The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  The next door opened to a similar sight, and the next. Gift had no idea how many hundreds of cans he was looking at. No one had been here for a long time and the dust lay thick on the shelves.

  The plant officials accompanying the Oak Ridge engineer allowed him to pick out sample cans for a random assay. In the plant laboratory, technicians dissolved four uranium samples from the cans in nitric acid and assayed the dissolved material in a mass spectrometer. As claimed, it was 90 percent U235. Gift estimated that he had 360 cans. He collected several more samples, shipped them back to the United States via diplomatic pouch from the U.S. embassy in Almaty, the newly renamed Kazakh capital (formerly Alma-Ata), and returned home.

  With confirmation that the cache of submarine fuel was HEU, and with Kazakhstan’s formal accession to the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapons state at a signing ceremony in the White House on 14 February 1994, the U.S. government finally took the Ulba uranium problem seriously. Word came as well that Iranian officials had visited the Ulba plant, ostensibly interested in buying beryllium and low-enriched reactor fuel but presumably also exploring the possibility of an HEU buy. In June, Vice President Al Gore cleared the proposed removal with the Russian government through his ongoing collaboration with Viktor Chernomyrdin. Elwood Gift’s boss at Oak Ridge, a senior engineer named Alex Riedy, was assigned to lead the technical team, and to see what he was getting into, Riedy traveled to Kazakhstan at the beginning of August with eight other Oak Ridge experts. He was shocked to discover that Gift had underestimated the number of fuel containers by almost 300 percent: There were 1,050 cans in the Ulba vault, not 360. Riedy had been thinking of a fourteen-person team, two weeks of repackaging, and a single shipping container. He scaled up his plans accordingly.

  Back at Oak Ridge, he put out a call for volunteers. Twenty-seven Department of Energy contractors from Oak Ridge and Nevada signed on—nuclear, chemical, and industrial engineers; health physicists; industrial hygienists; packaging experts; criticality safety engineers; and maintenance technicians.25 The DoD supplied a military coordinator and three interpreters, and an Oak Ridge doctor rounded out the thirty-two-person team. The team members’ job, a government official explained later, “was to assay26 the material, to make judgments as to its stability, and to determine whether it required processing.” Once they had done so, they would package the material in standard IAEA-approved steel containers. The packaging would have to be done in chemical protection suits with respirators because even a single exposure to inhaled beryllium dust can cause berylliosis, a chronic, debilitating lung disease. Riedy had a portable glove-box unit—a “hood line” used for handling dangerous materials—built at Oak Ridge that would fit inside the Ulba vault; the team spent the late summer of 1994 doing what Riedy called “emergency drills27 and dry runs.”

  Washington had set up a Tiger Team—a special, one-off group of experts from a number of different U.S. departments and agencies—within the DoD to coordinate the Sapphire operation. “I was running the meetings,”28 Jessica Stern told me of her work that autumn and winter. “It was pretty exciting.” The national security bureaucracy had debated whose budget would carry Sapphire as well as compensate the Kazakh for the uranium. That debate continued through the summer, with the responsibility finally assigned to the Nunn-Lugar program. “By fall,” Stern said, “who was going to pay was settled. That’s when we started the operation.”29 Clinton signed off on Project Sapphire on Friday afternoon, 7 October 1994; the Sapphire team flew out of McGee-Tyson Air National Guard Base, near Knoxville, early the next morning on one of three black C-5 Galaxy heavy transports, with a share of 130 tons of equipment in the cargo hold and the team members seated facing backward on the troop-carrier deck above.

