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But even if Islamabad's bombs stay buttoned up, the nuke risk remains high. That's because Russia and the former Soviet states are leaking like a sieve. The Soviet Union produced more than 140 tons of weapons-grade plutonium and a whopping 1,000 tons of highly enriched uranium during its nuclear peak. Russia's internal-security agencies admit that on hundreds of occasions they have had to seize fissionable materials or technical documents that had fallen into the wrong hands. The United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency reports 175 cases of trafficking in nuclear material since 1993. In the late 1990s, Afghan and Pakistani smugglers were sneaking so much nuclear material out of the former Soviet Union that they had to stockpile it in at least one warehouse in Peshawar, Pakistan. Robert Puffer, an American antiquities dealer familiar with Pakistan's black markets, claims to have been in the warehouse, where dozens of canisters of nuclear contraband were stored under the floor. "These Afghans didn't know anything about radioactivity," he told TIME. "They were walking around with stuff they said was 'yellow cake,' which they kept in a matchbox in their pocket." U.S. officials in the region at the time were less impressed by whatever the smugglers were selling, saying most of it was radioactive waste material scavenged from hospitals--certainly not weapons-grade stuff.
If nuclear material of whatever quality is trickling out of the former Soviet Union, nuclear engineers are too. In the early 1990s--well before Mahmood and his Pakistani colleagues may have got the itch to help out al-Qaeda--Russia intercepted a planeload of its missile scientists leaving the country to go work for North Korea. In the years since, out-of-work engineers have grown no less desperate, and Russian borders have grown no less porous--meaning that the brain drain may only grow worse.
But detonating a bomb won't take any technical assistance if bin Laden can get his hands on a few fully built--and widely feared--suitcase nukes. During the cold war, the Soviets built an unknown number of portable nuclear explosives, small enough to be carried in a case 8 in. by 16 in. by 24 in. After the East-West thaw, Russia claimed to have secured all the weapons, but plenty of people have doubts. In 1996, Russian General Alexander Lebed claimed that his government had lost track of 134 mini-nukes, and stories have circulated that bin Laden himself bought 20 of them from the Chechens for $30 million and two tons of opium.
Given the nature of post-Soviet record keeping--which often means no record keeping at all--the truth of the claims is impossible to determine. Colonel-General Igor Valynkin, a top official of the Russian Defense Ministry, dismisses the talk as "ravings," and even if there is more to the stories than that, there is reason to believe the danger is not as great as it seems. Though suitcase bombs may be out there, they may also be duds, since the tritium triggers needed to ignite them have probably decayed. "You need to recharge the tritium every six years," says Paul Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute. Of course, even partial detonation of a weapon could cause a lot of damage--and release a lot of radioactivity.