Mystery? Or Pending Catastrophe?

It's the stuff of thrilling legend. Like ships mysteriously missing off certain notorious waterways or straits, or areas of the world's oceans that swirl ominously, picking up speed with the connivance of prevailing winds and finally swallowing ocean vessels whole, along with their hapless crews.

The life of ocean-going crews can be a tenuous, short-lived and rather exciting one.

But then, this is the modern world, and we know with a certainty where and how shipping occurs. There are rules and regulations and ships' manifests, and great corporations and countries' concerns, and insurance agencies, and everything must be accounted for.

Except that this is also a world of intrigues, and underhanded, coercive and illegal and furtive activities. Who, on the high seas, can take the measure of events as they unfold, when some may conspire to achieve sinister ownership of materials held to be contraband, strictly forbidden?

There's brisk business done daily in the importation and export of arms, conventional and not-so-conventional. Just as there is a brisk trade in illicit drugs, from the countries that produce them, to the voracious needs of the populations existing in the countries that consume them.

Needless to say, these represent a minute fraction of the legitimate shipping enterprises and their business and their constant forays over the World's oceans.

And Finland strenuously denies, in the case of the AWOL freighter registered in Malta, carrying a $1.3-million cargo of timber heading to Algeria, that despite rumours to the contrary, there were no nuclear materials secreted in the vessel for conveyance to some port of call. That must mean, ipso facto, that there were such materials present, no?

Was it a ruse, the reported boarding of masked men posing as anti-drug police in Swedish waters, a mere day after the ship left Finland's Pietarsaari port? For two weeks the whereabouts of the ship was unknown to the world at large which, alarmed at its lack of communication and apparent disappearance, mounted a search and rescue mission.

Finally located, its 15-man Russian crew have been taken into custody by their home country. For intensive questioning. It is, unquestionably, of some concern if some state actors seek to acquire materials the international community would prefer, with good reason, they not have in their possession.

It is of infinitely more grave concern should non-state actors find themselves serendipitously in possession of forbidden fissionable materials.