The U.S. C-5 Galaxy aircraft is loaded with drums of the highly enriched uranium (HEU) in November, 1994.Andy Weber/Supplied
The secret 1994 U.S. mission to extract highly enriched uranium from post-Soviet Kazakhstan was not without problems.
An accidental fire threatened American workers with toxic fumes from carcinogenic beryllium. Sleet and black ice in the foothills of the Altai Mountains raised the risk of catastrophe as the workers moved material that could have been fashioned into a deadly array of nuclear weapons. The local airport did not have equipment to de-ice the six-storey-high military transport plane sent to fly the material safely out of the country.
And the small team of workers sent to Kazakhstan had reason to complain about their accommodations at the Irtysh, “one of those old crappy Soviet hotels,” former U.S. diplomat Andy Weber recalled.
Andy Weber and the head of security for the Ulba Metallurgical Plant stand near the trucks loaded with the HEU.Andy Weber/Supplied
The single-bed rooms did not scream luxury. Dinner often consisted of what Mr. Weber called “meatless chicken.”
“Because they wouldn’t kill the chickens until they stopped laying eggs. They were these mean old hens with no meat left on them.”
The Irtysh nonetheless offered a place of relative comfort for Project Sapphire, the highly classified operation that brought a trove of poorly guarded nuclear material to the U.S., keeping it out of the hands of Iranian scientists who had already tried to procure some of it.
And whatever unpleasantness the U.S. team experienced in Kazakhstan is utterly unlike the risks that await anyone seeking to do the same today in Iran.
The White House has considered sending troops into the country to remove its cache of near-weapon-grade uranium. But replicating 1994’s feat in a hostile country determined to hold on to material that may be stored deep underground would constitute “a huge logistical and security challenge,” said Mr. Weber, who is now a senior fellow with the Council on Strategic Risks.
“I just don’t think it’s something we should risk.”
Nonetheless, the operation carried out three decades ago in a distant corner of Kazakhstan echoes loudly in the minds of American policymakers as they consider the estimated 440 kilograms of enriched uranium that remains in Iran after weeks of intense bombing.
Trucks loaded with HEU cross the tarmac to meet the waiting U.S. aircraft.Andy Weber/Supplied
The success of Project Sapphire bolstered the confidence of U.S. political leadership and military planners, who proved that a global nuclear menace could be neutralized by packing it up, loading it onto C-5 transport aircraft and winging it 9,900 kilometres to the safety of American soil.
“The big lesson is we can solve the problem if we can move that material out of the country,” Mr. Weber said. Had Tehran managed to get that material in the early 1990s, they would already have “a nuclear arsenal.”
But the history of Project Sapphire illustrates the immense difficulty of such an operation, even in a country whose leadership had given Washington its full support.
Mr. Weber was in his early 30s when he arrived in Almaty − Kazakhstan’s largest city and still its capital then − in mid-1993 as a U.S. diplomat charged with political and military affairs. He moved into a chalet-style home in the mountains equipped with a sauna and a 50-litre metal container in the kitchen filled with honey. A man named Slava fixed his car and helped him navigate a country that had asserted its independence from Moscow only a year and a half earlier.
It was Slava who, early in Mr. Weber’s post, told him there was someone he should meet, introducing him to the director of a factory in the country’s northeast.
The director said he had some uranium he wanted to sell to the U.S. government but provided few details. It took months for Mr. Weber to gain his confidence. At one point, he joined a moose hunting trip to build trust with the man.
One of the canisters found at Ulba Metallurgical Plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk holding highly enriched uranium.Andy Weber/Supplied
Months later, he was handed a note:
U235
90 per cent
600 kilos
It was enough uranium to fashion two dozen nuclear bombs, the remains of a failed Soviet attempt to design a small attack submarine − the uranium intended to be the submersible’s fuel.
The revelation, quickly reported back to Washington, D.C., prompted a number of questions.
Was this real?
And if it was, what could be done to keep the uranium out of the hands of people who could use it for harm?
The worry was “somebody else would get it before we could ship it out,” said Matthew Bunn, who at the time was on the staff of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Andy Weber during the March, 1994, visit to the Ulba Metallurgical Plant.Andy Weber/Supplied
After Mr. Weber secured an invitation to assess the material, he arrived at the sprawling grounds of the Ulba Metallurgical Plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk. He was brought to the door of a warehouse secured with an ancient padlock and guarded by a single woman with a pistol.
