'Dirty Bomb' Missiles Reported Missing
Mon Dec 8, 1:53 PM ET
By VASILE BOTNARU, Associated Press Writer
CHISINAU, Moldova - Dozens of rockets outfitted with so-called dirty bombs -
warheads designed to scatter deadly radioactive material - appear to be
missing in a breakaway region of Moldova, an expert said Monday.
Oazu Nantoi, a political analyst who works at the non-governmental Institute
for Policy Studies in Chisinau, said he had seen photocopies of Russian
military documents showing that the dirty bomb warheads - 24 ready to use,
14 dismantled - were missing from a storage depot near the Trans-Dniester
Tiraspol military airport.
Nantoi is a respected expert on the region of Trans-Dniester, which is
populated by ethnic Slavs and has been policed by thousands of Russian
troops since the region's fight for independence from Moldova 12 years ago.
Moldova has strong ethnic and cultural links to neighboring Romania.
The possibility the warheads were missing was first published in The
Washington Post on Sunday.
Nantoi said the documents came from a disgruntled Russian military official
who claimed he had not received compensation for being exposed to
radioactive material.
The possibility of terrorists acquiring dirty bombs is a main concern of the
International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria. IAEA Director-General
Mohamed ElBaradei said last week that his agency, which tries to cap the
spread of nuclear weapons, is now "spending a great deal of time working on
this threat."
The Organization for Security and Cooperation (news - web sites) in Europe
and other agencies have expressed repeated concern about reports that the
Trans-Dniester region is a major weapons smuggling center.
Moldova is a former Soviet republic and thousands of tons of weapons and
ammunition remain stored in Trans-Dniester after the breakup of the Soviet
Union in 1991. The region has a robust arms industry.
Nantoi said reports first reached him in 1998 that Alazan rockets - normally
used in the former Soviet Union for weather experiments - had been fitted
with warheads modified to carry radioactive material.
Since then, the rockets and warheads appear to have disappeared from their
storage area, and "I could not discover what had happened to them," he told
the AP.
"We tried to work with Moldovan officials, but there wasn't a clear
investigation, because the territory is not controlled by Moldova," he said
by telephone.
Trans-Dniester does not see itself as part of Moldova. It is not recognized
internationally.
Moldova's government declined comment Monday, while an official of the
Trans-Dniester Defense Ministry in Tiraspol called the claims "propaganda
from Chisinau."
OSCE (news - web sites) spokesman Claus Neukirch said he was familiar with
the reports and that organization military experts were investigating. He
declined to give details.
The OSCE, together with Russia and Ukraine, are mediators in the conflict in
Trans-Dniester, which broke away ostensibly over fears that Moldova would
reunite with Romania.
Some 1,500 people died in the fighting, which ended after a Moscow-brokered
truce and the deployment of Russian peacekeepers.
There are still about 2,000 Russian troops in the breakaway region,
officially acting as peacekeepers and guarding an estimated 28,660 tons of
ammunition.
Russia has promised the OSCE that it would withdraw the troops and
ammunition by the end of the year, but progress has been slow.
Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin recently rejected a Russian peace plan,
saying it would have given too much autonomy to Trans-Dniester.
==================
Statements of the Director General
2 July 2002 Essay, published in the Washington Post
Dirty Bombs: Assessing the Threat?
by IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei
A new term has entered our lexicon of fear: the so-called "dirty bomb." But
giving the new threat a name has only heightened panic; the crucial step is
to improve public understanding of what a dirty bomb is, and of how the
international community is addressing the threat.
A dirty bomb would be made of ordinary explosives - such as dynamite -
packaged with radioactive material, which would be dispersed when the bomb
goes off. As with any explosion, people in the immediate vicinity could be
killed or injured by the blast itself. The radioactive material dispersed,
depending on the amount and intensity, could cause radiation sickness for a
limited number of people nearby if, for example, they inhaled large amounts
of radioactive dust. But the most severe tangible impacts would likely be
the economic costs and social disruption associated with the evacuation and
subsequent clean-up of contaminated property.
Packaging explosives with other toxic substances could cause equally severe
public health effects and social disruption, with less effort and risk for
the terrorist. Radioactive material is hard to handle: the bomber would have
to choose between being directly exposed to a concentrated clump of material
- which could be lethal - or using large amounts of lead shielding, which
would hamper bomb assembly and transport. But a dirty bomb could be a
terrorist's weapon of choice simply in order to play on public fears of all
things nuclear and radioactive. Panic and chaos are a terrorist's primary
objectives.
Around the world, radioactive materials have been widely used for decades to
benefit humankind - to diagnose and treat illnesses, to monitor oil wells
and water aquifers, and to irradiate food to eliminate microbes. But a lack
of control over the thousands of radioactive sources worldwide makes their
acquisition and use by terrorists a real possibility. In Kabul, Afghanistan
in late March, my organization - the International Atomic Energy Agency -
secured a powerful cobalt source abandoned in a former hospital. In Uganda a
week later, we helped to secure a source that appeared to have been stolen
for illicit resale. And as I write, a team of IAEA and local experts are
searching through remote areas of the Republic of Georgia to locate and
recover a number of powerful strontium sources that have been outside
official control for years. Even in the United States and Europe, where
regulatory controls are relatively stringent, thousands of radioactive
sources have been lost or stolen, their present whereabouts unknown.
Providing security controls for radioactive material is not a new concept.
Common sense measures have been required for many years - such as strict
inventories, locked storage facilities and security guards, depending on the
type or amount of material. But the primary focus in the past has been on
safety hazards and the prevention of inadvertent (rather than deliberate)
exposure.
The terrorist attacks of last September catapulted security to the
forefront. The sophistication of the attacks, the evident will to create
large scale panic and destruction, and the willingness of the terrorists
themselves to risk their lives to achieve their ends made the dirty bomb
threat far more realistic.
The degree and nature of the threat vary significantly from one country to
another. National governments are redoubling their efforts to prevent and to
counter nuclear terrorism, both at home and abroad. The IAEA is serving as a
catalyst for these efforts. We have provided equipment and training to
hundreds of border guards and other law enforcement officials, to help them
detect illicit trafficking of radioactive material across borders. We are
helping countries to locate and secure, as a priority, the most powerful
sources. We have held dozens of workshops to help governments and operators
in assessing the threats to their nuclear facilities, raising their
standards of security, maintaining proper control of nuclear and radioactive
material, and being prepared to respond to any related emergencies that
arise. And we recently forged a trilateral partnership between the United
States, the Russian Federation and the IAEA to locate, secure and dispose of
powerful radioactive sources that were lost or abandoned during the break-up
of the former Soviet Union.
The good news, in brief, is that governments and the IAEA are working
overtime on this problem, and we have every intention of continuing until
the threat has been vastly reduced. But this will not happen overnight;
bringing the global inventory of radioactive material under proper controls
will require a sustained and concerted effort.
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Received on Mon Dec 8 20:23:41 2003
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