For some months in the early 1990s, there had been occasional newspaper reports, mainly tucked away in the foreign pages, of nuclear material being smuggled out of the former Soviet Union for sale illegally to anyone with the money. But no journalist had yet sought to demonstrate how easily such material might be acquired. Could The Cook Report do so? By 1993, The World Trade Center in New York had been attacked - for the first time - by what later turned out to be al-Qaeda extremists. Was it only a matter of time before some fanatical organisation upped the ante and got hold of enough plutonium to make a small bomb to be detonated in another Western city?
The Cook Report created an elaborate cover story and through an undercover contact in Moscow, the programme was eventually introduced to two prominent Russian members of the Solntsevskaya Bratva - the Russian Mafia - who could supply weapons-grade Plutonium. The plan was that Roger Cook would pose as the representative of a reactionary Middle Eastern regime eager to join the nuclear club and keen to buy enough plutonium 239 to make several small nuclear bombs
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Back in Britain, the programme hired an eminent consultant nuclear engineer who built us a highly accurate replica nuclear device in a briefcase from information freely available on the internet. There were several options, but the programme opted to replicate a relatively simple bomb that would operate in one of two modes - in that even if it failed to produce a nuclear explosion, it would still act as a very effective Radiological Dispersal Device - an RDD. These evil devices later became known as ‘dirty bombs’, so called because triggering them would disperse countless millions of highly radioactive particles over the target area and could render that area uninhabitable for centuries.
In a seedy back-street maisonette in Moscow, Cook’s Mafiosi targets negotiated to sell him 25 kilogrammes of Plutonium 239 for $200 million and offered a sample from a stash kept under the stairs next to their vacuum cleaner. The situation was as bizarre as it was dangerous and the sample later tested out as the real thing. Also on offer was a ready-made bomb in the form of an SS-20 nuclear warhead. Naturally, that was as far as the programme took the transaction, but the vendors were reported to the Russian security services, the FSB, later that day. They were promptly arrested and the illegal nuclear material was recovered. So, it was relatively easy to build a dirty bomb - and as the Cook Report would prove, relatively easy to acquire the nuclear material needed to do so. And if mere journalists could do this, surely a terrorist could too.
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17 фев 2022
