IT’S been a long day at the Port of New York and New Jersey. Officials have wasted precious time and money opening up or X-raying at least 150 incoming freight containers. They turn out to be full of cat litter, ceramic tiles or bananas – all of which happen to be naturally radioactive.
What they don’t realise is that they have also nodded through a container in which is stowed a 50-kilogram canister of stolen highly-enriched uranium. Unlike the bananas, the low-energy gamma rays it emits are easily absorbed by the 2-centimetre-thick sheet of lead around it, so it passes through the radiation monitors unnoticed. Some time…
