Radioactive, unprotected: A `dirty
bomb' nightmare
Soviet-era nuclear material is a target for smugglers willing to
sell to anyone
By Alex Rodriguez
Tribune foreign correspondent
February 15, 2007
YEREVAN, Armenia --
Jobless for two years, Gagik Tovmasyan believed escape from poverty lay
in a cardboard box on his kitchen floor.
Inside the box, a blue, lead-lined vessel held the right type and
amount of radioactive cesium to make a "dirty bomb." The material was
given to him by an unemployed Armenian Catholic priest who promised a
cut if Tovmasyan could find a buyer.
He found one in 2004, but the man turned out to be an undercover agent.
Tovmasyan spent a year behind bars on a charge of illegally storing and
trying to sell 4 grams of cesium-137.
Today the chain-smoking Armenian cabdriver says his actions
amounted to simple survival. "That's just the way it was back then,"
said Tovmasyan, 48, who insisted he had no idea of the danger the
material presented. "I was selling all my belongings just to get by."
At a time when the U.S. is grappling with the specter of nuclear
weapons in North Korea and Iran, security experts warn that a vast
supply of radioactive materials--enough to make hundreds of so-called
dirty bombs--lies virtually unprotected in former Soviet military bases
and ruined factories.
Desperately poor scavengers looking for scrap metal already have
raided many of those sites, fueling an ever-growing concern in the war
on terrorism.
There were 662 confirmed cases of radioactive materials smuggling
around the world from 1993 to 2004, according to the International
Atomic Energy Agency. More than 400 involved substances that could be
used to make a dirty bomb, a weapon that would spew radioactivity
across a broad area. Experts say even these alarming numbers do not
reflect the magnitude of the smuggling.
The risk has grown despite tens of millions of dollars spent by
the United States to provide radiation detection equipment and security
training in former Soviet republics. Tracking how the money is spent by
opaque, often-corrupt governments has proved especially difficult.
The problem is wider in scope than often acknowledged, and the
stakes are enormous: It takes only a few grams of a deadly radioactive
substance such as cesium-137 or strontium-90 to make a dirty bomb.
Along Russia's barren, jagged coastline on the Barents Sea, enough
strontium-90 to make hundreds of dirty bombs can be found in dozens of
unguarded lighthouses and navigational beacons. In Semipalatinsk in
eastern Kazakhstan, once the site of Soviet nuclear weapons testing,
scavengers routinely slip through breaches in tunnels where poorly
secured strontium-90, cesium-137, plutonium and uranium waste is stored
alongside scrap metal, the site's director says.
In the small mountainous republic of Georgia, the director of a
former Soviet laboratory in the breakaway province of Abkhazia says
separatist leaders have prevented IAEA inspectors from adequately
surveying the institute, where stockpiles of uranium, cesium-137,
strontium-90 and other radioactive materials cannot be accounted for.
Many cases undetected
Many former Soviet republics do a poor job of maintaining reliable
inventories of radioactive material, according to Lyudmila Zaitseva, a
radioactive materials trafficking researcher at the University of
Salzburg in Austria. Former Soviet borders are porous, and corruption
is rife at border guard posts.
When it comes to protecting radioactive materials, the countries
that once made up the Soviet Union are "the weakest and most dangerous
link in the whole chain," said Igor Khripunov, a U.S.-based expert in
nuclear and radioactive materials security at the University of Georgia.
Zaitseva and her research colleague Friedrich Steinhausler, who
log radioactive materials trafficking cases into a database at the
University of Salzburg, estimate that roughly 3 of every 5 cases of
radioactive materials smuggling go undetected. "I am far more concerned
with what we don't see than with what we see," Steinhausler said.
The U.S. government has been slow to gird its ports and border
checkpoints with enough detection capability to prevent smuggled
radioactive materials from entering the country. In December 2005,
congressional investigators smuggled enough cesium-137 across U.S.
checkpoints on the Canadian and Mexican borders to produce two dirty
bombs, according to a 2006 Government Accountability Office report.
