Reality Check

Despite that deal, agreements on locking up loose nukes come more slowly these days. ""There's a lot of inertia and not very much leadership coming out of the White House or any other agency,'' says Luongo. He says the slowdown is ""indicative of the administration's second-term priorities,'' which he believes are domestic rather than foreign. Another cause of the downturn may be that, having dealt with the relatively easy problems, the Americans and Russians now face the really tough ones.

Russia, for instance, has a stockpile of perhaps 17,000 tactical nuclear warheads that would be especially useful to terrorists because of their relatively small size. Western intelligence isn't even sure where most of those warheads are. Then there's the claim made last summer by Yeltsin's former national-security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, who said Russia had developed small ""suitcase bombs''--""an ideal weapon for nuclear terror,'' he said. Some U.S. experts think an even more urgent problem is presented by the nearly three tons of plutonium now sitting in a storage facility at Aktau in Kazakstan, just across the Caspian Sea from Iran. To those who worry about such things, Aktau sounds like a serious threat--or a potential screenplay.

LOOSE NUKES REALLY HAPPEN

Oct. 9, 1992: An engineer smuggles 1.538 kilos of highly enriched uranium (HEU) out of a Russian plant. He is caught leaving for Moscow to find a buyer.

May 1993: Police in Lithuania raid a bank vault and find a rod of beryllium with about 150 grams of HEU embedded in it.

July 29, 1993: Two seamen steal 1.8 kilos of HEU from a naval storage site in Arctic Russia. Ties to organized crime are suspected.