Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Uranium

A very interesting story has cropped up over the last couple of months. Back in late August, an Iranian ship was rounding the horn of Africa, making for the Suez Canal. However, they were waylaid by Somali pirates, an unfortunately common occurrence in this region, who intended to sell the cargo and ransom the crew. Upon boarding the ship, the pirates interrogated the captain and asked what their cargo was. The captain was evasive but finally said that it was minerals. The pirates didn’t quite believe him and cracked open a couple of the crates and found it to be a white, sandy soil, very similar to the way the captain had described. Perhaps a little disappointed that the cargo wasn’t anything of greater value, the pirates drove the ship to shore and had the captain give them contact information to demand ransom.

Three days later, all the pirates who had boarded the ship began getting sick with symptoms that included hair loss, vomiting, and severe skin rashes. Three weeks after the original capture, sixteen of the pirates were dead and the story was beginning to crack worldwide media. The freighter was then seized by a group of nations (including the US) who found that the “minerals” were in fact radioactive sand that had apparently been purchased by Iran from China in exchange for oil. The captain was questioned again and he disclosed that their instructions had been to sail into the Eastern Mediterranean and then abandon the ship off the coast of one of Israel’s ports. They were then to blow up the ship remotely on Yom Kippur (Oct. 9) where the prevailing winds would have carried the radioactive cloud over Israel’s major population centers. Undoubtedly, quite a few Palestinians as well as many Israelis would have been sickened and likely killed by this attack, but they were seen as collateral to Iran’s central goal of killing Jews and creating chaos that could have been exploited by the Syrians and Hezbollah.

This of course becomes even more interesting when one notes that two days ago, it was leaked that members of the Iranian parliament are favoring a pre-emptive strike on Israel to thwart them from destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel’s current estimate is that Iran will have enough nuclear material to begin building a nuclear bomb by February. Incidentally, it may have been this report which triggered Mr. Biden’s statement regarding Mr. Obama being tested. Iran threatening to detonate a nuclear weapon in Israel might indeed be considered something of an international crisis.