Testifying before a Senate homeland security subcommittee in
March, GAO officials said they doubted that the Department of Homeland
Security could hit its deadline of placing more than 3,000 radiation
detectors at border crossings, seaports and mail facilities by 2009. It
was likelier, said the GAO's Eugene Aloise, that the department would
not finish until 2014.
"Four and a half years after Sept. 11, and less than 40 percent of
our seaports have basic radiation equipment," said Sen. Norm Coleman
(R-Minn.), the subcommittee chairman at the time during a congressional
hearing last March. "This is a massive blind spot."
Lure for terrorists
No one has ever detonated a dirty bomb, but terrorists have made it
clear they have the means and desire to do so.
In November 1995, Chechen separatists buried a canister of
cesium-137 under the snow in Moscow's Izmailovo Park and told a Russian
television network where to find it. Last year, a British court
sentenced Dhiren Barot, a London resident linked to Al Qaeda, to 40
years in prison for planning a series of terrorist attacks in London
and the U.S. that would have included a dirty bomb.
In the dense stands of birch and pine in Russia's far north,
special generators used to power lighthouses represent one of the most
vulnerable sources of material. Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators
create electricity through the decay of strontium-90. A single RTG can
house enough strontium-90 for 40 dirty bombs.
Russia has more than 600 RTGs scattered across its 11 time zones.
Lighthouses and navigational beacons equipped with them are largely
unguarded, at times lacking even a chain-link fence for protection.
In the Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regions along the Barents
coastline, scrap metal hunters have broken into six RTGs in recent
years, said Vladimir Kozlovsky, a local official involved in a
Russian-Norwegian project to replace the aging RTGs with safer
technology.
In March, scrap metal hunters broke into a deserted military base
above the Arctic Circle and ripped apart four RTGs, according to
Bellona, a Norwegian environmental watchdog organization.
While there are no reports of strontium being taken from an RTG, the
scavenging highlights the risks.
Radioactive materials transported in Russia by rail are also alarmingly
vulnerable.
Last year Greenpeace activists staked out a train depot in a
village near St. Petersburg, Russia, to monitor trainloads of uranium
from Western Europe that had been stopping on their way to Siberia for
disposal.
50,000 tons shipped yearly
"There were no police, no guards, no armed personnel around," said
Greenpeace activist Georgy Timofeyev. "The first time we noticed this
in May, we called authorities. They said, `If there aren't any guards,
then there's no danger.'
"But anyone can walk up and open them because there are no serious
locks on the containers," Timofeyev said.
Greenpeace activists say Russian authorities confirmed that the
shipments were being handled by Izotop, a state-owned nuclear materials
transport company. The firm handles roughly 50,000 tons of nuclear
material shipped through St. Petersburg each year, according to
Bellona. Izotop officials declined to comment.
In Kazakhstan, once a hub for Soviet nuclear production and
research because of its remoteness in the steppes of Central Asia, vast
networks of tunnels and boreholes used for nuclear weapons testing pose
a unique problem.
For four decades, the treeless stretches of scrub outside
Semipalatinsk in eastern Kazakhstan served as the Soviet Union's ground
zero. The Soviet military machine conducted 458 nuclear weapons tests
at the 7,200-square mile site. Most of the blasts occurred in 181
iron-lined tunnels a half-mile below the ground, or in the site's 60
boreholes.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan
relinquished its entire nuclear arsenal and sealed Semipalatinsk's
tunnels and boreholes with concrete.
Those seals have failed to deter impoverished Kazakhs, who fashion
propane tanks into makeshift bombs to blast their way into the tunnels.
Their quarry is scrap metal, but local authorities worry that the vast
amounts of strontium, cesium, plutonium and uranium waste still inside
the tunnels could attract those intent on building a dirty bomb.
"Anyone who wants to make a dirty bomb can target by-products of
the blasts," said Kayrat Kadyrzhanov, director general of the
Kazakhstan National Nuclear Center, which oversees the site. "When test
blasts were done, not all of the particles burned out. Even taking soil
samples would be of value to a terrorist or rogue state.
