Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Visit your friendly Plutonium Mart

From Aftenposten Norway, Norwegian news in English:

"Nuclear bomb-grade plutonium seized:

Security forces in the ex-Soviet state of Kyrgyzstan have detained a man who tried to sell nuclear bomb-grade plutonium on the black market, a senior security official said on Wednesday.
Tokon Mamytov, deputy head of the Central Asian republic's National Security Service, said the detained man was a Kyrgyz national. Nuclear experts in Moscow said the material was likely to be of Russian origin.
Investigators were trying to establish the identity of the potential buyer and where the substance, identified as plutonium 239, had come from, Mamytov said.
Former Soviet states, including Russia with its huge nuclear arsenal, are under heavy pressure to prevent dangerous atomic material from falling into the hands of extremists after the Soviet collapse left many nuclear facilities under-protected"


Don't you think we should pass the full employment act for Nuclear Scientists in the Mideast? We could offer every one of them a well paying job and asylum in the United States. It would be the cheapest way to reduce the threat. Assume 1000 scientistsx 100,000 per year <= 1/2 the flyaway cost of one F-22. And it will prevent a lot more bloodshed.

As for the buyer, I think we can all think of dozens of the usual suspects. It's not enough to make a bomb, so Uncle Kim would probably pass but there are a lot of smaller Muslim countries and countless nut-jobs that would LOVE to set off a dirty bomb somewhere- New Delhi, New York, Tel Aviv, London, Warsaw.

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