The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

other military equipment. Saradzhyan also cites case after case in which Russian policemen — usually from non- Russian nationalities and Islamic backgrounds — have “gone over to the other side” and begun to help Chechen or Islamic militants. Russia’s well-known “mafiyas” (gang- sters) also play a role in bribing, threatening or coercing guards or employees at nuclear facilities. Terrorist and criminal groups are also displaying an increasing tendency to merge and cooperate. As Alexander Ovchinnikov, head of the anti-organized crime directorate of the Interior Ministry, said in 2002, “The trend of organized crime groups merging with terrorism- and extremism-oriented groups is gaining strength.” How does the Russian leadership react to this worri- some state of affairs? With blithe, hollow reassurances that all is well. During a 2004 visit to Washington, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that “It is impossible for Moscow’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons and nuclear fuels to fall into the hands of terrorists.” Perhaps the most authoritative U.S. assessment of the situation, an April 2006 report to Congress by the Direct- or of National Intelligence, concluded: “Undetected smuggling of weapons-usable nuclear material has likely occurred, and we are concerned about the total amount of material that could have been diverted or stolen in the last 15 years. We find it highly unlikely that Russian or other authorities would have been able to recover all the mate- rial likely stolen.” That said, proliferation experts think it’s quite unlikely that terrorists would gain access to an intact nuclear weapon, in part because weapons are much better guard- ed and are difficult to smuggle. A much more likely sce- nario would be theft of highly enriched uranium, which can be assembled into a weapon without great technical difficulty. Another troubling possibility is that terrorists or other bad actors could assemble and explode a “dirty bomb,” which presents a very different problem than a true nuclear weapon. As Gottemoeller comments, “You could have major panic among the population, major problems F O C U S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 39