$320 million per kg is the most you could expect on the black market. At 10% of that for a quick sale you could still net yourself $32 mill. I’m off to Kazakhstan where 205 kg just magically turned up one day due to an accounting error. The Russians had forgotten about it.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_muller101102.asp
Looking back over an old Wired article….
“Russia, for example, has over 6,000 tons of weapons-usable material, and only a third of it has been secured,” said IIS researcher Lyudmila Zaitseva.
So there’s an awful lot floating around.
Information gleaned from the database so far shows that about 40 kilograms of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium have been stolen from nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union during the last decade.
While most of that material was retrieved, 2 kilos of highly enriched uranium remains missing, Bunn said.
Now to build your WWII era Atom bomb you need 25 kilos of weapons grade uranium, but with the right set up you could do it with less. Maybe not 2 kg, but 15-20 kilos and a large modified howitzer you could knock together something that would wipe the downtown off of any city you could ship it into.
Ship being the operative word. We’ve had planes used as weapons of terrorism, now any port in the world is a potential military target. One or two freight containers could happily hold this bomb. Put aboard any ship they wont be searched until they reach the customs area of a western port. Then **<< schfoom >>**
Oh and if it’s made with Uranium it would be almost undetectable. Long half life, low emissions, mostly alpha particles and low energy gamma rays.
Likely target for a rogue nation? America? Maybe somewhere closer where the security isn’t as paranoid. Would the US invade Iraq if a nuclear threat was held to a ally’s jugular? Would there still be no negotiation in mass hostage situations?
