Guest columnist: Lawrence Sheets on Uranium Smuggling

Apologies to O and G readers for the long absence. I've been trying to finish up the Russia book. That's no excuse, so here we go.

We have as a guest Lawrence Scott Sheets, who will be taking any questions on a piece he's got on uranium smuggling in next month's Atlantic magazine, called "A Smuggler's Story." The story isn't posted yet, but Atlantic has put up an interview with Sheets on its web site. The theme is the back story to a scoop that Sheets broke in The New York Times a few months back about a hair-raising scheme to sell weapons-grade uranium from former Soviet Georgia. This is a story of the highest order.

I've known Sheets for some fifteen years, since both of us were Tbilisi-based correspondents covering the Georgian-Abkhazian civil war, he for Reuters, and I for Newsweek and The Washington Post. At a time and place when there simply was no infrastructure -- everything in the Caucasus seemed to have fallen apart -- Sheets demonstrated a superlative ability to make his bureau work. He went on to become NPR's Moscow correspondent, and is now working on what appears likely to be a classic, book-length account of his couple of decades in the former Soviet Union.

Here is how The Atlantic leads into the interview with Sheets:

Uranium on the Loose

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in December 1991, the United States could claim victory in the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama could declare the end of history, and some 280 million people could look forward to a liberated future. But in fact the Soviet Union left its 15 successor states to navigate their own way to democracy and a market economy. And with some 22,000 tactical nuclear weapons—along with perhaps 1,200 tons of bomb-grade uranium—scattered under uncertain ownership and questionable supervision, the securing of the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear materials became a matter of pressing concern.

Over the past decade and half, with extensive help from the United States, Russia has tried to lock down this atomic detritus, at great expense. But the task is a massive one, and as of 2008, the two nations face nuclear concerns that scarcely registered during the upheaval of the 1990s. Seven years after 9/11, Russia has become something of a terrorists’ nirvana—with 12,500 miles of borders, a military so corrupt its members have sold weapons to their battlefield enemies, and vast networks of poorly safeguarded nuclear facilities.

Russia is likely the only place in the world where a man like Oleg Khintsagov, an ordinary, destitute, and dimwitted hustler, can pick up weapons-grade uranium and try to hawk it from his pockets. Khintsagov, along with two other smugglers of similar means and aptitude—Garik Dadayan and Tamaz Dimitradze—are the subject of “A Smuggler’s Story,” Lawrence Scott Sheets’ piece in the April issue of The Atlantic. To a man, the couriers Sheets describes are poorly prepared for their missions, yet they have their hands on potentially catastrophic atomic ingredients. The story Sheets tells is of a society in collapse in the face of separatist anxieties, ethnic animosities, and ambiguous borders—and of impoverished people seeking to feed their families in a radioactive land.

Read interview

Blow to Bush: Russia Says No New Sanctions on Iran

Russia today joined China in a public rejection of the Bush administration's effort to increase sanctions on Iran. In Moscow, Russian and Iranian officials announced that they moved closer to finalizing Russian construction of a $1 billion nuclear power plant near the southern Iranian city of Bushehr.

The agreement in itself is unimpressive -- another of those interim pacts in which the parties agree to do something later, in this case to finalize a timetable for completing the plant, which is at the heart of Western concerns about Iran's uranium enrichment program.

But it puts meat on Vladimir Putin's resistance to further Iranian sanctions after a U.S. intelligence estimate last week said Iran had stopped trying to develop nuclear arms four years ago. The Bush administration has continued to push for stepped-up sanctions, saying the new intelligence doesn't mean that Iran is less dangerous.

The Russian position makes it even harder for Bush to get agreement since China on Sunday made its feelings on the matter known when Sinopec, the Chinese oil company, signed a $2 billion oil contract with Iran.

Photo: Daniella Zalcman
Rights: Creative Commons

Russia in the Air

The Central Asia republics joined their two paternalistic neighbors -- Russia and China -- in a military show yesterday. The climax was President Putin's announcement that Russia had resumed long-range flights by its nuclear bombers, and a U.S. announcement that NATO aircraft had scrambled the aircraft. The upshot: The message was not warlike, but it was belligerent. Russia is attempting to demonstrate that its global ambitions are not limited to refineries and pipelines.

The first paragraph of the L.A. Times account: Russian President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday announced reinstatement of the Soviet-era practice of having nuclear bombers routinely make long-distance flights that bring them within striking distance of the United States and its allies. "Today just after midnight, 14 strategic missile aircraft, with support and fuel planes, took off from seven airfields across Russia," Putin said in televised remarks. "Combat duty began in which a total of 20 planes are taking part. From today, combat duty of this kind will be carried out on a regular basis." Read story

Steve's comment: Russia's bomber flight is reminiscent of a similar show that the U.S. put on almost precisely 10 years ago. On Sept. 15, 1997, the U.S. 82d Airborne flew from the U.S. all the way to Kyrgyzstan for a Central Asia military exercise. It was the longest such airborne mission in history, capped by a parachute landing.

It was intended to demonstrate not that the U.S. intended to invade, but that it had the reach and will to get to the region. No one anticipated that, four years later, that would be illustrated in fact with the establishment of a semi-permanent military presence there.

The Russian flight was farce in the sense that Moscow lacks the capability to mount a massive long-range military assault. But in military language, image can be crucial. Russia is saying that it intends over the coming years to take its previously formidible military out of mothballs, and turn it into something of use. That use is surely regional, but given the neighborhood it is something that bears watching.

Here is the first paragraph of a Reuters account of the Shanghai military exercises: CHEBARKUL, Russia - Russia and China staged their biggest joint exercises on Friday but denied this show of military prowess could lead to the formation of a counterweight to NATO. Read story