In mid-April, Jacques Attali announced that the equivalent of 30 kilograms of weapon-grade fissile material—"enough to fabricate at least two or three bombs"—had been stolen from the inventories of the former Soviet Union since 1993. But the messenger has a credibility problem. Attali, the former president of the Bank for European Reconstruction and Development, became a nuclear expert when he found himself without a job last year—he had been sacked for spending millions to decorate the bank's London office. U.N. officials say that cronies at the Elysee Palace—Attali was a Mitterrand protege— backed his effort to get a U.N. appointment to write a special report on nuclear smuggling.
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