Word: shipping
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Searching for a Sunken Ship's Survivors...
...following four days, Bieniawski and his team plus a U.S. shipping contractor met with Chilean officials to plan an escape route. The meetings had an odd quality - aftershocks twice spilled coffee from cups. The original plan was to ship the HEU to the U.S. from the Chilean port of San Antonio, but it had been destroyed by a tsunami, so eventually the team decided to use the port of Valparaiso, 50 miles (80 km) to the north. On the evening of March 2, the officials and security teams met at the Lo Aguirre military base about 25 miles...
...Could the Chilean HEU have fallen into terrorist hands? The afternoon before the earthquake, Paul Simons, the U.S. ambassador to Chile, pointed out that local criminal gangs ship Bolivian cocaine to the U.S. from Chilean ports and that "we recognize that Chile and its ports could be used as a funnel for other illicit materials." At the time, of course, he could not know that four days later a bomb's worth of HEU would be on its way to one of those ports - and in the middle of a national catastrophe...
...When the convoy carrying the HEU arrived at Valparaiso, two NNSA ships were anchored a short distance from the coast; the agency had decided to split up the material so that neither ship would carry enough HEU for an atom bomb. But as long as the HEU remained on land, it was vulnerable. About a dozen dockworkers moved freely among the containers. Two of the three bottles of Champagne Bieniawski had taken along for postshipment celebrations were stolen. By 9:45 a.m., the final shipping container was ready to load onto the first ship. As it hoisted the container into...
...contracts with foreign governments, the NNSA gains title of the HEU at the exact moment that the crane's cables slacken and the container settles onto the ship. The crane operators regained control of the container, and a few moments later Chile no longer possessed a bomb's worth of HEU. In the bright morning sunshine, the first ship sailed out of the harbor, a Chilean gunboat darting in front of it like a little duckling. Onshore, the group piled back into the embassy van, and soon the remaining bottle of Champagne was uncorked. As Bieniawski slapped backs and offered...