Soaring mountains provide endless places to hide here. Vast, empty steppes swallow up the sight of a man. And border security is a loose weave of remote guard stations thinly staffed by poorly trained, low-paid forces.
Drug smugglers have exploited this Central Asian landscape for years, making the fabled Silk Road a major conduit for opium. Now, political instability is adding to concerns that smugglers may be bringing in something worse -- nuclear material, which terrorists could use for fission weapons or crude "dirty bombs." It's a "new security threat," the UN Office on Drugs and Crime says.
Tajikistan, with its 1,335km border with Afghanistan, is considered the most fertile ground for nuclear smuggling along drug routes, according to the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, an affiliate of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.
And the recent political turmoil in Tajikistan's neighbor, Kyrgyzstan, underlines worries that uprisings against the repressive regimes of the former Soviet states could bring disorder and make it even easier for smugglers to avoid detection.
"We don't know how much [radioactive material] is on the market, but we do know that access is the easiest and controls the poorest in Tajikistan," said Dauren Aben, program coordinator at the non-proliferation center's office in Kazakhstan.
"Radioactive materials are easier to obtain, easier to assemble, easier to transport, easier to hide and easier to use -- all of which would make it the weapon of choice for terrorists," he added. "This is a real big security risk out of Central Asia because of the smuggling and trafficking routes in this region and the impossibility of protecting every square meter."
A "dirty bomb" is set off by conventional explosives to scatter radioactive material, contaminating and panicking people and forcing evacuation of areas.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, radioactive material simply disappeared from facilities in the newly independent Central Asian countries.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has no estimates of the amount, but says it was a "widespread phenomenon." The most powerful material, such as cobalt-60, strontium-90, caesium-137 and iridium-192, can be found in radiotherapy machines, industrial irradiators and thermoelectric generators.
At a conference in Vienna last month, IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei said a "dirty bomb" posed the greatest nuclear security threat because of the abundance and availability of radioactive material.
"While the probability of a nuclear explosive device being acquired and used by terrorists is relatively small, it cannot be dismissed, and the consequences would be devastating," he said. "On the other hand, a dirty bomb would likely have far less impact in terms of human life, but the relative accessibility of radiological sources make it more likely that such an event could occur."
Last year alone, the IAEA recorded nearly 100 incidents of trafficking in nuclear or other radioactive material, ElBaradei said.
"The number of incidents shows that the measures to control and secure nuclear and other radioactive materials need to be improved," he said.
Jamshed Abdushukurov, a scientist at the Tajik government-run Institute of Physics and Engineering in the capital Dushanbe, said the IAEA has given US$100,000 to the hunt for lost radioactive material. And in 2000, the government established the Agency for Atomic Energy to inventory radioactive materials in Tajikistan.
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