joe, you just heard me discussing with evan the fact that isis has a lot of materials at its disposal. i spoke to one official today who said, if isis wanted to make a dirty bomb today, it could. so do they actually need these materials from eastern europe? they need radioactive materials from somewhere. in the territory they control right now, they don t have it. we were afraid that when one of the cities they took over had a hospital that might have had some of this material. turned out not to be the case. the trouble you have with isis is it s a fundamentally new threat. the first time we have a terrorist group that has state-like capabilities, territory, money, an international recruiting mechanism that could bring in experts that could help them build a dirty bomb or even a nuclear bomb. that s what s so concerning about the story, the possibility that the smugglers are trying to
hook up with isis. because they know that isis has a lot of money. they know what isis intent is. this february sting operation involving the fbi was a situation where one of the criminals was trying to pell pcms. talk to me about that. how dangerous is it if something like that fell into the wrong hands? it s very dangerous russ. a dirty bomb isn t a nuclear device. it doesn t use uranium or plutonium. it uses other more radioactive materials like cesium or amare sthee yum, cobalt, materials like that. these are actually stored in thousands of facilities in hundreds of countries. most of that material is fairly well secured. the reason you re worried about eastern europe, about russia in particular is that it s a corrupt, dysfunctional state. you see the kind of mentality the smugglers had in these stories.