Kazakhstan: transformation of the largest known WMD stockpile in history
By Prof. Shimon Silman, RYAL Institute and Touro College
The story of Kazakhstan’s Swords into Plowshares conversion is one of the most fascinating and one of the least known of any country. Most fascinating because, well…just read on. And least known because much of it was done in secret, some of it was only recently completed and, besides, who ever heard of Kazakhstan? Before the fall of communism it was all just “the Soviet Union” or just plain “Russia” and it was all behind “the Iron Curtain.” In those days the only thing I knew about Kazakhstan was that it was the region where Rabbi Levi Yitzchok, the Rebbe MH”M’s father, was sent into exile.
When the Republic of Kazakhstan declared independence from the Soviet Union on December 16, 1991, its leaders found themselves in possession of 1,040 nuclear warheads, seven heavy bombers, and hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles and other nuclear weapons-related equipment. This was all in addition to a lot of chemical and biological weapons. Kazakhstan now held one of the largest and most diverse systems for producing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in history.
Nuclear materials and sensitive equipment remained strewn across the massive Semipalatinsk nuclear
weapons test site, where the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear weapons test and followed with 455
more. Just to the east, a metallurgy facility in the town of Ust-Kamenogorsk held enough highly enriched uranium to make about 24 nuclear weapons. Further west, the city of Stepnogorsk housed an industrial-scale facility ready to produce and weaponize several hundred metric tons of anthrax and other biological agents if war broke out between the Soviet Union and the United States. At a nuclear reactor along the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan now possessed one of the largest stocks of weapons-usable plutonium and highly enriched uranium in the world—enough to produce around 775 nuclear weapons. Still other sites held capabilities needed for developing nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
But now, the scientists and experts with experience relevant to running the WMD programs went unpaid or were under-employed. Many left the country altogether.
In this article we will discuss the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that were present in Kazakhstan and how they dealt with them.
The Kazakhstanis took several approaches to nuclear security efforts that its Soviet-era legacy required. In the 1990’s, it dismantled a large-scale biological weapons program. Today, it is participating in comprehensive efforts to bolster security of biological materials, gainfully employ those with dual-use knowledge in the biological sciences and expand public health capacities. This was accomplished by the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) discussed elsewhere (see my book Scientific Thought in Messianic Times, Chapter III), and other institutions. Finally, Kazakhstan now takes deliberate steps to leverage its WMD experiences to promote nonproliferation and arms control among the international community.
Not long after independence, Kazakhstan chose to give up entirely all the nuclear weapons and related components it had inherited. President Nazarbayev decided in 1992 to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and agreed that Kazakhstan would live up to its part of the nuclear commitments made between the United States and the Soviet Union. After multiple engagements with U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, on May 19 he wrote to President Bush to confirm, “Kazakhstan guarantees the carrying out of the elimination of all kinds of nuclear weapons, including strategic offensive weapons, located on its territory, over a period of seven years in accordance with the START treaty.” By April 1995, Kazakhstan had completed the process of sending all of its more than 1,400 nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and other nuclear weapons-related equipment back to Russia and finished dismantling seven heavy bombers that remained in its territory by the following year. One decade later, Kazakhstan joined its neighbors in creating a nuclear weapons-free zone for Central Asia.
PROJECT SAPPHIRE
Project Sapphire, a mission to remove extremely dangerous nuclear materials from Kazakhstan, was
conducted quietly in 1994. In late 1993, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kazakhstan were approached by individuals offering to sell about 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium to the U.S. government… [till today it is unknown who these individuals were]. By March 1994, the government of Kazakhstan permitted U.S. experts to visit the Ulba Metallurgical Plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk in eastern Kazakhstan, where the uranium was then stored, in order to collect samples.
