The Dark Web is the perfect place to buy just about anything.
You can find exotic animals, weapons, and stolen credit cards and identities.
But can you buy a nuclear bomb?
The Dark Web is the ultimate black market, a wild zone where anything can be put up for
sale anonymously and purchased via hard-to-track cryptocurrency.
That means anything is possible - but in order to buy one of the deadliest weapons in history,
it takes a chain reaction going back decades.
Nuclear weapons are only in the hands of world powers, and no country makes them legal for
private ownership - which would take a right to bear arms to a whole new level.
So how does one wind up for sale in the first place?
In 2015, a French reporter revealed a terrifying tale.
He traveled to the Eastern European country of Bulgaria and supposedly met with a man
named Ivanoff, a former high-ranking official in military intelligence.
Ivanoff had fallen on hard times since the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and he had gotten
in with some bad people.
They included Saudi Arabia, which had many people interested in weapons of mass destruction.
And Bulgaria had them to spare.
But Bulgaria isn’t a nuclear power - is it?
It’s a little more complicated than that, and it all comes back to that source of most
complicated things in global affairs - the Cold War.
Bulgaria was firmly in the Soviet sphere during that era and was known as the People’s Republic
of Bulgaria.
While Bulgaria wasn’t a rich country during the era, it was strategically significant
and that meant that the Soviet Union armed it heavily with short and long-range missiles.
They weren’t meant to be launched on their own but were essentially a fail-safe for the
Soviet military.
Because these conventional weapons were set to go nuclear at a moment’s notice.
If war broke out - as it almost did several times during the Cold War - the Soviet forces
would sweep in and take over the Bulgarian infrastructure.
They would equip the ready-made Bulgarian missiles with Soviet nuclear warheads, and
let loose on their enemies from a front that the Western countries wouldn’t see coming.
Whether this plan would have worked or not is up for debate - there’s a good chance
that any US-Soviet war would have been too destructive for any secondary plan like this
to work - but Bulgaria was far more heavily armed than one would expect a small nation
to be.
But soon, those weapons would be a danger of a very different kind.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it set its entire sphere into chaos.
Countless countries saw their communist governments collapse and be replaced, and there were years
of uncertainty and violence in many of them.
And in that chaos, it was very easy for weapons to go missing.
Suddenly, everyone’s eyes were on Bulgaria’s weapons program - what exactly did they have
hidden in their military facilities?
Their missile programs were well known, and there was no evidence of biological weapons
and little of chemical weapons.
Their nuclear weapons were a different story.
While Bulgaria never developed their own nuclear weapons, they had plenty of nuclear-capable
missiles and a treaty that required the Soviet Union to deploy their own weapons in Bulgaria’s
defense.
But the question was - did they have any already stored in the country, and where did they
go?
No one knew for the first few years, but in the mid-90s, an anonymous Soviet Captain spoke
up.
He revealed a massive nuclear weapons facility in the country hosting seventy missiles.
It had supposedly been disbanded in 1989 and the weapons shipped to Ukraine, but the question
on everyone’s mind was if they had got them all.
And it seems the answer was no.
In the chaos of the collapse of an empire, things slip through the cracks and people
take advantage.
The mysterious Ivanoff had apparently stolen a non-armed warhead from a facility and hid
it - buried in the ground near his mother’s house.
He had made a small fortune for himself with his business dealings in Saudi Arabia but
kept a tight hold on his prize possession.
While abroad, he would meet with shady elements involved in global terrorism.
Some wanted to get their hands on nuclear material - and one was particularly ambitious.
His name was Osama Bin Laden.
The terror mastermind, who would later become infamous worldwide, was seeking to make a
nuclear bomb out of radioactive waste - a so-called “dirty bomb”.
While it wouldn’t carry the full nuclear payload of a warhead, it could contaminate
a major American city and render it inhospitable for decades.
But Ivanoff, who had no problem brokering deals with the worst elements in the world,
offered him a better option - why not go for the genuine article and purchase a Soviet-era
nuke?
It was an exchange that could have changed the path of world history.
Why didn’t Bin Laden buy Ivanoff’s nuke?
Perhaps he was worried about being traced and his terror network being destroyed.
Maybe he didn’t trust that the nuke was still in working order.
Maybe they couldn’t agree on the price and Ivanoff decided to keep his prized possession
in hand.
Or maybe Ivanoff is fond of tall tales and never actually met the terror mastermind,
despite the wild stories he tells to reporters.
What is known is that Ivanoff claims his personal nuclear bomb is still buried at his mother’s
house.
And there’s a reason it stays underground.
Nuclear power isn’t foolproof - as those in Chernobyl found out the hard way.
One minor mistake can release deadly nuclear energy, killing or sickening anyone nearby
and contaminating the area for decades.
Bombs can degrade and leak as they age, but burying them can neutralize possible exposure
- especially if it’s buried in a vegetable garden.