“She was in a uniform with one of those fur hats and the medallion in front,” Mr. Weber recalled.
Inside, stainless steel containers of different sizes and shapes were arrayed on a platform. They were positioned “in what was called a critically safe array. Because you couldn’t have too much in proximity or it could cause a chain reaction,” Mr. Weber said.
Worse, some were already addressed to Tehran, the result of a failed attempt by the Islamic regime to purchase some of the goods through middlemen.
Samples confirmed that the material was as described.
But the “uranium was oxidizing, which means it was becoming unstable,” Jeffrey Starr, who was then in charge of threat reduction policy at the Pentagon, told the At the Brink podcast.
”We’d have to take it out of those Soviet containers and put it into American containers, which was going to be a major operation.”
Before any of that could happen, though, a deal needed to be struck. The operation was kept a closely guarded secret in the U.S. to avoid alerting anyone else to the presence of the material.
Former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in Almaty in July, 1998. Nazarbayev, who served as the first president of Kazakhstan for almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, gave Project Sapphire his blessing.Shamil Zhunatov/Reuters
But it was done with the full knowledge and blessing of Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s then-president, who also sought and received confirmation from Boris Yeltsin that the Russian President would not interfere. Post-Soviet Russia had its own vast stocks of plutonium and highly enriched uranium to deal with, many of them also poorly guarded.
The U.S. agreed to buy the material for US$3-million. Another US$27-million was sent in the form of aid, including money to equip a hospital so it could better help Kazakhstanis sickened by nuclear testing.
Kazakhstan, meanwhile, offered to provide security for the 31-person American team that transferred the material to hundreds of special 55-gallon barrels, each fitted with a tough styrofoam-like interior to keep the uranium safe for transport.
The job took weeks. It was dangerous work. Some of the uranium had to be baked to remove moisture, at one point sparking a fire.
“A friend of mine had to pee in a bottle for weeks after that to assess his level of contamination with beryllium,” said Mr. Bunn, who is now a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.
By the time the packing was done, winter was nigh and U.S. military planners − who had little access to trustworthy weather information in the region − were skittish.
Finally, the extraction was set in motion in the early hours of Nov. 18, 1994, as winter descended. Barrels of material were driven to the airport at 3 a.m. on roads coated in black ice. Before the loaded plane could take off, the runway had to be cleared of snow − the locals blasted it dry with a jet engine attached to a truck − and the enormous military transport plane had to be de-iced. When the 20-metre tail of the C-5 Galaxy proved too tall for airport equipment, a firetruck was ordered in to reach high enough.
It worked. The material was flown non-stop to the U.S. In more than 30 years, neither Kazakhstan nor Iran has built a nuclear bomb.
Nonetheless, Tehran now oversees “a very significant quantity of highly enriched uranium that’s near weapons-grade. And I do believe that getting it out should be the highest priority,” Mr. Weber said.
But he finds it hard to imagine doing so through a military incursion into a country that is not co-operating – and, indeed, is willing to kill to protect its assets.
“You would need thousands, maybe 10,000 or more boots on the ground to protect the site inside Iran from drone attacks or a ground assault,” he said. “It would be like a forward operating base.”
Better, he said, to strike some sort of nuclear deal as the Obama administration did in 2015 with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal three years later.
Mr. Bunn agrees.
The war with Iran, now on pause, “is not only illegal under international law, but also unnecessary,” he said. “It could have been avoided had Donald Trump and his team done a better job of negotiating.”
A satellite image shows the Iranian Shahid Ahmadi Roshan Nuclear Facility, the country's main uranium enrichment site, on March 7. The White House has considered sending troops into Iran to remove its cache of near-weapon-grade uranium.VANTOR/Reuters
That’s not to say it is impossible to imagine a military operation to rid Iran of its enriched uranium. The country’s materials are likely stored underground, in tunnels almost certainly booby-trapped, although none of those factors present impossible barriers to special forces teams that have trained for exactly such scenarios.
The material would also not need to be removed − it could simply be destroyed.
Nonetheless, even if armed teams were to eliminate every gram of enriched uranium from Iran, too much nuclear capability would remain, Mr. Bunn said.
“This is a program that’s been going on for decades, involving hundreds and hundreds of people,” he said. “You just can’t bomb their knowledge away.”