By DOUGLAS FRANTZ ISTANBUL, Sept. 10 — The police in Batumi, a Black Sea port in Georgia, heard a rumor in July that someone wanted to sell several pounds of high-grade uranium for $100,000. The most tantalizing aspect of the tip was that one of the sellers was reportedly a Georgia Army officer. All sorts of scoundrels have tried nuclear smuggling in recent years. Many are amateurs; most of what they try to peddle proves useless for making bombs. But the possible involvement of an army officer gave the Batumi case a measure of deadly seriousness, beyond its status as another example of how the smuggling of nuclear material has shifted to Central Asia. On the morning of July 20, the local antiterrorist squad burst into a small hotel room near the port, just outside the Turkish border. They arrested four men, including an army captain named Shota Geladze. On the floor of the room, in a glass jar wrapped in plastic, sat nearly four pounds of enriched uranium 235, according to Revaz Chantladze, one of the police officers. The quantity was less than is usually required for a small atomic bomb. Subsequent analysis yielded differing opinions. A Western diplomat said the uranium probably had no value for bomb-making, but Georgian officials called it the third seizure in two years of uranium with potential weapons use. The appearance of a relatively large quantity of uranium on the black market in Georgia underscored American concerns that such trafficking has shifted from Europe to the Caucasus, Central Asia and Turkey. Washington has responded by sending millions of dollars' worth of detection equipment to several countries in the region. The Americans are also providing training for border guards to learn to spot illegal shipments of nuclear material, and they helped to improve security at nuclear plants and airports. The region is the gateway from Russia, which has huge stocks of nuclear material, to countries that are in the market for weapons material. Two of them, Iran and Iraq, are trying to develop nuclear weapons; a third, Pakistan, is expanding its nuclear arsenal. Few smuggling incidents involve material that could be used to make bombs, and intelligence officials say they know of no successful attempt at smuggling weapons-grade material. But they concede that the scope of smuggling remains uncertain. The rising number of incidents and the strong belief that only a fraction of shipments are intercepted have raised the level of anxiety here. The worries are heightened by the slackness of border controls and the economic instability that has left customs officers vulnerable to bribes. "The nuclear material tends to come from Russia, but once it gets outside, the region is pretty wide open," Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington, said during a trip to the region to brief customs officials on suspected buyers. The International Atomic Energy Agency provided new figures on Friday showing that the number of confirmed cases of nuclear smuggling had fallen in the rest of the world but had risen in Turkey, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Only four of the 104 cases from 1993 to 1995 occurred in this region, the agency reported, but from 1996 to last month, 16 of the 72 cases worldwide occurred in the region. The data covered only three weapons-related elements — uranium, plutonium and thorium — and only incidents confirmed by the international agency. Intelligence authorities said smugglers are seeking new routes out of Russia and find their paths easier across the southern flank. "There has, since the mid-1990's, been a shift of smuggling to the Middle East and Asia," Alex Schmid, head of antiterrorism for the United Nations, told a conference recently. In the last eight years, there have been 104 attempts to smuggle nuclear material into Turkey, according to an internal report by the Turkish Atomic Energy Authority. Most cases, like those elsewhere, involved tiny amounts of radioactive material with no weapons uses. But officials at the authority said a handful were potentially more serious. In September 1998, eight people were arrested for trying to smuggle nuclear material from Russia through Turkey to an unknown destination. The police seized about 10 pounds of uranium 235 and a tenth of an ounce of a plutonium mixture. Yasar Ozal, director of Turkey's nuclear research center, said the plutonium and uranium were not weapons-grade material, but appeared to be fuel pellets. Nonetheless, he said, the appearance of plutonium on the black market was alarming. In another case, a Turk was arrested at the Bulgarian border carrying a small amount of enriched uranium 235 in May 1999. Authorities said that the quality was high and that the material might have been a sample that he was trying to use to drum up a larger sale. But Ismail Caliskan, director of Turkey's police unit fighting smuggling and organized crime, said the danger from nuclear smuggling had been exaggerated. Almost every incident, he said, involved amateur criminals trying to sell radioactive material with no weapons value. The only buyers, he said, are undercover policemen. Turkey illustrates the difficulty of monitoring borders. The country is slightly larger than Texas and has 120 border posts, including crossings to Iraq and Syria in the south, Bulgaria in the northwest and Georgia, Armenia and Iran in the east. A senior customs official said only two border posts have systems to detect radioactive material, both donated by the United States. He asked that the locations not be identified, but said neither is at Habur, a busy crossing between Turkey and Iraq. Locations without detection devices rely on visual inspections, something that can be difficult. A kilo of plutonium (2.2 pounds) is so dense it can be concealed in a container the size of a soft-drink can. Some American detection equipment went to Uzbekistan, which has hundreds of miles of border in remote deserts and mountainous terrain. Border guards at three locations received van-sized detection units and 30 hand-held detectors far more powerful than Geiger counters. Early last month, guards at a remote Uzbek post on the border with Turkmenistan stopped a sealed truck en route to Iran when one of the American-supplied devices went off, according to American officials. The officials said they did not know what type of material the truck carried. They said the truck had come from Kazakhstan and passed undetected through the checkpoint at Gisht Kuprik on the Kazak border before being stopped in Alat. Another American device, on the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, about 20 miles from Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, detected radioactive material in March 2000 in a truckload of scrap metal. Uzbek authorities said the truck was coming from Kazakhstan, bound for Pakistan with 10 briefcase-sized containers of radioactive material. The Uzbeks sent it back to Kazakhstan for analysis of the material and a criminal investigation. A Western diplomat said that when the Uzbeks stopped the vehicle, a second truck loaded with scrap turned and went back to Kazakhstan. What followed remains a bit of a mystery and an illustration of how regional rivalries can make it tougher to stop trafficking: The Uzbeks complained that the radioactive material disappeared in Kazakhstan and that no arrests were made. The Kazakhstan government has a good record on trying to curb nuclear-related smuggling. It worked closely with the United States to protect its Soviet-era nuclear facilities, and 1,300 pounds of weapons-grade uranium was removed from the country in 1994 by American officials. But Western officials said they, too, were left in the dark about the outcome of the inquiry into the material on the scrap-metal truck. In Kazakhstan's first official explanation, Altynbek Sarsenbayev, assistant to the president for national security, denied that there were any briefcase-size containers. He said the problem arose because the scrap metal was contaminated with low-level radioactivity. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company