Based on Chill’s reading of the headline, my initial reaction would be that this is just a ‘radioactive material awareness’ poster. On the other hand, the mention of the ‘possibility’ of missing material ‘from before the creation of Pakistan’ helps me maintain some doubts.

One sidebar to this – it is in fact true that regulation of nuclear materials before the 1946-47 period – whether in Britain or ‘British India’ – was almost non-existent. Radioactive materials, however, were in use back then – in luminosity applications – clocks and watches, aircraft instrumentation, etc; medical applications – X-rays; and exotic industrial applications such as uranium-doped glasses and ceramics. With the possible exception of X-ray equipment, I can’t see how there could have been any significant radioactive material in the area that is now Pakistan before 1947. I did look at the list of registered radioactive material importers on the PNRA website. Some of them are just P.O. Boxes; hopefully someone actually knows who they are.

kya aap yeh nishan pechantay ho? Do you recognize this sign?

Yeh tabkari ka nishan heh. This is a tabkari sign.

As far as government actions being mostly lame to control the criminal element, this is analogous to gun control. Here, the goverment’s action was running newspaper ads. It’s a catch-22. Its efficacy in finding what might not even be lost could be a secondary consideration.

The calculation here may be that it’s better to do something public than nothing public, while working a clandestine investigation at the same time. You can bet that CIA agents are tapped into the black market arms trade, seeking out this sort of material as a priority.