  For the next six weeks, Riedy’s team worked twelve-hour days, six days a week, processing and canning the Ulba HEU. “It was a very big endeavor,”30 the engineer said later. “We had about 1,050 nuclear containers to empty.… There were also about 6,000 sample bottles that we had to empty that the Kazakh officials at the Ulba plant unloaded and put in a form that we could repackage.” The 581 kilograms of HEU that was the object of the team’s effort wasn’t pristine; it was incorporated into a total of 2.37 metric tons of material stock,31 including uranium metal, uranium oxides, uranium-beryllium alloy rods, uranium oxide–beryllium oxide rods, uranium-beryllium alloy machining scrap and powder, uranium-contaminated graphite, and laboratory salvage. Everything but the kitchen sink, that is, and some of it “wet,” in semiliquid form, which Riedy asked the Ulba technicians to dry. “But it came back not32 in powder form,” the Cockburns report, “as they had expected, but caked into hard lumps. Now the workers on the hood line had to spend hours breaking it into small pieces before they could pack it up.”

  While the canning went on at the Ulba plant, Bill Perry was working with Kazakhstan’s defense minister, Sagadat Nurmagambetov,33 to further the country’s nuclear disarmament in other realms. In an exchange of messages with the secretary of defense on 13 October, Nurmagambetov reported nuclear warheads and SS-18 ICBMs formerly based in Kazakhstan being moved to Russia. Missile silos and launch-control centers would soon be closed down, he added, with destruction scheduled to begin before the end of the year.

  During the same period, Ukraine as well moved toward compliance; on 16 November the Ukrainian parliament voted34 301 to 8 to endorse Ukraine’s accession to the NPT. The Ukrainians had been impressed by the implicit threat of a Russian preemptive first strike in the event of a military conflict, a threat Russia had emphasized, wrote the international relations specialist William Martel, “when it pledged35 not to attack signatories of the NPT.” So Ukraine came to recognize that its nuclear arsenal was more a danger than a shield, capable of drawing down the lightning.

  On their one day a week out of the canning room, Riedy’s chemists and engineers took up humanitarian work. Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary described it at a press conference afterward:

  The team, I want to tell you,36 worked ten to twelve hours every day, six days a week. On the rare seventh day when they were off, their colleagues working there at the site simply took them sightseeing around the area. The USA team asked, “Is there anyone nearby who needs some assistance?” They were told about the orphanages and a pension home.… From that one question the team on the ground adopted an orphanage and later decided on their own that they would like to collect funds so that the youngsters living in two orphanages there would receive milk and other food and clothing for the cold winter. They then called back to the States, discussed with their colleagues both at Martin Marietta and at the Defense Department and in the Department of Energy the further need for other equipment to get citizens through the winter. That phone call led to a follow-on of the $1,800 that the team on the ground put together for the youngsters in the orphanage, and then the delivery of some 30,000 pounds of equipment that went in with the transport plane that brought out the material.

  That November, the Republican Party won a landslide victory in the Clinton midterm elections, the first Republican legislative majority in forty years. Democrats lost fifty-four seats in the House of Representatives. Newt Gingrich, the new House speaker, announced his Contract with America. The new crowd of representatives brought a highly parochial perspective to government, Christian Alfonsi noted:

  Many of the new Republicans37 on Capitol Hill were young enough to have avoided Vietnam entirely; and most of those who had not been young enough had received deferments. Never before had the American people elected a congressional majority so few of whose members had served in the military. Perhaps the most striking attribute of the new House membership, though, was its startling lack of familiarity with the world outside America’s borders. Fully a third of the new Republican House members had never set foot outside the United States. In the main, many of them considered that a good thing; or if not, then certainly not a deficiency to be rectified. The deep suspicion of the UN reflected in the Contract with America was an accura
te reflection of these individuals’ deep distrust of the foreign, in all senses of that term.

  Gingrich, no international sophisticate himself, was sufficiently concerned about his colleagues’ parochialism that he considered “putting together an orientation38 program,” Alfonsi added. “When the possibility of discussing foreign policy with the staff of the Clinton White House was raised in caucus, the House Republicans angrily kyboshed the very notion.”

  The Sapphire team finished recanning the Kazakh HEU around 18 November 1994, six days before Thanksgiving that year. Criticality is an issue with HEU; too much HEU in any one place can result in a massively explosive and radioactively deadly chain reaction. The 1,050 Ulba cans had yielded 1,299 smaller, IAEA-approved cans of material. Acquiring it cost the United States between ten million and thirty million dollars (the actual amount is classified) and a warehouse of goods: eight police cars, five minivans, eight pickup trucks, and four buses as well as cameras, computers, printers, scanners, software, photocopiers, and medical supplies.39 The cans were loaded into 447 special fifty-five-gallon drums for secure transport and planes were summoned from America.

