Russia and the Nuclear Black Market (ML)

Sometimes I marvel at Russia's apparently limitless capacity for causing long-lived problems. Indeed, some of these problems indeed have half-lives in the tens of thousands of years. Here's this pleasant bit of news:

U.S. and Georgian officials told The Associated Press that Georgian authorities, aided by the CIA, set up a sting operation that led to the arrest last year of a Russian citizen who tried to sell a small amount of uranium enriched to about 90 percent U-235, suitable for use in an atomic bomb...

In a 2006 report, the International Atomic Energy Agency said there were 16 confirmed incidents of trafficking in highly enriched uranium or plutonium globally from 1993 to 2005. In seven cases, the nuclear material was thought to originate in Russia or a former Soviet state.