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Half a Ton of Uranium -- and a Long Flight ---the story of Project Sapphire
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Magnu-@aol.com
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Sep 25, 2009 15:47 PDT
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_http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/20/AR200909200
2881.html_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/20/AR2009092002881.html)
Half a Ton of Uranium -- and a Long Flight
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Andy Weber is shown at the metal plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan, in
1994 during Project Sapphire. (Courtesy Of Andy Weber)
By _David E. Hoffman_
(http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/david+e.+hoffman/)
Washington Post Staff Writer
September 21, 2009
On a snowy day in December 1993, just months after Andy Weber began his
diplomatic job at the U.S. Embassy in Almaty, Kazakhstan, he met with a tall,
bullet-headed man he knew only as Col. Korbator.
"Andy, let's take a walk," the colonel said. As they strolled through a dim
apartment courtyard, Korbator handed Weber a piece of paper. Weber
unfolded it. On the paper was written:
U235
90 percent
600 kilos
Weber did the calculation: 1,322 pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough
to make about 24 nuclear bombs. He closed the note, put it in his pocket
and thanked the colonel. After several months of patient cultivation of his
contacts, Weber finally had the answer he had been seeking.
The piece of paper was a glimpse into what had become the most urgent
proliferation crisis to follow the collapse of the Soviet Union: the discovery
of tons of nuclear materials left behind by the Cold War arms race, much of
it unguarded and unaccounted for.
This is the story of Project Sapphire, the code name for an early
pioneering mission to secure a portion of those nuclear materials before they could
fall into the wrong hands. New documents and interviews provide the fullest
account yet of this covert operation to remove the dangerous uranium from
Kazakhstan and fly it to the United States. When it was over, the U.S.
government paid Kazakhstan about $27 million for the cache.
Efforts to lock up nuclear materials scattered around the globe are still
underway. This week, at the U.N. Security Council, President Obama will
chair a high-level meeting on the continuing dangers of proliferation.
Weber first learned of the uranium in Kazakhstan during the summer of 1993,
when Vitaly Mette, a former Soviet navy submarine commander, discreetly
set up a meeting by leaving a message for Weber with his handyman and car
mechanic. Mette, who wore a leather jacket and kept his thick hair combed back
from his angular face, told Weber that he wanted to sell uranium to the
United States. But he was vague about the uranium's enrichment level. The
uranium was stored at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, an enormous industrial
complex that fabricated reactor fuel in the grimy city of Ust-Kamenogorsk, in
Kazakhstan's northeast. Mette was the director.
To build trust with Mette, Weber went hunting with him in the Altai
Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan, near the borders of Russia and China. Weber
enjoyed the banya steam baths, chewed on smoked pork fat and shivered in the
early-morning cold with Mette and other Russians.
At the end of the trip, Mette volunteered to show Weber the plant in
Ust-Kamenogorsk. "If it is not a secret," Weber asked Mette gently as they drove
around the gargantuan fenced-off factory, "do you have any highly enriched
uranium?"
=====
Mette remained evasive. Weber needed proof to satisfy skeptics in
Washington.
In 1993, two years after the Soviet Union's collapse, its former republics
were brimming with highly enriched uranium and plutonium. That summer,
Viktor Mikhailov, the Russian atomic energy minister, revealed that Russia had
accumulated up to 1,200 metric tons of highly enriched uranium, more than
was previously thought. The Iranians and the Iraqis were casting about for
material to build nuclear bombs. "We knew that Iran was all over Central
Asia and the Caucasus with their purchasing agents," recalled Jeff Starr, who
was then director for threat reduction policy at the Pentagon.
But the former Soviet lands were also awash in scams and deception --
people offering to sell MiGs, missile guidance systems or fissile material, real
and imagined. When Weber filed his initial reports on his meetings with
Mette, he recalled, "A lot of people thought it was a scam."
Weber went back to Mette. "Look," he remembered saying, "for us to take
this seriously, you have to tell me what the enrichment level is, and how much
of it there is."
Not long after that conversation came the note delivered by Col. Korbator.
* * *
Weber sent a cable to Washington, with limited distribution. Nothing
happened for about a month. Then in January 1994, his cable came up as an
afterthought at a White House meeting. Ashton B. Carter, an assistant secretary of
defense, volunteered to take over the issue. Carter called Starr into his
office. "Your job is to put together a team and go get this stuff out of
Kazakhstan," Carter said. "Whatever you need -- do it." Carter wanted the
uranium out within a month.
