A column in The Bulletin Online argues that the current assumptions regarding the trafficking of nuclear materials is incorrect.

Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley writes that the belief that a nuclear black market exists in the former Soviet Union is based on false premises.

The supposed nuclear black market in the former Soviet Union lacks an important component of any market: an established clientele. According to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies’s Illicit Trafficking Database and publications, most nuclear transactions are conducted by isolated suppliers–primarily economic opportunists–who have no clients at the outset, and blindly probe the underground world to identify potential buyers.

In addition, incidents that are classified as nuclear trafficking generally entails small amounts of radioactive mateirals.

Additionally, the vast majority of materials involved in documented trafficking transactions have no application in a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb, and their value is typically overestimated. Fifty percent of trafficking incidents between 2001 and 2006 concerned radioactive orphan sources, contaminated scrap metal, and radioactive isotopes. Accounts of these incidents rarely indicate the exact quantity or quality of the radioactive material, making it difficult to evaluate the significance of the incident; the analysis of these cases showed, however, that most of them involve industrial instruments that typically contain small quantities of radioactive material.

See more information at our Nuclear Materials Smuggling page.