Experts: Nuclear Know-How For Sale on Black Market
Many experts fear that ‘blueprints and manuals on manufacturing weapons-grade uranium for atomic warheads are circulating on the international black market. Nuclear investigators have been following up on these concerns since the Swiss government disclosed last week that it had destroyed tens of thousands of documents pertaining to an infamous nuclear smuggling probe.’ According to newspapers, the documents were destroyed under pressure of the US.
The some 30,000 nuclear files were confiscated from the home and computer of a 43-year-old Swiss engineer named Urs Tinner, who has been in detention for almost four years for his alleged connection with a nuclear smuggling ring run by Pakistani metallurgist, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Khan, who is currently under house arrest in Islamabad, allegedly trafficked nuclear materials, information and equipment to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
The Swiss government said that it destroyed the documents to make sure that they would not fall in the hands of terrorists “or an unauthorized state.”
According to nuclear experts, however, it’s too little, too late. “We know that copies were made,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, an expert at the British-based International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) said. “Both US intelligence and the IAEA had been pursuing this with great urgency and diligence. But what happened to the other copies that he made? It is worrisome that there are other plans floating around somewhere out there.”
For some reason, some governments seem to underestimate the danger terrorists and their buddies pose to the West, and to the world as a whole. Still. 7 years after 9/11. Is there anyone who doubts that terrorists will use weapons of mass destruction if they can get their hands on them?
Something has to be done about the black market; this threat has to be removed.
