OK, here’s a pretty scary story I originally discovered on Business Insider yesterday, and confirmed with ABC News, but doesn’t seem to have gotten much traction yet with other media sources:
Yakuza boss charged with conspiring to traffic nuclear materials
The Justice Department unsealed new charges against a leader of the notorious Japanese Yakuza gang who they accuse of attempting to traffic weapons-grade nuclear materials from Burma to other countries, according to a newly announced superseding indictment.
Prosecutors in Manhattan say that beginning in early 2020, Takeshi Ebisawa conspired to transport material containing uranium and weapons-grade plutonium believing it could be used by countries like Iran in the development of their nuclear-weapons program.
"It is chilling to imagine the consequences had these efforts succeeded," Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen said in a statement announcing the charges.
The 60-year-old Japanese national and another co-defendant had already been charged in April 2022 with narcotics trafficking offenses. Ebisawa and his co-defendant were arrested in Manhattan on those charges with a U.S. judge in New York ordering both men detained. Both men pleaded not guilty.
According to their superseding indictment, Ebisawa told two undercover agents in early 2020 he had access to a "large quantity" of nuclear materials he wished to sell, and sent a series of photos of rocky substances next to Geiger counters that measured radiation levels.
One of the undercover agents told Ebisawa they had an interested buyer who they claimed was an Iranian general.
"They don't need it for energy, Iranian government need it for nuclear weapons," the undercover agent told Ebisawa, according to the indictment.
"I think so and I hope so," Ebisawa allegedly responded.
"As alleged, the defendants in this case trafficked in drugs, weapons, and nuclear material – going so far as to offer uranium and weapons-grade plutonium fully expecting that Iran would use it for nuclear weapons," Anne Milgram, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration said. "This is an extraordinary example of the depravity of drug traffickers who operate with total disregard for human life."
At least this story seems to have a relatively happy ending, in that these nuclear materials (5 tons worth?) never actually made it to Iran or anywhere else — but the main question I still have, which doesn’t seem to have been addressed in either of these reports, is where and how did a Japanese Yakuza come into possession of this exceedingly dangerous stuff in the first place?
Unfortunately I had to dig a little deeper, and it turns out (according to wikipedia) that the military government in Burma/Myanmar apparently did have the ambition to develop their own nuclear weapons program back in the 2009-12 period:
According to an August 2009 report published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Burma had been working to develop a nuclear weapon by 2014. The reported effort, purportedly being undertaken with assistance from North Korea, involves the construction of a nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction facilities in caves tunneled into a mountain at Naung Laing, a village in the Mandalay division.[6] The information cited in the newspaper story reportedly originated from two high-ranking defectors who had settled in Australia.
The 2000 kg of Thorium and 100 kg of Uranium mentioned in the ABC report could be obtained from indigenous mining operations, but Plutonium can only be created in a nuclear reactor — and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) apparently had no knowledge of such a reactor in Burma back then?? Yikes!