Azernews.Az

TBILISI – Highly enriched uranium which could be used to make a nuclear bomb is on sale on the black market along the fringes of the former Soviet Union, according to evidence emerging from a secret trial in Georgia, Guardian reported.

At the centre of the case are two Armenians, a businessman called Sumbat Tonoyan and a physicist, Hrant Ohanyan. Both have pleaded guilty to smuggling highly enriched uranium (HEU) into Georgia in March, stashing it in a lead-lined package on a train from Yerevan to Tbilisi.

Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, informed other heads of state of the sting operation at a nuclear summit in Washington in April, but no details about the case have been made public until now. The trial has been conducted behind closed doors, Georgian officials say, to protect the operational secrecy of the country's counter-proliferation unit.

But investigators have given the Guardian an exclusive first-hand account of the case.

It reveals that the critical ingredient for making a nuclear warhead is available on the black market and is reasonably easy to smuggle past a ring of expensive US-funded radiation sensors along the borders of the former Soviet Union. What is not clear is how much nuclear material is in circulation and whether any has already been bought by extremist groups.

The US has made the prevention of nuclear terrorism its national security priority. To that end, Barack Obama persuaded 50 world leaders at the April summit to pledge to secure all vulnerable nuclear material within four years.

Billions of dollars have been spent upgrading security at nuclear sites around the globe, particularly in Russia, which has an estimated 700 tonnes of HEU in hundreds of facilities. But it is unclear how much has already been stolen.

"The question is: of what iceberg are seeing the tip?" said Matthew Bunn, a Harvard expert and former White House science adviser, who compiles an annual assessment of the nuclear terrorism threat titled Securing the Bomb.

The sample that Tonoyan and Ohanyan were peddling is thought to have been stolen several years ago. US nuclear laboratories have confirmed it is 89.4% enriched, usable in a nuclear warhead. The amount the Armenians had was small, 18 grams, but they had been told by their supplier in Armenia that much more would be available if they made a sale.

They smuggled it into Georgia by train, stuffing into a cigarette box lined with lead strips to fool radiation sensors at the border. Tonoyan, a 63-year-old who once ran a successful dairy business but gambled away his fortune, and Ohanyan, a 59-year-old scientist at the Yerevan Institute of Physics, had arranged to meet their buyer in a hotel room in the Georgian capital on 11 March. They were under the impression they were selling their 18g sample to a representative of an Islamist group as a precursor to a bigger consignment. But the buyer was a Georgian undercover police officer.

The sting operation marks the third time in seven years that HEU has been intercepted on Georgia soil. Altogether, there have been 21 seizures or attempted thefts of weapons grade material, uranium or plutonium, in the region since the Soviet Union collapsed.

In every case where such material has been seized, its absence had not previously been noticed. And subsequent investigations found that in almost every case, the theft was carried out by an insider.

"There has never been a good physical inventory. Accounting rules in the Soviet Union were not designed with an internal threat in mind," said Elena Sokova, a non-proliferation expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

"No one registered that this material was missing and we still don't know whether other material went missing."

In the three Georgian cases, there is some evidence linking the stolen HEU to a nuclear fuel plant in Novosibirsk, Siberia. An investigation by Russia's Federal Security Service found that Garik Dadayan, the smuggler involved in the first case in 2003, had gone to Novosibirsk, before trying to smuggle about 200g of HEU into Georgia.

In the second case, the smuggler, Oleg Khintsagov initially told investigators he acquired his HEU from business acquaintances in Novosibirsk although he later changed his account. Onhanyan and Tonoyan say they got their sample from Dadayan, who was released from prison in Armenia in 2005.

The tense state of Georgian-Russian relations since the two states fought a short war in 2008 has meant it is impossible to trace the material to its source.

"Most likely, the materials were stolen in the mid- or early 90s when a big amount of material disappeared. It's hidden somewhere and from time to time, someone is trying to find new buyers," said Archil Pavlenishvili, the head of Georgia's radioactive materials investigation team.

"We think that the game is not over. There will be more attempts."