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Is nuclear proliferation this year’s ‘inconvenient truth’?

FEB 15, 2010
Physics Today
Wired.com : In 2006, Oleg Khinsagov was caught trying to smuggle 100 grams of refined uranium into Georgia with the aim of selling it to a Muslim man he believed was connected to “a serious organization."The amount was small, but enriched enough to make a bomb, and Khinsagov said he had another 2 to 3 kilograms stored in his apartment that he was willing to sell.That should be the opening scene of a new documentary on nuclear proliferation, but instead it’s tucked into the middle of Countdown to Zero , which aims to do for antinuclear proliferation what An Inconvenient Truth did for the environmental movement.The film takes a while to work up to its most important point—that anyone with a relatively small amount of money has the ability to obtain enough nuclear weapons material to incinerate everything in a five-mile radius of a large city. And he or she wouldn’t have to missile it into the US, they could simply detonate it in a container ship at a port.
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