There's one fear that keeps leaders from across the globe awake at night: The prospect that somehow, somewhere, criminals or terrorists are getting their hands on the essential ingredients of a nuclear weapon. At the nuclear summit in South Korea last month, policymakers gathered to prevent that nightmare from becoming a reality by launching an initiative to secure all vulnerable nuclear stockpiles within four years. But despite the fanfare surrounding the summit, one of the greatest recent successes in this initiative has thus far remained buried -- both literally and figuratively.
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In an extraordinary feat of engineering and
international cooperation, U.S., Russian,
and Kazakh scientists, engineers, and miners recently secured enough fissile material for a dozen nuclear
weapons that had been left behind vulnerable
to theft in tunnels formerly used by
the Soviet Union for underground nuclear
weapons tests in Kazakhstan.
The formerly secret mission was launched in 2005
at the encouragement of an intrepid U.S.
weapons expert, after it was discovered that metal scavengers had penetrated the
abandoned tunnels. The project received attention
from the highest levels of government -- both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama monitored its progress.
It is an example of the quiet but
essential international cooperation that is
urgently needed to prevent terrorists from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.
How this extraordinary, seven-year effort came
to pass deserves the long version of the
story. From 1961 to 1989, the Soviet Union conducted hundreds of nuclear tests and experiments at a remote and
forbidding site called Degelen Mountain. Located
within Kazakhstan's Semipalatinsk test range, the site is about the size of New
Jersey and located some 300 miles east of
Astana, the second
coldest capital city in the world.
It was chosen by the Soviets precisely because it is so desolate: Temperatures
soar to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in
the summer and plunge to -40 degrees in the winter. Blizzard conditions are common -- remarkably, they sometimes make
the test site more accessible by filling
in potholed roads, which have gone unrepaired since the Soviet era, with ice
and snow.
The Soviets conducted
over 450 nuclear detonations at Semipalatinsk, mostly in tunnels hundreds of
yards long, buried deep below ground. Roughly 40 of the tests were small
explosions with very low nuclear yields,
so the fissile material -- highly enriched uranium or plutonium -- was neither consumed by the blasts nor
infused into the molten rock created by
them. Instead, according to one senior Obama administration official, hundreds of pounds of weapons-grade fissile
material was "readily recoverable" in
the tunnels. This did not matter much so
long as the KGB, the USSR's premier internal security agency, held an iron grip
on the Soviet Union, with special
attention paid to remote and sensitive nuclear sites like Semipalatinsk. But when the Soviet Union crumbled into
15 independent countries in 1991, all that changed.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
Kazakhstan gained its independence. But
it came with a catch: Kazakh officials were now responsible for an environmental
catastrophe, as well as a proliferation risk, at the former Soviet test
site.
Indeed,
the world did move quickly -- but sadly, insufficiently -- to contain this
risk. Working under Cooperative Threat Reduction programs, which were launched by President George H.W.
Bush's administration, to dismantle the former Soviet nuclear establishment in the 1990s, U.S. engineers helped to
barricade 181 tunnels and demolish their
entrances to prevent them from ever again being
used for nuclear testing -- but, in a pre-9/11 world -- they paid little attention to the possibility of fissile
material left in the testing tunnels.
The extreme weather conditions and the passage
of time eventually cracked and eroded the material sealing the testing tunnels. By 2004, scavengers looking for scrap
metal to sell had broken into some of
them. Reports of the looting alarmed U.S. officials, who feared that fissile material could be at risk. The U.S.
government encouraged and aided the Kazakh
government to improve security at the
site until more permanent measures could be implemented. Astana declared an exclusion zone, where a ban on
trespassing was strictly enforced, and mounted patrols to guard the tunnels and
the surrounding area.
Next, nuclear weapons scientists who once sat on
opposite sides of the Iron Curtain
determined how best to secure the material. They
decided to fill the test chambers with a specialized grout, which bonds chemically with fissile material to
render it useless for weaponization. In
some tunnels, it would be necessary to mine horizontally to reach the test chamber where the nuclear experiments
took place.
It was
hazardous work: The old tunnels were partially collapsed and dangerous to enter. At other sites, the cement
could be pumped from above after drilling
into the test chambers. In every case, once the work was done, removing the cement would require a major mining
operation that required specialized equipment and was beyond the capability of scavengers or would-be terrorists.
Because fissile material was involved, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was also informed of the
project.
The United States, working with Kazakhstan and
Russia, spent $150 million on the project
-- a tiny amount of money given the threat posed by the material required for one nuclear weapon falling
into the hands of criminals or
terrorists, let alone enough material for a dozen weapons.
But the
hard work to secure the site couldn't have been accomplished without America's
local Kazakh partners. Four 10-man Kazakh crews worked year round for seven
years to dig out, drill into, and ultimately fill the former nuclear test chambers with
the special cement. They lived in modified 40-foot
cargo containers and braved extreme
conditions. One frigid day on the steppe, a work crew had to take a blow torch to the side of their frozen
water tank truck just to melt a supply of
drinking water. The Kazakh work crews were guided
by Russian nuclear scientists and U.S. experts from the Pentagon's Defense
Threat Reduction Agency and the Los Alamos
National Laboratory, who traveled to the
site every four to six weeks, also braving difficult conditions.
U.S. assistance also went to help the Kazakh government enforce its exclusion zone, pay for fences, patrol vehicles, aerial surveillance drones, and even seismic sensors disguised as rocks to alert security forces to the presence of an intruder. These measures have worked. No scavenger activity has been observed at the site since 2009.
Related initiatives to secure other types of nuclear material are ongoing around the world -- and more will be required. The work at Degelen Mountain is a model of how the international community, and Republican and Democratic administrations alike, is cooperating to reduce the nuclear threat. The world is safer for this effort, and it deserves to be recognized.
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