On 8 May 2005, the London Times reported that an arms dealer in Bender, Transnistria, had offered to sell three Alazan rockets equipped with radioactive warheads to a Times reporter posing as the representative of an Algerian militant group.[1] [The Alazan was originally designed by Soviet scientists as a weather control rocket to prevent hail. After the weather control experiment failed, the rocket was later used for military purposes. It has a maximum length of 1.4 meters and range of 10 km.][
just two weeks before the Times article, the Russian journal Politicheskiy zhurnal published an interview with Mikhail Bergman, former commandant of Russian military forces in Tiraspol, who said that in the mid-1990s the 14th Army discovered that two tactical weapons with “nuclear explosion imitators” as well as “nuclear suitcase” weapons had disappeared from storage areas in the region.