Because the AP’s investigation focused on sting operations by the FBI and Moldovan authorities, in which undercover informants broke up transactions they themselves may have played a role in initiating, the report left open questions about the real likelihood of terrorists obtaining large quantities of nuclear materials. “[I]n most of the operations arrests were made after samples of nuclear material had been obtained rather than the larger quantities,” the AP wrote. “That means that if smugglers did have access to the bulk of material they offered, it remains in criminal hands.”

Alternatively, it’s in nobody’s hands. In a case from February, for example, a smuggler tried convince a representative of ISIS to buy enough cesium 137 to, in the AP’s words, “contaminate several city blocks.” (Cesium is not one of the key elements used to make nuclear weapons; rather, it has medical and industrial applications.) Only the ISIS representative was actually an undercover informant, and “investigators said the one vial [of cesium] they ultimately recovered was a less radioactive form of cesium than the smugglers originally had advertised, and not suitable for making a dirty bomb.” On the other hand, in a 2011 case, an informant was able to buy highly enriched uranium in a “green sack” from out of a Lexus parked near a circus in Moldova’s capital. The AP reported that tests revealed it “was high-grade material that could be used in a nuclear bomb.”

More disturbing than the revelations are the unknowns:

Moldovan investigators can’t be sure that the suspects who fled didn’t hold on to the bulk of the nuclear materials. Nor do they know whether the groups, which are pursuing buyers who are enemies of the West, may have succeeded in selling deadly nuclear material to extremists at a time when the Islamic State has made clear its ambition to use weapons of mass destruction.

Reports such as these surface periodically from the former Soviet Union and Pakistan and, perhaps because the implications are too terrible to think about and the solutions are too hard to find, they fade more quickly than their severity warrants. The underlying issues are largely the same as they were 20 years ago: The black market exists because there’s a supply of the material and a demand for it. As one Moldovan investigator told the AP: “As long as the smugglers think they can make big money without getting caught, they will keep doing it.”