Not only did it host warm-water ports on the Black Sea but its mountainous terrain it was the site of a crucial victory for

Not only did it host warm-water ports on the Black Sea, but its mountainous terrain (it was the site of a crucial victory for the Tsar against the Ottomans during the First World War) buttressed the empire against Turkey, Nato’s eastern flank. And with its fierce Georgian nationalism, its volatile mountain minorities in the north Caucasus and its location on a fault line between the Christian and Muslim worlds, it’s no wonder that the region was considered a powder keg. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, troops manned over 300 military installations in the tiny republic, though few knew this: discussing it was tantamount to treason.Not until 1997, when Georgian soldiers training at one of these bases contracted radiation disease, were government officials confronted with the prospect of an environmental scourge in that vast military infrastructure Since then, their worst fears have been confirmed. Kakushadze’s team has so far inspected 60 installations, all of which are contaminated. According to the Ministry of Environment, three have extremely dangerous levels of radiation.The problem, they would soon discover, did not stop there.

Not long after the soldiers fell ill, two people rummaging through an abandoned railway carriage died when they unwittingly opened a container of nuclear debris. This time the victims were civilians, and the setting was urban – Kutaisi, Georgia’s second largest city. When officials realised that the threat went beyond the bases, they launched a public awareness campaign.Soon civilians across Georgia, like the weightlifter, were calling in about suspicious objects. Recently, Georgian newspapers reported that children had found six empty containers contaminated with radiation. Officials suspect that they had held capsules of caesium-137 – a highly toxic isotope with a half-life of 33 years. The press has counted 28 such episodes; more are inevitable.An official at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna confides that at least eight potentially lethal scraps of strontium – used by the Soviets to power mobile generators on construction sites – seem to be missing. “This,” says the official, “could pose a very serious problem.”"I suspected that we had a problem several years ago,” says Kakushadze.

“I tried to get funding from abroad to look into it, but didn’t find any interest.” To date, Georgia has received only paltry assistance, in the form of equipment and training from the IAEA. US State Department officials disregard the problem, concentrating instead on the regional trafficking of weapons-grade materials. (Nearly all of these incidents have involved substances that, while hazardous, cannot be used to build nuclear explosives.)To make matters worse, Georgia is in a state of complete economic collapse. In the past, the country was relatively prosperous; its carefree culture, scenic coastline and good skiing conditions attracted vacationing apparatchik.

But the fall of the Soviet Union unleashed a plague of nationalism and separatism that for several years plunged the country into chaos. While peace has largely returned, corruption is rampant and unemployment so high that people who haven’t been paid for months still show up for work to avoid losing their jobs. Worst of all, with the government hundreds of millions of pounds in arrears to its energy suppliers, public services like electricity and water are rare in the capital and almost nonexistent elsewhere.While the country lacks resources for a systematic search and clean-up operation, in Kakushadze it has a patriotic and remarkably industrious physicist, who appears determined to save the country from the dangerous detritus almost single-handedly. As the rest of Georgia grinds to a halt, Kakushadze works with patience and fervour. In the post-Soviet shambles of a region known for its tubercular prisons, ruthless mobsters and vodka- pickled politicians, he seems inexplicably civic-minded.

He handles the most dangerous jobs himself, and is paid less than pounds 25 a month.At the Ministry of Environment, we watch a videotape showing one of his more heroic adventures. The mission in Svaneti, an unruly mountainous territory near the Russian border, appears crudely executed and largely improvised, with a blatant disregard for safety. “If we were to try to do things as they’re done in western Europe, they wouldn’t get done,” Kakushadze says.Dressed in white overalls, he clambers several hundred feet down a steep, rocky embankment to the bottom of a river gorge, where two highly toxic cylinders of strontium await him. The Soviets, it is surmised, used these to power generators while constructing a dam upstream.The plan is to lift each cylinder, using 5ft-long metal tongs, into custom-made lead containers. The first drops in with ease, and within an hour Kakushadze has attached it to a rope, and it is winched precariously out of the gorge.