As far as newspaper ads go, these must rank as some of the most unusual ever. The Pakistani government last week placed ads in several Urdu-language newspapers, with the large yellow radiation symbol and a warning to report any lost or misplaced isotopes. In coming weeks, ads will also appear in regional and English-language papers.
Pakistan's nuclear regulatory authority played down the significance of this public information campaign, reported Nature.com, which carried the story.
"No radioactive source has been stolen, lost or missed," the Pakistani spokesman Zaheer Ayub Baig told the science journal via email. Apparently the newspaper ads are meant to warn citizens about old medical and industrial sources that may have been lost before the founding of the nation a half-century ago.
Nature says lost radioactive materials, often called "orphan sources", can pose a risk to public health. In 1987, an abandoned canister of caesium-137 found in a Brazilian scrapyard contaminated more than 244 people. In March, a container of yellowcake uranium somehow turned up in a Los Angeles-area pawnshop.
Nuclear material and Pakistan already have a combustible relationship. AQ Khan, the brains behind Pakistan's nuclear weapons, notoriously sold atomic secrets on the black market to countries such as Libya and North Korea, so the ads will hardly boost confidence in Pakistan's approach to nuclear material.
One question though. How on earth will Pakistanis know whether they have stumbled across some stray isotopes?