The vegetables absorb the radiation in small amounts, making it safer to live near where
the weapon is buried.
But mom might want to get her cabbages from the local market instead.
But buried things don’t stay buried forever.
The nuclear black market is still going strong, but most of it is based around nuclear materials
rather than finished weapons.
Enriched uranium, which can be used to arm a nuclear bomb, has shown up in several smuggling
operations.
The smugglers usually get caught, and this material can command a high price - well into
the six figures.
Police investigations showed that the source of the material was likely a classified military
facility in Russia, but they didn’t believe that Russia was funneling its own weapons
out of the country.
Rather, they believed that an insider was using the massive, poorly regulated nuclear
cache in eastern Europe to turn a profit.
But are these black market weapons actually a threat?
Yes...and no.
Someone who winds up with a cache of black market uranium is unlikely to be able to build
their own nuclear bomb.
An actual nuclear bomb costs millions to build and the designs are highly classified.
While a dirty bomb could be simpler, the odds are an untrained person would be more likely
to kill themselves while working with the uranium.
But that’s where the threat comes in.
Even if someone never gets to the point of building a bomb successfully, there’s a
good chance their failure will release radiation into the surrounding area.
That’s why federal agents around the world are determined to stop the nuclear black market
in its tracks.
But so far, the results are mixed.
Much of the information on the nuclear black market is highly classified, and attempts
to find out more from the government will often get reporters quickly ushered out of
the room.
That’s why reporters have gone to greater extremes - including heading to Bulgaria personally
to meet with nuke-peddlers.
The first was a French reporter, who claimed to have gotten all the way to Ivanoff’s
mother’s garden to purchase the nuke.
But reports vary, and many say that the French reporter actually purchased a Bulgarian nuclear-capable
warhead rather than an equipped nuclear weapon.
But the allure of a good story is too much to resist.
When Vice followed up on the story and headed to Bulgaria, they found conflicting reports.
Ivanoff was ready to tell them all about his crazy adventures, including the story of how
he nearly sold the nuke to the world’s most notorious terrorist.
But what he was more cagey about was showing them the actual nuclear weapon - especially
once the cameras turned on.
After all, televised proof of holding an illegal nuclear weapon for sale would instantly make
him the most wanted man in the world.
This raises the question - is it actually possible to buy a nuclear weapon?
For anyone to do it in person would be tricky for a lot of reasons.
For one thing, nuclear weapons are big.
Even a portable one will be fairly heavy and hard to transport through any sort of security.
It’s likely to not only set off metal detectors but give off a radiation signature that would
trigger an alert at any airport or other secure facility.
And unlike other weapons, there is really no excuse someone can give that would let
them slip it past security.
The odds of getting it from one location to another without being arrested and jailed
are slim to none.
The cost of such a weapon would also likely be high, and the bank transaction would raise
law enforcement alerts as well.
This is why anyone who wants to unload one might be tempted to go another route.
The anonymity of the dark web is its main selling point.
All websites are cloaked in Onion routing which makes them hard to track.
Anyone logging in likely has their IP addresses hidden, and all communications are done through
private networks and with complete anonymity.
If money is going to change hands, it’ll be done via cryptocurrency, which is bought
off the dark web and allows people to exchange goods and services without there being any
link to the actual money involved.
The seller gets the cryptocurrency, cashes it out, and the only visible transaction is
between the person and the crypto site.
But there’s one other big problem with buying from the dark web.
If you order something from Amazon and don’t get what you asked for, you’re heading straight
to their customer service chat.
But if you order something from the dark web and you get an empty box, good luck.
The odds are your scammer has already deleted their account, and if you go to the police
to complain the odds are their response is going to be “What’s a dark web?”.
And while this might just be an inconvenience for someone who loses several hundred dollars
on a mystery box or bootleg, it’s possible to lose much bigger sums on the dark web when
buying illegal weapons.
So while it’s possible to buy a nuclear weapon on the dark web, it might be unlikely.
For one thing, anyone looking to ship the weapon to its new owner would still face the
same problem as any other seller - how do you get it from one place to another?
It still has to go through customs, with dogs who would sniff out radiation in a few seconds.
Good boys!
And while the dark web is mostly anonymous, law enforcement is on the trail of smugglers
who sell dangerous things like drugs and weapons.
The head of the notorious black market Silk Road was even sentenced to life in prison
for dark web activities.
So you might be able to buy a nuke on the dark web - but don’t bet on actually getting
it.
You’re far more likely to wind up with a visit from law enforcement, or maybe just
an empty box and a big hole in your bank account where that cryptocurrency used to be.
It’s probably best to put those dreams on hold and use the dark web for what it was
intended for - buying that pet red panda you always wanted.
For more on the secrets of the dark web, watch “Everything You Didn’t Know About Dark
Web, But Should”, or check out this episode instead!