Dirty bomb ingredients easy to steal, UN warns

More than 100 countries around the world need to upgrade their security to prevent the theft of radioactive materials that could be used to build a "dirty bomb", a report by the United Nations warns.

Some of these countries, including the US and many EU nations, must also do more to recover missing supplies.

"What is needed is cradle-to-grave control of powerful radioactive sources to protect them against terrorism or theft," said Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN body that produced the report.

"One of our priorities is to assist states in creating and strengthening national regulatory infrastructures to ensure that these radioactive sources are appropriately regulated and adequately secured at all times."

A total of 82 countries are understood to have asked the agency for help in this area.

The report is part of the agency's expanded efforts since the attacks of 11 September to tighten security around radioactive material that could be used to make dirty bombs.

Such devices use conventional explosives to spread radioactive material over a limited area. While experts believe such an attack would initially kill no more people than a conventional bomb, the dispersal of substances such as cobalt-60, strontium-90, caesium-137 or iridium-192 would lead to many other people being exposed. It would also create huge panic.

Because of the relative ease with which they can be made, dirty bombs have become something of an obsession, particularly in America.

Earlier this month, US officials arrested an alleged American al-Qa'ida operative, Jose Padilla, who was said to be plotting to build and detonate a dirty bomb in Washington. Mr Padilla is in custody, where he is being treated as an "illegal combatant".

While the IAEA report did not list the 100 countries it said may not be doing enough to prevent the theft of radioactive material, it did highlight one region long known to be a marketplace for radioactive material – former Soviet states such as Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. "Uncontrolled radioactive sources are a widespread phenomenon in [such] states," the report said.

Two weeks ago, the agency – in what it considered a significant move forward – brokered an agreement between the US and Russia to develop a plan to locate and secure materials throughout the former Soviet Union. The US Department of Energy and Russia's Ministry for Atomic Energy will try to recycle such material. But the report pointed out that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission had revealed that American companies had lost track of 1,500 items of radioactive material since 1996.

It also drew attention to a European Union study which estimated that every year up to 70 radioactive sources were lost from regulatory control and that many countries would not even notice if such materials were taken.