Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
Looks more and more like the neocons picked the wrong section of the world to represent as a threat, don't it?
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 7, 2003; Page A01
TIRASPOL, Moldova -- In the ethnic conflicts that surrounded the collapse of the Soviet Union, fighters in several countries seized upon an unlikely new weapon: a small, thin rocket known as the Alazan. Originally built for weather experiments, the Alazan rockets were packed with explosives and lobbed into cities. Military records show that at least 38 Alazan warheads were modified to carry radioactive material, effectively creating the world's first surface-to-surface dirty bomb.
The radioactive warheads are not known to have been used. But now, according to experts and officials, they have disappeared.
The last known repository was here, in a tiny separatist enclave known as Transdniester, which broke away from Moldova 12 years ago. The Transdniester Moldovan Republic is a sliver of land no bigger than Rhode Island located along Moldova's eastern border with Ukraine. Its government is recognized by no other nation. But its weapons stocks -- new, used and modified -- have attracted the attention of black-market arms dealers worldwide. And they're for sale, according to U.S. and Moldovan officials and weapons experts.
Posted by P6 at December 7, 2003 09:38 AM | Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2452oh jeeze...that land in the mountains away from civilization is lookin' more and more welcoming . . .
We won't invade; we agreed to let the Russians lay that smack down.
Transdneister- which was an artificially created post-WWII ethnic Russian enclave- separated from Moldova through the direction of conservative Red Army officers and security service apparatchiks in order to keep a Russian hand active in the Ukraine-Moldova-Romanian- Carpathian region.
Formerly Transdneister was firmly, if indirectly, in the grip of the Russian government. If it still is, I'd be skeptical of these stories because Putin has far more dangerous things to sell - if he wished to annoy the US he'd have picked more lucrative arms. If Transdneister has slipped from the Russian orbit to a local mafiya network I'd be more worried.