Starr put together a top-secret "tiger team," an ad hoc group of officials
from different agencies. On Feb. 14, 1994, the Kazakh president, Nursultan
Nazarbayev, made his first trip to Washington, where he met with President
Bill Clinton. Weber and William Courtney, the U.S. ambassador to
Kazakhstan, were in Washington at the time of the visit.
In a White House ceremony, Clinton praised Nazarbayev's "great courage,
vision and leadership" and announced that U.S. aid to Kazakhstan would triple,
to $311 million. No mention was made of uranium.
Meanwhile, Weber and Courtney quietly went to see Nazarbayev at Blair
House, where he was staying. They asked him if the United States could send an
expert to verify the composition of the uranium at Ust-Kamenogorsk.
Nazarbayev agreed, but he insisted it be done with the utmost secrecy.
The job went to Elwood Gift, a chemical-nuclear engineer with the National
Security Programs Office at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Gift had experience in most of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium
enrichment. He arrived in Kazakhstan on March 1 amid swirling snowstorms and
holed up at Weber's house until the weather cleared. Several days later,
using tickets in false names given to them by the Kazakh government, Gift
and Weber boarded a plane for the 535-mile flight.
By this time, Weber had come to know Mette better. Weber found him
charismatic, gutsy and intelligent, the opposite of an old Soviet bureaucrat. When
Weber and Gift showed up the first morning to take samples of the uranium,
Mette told them the story of how it ended up there. The uranium had been
prepared for a secret submarine fuel project, but the project had been
canceled in the 1980s. The highly enriched uranium was left behind.
=====
As they approached the building, Weber saw that the security system
consisted of what he later described as a "Civil War padlock." The doors swung
open into a large room with concrete walls and a dirt floor. Knee-high brick
platforms stretched from one end to the other, covered by sheets of plywood
with steel buckets and canisters holding the uranium, spaced about 10 feet
apart to avoid a chain reaction.
Working with plant technicians, Weber and Gift randomly selected a few
containers and took them to a small laboratory area. In one canister, they
found uranium rods wrapped in foil, as if they were items in a picnic cooler.
Weber hefted one of the rods, and was surprised by how heavy it was.
Gift wanted to break off a piece and bring it back to verify the enrichment
level. He asked a technician to take a hammer and a chisel to it, but the
ingot would not break.
Weber went off with another worker to watch him file off some shavings for
samples. At first, the technicians handled the uranium in a glove box, but
one of them took it out and placed it on a table. The technician slid a
piece of paper under it and began to file the ingot. Sparks flew, as if it
were a child's holiday sparkler.
"My eyes are lighting up, because I've had this chunk of metal in my hand,"
Weber recalled. "I know it is bomb material. . . . This uranium metal
would require nothing -- just being banged into the right shape and more of it
to make a bomb. It didn't need any processing. This is 90 or 91 percent
enriched uranium 235, in pure metal form. And I remember thinking that dozens
of nuclear weapons could be fabricated from this, easily fabricated from
this material, and how mundane it is. It was just a piece of metal. And just
looking at these buckets, how could something this mundane have such
awesome power and potential for destruction? So, as he started filing, and sparks
are coming off, you can imagine what's going through my head."
Seeing the sparks, he called out, "Elwood! It's sparking!" Gift was on the
other side of the room, dealing with another sample. He didn't realize they
had taken the uranium out of the glove box, but he didn't look up. "Don't
worry," Gift said, "that's just normal oxidation."
Gift collected eight samples of highly enriched uranium. Portions of four
samples were dissolved in acid and analyzed by mass spectrograph while Gift
and Weber were still there, and they confirmed it was 90 percent enriched
uranium. They left with three of the dissolved samples and the eight
original samples to do further analysis.
* * *
Back in Almaty, Weber and Gift told Courtney, the ambassador, they had
verified that the uranium was highly enriched. Courtney immediately cabled
Washington, noting the ancient padlock on the door. The cable, Weber said, "hit
Washington like a ton of bricks."
Weber thought there was only one thing to do. "In my mind, it was a
no-brainer," he said. "Let's buy this stuff as quickly as we can and move it to
the United States."
In October 1994, after months of preparation, a covert mission to remove
the uranium was almost ready to begin. "I kept pressing and pressing to get
this thing going, knowing full well that winter comes early in this part of
the world," Weber said. "It would get messy if we didn't get it finished
before the first snowfall."
