operation by the Interior Ministry of Georgia, which had been prodded by U.S. intelligence agencies to do more to catch smugglers offering old Soviet nuclear goods along with the usual cheap food and drugs. A detective with olive skin who spoke Turkish had been spreading the rumor among Georgia’s gangster class that he represented a “serious group” of people in the Middle East who would like to acquire some uranium suitable for making a bomb. Khinsagov eventually surfaced and offered to sell him a sample packet for $1 million.
He looked just like any other weary workingman from an out-of-the-way Russian town. His usual occupation, he said, was exporting fish and sausages. He had also driven tractors and repaired cars. A previous career as an oil-field worker had taken him to rigs in Iraq and Dubai. He initially tried to claim the uranium deal was a scam of his own making and that the dark powder was just ground-up ink from a computer printer cartridge. An American scientific analysis said otherwise. The stuff was uranium enriched to nearly 90 percent, the perfect blend for a bomb. This could have come only from the reserve of a superpower.
Khinsagov displayed a surprising cockiness once he was in custody. “Usually if you’re going to prison and you have eight years ahead of you, you try to be nice and make friends with your interrogators,” said Shoto Utiashvili, the head of the Department of Analysis in the Interior Ministry. “But this guy was so arrogant. He tried to show us that he was standing firm. He was offered many benefits, but he never named the source. This is not logical behavior for a low-level smuggler. The logical thing you can deduce is that he was promised protection in exchange for his non-cooperation with us. Most likely, he was a middleman.”
Georgian police never learned who supplied him with the uranium, or whether he had been telling the truth about the 4.4-pound cache supposedly back in his apartment. If he had been as good as
his word, there would have been enough uranium for a device big enough to destroy a good portion of downtown Chicago. Before the undercover officers revealed themselves, Khinsagov had bragged that he had a friend who worked as a security guard who could help him move the larger package across the border. But Russian authorities refused to cooperate with the investigation and displayed little interest in finding out where the uranium had been processed. Khinsagov eventually stopped talking altogether and was convicted in a closed trial of “possession of a hazardous material” and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.
His case resembled that of Garick Dadayan, a petty smuggler who had been arrested three years prior at the Armenian border, carrying a tea box with six ounces of highly enriched uranium. He told police he had been hired to deliver the package to “a Muslim man.”
There is no way to know, Utiashvili told me, how many other uranium salesmen may still be operating inside Georgia. With a history of corruption and a long porous border with its disliked Russian neighbor to the north, the former Soviet republic is one of the most likely spots on the globe to serve as a transfer point for garage-sale uranium on its way to a terrorist group. The whole country is a bit smaller than South Carolina, but within its borders there are two breakaway “nations” where the central government has no military or judicial control and where the smuggling of food, gasoline, vodka, cigarettes, drugs, and other goods from Russia and back is a routine affair.
One shibboleth among weapons experts is that new patterns of atomic smuggling are most likely to map themselves on top of more established corridors where law enforcement is weak or nonexistent or at least bribable. Soldiers on the Russian border are known to ignore particular cargoes, for a price.
“It starts simply, with cigarettes and oranges,” said Irakli Sesiashvili, the head of a military watchdog group. “Then comes the people who will set up deals for more interesting products, such as drugs, guns, or uranium. It’s easy to find these guys who will work these deals within the military.”
Tom Zoellner Page 29