  Five C-5s left Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, on the Sunday of Thanksgiving week, but blizzard conditions forced them to turn back. A second group of four C-5s tried again on Monday. This time three were diverted and one made it through. The lone C-5, braving the icy, wash-boarded nine-thousand-foot runway, landed at four a.m. on 22 November. It happened to be the plane that carried the thirty thousand pounds of supplies that Tennesseans had donated for the Ust-Kamenogorsk orphanages, which may have been what inspired its crew to fight past the sleet and snow that had forced the other crews to divert.

  Working with local authorities, a Sapphire military liaison had traced out a truck route from the Ulba plant to the airport. With the arrival of the first and so far the only aircraft, Kazakh security forces now took up positions lining the route that the truckloads of barreled HEU would follow. The crew unloaded the orphanage supplies as it waited for the delivery. At the plant, the shipment, too much even for a Galaxy, was sorted into two allotments. Twelve trucks, heavily guarded, delivered the first allotment to the airport by midmorning and a forklift loaded the barrels into the big aircraft’s capacious hold, its three loadmasters strapping down the multimillion-dollar cargo.

  The runway appeared impassible, thick with ice and snow. But heroic solutions to impossible problems were part of the Soviet heritage, and a large, battered truck now rolled onto the runway with an aircraft jet engine bolted onto its bed beside a tank of fuel. A team fired up the engine and it screamed to life. “The joke was on40 the Americans,” the Cockburns reported, “because within seconds the roaring jet exhaust began to blast away the thick layer of ice. Massive chunks flew through the air. The airmen laughed at this ‘brute force deicing,’ but it was working.” The Galaxy, six stories high, needed deicing as well. For that the Kazakhs ordered up an Ust-Kamenogorsk fire truck with high-pressure pumps that hosed deicing fluid over the wings and tail. By then, alerted to the landing of a second C-5, the only other plane that got through, the second convoy set out from the Ulba plant with the remainder of the barreled HEU.

  The first C-5 departed while the second was loading; they could coordinate by radio across the twenty-hour flight back to Dover, sustained by five aerial refuelings. The last of the Sapphire team departed on the second plane. Colonel Mike Foster, in command of the mission, recalled afterward that he and his crew “were sitting there in the cockpit41 writing Tom Clancy novels in our heads about what would happen if we had to go down.” From Dover, four three-truck convoys delivered the HEU to Oak Ridge to be blended down for reactor fuel.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, on 7 December 1994, the major nuclear powers meeting together in Budapest signed the Memorandum on Security Guarantees42 for Kazakhstan, guaranteeing its independence and territorial integrity and pledging conventional and nuclear nonaggression. The United States, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine exchanged instruments43 of START I ratification at the same conference; Ukraine deposited its instrument of accession to the NPT as well. In February 1995, China also weighed in44 with security assurances for Kazakhstan. The new nation officially announced that it was free of nuclear weapons in May 1995.

  “Under the Cooperative Threat Reduction program,”45 Bill Perry summarized in Foreign Affairs the following year, “the United States has helped Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan remove over 4,000 nuclear warheads from deployment and dismantle more than 800 bombers and ballistic missile launchers.… All nuclear weapons were removed from Kazakhstan last year, and by the end of 1996 Belarus will be rid of nuclear weapons. Nunn-Lugar funds also help the former Soviet nuclear states secure the weapons and materials to keep them from finding their way into the global marketplace.”

  In January 1996, Perry would recall, “I joined my Russian46 and Ukrainian counterparts in personally demolishing an SS-19 silo at the Pervomaysk missile complex in Ukraine. Pervomaysk was the crown jewel of the former Soviet ICBM system, housing 700 nuclear warheads aimed at targets in the United States. By June the missile field was a sunflower field (the flowers are a cash crop in Ukraine) and Ukraine had become nuclear-weapons-free.”