In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge Y-12 laboratory had built a mobile processing
facility. A team of 29 men and two women had been recruited for the mission.
On Oct. 7, Clinton signed a classified presidential directive approving
the airlift, and a final briefing was held at Oak Ridge. The next day, three
C-5 aircraft, among the largest planes in the world, lifted off from Dover
Air Force Base in Delaware, carrying the team and the mobile processing
facility. They flew to Turkey, and then, after some delays, to
Ust-Kamenogorsk.
=====
Weber was waiting for them in the control tower of the small airport. "This
was one of those bizarre post-Cold War experiences you have to live
through to believe, but I'm in the control tower, nobody in the control tower
speaks English," Weber recalled. "So they said, 'Andy, can you talk to the
planes and guide them in?' "
The planes left, planning to return only when the uranium was packed up. On
the ground, at the Ulba factory, the team members began their arduous
work. Each day, they left their hotel before dawn and returned after dark,
spending 12 hours packing the uranium into special containers suitable for
flying. There were seven types of uranium-bearing materials in the warehouse,
much of it laced with toxic beryllium.
This was an extraordinary mission, one country secretly swooping in to
another to remove the danger of nuclear materials that had been all but
abandoned. Altogether, the team discovered 1,032 containers in the warehouse, and
each had to be methodically unpacked, examined and repacked into quart-size
cans that were then inserted into 448 shipping containers -- 55-gallon
drums with foam inserts -- for the flight. The process required precision,
endurance and secrecy. If word leaked, the whole effort might have to be
aborted.
By Nov. 11, the packing was finished and the 448 barrels were loaded onto
trucks. The team was determined to get home for Thanksgiving, but bad
weather set in. A week went by before one C-5 could leave Turkey for Kazakhstan.
At 3 a.m., with the plane on its way, the uranium was driven from the Ulba
plant to the airport, with Weber in the lead security car, a Soviet-era
Volga. "It was black-ice conditions," he recalled. "And these trucks were
sliding all over the place, and I'm thinking, 'I don't want to make the call to
Washington saying one of the trucks with highly enriched uranium went off
the bridge into the river, and we're trying to locate it.' But somehow,
miraculously, we made it all safely to the airport."
It took three hours to load the plane. But before it could take off, the
runway had to be cleared of snow. Sleet, ice and rain blanketed the airfield,
a pilot later recalled. There were no plows to be seen. Finally, airport
workers brought out a truck with a jet engine mounted on the back. They
fired up the engine and blasted the runway free of snow.
The C-5 heaved itself into the sky. The next day, two more C-5s flew in and
back out with the remaining uranium, the gear and the team. The enormous
transports, operating in total secrecy, flew 20 hours straight through to
Dover with several aerial refuelings, the longest C-5 flights in U.S.
history. Once on the ground in Delaware, the uranium was loaded into large,
unmarked trucks specially outfitted to protect nuclear materials during the drive
to Oak Ridge.
On Nov. 23, the Clinton administration announced at a Washington news
conference that it had removed the uranium. Defense Secretary William J. Perry
called it "defense by other means, in a big way" and added: "We have put
this bomb-grade nuclear material forever out of the reach of potential black
marketers, terrorists or a new nuclear regime."
With imagination and daring, Project Sapphire underscored what could be
done with the cooperation of another government. But the methods used in that
mission could not be replicated in Russia, where there was far more uranium
and plutonium, and much more suspicion.
In late 1994, the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee prepared a
report about the extent of the Russian nuclear materials crisis. The
top-secret document concluded that not a single facility storing highly enriched
uranium or plutonium in the former Soviet Union had safeguards up to Western
standards.
Not one.
* * *
Epilogue: Since that 1994 report, many of the facilities with unguarded
nuclear material in the former Soviet Union have undergone security upgrades.
By 2008, more than 70 percent of the buildings with weapons-usable nuclear
materials had been fortified, although the uranium and plutonium were still
spread across more than 200 locations. At the Mayak Chemical Combine in
the Russian city of Ozersk, a massive fortified vault was built by the United
States at a cost of $309 million to store excess Russian fissile
materials, although it is still partly empty.
Since Project Sapphire, highly enriched uranium has been removed from
about 20 research reactors and sensitive installations around the former Soviet
bloc.
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