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Article: Tracking nuclear material worldwide. (Detection).
- Article from:
- USA TODAY
- Article date:
- June 1, 2002
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Society for the Advancement of Education. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It take just a Jew kilograms of plutonium, and less than 20 kilograms of highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb. According to a database compiled by researchers at Stanford (Calif.) University's Institute for International Studies (IIS), about 40 kilograms of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium have been stolen from poorly protected nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union during the last decade. While most of that material has been retrieved, two kilos of highly enriched uranium taken from a research reactor in Georgia is still missing, and that's just for starters.
"I think this is the tip of the iceberg," says Lyudmila Zaitseva, an IIS researcher ...