  For Sig Hecker, removing the weapons from Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan was “the single most important accomplishment47 of the 1990s.”

  NINE LEAVING THE LAAGER

  NOT ONLY FORMER Soviet states found it prudent to disarm as the Cold War came to an end; so also did states on the periphery of the long conflict. Brazil and Argentina abandoned their arms race well short of building any actual bombs. France and China belatedly signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; China’s strategic arsenal was minimal in any case, while France eventually stopped testing bombs and reduced its nuclear stockpile by half. The most notable of the converts was South Africa, the only nation in the world with an indigenously produced nuclear arsenal that has voluntarily disarmed.

  In June 1944, in the midst of the Second World War, when only the United States and Britain were yet fully committed to the development of nuclear weapons, the two allies agreed to set up an organization called the Combined Development Trust for the ambitious purpose of acquiring and controlling all known world resources of uranium and thorium ore.* At that time, Winston Churchill asked the South African prime minister, Jan Smuts, to conduct a survey of his country’s uranium-ore resources. They proved to be substantial at low concentrations, and South Africa became the primary supplier of uranium for American and British weapons; the two allies paid $450 million for forty thousand tons of South African uranium-oxide concentrate1 in the early years of the Cold War, when the Afrikaner-dominated nation was installing the official form of racial segregation known as apartheid. “The secret income flows2 were a windfall for the South African mining industry,” wrote the South African economist David Fig. “They helped to resolve the infrastructural bottlenecks in transport and steel production which plagued the country after the war, and the resulting boom served to stabilize and consolidate the apartheid government.” The United States also trained a generation of South African nuclear physicists, chemists, and other specialists in the new technology of nuclear energy.

  Under the Eisenhower administration’s Atoms for Peace program, the United States and South Africa in July 1957 signed a fifty-year agreement for nuclear collaboration. Since South Africa ranked only eighty-fifth in the world in recoverable oil reserves but fourth in uranium, it committed itself to nuclear-power development, and in 1961 the U.S. licensed the export to its primary uranium supplier of an Allis-Chalmers swimming-pool-type twenty-megawatt research reactor fueled with four kilograms of highly enriched uranium;3 the South Africans christened it Safari-1.

  The world began to isolate South Africa in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960, when a large but peaceful demonstration against the South African pass laws, which limited the movements of non-whites, came to bloodshed after the Sharpeville pol
ice fired into the crowd to disperse it. Sixty-nine people were killed, including women and children—many shot in the back—and more than 180 injured. The U.N. Security Council condemned the massacre, and the following year Britain forced South Africa out of the British Commonwealth. Successive U.S. administrations continued to cooperate with South Africa in nuclear-energy development, anti-Communism trumping antiracism, but schemed to avoid media coverage. Thus a U.S. National Security Council staff member wrote President Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy on 17 August 1964 proposing to keep quiet a shipment of Safari-1 reactor fuel until after the November 1964 presidential election:

  South Africa has imported4 an Allis-Chalmers experimental reactor which is due to go critical this winter.… A private US supplier will ship the fuel in the next several months. These events will be publicized in South Africa, which will unquestionably kick up a nice propaganda storm elsewhere about US nuclear cooperation with South Africa.… I propose to ask AEC to insure, quietly, that there is no fuel shipment or other cause for publicity until December.

  Bundy approved the proposal.

  South Africa began working secretly on uranium enrichment in the early 1960s5 and demonstrated an indigenous uranium-enrichment technology at laboratory scale in 1967.6 The aerodynamic technology involved blowing a mixture of gaseous uranium hexafluoride and hydrogen at high velocity through a tapered vortex tube to separate higher-U235 fractions from natural uranium by centrifugal force—in effect, a stationary centrifuge. Construction of a pilot-scale enrichment plant using vortex-tube technology began in 19697 at a site called Pelindaba, fourteen miles west of Pretoria. Since vortex-tube technology was capable of enriching uranium to weapons grade, South Africa’s technical preparation for secretly developing nuclear explosives can be dated from that time.