Who has the uranium?
COULD a terrorist build a nuclear bomb? Opinion is divided – but someone out there certainly wants to buy the ingredients. In March, police in the republic of Georgia stopped a gang trying to sell weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium (HEU) on the black market. It was the eighth such interception in Georgia since 2000.
Such tales helped persuade 47 world leaders meeting in Washington DC last week to pledge to lock up the world’s weapons-grade material by 2014. By current estimates, that’s 1600 tonnes of HEU and 500 tonnes of separated plutonium.
But how to do that?…
