A lot of people thought it was far-fetched of me to pitch a documentary/docudrama entitled “The Day We Bought A Nuclear Weapon“, not least of all 1 very senior exec at Channel 4, who described it as “the most extraordinary proposal we’ve ever received”. But as this talk shows, it’s not as far-out as you’d think.

Dr. Irwin Redlener spends his days imagining the worst: He studies how humanity might survive natural or human-made disasters of unthinkable severity.

In the old USSR, there is over 100 metric tonnes of highly enriched uranium (HEU, or weapons grade) stored in “very insecure” facilities which is easily “acquirable”. In the last 12 years, there have been over 220 documented incidents of nuclear theft, 18 of which involved HEU or plutonum. For a bomb the size of Hiroshima you’d need the size of 6 cans of coke, or plutonium the size of a cabbage.

In case you were wondering, 95% of the estimated 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world are stored in the US and Russia, and the global stockpile of weapons-grade fissionable material is around 2,000 metric tonnes.

IAEA official nuclear trafficking statistics:
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2005/traffickingstats.html