There are so many things you can buy for a home collection in the Caucasus's flea markets these days: vintage Soviet posters, samovars, and, now it turns out, highly enriched uranium that will be wrapped in a cigarette box for your convenience.
Two days after its Russian spy crackdown drama and less than two weeks before the November 19-21 NATO summit in Lisbon, Georgia has unveiled the details of a nuclear smuggling case first mentioned this past spring.
According to information shared by the Georgian Interior Ministry with The Guardian and the Associated Press, Georgian police seized 18 grams of nuclear-warhead-grade uranium (89.4 percent-enriched) this March from two Armenian nationals who smuggled the goods into Georgia from Armenia by train. The detained smugglers, who have plead guilty to smuggling Highly Enriched Uranium, hid their wares in a pack of cigarettes inlaid with lead. The wares seem to have slipped past Georgia's US-funded radiation detecting devices, which have been installed at border crossings. Georgian Interior Ministry officials believe the goods were just a test sample from a major batch.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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