According to published reports, Libya paid at least $100 million in the black market to Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan for nuclear weapons equipment and expertise.

Source: Matt Kelly, ” Nuclear weapons parts cost Libya $100 million,” San Diego Union-Tribune, March 16, 2004, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Issue Brief: Non-Proliferation, A.Q. Khan Nuclear Chronology,” Vol. VIII. No. 8, September 7, 2005, (accessed: February 17, 2007).

The Pakistani Military is estimated to have between 70 to 90 nuclear warheads.

Source:  Associated Press, “Security of Pakistan nuclear weapons questioned,” Google News, October 12, 2009.

According to the IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database (ITDB), between 1993 and 2007 there was 1,340 confirmed incidents of nuclear and radioactive material trafficking in the world.

The breakdown of the incidents as reported by the ITDB fact sheet:

Of the 1340 confirmed incidents, 303 incidents involved unauthorized possession and related criminal
activity, 390 incidents involved theft or loss of nuclear or other radioactive materials, and 570 incidents
involved other unauthorized activities. For the remaining 77 incidents, the reported information was not
sufficient to determine the category of incident.

Source:  “IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database, Fact Sheet” International Atomic Energy Agency, September 26, 2008.

The Foreign Ministry of Russia strongly stated that its nuclear weapons were safe from being trafficked.

From the AP (via the Washington Post):

Russia insisted Friday its nuclear arsenal is secure, angrily rejecting U.S. allegations that tens of thousands of aging Soviet weapons may not be fully accounted for.

The Foreign Ministry described U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ remarks on uncertainties about the old Soviet arsenal as being groundless “insinuations.”

The ministry stressed that all nuclear weapons in Russia have been under reliable protection since the 1991 Soviet collapse _ despite the nation’s economic turmoil.

“Despite all the difficulties our country faced in the beginning of the 1990s, standards of security and physical protection of Russian nuclear arsenals remained high,” the ministry said in a statement. “There have been no ‘leaks’ of nuclear weapons.”

Israel accused North Korea of trafficking nuclear technology and arms to various countries in the Middle East. 

From the AP (via Google News):

Israel accused North Korea on Saturday of covertly supplying at least half a dozen Mideast countries with nuclear technology or conventional arms.

The allegation was made at an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Vienna where world powers urged the North to stop reactivating its nuclear weapons program.

“The Middle East remans on the receiving end of the DPRK’s reckless activities,” Israeli delegate David Danieli told the meeting, referring to North Korea by its acronym.

“At least half a dozen countries in the region … have become eager recipients” of the North’s black market supplies of conventional arms or nuclear technology, he said — mostly “through black market and covert network channels.”

While he did not name any of the suspected countries, he appeared to be referring in part to Iran and Syria, which are both under IAEA investigation, and Libya, which scrapped its rudimentary weapons program after revealing it in 2003.

North Korea has told the United States that it no longer wishes to be removed from its terrorism list.

From the New York Times:

North Korea said Friday that it no longer wished to be removed from the United States’ terrorism blacklist, signaling that it is hardening its stance amid reports that its leader, Kim Jong-il, may be seriously ill.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry also confirmed what the United States and South Korea have said already: it has begun to reassemble a nuclear complex that can produce weapons-grade plutonium.

“We neither wish nor expect to be delisted as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism,’ ” the North’s state-run news agency, KCNA, quoted a ministry spokesman as saying. “We can go our own way.”

Bravado is North Korea’s common negotiating tactic. Still, the statement bodes ill for Washington’s efforts to keep the nuclear complex, Yongbyon, north of the capital, Pyongyang, disabled.

The New York Times reports on efforts of the CIA to sabotage Libya’s and Iran’s nuclear program with the help of Swiss moles. 

From the NY Times:

The United States had urged that the files be destroyed, according to interviews with five current and former Bush administration officials. The purpose, the officials said, was less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the C.I.A.

Over four years, several of these officials said, operatives of the C.I.A. paid the Tinners as much as $10 million, some of it delivered in a suitcase stuffed with cash. In return, the Tinners delivered a flow of secret information that helped end Libya’s bomb program, reveal Iran’s atomic labors and, ultimately, undo Dr. Khan’s nuclear black market.

In addition, American and European officials said, the Tinners played an important role in a clandestine American operation to funnel sabotaged nuclear equipment to Libya and Iran, a major but little-known element of the efforts to slow their nuclear progress.

The Guardian has a report on the search for nuclear materials. 

From the Guardian:

Since the end of the cold war, the United Nations has logged more than 800 incidents in which radioactive material has gone missing, often from poorly guarded sites. Who is taking it – and should we be worried? Julian Borger investigates.

 

South Ossetia, the semi-independent region at the center fo the Georgia-Russia conflict, is well-known to be a black market haven where illegal goods are traded.

In an article back in April 2008 for The Atlantic, Lawrence Scott Sheets wrote about nuclear smugglers in the region. He mentioned South Ossetia as an area where smugglers of all types of goods operate.

From A Smuggler’s Story:

Faced at independence with economic collapse, Georgia’s corrupt central government had essentially ignored South Ossetia, which became what its inhabitants joked was “the world’s biggest duty-free shop.” Near the administrative border with Georgia, traders even set up an enormous open-air market where people from all over the region came to buy everything from Russian gasoline to pasta, all free of the import duties that they would pay in other parts of Georgia. (In 2004, shortly after President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in Georgia, his government shut down the market by placing a police and customs post nearby.) South Ossetia also became especially popular with car thieves—Ossetian, Georgian, and Russian alike—who ripped off automobiles in Georgia, drove them the short distance to South Ossetia, and sold them to middlemen who then ferried them to Russia. And the U.S. government says counterfeit $100 bills traceable to South Ossetia have surfaced in at least four American cities.

The Washington Post has more on the possibility of nuclear materials being smuggled to unknown persons.

From the Washington Post:

An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by a former top U.N. arms inspector that suggests the plans could have been shared secretly with any number of countries or rogue groups.

The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states.

The computer contents — among more than 1,000 gigabytes of data seized — were recently destroyed by Swiss authorities under the supervision of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, which is investigating the now-defunct smuggling ring previously led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

But U.N. officials cannot rule out the possibility that the blueprints were shared with others before their discovery, said the report’s author, David Albright, a prominent nuclear weapons expert who spent four years researching the smuggling network.