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LONDON – British intelligence agents at stations across Europe are spearheading a hunt for enriched uranium that may be missing from Russia's poorly guarded stockpiles.The hunt began when a joint Slovak-Hungarian police hunt arrested three smugglers carrying what has been described as "an amount capable of making a dirty nuclear bomb," confirmed Martin Korch, a Slovak police spokesman. He placed the value of the seized uranium at $1 million.The recovered material has been identified as that missing from a nuclear storage site at Chelyanbisk-70, deep in the Ural Mountains. British intelligence agents also tracked the material's route out of Russia via Slovakia's border with Ukraine and suspect the smugglers have links with al-Qaida.But MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence division, believes there also are other routes that have been used by the smugglers. And scientists at the European Transuranium Institute in Karlsruhe, Germany, who are responsible for tracking all such material, believe there has been a "significant increase in the traffic of secret fissionable material in the past six months."Such was the concern that despite ever-mounting tensions between London and Moscow, Russia has informed MI6 of the situation.Experts believe there have been about 1,000 cases of nuclear theft since the 9/11 attacks, and an MI6 report says Osama bin Laden long has wanted to use a nuclear weapon.As in the days of Noah...
