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I wonder what it sold for, besides the trinkets mentioned at the end. If they had hodled they could clear maybe a trillion on the open market today (which consists of sovereign states).

Highly enriched U-235 would also be a sound basis for a commodity-backed hard currency, though not quite as good as the US Dollar and the Ruble which are backed by Pu-239.

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> what it sold for

Nuclear bomb construction material has no open market, it's only held by nuclear powers who work hard to prevent anyone else from possessing it (see the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) - that's the big stick, resulting in North Korea tier sanctions. The trinkets were the carrot.

Kazakhstan made a nuanced calculation of the risk of holding the enriched Uranium, concluded it wasn't worth it.

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