"When people get into the tunnels, we assume it's for iron. But that's
our assumption," Kadyrzhanov said.
Only 4 patrol teams
The U.S. government has given Kazakhstan more than $20 million to
seal up tunnel and borehole entrances, Kadyrzhanov said, "but the
problem is still there." Kazakh authorities deploy only four patrol
teams--made up of a local police officer, a radiation detector
specialist and a driver--to cover 181 tunnels and a tract of steppe the
size of New Jersey.
"The scrap hunters are well-equipped," Kadyrzhanov said. "They've
got cell phones and warn each other about approaching patrols."
Radioactive flotsam left behind by the Soviets in Georgia is just
as worrisome. Canisters of cesium-137 and other radioactive materials
have been routinely found at abandoned military bases, research
laboratories--even in farmhouses, according to nuclear safety
specialists with the Georgian government.
Last summer, inspectors found cesium-137 amid a pile of nuts and
bolts in a soap container at a farmer's house in the village of
Likhauri.
"We came across many cases where radioactive material was found in
the street, in a forest, or in fields," said Grigol Basilia, a
scientist with Georgia's Nuclear Radiation Safety Service.
Georgia's biggest worry is the rebellious province of Abkhazia on
the Black Sea coast, where a separatist government defies Tbilisi with
the political and military backing of Russia.
Abkhazia is home to the Sukhumi Institute of Physics and
Technology, or SIPT, founded in 1945 as a cog in the effort to build
the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb. In 1992, civil war broke out in
Abkhazia. Abkhaz separatists drove out Georgian troops in a year of
fighting that claimed 17,000 lives. Georgian scientists at the
institute fled, leaving the laboratory and its storehouse of uranium,
plutonium and other radioactive materials in the hands of Abkhaz
separatists.
No information on materials
Today, those Georgian scientists have no control over the fate of
SIPT's deadly array of radioactive substances. Guram Bokuchava, the
institute's director, operates out of a small office in downtown
Tbilisi, not knowing how those materials are guarded or even how much
are left.
In 2002, when IAEA inspectors flew to Sukhumi to check on uranium
stored at the institute, Abkhaz authorities would not let them inspect
the storage site, Bokuchava said.
"It's not known how much uranium is there," Bokuchava said. "And
it's not known how much cesium-137 and strontium-90 is there. Of
course, we're concerned about what happened to these materials ... but
the Abkhaz side is not giving any information about this."
Georgia also continues to be a major transit nation for
radioactive materials smugglers. In the most recent case, Oleg
Khinsagov, a 50-year-old Russian trader, was caught trying to smuggle
100 grams of highly enriched uranium through Georgia last year. He was
convicted of nuclear materials trafficking and sentenced to 8 1/2 years
in prison. Georgian authorities believe the uranium originated in
Russia.
Khinsagov fits the profile of the opportunistic radioactive
materials smuggler working the Caucasus region: He was a simple trader,
with no criminal background and no known connections to organized crime
or terrorists.
Tovmasyan, the Armenian cabdriver, and the other men arrested with him
fit the same profile.
The man who gave Tovmasyan the cesium, Asokhik Aristakesyan, was a
priest and also unemployed, said Vahe Papoyan, an investigator with the
Armenian National Security Service. So was another man who tried to
sell the cesium, Sarkis Mikaelyan, a jobless economist. They each were
convicted and also sentenced to a year in jail
"Especially in countries with low standards of living," Khripunov said,
"people can be very enterprising."
Big challenge: Corruption
The U.S. has aggressively tried to shore up border checkpoints in
Georgia and other former Soviet republics to stem the flow of
radioactive materials smuggling. From 1994 to 2005, Washington spent
$178 million to provide radiation detection equipment for border posts
in 36 countries, many of them former Soviet nations.
A March 2006 GAO report acknowledged that the new equipment helps, but
the bigger challenge is corruption.
"Border guards often don't know what they're dealing with,"
Zaitseva said. "They're bribed to switch off their detection equipment.
They don't know what's being smuggled, and they really don't care."