rogues

One of the most disturbing pieces of evidence in the United Nations report about Iran’s program to develop a nuclear “device” isn’t even about an Iranian. It’s about a Russian physicist who has evidently assisted Iran with weapons design. And there may be tens of thousands more just like him, nonproliferation analysts say, ripe for hiring by rogue states or terrorist groups.
Congratulations, Vyacheslav Danilenko: You’re infamous. Danilenko, a former Soviet weapons scientist, was reportedly found by the International Atomic Energy Agency to have tutored the Iranians “on building high-precision detonators of the kind used to trigger a nuclear chain reaction.”
Danilenko isn’t named in the IAEA report. But the report refers obliquely to “a foreign expert” who worked “in the nuclear weapon programme of the country of his origin.” That expert, whom the IAEA interviewed, helped Iran from 1996 to 2002 research a kind of “high explosives initiation system” used in nuclear devices.