On-site analysis and later testing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee confirmed what
Kazakhstani sources had indicated: the uranium was enriched to a weapons grade, with around 90%
uranium-235 present in all of the samples. After months of little action, confirmation by the U.S. experts
that the uranium was highly enriched, that it was in sufficient quantity for dozens of nuclear bombs, and that it was weakly secured, triggered an agreement to work with Kazakhstan on solutions. A small team of representatives from various U.S. agencies was created to conduct this work while keeping it secret.
The U.S. team assigned to explore solutions considered three main options: 1) doing nothing, 2) securing the materials in place and upgrading protection, control, and accounting capabilities at the Ulba plant, and 3) removing it. According to one account of the project: “The team initially considered keeping the material where it was, only with tighter security. This option was quickly rejected because of the huge investment required to beef up security at Ulba. This step would also have required routine infusions of upkeep money because the Kazakhs simply could not afford to pay the high price for it. Besides, there would always be some [US] uncertainty about how secure it really was.”
Instead, Nazarbayev and U.S. President Bill Clinton authorized a plan to secretly airlift the material to the Oak Ridge Y-12 plant for down blending (“down blending” is the opposite of enrichment, making the nuclear material suitable for use in commercial nuclear fuel). The technical experts took up the challenge and began developing operational details while others handled bureaucratic, legal, and political details. In what would become a common issue across the history of WMD removal operations, one major challenge was that the highly enriched uranium was not stored in containers or by methods that were compliant with IAEA requirements or international shipping standards. Those involved also wrestled with the question of whether or not to speak with officials in Moscow, given that the nuclear materials were originally Soviet-owned. Another challenge was resistance in Tennessee to importing Kazakhstan’s nuclear materials. The latter two challenges required escalation to high-level political leadership, and U.S. Vice President Al Gore assisted with overcoming both.
Another question was how to pay for the operation. Then-Senators Richard Lugar and Sam Nunn sponsored the legislation that formed the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program in 1991 with the goal of addressing WMD threats emanating from the breakup of the Soviet Union. The program’s designers and leaders originally envisioned its work would focus mostly on ridding the region of nuclear weapons, components, and infrastructure, and in doing so contribute to implementing bilateral U.S.-Soviet agreements to reduce nuclear arsenals from their Cold War heights. Though it would take on a very different character, Project Sapphire fit within the legal limits of CTR, and the interagency team agreed that it was the most appropriate option for the majority of U.S. costs and financial contributions related to the operation.
Fortunately, the United States and Kazakhstan had already finalized the general legal agreement to allow bilateral CTR work during Vice President Al Gore’s visit to Almaty in December 1993, just months before U.S. experts confirmed the extent of the risk inherent in the highly enriched uranium housed at the Ulba site.
Once the operation began in October 1994, the removal process took about one month on the ground.
Weather, minimal pre-trip training for some of its personnel, and poor secure communications capabilities were among the challenges encountered during the operation. Keeping an accurate inventory, repackaging, and properly labeling the nuclear materials required meticulous work, during which the team found several canisters of highly enriched uranium not included in the original inventory. Kazakhstani and U.S. officials navigated these and other issues without compromising the project’s success.
Project Sapphire became an early and high-payoff experiment. It proved that physically removing dangerous materials for disposal in a safe location could be a viable WMD threat reduction option. The generally good working relationship with Kazakhstan, which would continue to strengthen over time, proved the benefits of conducting this type of sensitive threat-mitigation work quietly and cooperatively among countries.
The work of Project Sapphire became the CTR program’s first major nuclear materials security effort and provided a public communications success story for Kazakhstan and the United States.
Just a few years after independence, Kazakhstan had a tangible and important international security success under its belt. Ambassadors from both countries and three U.S. cabinet secretaries held a press conference on November 24, 1994, one day after the completion of the main project and just before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Secretary of Defense William Perry succinctly summarized: “Both the United States and Kazakhstan had serious concerns about the security of the material. Now it is secure. There is no better example of how the Nunn/Lugar program can help eliminate the national security threat before it arises.”
