China is missing some uranium and they have no idea where it has gone.
Seventeen pounds of highly radioactive uranium was stolen in an attempt to resell the deadly element on the black market.
Four Chinese citizens have been charged with an attempt to sell enriched uranium between 2005 and 2007. The men were arrested in January after a potential buyer turned them in to the Chinese police.
However, the trial has been delayed because Chinese authorities have been unable to locate the missing uranium.
According to court records and information published in the Sydney Herald Post, all four defendants are suffering from radiation poisoning due to mishandling of the uranium.
The missing uranium was described in the press as being “weapons grade.” According to the court testimony, the uranium was obtained from a “military-controlled” mine in the mountainous southern province of Yunnan. More than 20 people are reported to be ill after being exposed to the radioactive material, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said, citing an official involved in the investigation.
The uranium incident has not received significant press in the West but it has shook up Western intelligence and law enforcement authorities. The uranium involved is capable of being re-processed into a nuclear bomb or used as it in a terrorist style attack “dirty” bomb. According to the defendants, who managed to appear in court while suffering from radiation poisoning, uranium samples were packed in carbon paper and then transferred to small vials before being shown to prospective customers. The bulk of the uranium is supposed to have been stashed in a cave, a location only known to the original seller from the military mine.
“The radioactive substance uranium does not explode when it is in its raw state, but it is very harmful to people’s health,” stated Jiang Chaoqiang, director of the Guangzhou No 12 People’s Hospital. “Therefore it needed to be found as soon as possible.”
U.S. authorities are concerned about the loss and have stepped up anti-radiation surveillance inside America. During the recent Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa., radiation detectors picked up emissions from a fan entering the stadium. Security agents using hand-held detectors were able to locate the fan in the stadium. However, officials noted there was no threat. The fan had recently undergone radiation therapy for breast cancer and she was still carrying residual amounts of the substance in her body.
China, for its part, has had a long history of poor controls on its nuclear materials and technology. In May 2005 China’s Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND) circulated a national warning about unauthorized uranium mining, smelting, and trafficking throughout southern China.
In July 2006, after Australia and China had signed a draft nuclear transfer treaty and the Bush administration entered into formal negotiations for the transfer of U.S. atomic reactor technology to China, COSTIND was again forced to issue another warning, this time targeted at Hunan province and co-signed by police, environmental and mining authorities. The Chinese Army unit COSTIND is well known to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials. According to Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents, COSTIND oversees nuclear weapons research and design for the Chinese Army.
COSTIND, according to the General Accounting Office, “oversees development of China’s weapon systems and is responsible for identifying and acquiring telecommunications technology applicable for military use.”
According to a report prepared for the U.S. government by defense contractor SAIC, “COSTIND supervises virtually all of China’s military research, development and production. It is a military organization, staffed largely by active duty officers.”
During the 1990s, COSTIND military operatives penetrated the Clinton administration, obtaining a vast array of U.S. military technology including American super-computers exported directly to Chinese nuclear weapons labs.
According to documents from the U.S. Commerce Department, obtained by the Freedom of Information Act, scientists from COSTIND were allowed inside the American nuclear weapons labs at Sandia and Los Alamos. “Efforts on the first major collaborative project to date will culminate in a June 1998 demonstration of a nuclear Materials Protection, Control & Accounting (MPC&A) system employing U.S. and Chinese technologies at the CIAE Nuclear Safeguards Laboratory near Beijing.
Two Chinese scientists worked at LANL and SNL to finalize the technical specifications of the project which will apply technologies to ensure physical protection and control of nuclear materials in a vault-like room,” notes the U.S. Commerce report.
Despite the help, despite the stolen technology and despite the authoritarian controls imposed by a one-party state, China has shown itself to be incapable of securing some of the most dangerous substances invented by mankind. The indications are that there is a raging underground market in China for stolen uranium and perhaps even deadly plutonium. So far, only the bumbling, inept and unskilled have been caught.
While many felt the ex-Soviet states might be the source for a nuclear terrorist — it is now clear that the best market for nukes is China. When the world suffers a nuclear 9/11 we may well be pointing our radioactive fingers at Beijing as the source.
© 2007 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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