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Highlights:

Kurchatov Institute in Moscow revealed that two of its scientists had been approached by Libya and offered jobs at $2,000 a month, about 10 times their existing salary.

Klaus Fuchs passed American secrets on to the Russians, who in turn gave it to the Chinese, who then gave it to the Pakistanis. The Americans helped the British who helped India. The Israelis benefited from French and American help.

The nuclear ambitions of Iran, North Korea and Libya might scare the daylights out of George Bush, but those countries do not want the bomb for aggressive purposes. They’re simply adhering to the well- established principle of deterrence - the only sure way to keep an enemy (namely the US) at bay is to go nuclear.
{{{The My Daddy can Whoop Your DaddySyndrome}}}

Osama bin Laden could easily find someone to build him a bomb. The difficulty lies in getting hold of the materials.

The difficulty of that bomb lay in separating the U-235 isotope from natural uranium. That required an infrastructure nearly the size of the Detroit car industry.

While plutonium is easy to collect, getting it to explode is difficult.

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In {{1992}} the Russian nuclear technician Yuri Smirnov was arrested for stealing 1,538 grams of enriched uranium from his laboratory. During his trial, he explained that he had been driven to desperation because of poverty. He hoped to sell the stuff for $500. "That was my salary for two years," he explained. "I needed a new refrigerator and a new gas stove. That’s all. I didn’t need to make a big profit."

{{{Herein lies the reason why Russia IS in fact the biggest threat!}}}

The most frightening aspect of Smirnov’s story is how easy it was for him to steal the uranium. At his lab, procedures allowed for an ‘irretrievable loss’ of around 3%. Through careful handling of the material, he siphoned off small amounts, which no one missed. He simply went home every few days with a small vial containing 60 grams in his pocket. As it turned out, Smirnov was arrested before he could figure out how to sell the material. His arrest was, however, entirely accidental; he was picked up while in the company of some friends who had been stealing car batteries.

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In September 1998, a US team visiting the Kurchatov Institute was shown a building containing 100 kilos of highly enriched uranium. The facility was unguarded because the Institute could not afford to pay a guard. At other storage sites, guards had left their posts to forage for mushrooms and berries or because they did not have winter uniforms to keep them warm on patrol. Surveillance equipment was shut down because electricity bills had not been paid. Wage payments were three months in arrears, and some officers had received potatoes in lieu of pay.

When poverty mixes with nuclear technology, the result can be explosive. If the Russians are having difficulty keeping track of their plutonium, just think how much more serious the problem is in Pakistan, where the desire to make some extra cash might be reinforced by genuine sympathy for the rogue groups keen to buy the plutonium.