Captain's Quarters -

With the world focused on two potential nuclear proliferators and an ongoing Islamist terrorist threat, one might believe that nations with nuclear materials would take security a bit more seriously these days. Unfortunately, one would be wrong, at least in Congo. The Democratic Republic of Congo arrested its nuclear chief after the government found 100 bars of enriched uranium missing from their stocks:

The head of the Democratic Republic of Congo's dilapidated and poorly guarded nuclear reactor plant has been arrested on suspicion of illegally selling enriched uranium, following the disappearance of large quantities of the material.

The commissioner general for atomic energy, Fortunat Lumu, was detained on Tuesday along with an aide. Congo's state prosecutor, Tshimanga Mukeba, said Mr Lumu was being questioned about the disappearance of unspecified quantities of uranium in recent years.

Mr Mukeba said Mr Lumu was suspected of "orchestrating illicit contracts to produce and sell uranium" but he did not name the alleged buyers.

Le Phare newspaper reported that about 100 bars of uranium had disappeared from the small experimental reactor, the oldest nuclear facility in Africa. The uranium produced by the reactor in Congo's capital, Kinshasa, is enriched but not to weapons grade, although it could be used in a "dirty bomb" to spread radiation.

The problems at the Kinshasa reactor are no secret. The IAEA and various countries have complained about the lax security provided by Lumu and the Congolese government. Two years ago, Iran reportedly purchased uranium on the sly from Lumu's organization, and five years before that Newsweek reported that Saddam Hussein had tried to do the same.

For a nation that operates a nuclear reactor in an age of terrorism, they have remarkably little security. The Guardian reports that the facility only has a low fence, a flimsy gate, and no security guards to watch the facility, which no longer operates. It has -- or had -- 98 bars of leftover uranium bars. The disappearance of two bars in the 1970s made headlines. One rod got recovered in the Middle East, after having been sold there by the Mafia, while the fate of the other rod remains a mystery.

Not that anyone needs to steal it from the facility, as it turns out. Congolese farmers mine it with their bare hands in the war-torn south, putting it on the black market to survive the poverty there.

This points out a vital hole in international security, and a reason to be skeptical of nuclear power as a panacea for the energy production of Third World nations. The DRC apparently does not have the resources to properly guard even those facilities that no longer operate, let alone the level required for operational reactors. Even worse, the few resources assigned to securing the facilities wind up exploiting them for their own personal profit and potentially handing the means of our own destruction to our enemies.

We need to start securing these old reactor sites, immediately. Our lives depend on it.