DIRTY BOMBS, DARK SECRETS: INSIDE THE URANIUM UNDERWORLD

/ Intelligence, International Affairs, Iran, Iran Nuclear Deal, ISIS Terror Group, Missle Defense, National Defense, Nuclear Energy/Weapons, Radical Islam, Technology, Terrorism / By

 

GEORGIA

Inside the Uranium Underworld: Dark Secrets, Dirty Bombs

Simon Shuster / Tbilisi, Georgia
6:16 AM ET
Tamila Chaduneli holds a picture of her son Amiran, who was caught attempting to sell highly radioactive uranium in Georgia  Yuri Kozyrev—Noor for TIME
    EXCERPT FROM THE ARTICLE:  There have already been plenty of signs that ISIS would like to go nuclear. After the series of ISIS-linked bombings in Brussels killed at least 32 people in March 2016, Belgian authorities revealed that a suspected member of a terrorist cell had surveillance footage of a Belgian nuclear official with access to radioactive materials. The country’s nuclear-safety agency then said there were “concrete indications” that the cell intended “to do something involving one of our four nuclear sites.” About a year earlier, in May 2015, ISIS suggested in an issue of its propaganda magazine that it was wealthy enough to purchase a nuclear device on the black market—and to “pull off something truly epic.”

One night last spring, Amiran Chaduneli, a flea-market trader in the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia, met with two strangers on a bridge at the edge of Kobuleti, a small town on the country’s Black Sea coast.

Over the phone, the men had introduced themselves as foreigners—one Turkish, the other Russian—and they were looking for an item so rare on the black market that it tends to be worth more, ounce for ounce, than gold. Chaduneli knew where to get it. He didn’t know that his clients were undercover cops.

From the bridge, he took them to inspect the merchandise at a nearby apartment where his acquaintance had been storing it: a lead box about the size of a smartphone, containing a few pounds of radioactive uranium, including small amounts of the weapons-grade material known as uranium-235. The stash wasn’t nearly enough to make a nuclear weapon. But if packed together with high explosives, these metallic lumps could produce what’s known as a dirty bomb—one that could poison the area around the blast zone with toxic levels of radiation.

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