After numerous warnings, the first live sample of weapons-grade plutonium stolen from Russia was recently reported found in Germany. The plutonium, according to the Germans, had been produced in "Russian atomic weapons plants." Of course only 6 grams has so far been found, not enough to make an atomic bomb. But could this be just the first test shipment sent to the West by Russia's "nuclear" mafia?


The answer is that there are a few problems with the German theft report. Viktor Kelkh, a veteran of the atomic weapons industry, who spent 20 years on a weapons assembly line in the closed city of Penza-19, told me: "I never held 'live' plutonium in my hands. They were metal balls covered with a safety shield."


If weapons-grade plutonium stolen from Russian weapons plants -- where they used to assemble, and now, for the most part, disassemble, warheads -- ever does make it to the West, it will be in the form of metal balls. These are nuclear "fuses" for modern bombs.


Valery Bogdan, special assistant to Viktor Mikhailov, the Russian nuclear minister, told me Monday that the Nuclear Power Ministry "has not yet received any official inquiry from Germany, and without the results of isotope and chemical analysis we cannot really say what the substance is they found or where it comes from.


"It is strange," he said. "Why did we establish special 'hotlines' with the FBI and the German intelligence service? Anyway, what they found is almost certainly not weapons-grade plutonium."


In private conversations high-level officials at the Ministry say that numerous leaks of false information about stolen Russian nuclear materials are the result of a Western conspiracy to subject the Russian nuclear industry to Western, or American, control. But officials trained in the former Soviet Union underestimate the ability of the free Western press to search for and to find information. It seems that the major customers for nuclear material on the black market are not Libyans or Koreans but Western journalists and researchers. In fact, without them this market might not exist at all.


In a recent issue of Atlantic Monthly, Seymour Hersh writes about how a well-known researcher and nuclear muckraker, Bill Arkin, tried for eight months to bribe a young Russian lieutenant in Germany to sell him a nuclear warhead from a Scud tactical missile. The August 1991 coup attempt, the article said, was all that prevented Arkin from making the purchase. The missiles were unexpectedly brought back to Russia.


But in 1992 the chief of the Russian general staff, General Kolesnikov, told me that all Soviet tactical nuclear warheads were shipped out of former East Germany in 1989, right after the fall of the Berlin wall. The Russian military was afraid that at least one warhead would be stolen by Western agents. The missiles themselves were recalled much later.


The fact is that the old-fashioned Soviet nuclear security system, created by the KGB and the Army, is still in place.





Pavel Felgenhauer is the defense and national security editor for Segodnya.