Dirty Bomb Rockets For Sale

Via The Jawa Report comes this story from The Sunday Times:

THREE radioactive rockets capable of contaminating a city centre were offered for sale last week to a Sunday Times reporter posing as a middleman for Islamic terrorists.

Of note is that the rockets are apparently in the possession of arms dealers in Moldova's breakaway region known as Transdniester. It seems that the government is conspiring with arms dealers to sell the rockets leftover from the Cold War era.

Notably, from a source citing a Washington Post report from December 2003:

In the ethnic conflicts that surrounded the collapse of the Soviet Union, the three-foot-long Alazan rocket, originally designed for weather experiments, was transformed into a terror weapon, packed with explosives, and lobbed into cities. Military records show that at least thirty-eight Alazan warheads were modified to carry radioactive material, effectively creating the world's first surface-to-surface dirty bomb. The warheads are not known to have been used. But now, according to experts and officials, they have disappeared.

Well, it looks like some of the have reappeared, thanks to a Sunday Times reporter.

Also, according to the CIA World Factbook, the region is one of the world's poorest with 80% of the population living below the poverty line. It is also a transshipment point for illegal drugs from SW Asia through Central Asia to Russia, Western Europe and possibly the U.S. With widespread crime and a vigorous underground economy, the best characterization would be to say the region is essentially lawless. Consequently, it quite understandable that the area would be a base of operations for renegade arms merchants.

Maybe I'm looking at this wrong but, if there are 38 rockets and we have an idea where they are, why doesn't someone in the administration arrange for their purchase? At $200,000 each, the total bill for all the rockets would be less than $8 million. That's probably not too much to pay for at least a billion dollars in peace of mind. Otherwise, we'll continue to worry about who has 38 highly-portable dirty bombs and wonder what they plan to do with them.

Additional coverage: Dean's World, The Moderate Voice