PET教材 Unit3.doc

Unit3 Crime Text Formula for Terror On a sunny afternoon in central Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic, two private security guards and a trading-company executive strolled along a quiet street. They were expecting to meet a middle-aged man from St. Petersburg. In exchange for $ 1 million, they would handover a 20-cm by 20-cm metal container holding highly radioactive material. But as the traders and their clients were about to make their open-air swap in mid-August, 15 police officer rushed out to grab them. The police seized the 59-kg case emitting gamma radiation. Until a specialized laboratory can examine the material, the police cannot be sure what it is or where it was stolen from, but they believe it is dangerous and illicit. This is the second major case of nuclear theft that Vladimir Kolesnik, the deputy chief of St. Petersburg’s organized-crime department, has thwarted since last May. “The problem,” he says, “is that security standards have slackened, virtually everybody who has access to nuclear materials could steal something.” The first symptoms of the nuclear plague are spreading into Europe. After years of scares and false alarms—almost all the supposed bomb-grade goods on offer turned out to be deceitful-German police have in the past four months uncovered four cases of nuclear material that could actually be used to make an atom bomb. The biggest haul came on Aug.10, when Lufthansa Flight 3369 from Moscow landed in Munich with350 grams of atomic fuel aboard. As it happened, so was Victor Sidorenko, Russia’s Deputy Minister for Atomic Energy, whose agency supervises Moscow’s stocks of fissionable materials. The lead- lined suitcase was carrying MOX—mixed-oxide fuel for reactor but perfectly usable in a bomb since it contained plutonium enriched to 87%. A Colombian and two Spaniards were arrested. While the Germans made it clear that they did not suspect Sidorenko of any involvement in the case, they had no doubts that it was the deputy