Bomb-Grade Uranium May Be Missing From Ex-Soviet Republic

Paraphrased by Steve Waldrop
June 27, 2002

Tbilisi, Georgia- Has bomb-grade uranium and the equipement that makes such materials diasppeared from the abandoned nuclear facility in this ex Soviet province? That's the question being asked by international nuclear inspectors.

The answer is not easy. Abkhazia, a breakaway province of the post-Soviet republic is being run as a de facto independent state since 1993. After insurgents captured the capital, Sukhumi, and drove Georgian scientists from the institute, its cache of highly enriched uranium vanished.

An inventory taken in 1993 showed 655 grams (1.4 pounds) of the material at the site, the Sukhuni I. Vekua Institute of Physics and Technology. American nonproliferation specialists say Georgian sources report it may actually have been as much as 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds).

According to data maintained by California's Monterey Institute of International Studies,it would probably take many times more than that to build a bomb. But the uranium dioxide pellets are of the highest grade- enriched to over 90 percent of the fissionable isotope U-235- and it's the only known case of missing bomb uranium in the world.

Georgian authorities say they have no clue whether illicit traffickers, well-intentioned scientists or others took the material.

"There are many people who would be interested in it," the minister of Georgian state security, Valerian Khaburdzania said. "It would have been easy for them to take it out by a ship coming in from Turkey, or from Ukraine. It's an uncontrolled area."

In 1997 scientists of Russia's Atomic Energy Ministry, regained brief access to the institute, and later quietly informed Monterey nonproliferation experts that the uranium was missing from its bunker.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian scientists at the institute withdrew to Russia, Georgia became independent, and ethnic Abkhazians rebelled. The last 200 scientists and technicians fled to Tbilisi in 1993.