“Parenthetically, why does Georgia have weapons-grade uranium in the first place? “
About ten years ago a Russian/American friend got her mother in Moscow an ambulance ride and through the back door of a hospital in front of the queue for x-rays...for a bribe totaling $20US. Can you imagine how many ways that money got split? The ordinary people in the former Soviet Union are desperately poor.
I couldn’t find any evidence of nuclear power in Georgia. However, drugs manufactured in Columbia are sold by the train car load in the USA. A few pounds of uranium should be easier to smuggle than a boatload of cocaine.
One of the problems of incredibly valuable nuclear weapons or nuclear material in desperately poor places like Russia or Pakistan, is that at some point the rightful owner is trusting a few peasants to keep it safe.
A relative living in a guarded compound in the Philippines said, “Having guards 24 hours simply restricts the thievery to those thieves related to the guards.” I suspect that guarding nuclear materials in poor countries is much the same.
Back when the Berlin wall fell down, they should have shipped all fissile material to secure locations within Russia, not left it lying around former republics. I thought that was what they had done.
This is not weapons grade uranium.