The Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has told fellow leaders at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington that his government has thwarted an attempt to sell highly-enriched uranium on the black market last month.
Georgian sources said the HEU was intercepted in a sting operation carried out by the Tbilisi authorities without international assistance. They said the uranium was over 70% enriched. The exact analysis is expected in a few days, but it appears to have been pure enough to use in a crude nuclear weapon.
The amount seized was small, measured in grams, so nowhere near the 25kg needed for a bomb, but Georgian officials said the criminal gang who was trying to sell the HEU was offering it as a trial sample of a bigger quantity available for purchase on the black market.
In his formal presentation to the summit today, Saakashvili said:
The Georgian ministry of interior has foiled eight attempts of illicit trafficking of enriched uranium during the last ten years, including several cases of weapons-grade enrichment. Criminals associated with these attempts have been detained. The most recent case of illicit trafficking was the attempted sale of highly enriched uranium in March of this year
The seizure echoes the case of Oleg Khinsagov, a North Ossetian smuggler, who was arrested in 2006 trying to sell 100 grams of HEU in Georgia. He had also claimed to his would-be buyers that it was just a sample from a bigger batch. The latest case suggests that bigger batch of stolen HEU may well exist.
Since 1993, the IAEA has confirmed 15 cases of smuggling of weapons-grade HEU or plutonium, but investigators admit they have no idea how big a tip this is of how big an iceberg.
