Category: Hot Off The Presses
Thursday, March 25, 2004
BBC News -- Ukrainian missiles 'gone missing':
Ukrainian Defence Minister Yevhen Marchuk has said that several hundred of his country's missiles are unaccounted for.
The weapons were supposed to have been decommissioned in the years that followed the break-up of the USSR.
But it is now being claimed that there is no record of them being destroyed.
This is being blamed on accounting problems during the period of transition that followed the country's independence in 1991.
"Unfortunately strange things happen," Mr Marchuk said in an interview for the Ukrainian newspaper Den.
Strange things happen. Indeed!
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But what type of missles? The article never actually said. Are they ICBMs, Cruise missles, SCUDS, Air to Air missles? Did the missles have warheads, and how deactivated were they before they went missing? paranoid minds want to know!
It's hard to say. The BBC is the only outlet on the story at the moment:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&newsclusterurl=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/3568139.stm
It seems clear that if the missiles were being decommissioned after the breakup of the Soviet Union that they were probably ICBMs, intermediate-range missiles, or tactical nukes. (Conventional missiles like Scuds wouldn't be included in the decommissioning, would they?)
What isn't clear is whether they'd had their warheads removed before they went on walkabout. The article doesn't say, which I would chalk up to the Ukrainians seriously not knowing. Considering that they just caught a guy last month trying to smuggle uranium out of Ukraine in his minibus, they are probably figuring anything's possible:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3486208.stm
Even if they did have their warheads removed, though, the missiles could still have substantial value on the black market -- North Korea, for one, would love to have some missiles with enough range to reach the continental U.S.