Absolutely astounding.
Today's British Daily Mail recounts how border guards just happened to seize a delivery truck (lorry in Britspeak) on its way to make a delivery to the Iranian military - packed with radioactive material that could easily be used to build a dirty bomb.
The lorry set off from Kent on its way to Tehran but was stopped by officials at a checkpoint on Bulgaria's northern border with Romania after a scanner indicated radiation levels 200 times above normal.
On board they found ten lead-lined boxes addressed to the Iranian Ministry of Defense. And get this - inside each box was a `soil-testing device', containing highly dangerous quantities of radioactive caesium 137 and americium-beryllium.
The soil testers had been sent to Iran by a British firm with the apparent export approval of Britain's Department of Trade and Industry!
A spokesman for Bulgarian customs said: "The documentation listed the shipment as destined for the Ministry of Transport in Tehran, although the final delivery address was the Iranian Ministry of Defence.
"According to the documentation they are hand-held soil-testing devices which were sent from a firm in the United Kingdom."
The head of the Bulgarian NRA, Nikolai Todorov, said he was shocked that devices containing so much nuclear material could be sold so easily.
He said: "The devices are highly radioactive - if you had another 90 of them you would be able to make an effective dirty bomb."
Dr Frank Barnaby from the Oxford Research Group was even more succinct: "You would need a few of these devices to harvest sufficient material for a dirty bomb. Americium-beryllium is an extremely effective element for the construction of a dirty bomb as it has a very long half-life, but I would be amazed to find it out on the street.
"I don't know how you would come by it as it is mainly found in spent reactor-fuel elements and is not at all easy to get hold of. I find it very hard to believe it is so easily available in this device."
No I wonder, I wonder...what would the Iranian military want with soil testers? Couldn't be the nuclear material inside, could it?
With all the hoo-hah over Iran's nuclear weapons program, it seems that countries like Britain are doing little or nothing to stop the tools of the trade from being exported to the mullahs when there's a little money to be made.
According to the Daily Mail, this isn't the first time either.
In August last year a Turkish truck carrying a ton of zirconium silicate supplied by a British firm was stopped by Bulgarian customs at the Turkish border on its way to Tehran, after travelling from Britain, through Germany and Romania, without being stopped.
Zirconium is used in nuclear reactors to stop fuel rods corroding and can also be used as part of a nuclear warhead. The metal can be extracted from zirconium silicate and its supposd to be a strategic and tightly controlled material.
Hat tip to Little green Footballs...
No comments:
Post a Comment