Wanted to Buy: Do-It-Yourself Nuke Kits

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a plague of press reports has warned of a black market in weapons-grade nuclear material in Russia. The Central Intelligence Agency claims that most of these stories are untrue. CIA Director R. James Woolsey went so far as to tell the Senate Intelligence Committee that his agency was "not aware of any illegal transfers in quantities sufficient to produce a nuclear weapon."

But top officials in Washington and Moscow fear that poorly policed borders and potentially staggering profits provide both opportunity and incentive for illegal trading. Many hustlers in Moscow brazenly offer to sell small quantities of what they claim to be spent nuclear fuel stolen from production facilities. Often the ingredients these scam artists pass off as "samples" are benign substances, like cesium 137 and low-enriched uranium, that cannot be used to make a bomb. But no one doubts that a market for the real stuff exists. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, membership in the world's nuclear club requires only 55 lbs. of highly enriched uranium or 18 lbs. of plutonium to make an atom bomb.

So far, experts say, there has been only one credible case in which a gram or more of weapons-grade material was stolen; within the past year, an employee at a nuclear-fuel research facility near Moscow made off with three pounds of highly enriched uranium. Though he was later arrested and the uranium recovered, officials in Moscow are alarmed enough by continuing attempts that they have called for international monitoring of the nuclear trade. In the absence of adequate controls, proliferation is only a matter of time. "So far," says William Potter of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, "we have been extremely lucky."