The scariest story of the year
Posted by:
Economist.com | NEW YORK
How can it be that the New York Times relegates the most terrifying
story of this young year to a single column's width on yesterday's
front pagewithout attaching so much as a photo to get our blood
pumping? The casual reader of "Smugglers' Plot Highlights Fear Over
Uranium" above the article's Tbilisi dateline can be forgiven for
missing the fact that this story should concern every reader, every
New Yorker, every citizen of a big city or the civilised world, much
more than anything else in this week's news.
Smuggling, schmuggling. The real story is not quite that "a Russian
man with sunken cheeks and a wispy mustache"his name, by the way, is
"Oleg Khinsagov, a shabbily dressed 50-year-old trader who specialized
in fish and sausages"smuggled "100 grams of uranium so refined that
it could help fuel an atom bomb" into Georgia. In a world of sane
editorial judgments, the banner headline ought to scream that "MAN HAD
0.1 KILOGRAM OF BOMB-GRADE URANIUM". The Times story goes on to
recount in great and (in a way) interesting detail that Georgia's
breakaway regions are fine places to trade in all manner of
contraband, including "illicit caviar, cheap light bulbs and smuggled
gasoline".
As if we should care. The problem is not Georgia, nor the fact that a
fishmonger named Oleg was carrying illegal goods across international
borders. The problem is the uranium, which is highly enriched uranium
(HEU), the substance most likely to end the world as we know it, and
the fact that in today's world it can end up in the hands of a person
who has nothing better to do than to sell it. Oleg is said to have
thought that he'd sell his sample, along with untold kilograms more,
to "a Muslim man" from a "serious organisation". Once such an Oleg has
such stuff as HEU in his hands, I care not how he tries to bear it
away from Mother Russia (Mother, it seems without a doubt in this
case, of this bomb-in-the-making). Because that's the easiest thing in
the world to do. Oleg got unlucky in Georgia, which is why we're
reading about his story in the paper. The real, earth-shaking point of
this news is that he got lucky enough to get his hands on these
precious grams in the first place. The worries we devote to the
likelihood that Iran will develop its own weapons-making capacity, or
that North Korea has a big pile of plutonium all its own, are as
nothing to the fact that there is unmonitored, commercial trade in
HEU. And a grubby-sounding trade at that.
With only 25kg of HEU, any halfway decent demolitions expert or DIYer
with a basement and a welding torch can build a bomb that would kill
thousands. A clever couple of grad students could lay waste to a city
of millions (not by vaporising it, quite, but by blackening its centre
with a radioactive hangover to last centuries). Since HEU is stable
enough to carry by hand, transporting it across borders, into
buildings or into graduate-quality labs is not a problem for anybody.
Oh, and it doesn't set off metal detectors or bomb-sniffing dogs
either, should the enterprising smuggler feel like putting a few
pounds in his pocket (it's extremely dense stuffyou'd be surprised
how many pounds you can cram into a small space). I suspect that if
Oleg had been a more prosperous fishmonger, he might've flown from,
say, Odessa to ... Karachi, Riyadh, London, Tel Aviv? With however
many kg of HEU he and his suitcase can carry.
This material came from Russia. It got into private hands. Good
Georgian police work intercepted it. That's the happy coda, but
somehow I find it a distraction.
This story, however we are to construct its lede, is an important one.
Yet more words on yesterday's front page were devoted to the
sub-standard new radio system the NYPD has declined to use.
NYT Story Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/world/europe/25nuke.html
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