JJ Nitro

2008-04-11, 23:47:30

I really wanted to like the movie "The Half Life of Timofey Berezin," aka PU-239. I had read an article in the April issue of The Atlantic, "A Smuggler's Story," and was curious to see a dramatized version of this kind of work.

The article talks about a few men who have been caught in Georgia, the former Soviet republic, trying to smuggle out highly enriched uranium. One of them was Oleg Vladimirovich Khintsagov:

For 15 years, Khintsagov had eked out a living, like so many Russians after the Soviet collapse, mostly as a small-time trader. Cheap Turkish chandeliers, dried fish, sausages—Khintsagov would peddle just about anything he could get his hands on, and the returns were usually meager. But now his luck looked about to change. In fact, if everything went according to plan, he would end the day very much richer. No truck would be needed to ferry today’s goods. The 100 grams of highly enriched uranium in his tattered leather coat was tucked into a plastic bag—the type a day laborer might use to wrap a sandwich.

He wasn't anything like the character Timofey Berezin in the movie, who was a technician of some kind at a nuclear weapons center, and who stole plutonium to sell on the black market. Khintsagov and the other real-life smugglers knew little about what they were doing.

Also, it's a bit strange to me that the movie takes place in post-Soviet Russia, rather than in one of the former Soviet republics. In my understanding, it's in these former republics that became independent where warheads and nuclear materials are only loosely protected, and where the majority of the smuggling takes place.

I was disappointed with the movie, since it got caught up too much in the human drama around this man's quixotic attempt to sell stolen plutonium. ***Warning: plot spoller!***  If he had been successful, or made connectios with some other people who were interested in the plutonium and actually knew what they could do with it, that would have been far more fascinating. But it would have made the story less tidy, and taken the focus away from the one man, his family, and his conflict with the place that he worked.

Also, I wonder how many people might get the idea that the movie is meant to be a condemnation of nuclear power. For one thing, it shows Timofey hanging out around and inside the iconic cooling towers of a nuclear power plant. But the character actually works in a secret nuclear weapons center that is not included on a map—a very different situation from nuclear power plant, and a place that probably wouldn't have cooling towers.

The movie is well acted, but for a good story about nuclear smuggling, I'd spend your precious time reading The Atlantic's article instead.