But yeah, my source for this was a paper written in 2002, and unfortunately uses a different (classified, unfortunately) database that notes 4 incidents in Kazakhstan, mostly around the turn of the century (heh, I don’t think I’ve gotten to use that phrase yet for the 1999-2000 time period).

And unfortunately, the news gets worse, the source for the smuggled materials in each case was suspected to be Ulba, so it does point to poor security at Kazakh facilities.

Still, I dunno. I don’t see it as being any worse than Russian facilities. Right? I may write something up on this myself, if I do, I’ll do a trackback.

Georgia, on the other hand, is a whole other story. There are a *lot* of incidents in Georgia, relative to the total number of incidents. This may be because Istanbul seems to be a big selling point for nasty nuclear materials.

But I definitely think their interdiction record is only slightly related to the question at hand. Most of these smuggling efforts are people getting materials from Russia itself because of their laughable security at labs.

So the key question is then how responsible do we think Kazakhstan would be in maintaining these mines? And I think you make an excellent case that they would be, citing the maturity they had in rescinding their weapons after independence, and the efforts to make Central Asia a nuclear weapons free zone.

Also, on the interdiction thing, we should actually be more pleased if there are smugglers being caught in Kazakhstan, not less. That means they are able to effectively deal with these sorts of situations. Looking at Georgia, nobody can say that they haven’t done a good job with interdiction. Sure, for every one caught, I’m sure one or more got through… but at least we know they are catching /some/ of these guys.