Nuclear Fronts.

The Guardian has a story on various front companies that are used to buy up nuclear technologies and materials. (Note that these would not include uranium and plutonium themselves. Rather the specialist materials to manipulate those.)

Perhaps only vaguely interesting to most but it brought back memories. We’ve been asked by a couple of Indian research centres to supply materials like aluminium scandium. Most worldwide usage is to make baseball bats and bike frames but it was originally produced to make rockets. When we started making up the export documents in Russia we got some very severe looks from the FSB officers who came round to talk to us to ask why we wanted to ship to these specific Institutes.

We just shrugged our shoulders and said we didn’t know what they wanted to use it for and thus we were told that they were the main research centres for the missile and rocket programs.

So it isn’t just MI5 that keeps such lists, nor the CIA. Everyone is. And no, they didn’t get their material.