Coming soon to a city near you

As if shit isn't terrifying enough these days, a cache of dirty bombs seems to have up and vanished like a fart in the wind:

In the ethnic conflicts that surrounded the collapse of the
Soviet Union, fighters in several countries seized upon an unlikely new
weapon: a small, thin rocket known as the Alazan. Originally built for
weather experiments, the Alazan rockets were packed with explosives and
lobbed into cities. Military records show that at least 38 Alazan
warheads were modified to carry radioactive material, effectively
creating the world's first surface-to-surface dirty bomb. The
radioactive warheads are not known to have been used. But now,
according to experts and officials, they have disappeared.
The last known repository was here, in a tiny separatist enclave known
as Transdniester, which broke away from Moldova 12 years ago. The
Transdniester Moldovan Republic is a sliver of land no bigger than
Rhode Island located along Moldova's eastern border with Ukraine. Its
government is recognized by no other nation. But its weapons stocks --
new, used and modified -- have attracted the attention of black-market
arms dealers worldwide. And they're for sale, according to U.S. and
Moldovan officials and weapons experts.
Several U.S. and Moldovan government officials knowledgeable about
Transdniester's weapons said in interviews that they were familiar with
the reports of radioactive Alazans, but could neither verify or dispute
the existence of such devices. Oazu Nantoi, a former Moldovan
government official and political analyst, sought in 2001 to trace the
Alazans with radiological warheads, using contacts in Moldova and
Transdniester. He said that the last known location of the weapons was
a military airfield north of Tiraspol, but what happened to them after
the 1990s remains a mystery.

Posted by flow Frazao on December 7, 2003 at 07:43 PM | Permalink