THE DEGELEN MOUNTAIN PROJECT: SECRET SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES
Quiet trilateral cooperation from 1996 to 2012 among the United States, Kazakhstan, and Russia enhanced security and surveillance and sealed off boreholes, tunnels, and other infrastructure previously used by the Soviets for nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk nuclear weapons test site. This effort became known as the Degelen Mountain project, named after one area of the site where many underground tests were conducted. “Between 1991 and 2012, scavengers looking for valuable scrap metal and equipment from the former Soviet test site came within yards of the unguarded fissile material.” Over more than 16 years, the three countries worked together to prevent further access to this dangerous material.
In the early 1990’s, when focus regarding the newly independent Kazakhstan tended to be directed at removing its legacy Soviet nuclear weapons and related heavy military equipment under the Nunn-Lugar CTR program, Kazakhstani and U.S. leaders used this program as a mechanism for experts from both countries to assess conditions at the Degelen site and begin the process of sealing its tunnels and access points. Along with Project Sapphire, this showed the flexibility of the CTR program, which was being used to address a new type WMD risk that did not involve weapons themselves. It also provided further evidence that the program could facilitate quick action, as the first tunnel was sealed less than six months after the work agreement was settled.
Kazakhstan’s leaders even agreed to use the site for data collection regarding underground explosions as an early contribution to the new Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) of 1996. Kazakhstan allowed three massive conventional explosions within its test tunnels, which offered a unique opportunity for monitoring stations around the world to gather data on the characteristics of conventional underground detonations. These could be compared to data from past U.S. and Russian underground nuclear tests, and to natural events such as earthquakes, to improve the world’s ability to characterize future nuclear tests.
Within a few years, however, a small group of American scientists became alarmed that weapons-usable
materials may still be recoverable if the tunnels were broken into, and that additional, unsecured materials may be located in then unknown locations at the site. By the end of the 1990’s and the beginning of the new century, quiet dialogue and survey work among U.S., Kazakhstani, and Russian experts began to raise new details about Soviet-era experiments. Throughout this decade, scavengers continued to extract metal and equipment parts, and herders continued to roam the areas around the former nuclear test site looking for places for their flocks to graze.
The tri-national experts decided to secure most of the site’s nuclear materials rather than removing them, and provided much improved security and surveillance around the site. One perpetual obstacle to removing the nuclear materials was Russian suspicion that too much U.S. handling of the materials and knowledge gained about their composition could be used to learn classified details of Russia’s nuclear weapons program. Removal operations could also be costlier, and risked igniting ever-present fears regarding the area’s environmental contamination.
The full scale of the Degelen project was only revealed to the public by Presidents Obama, Nazarbayev, and Medvedev at the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul. Kazakhstan, Russia, and the United States had agreed that the operations conducted in the 2000’s should remain secret—including from the IAEA (there was some IAEA involvement though, mostly to provide assistance to the government of Kazakhstan in assessing potential radiological contamination risks)—in order to keep the nuclear materials secure. Informing the public about the ongoing operation would amount to showing terrorists or black marketeers where they could obtain usable nuclear materials.
PORT AKTAU: YOU THINK IT’S EASY TO MOVE?
Along the Caspian Sea, in late 1991, the newly-independent Kazakhstan became the owner of a BN-350 fast breeder reactor. The Soviet Union began operating the reactor in 1974 to supply electricity, desalinate water, and produce plutonium for its nuclear weapons.
The site, in a port town now called Aktau, held 10 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and 3 metric tons of weapons-usable plutonium, one of the largest stockpiles of the latter anywhere in the world.
This was enough material to make 775 nuclear weapons and was held at a site accessible by boat from Iran, Dagestan, and other areas of concern. Kazakhstan, working with the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration and National Labs, the United Kingdom, the IAEA and other partners, began in 1997 to move the dangerous nuclear materials from Aktau to secure, long-term storage.
The first step was to consolidate the highly enriched uranium and plutonium into large casks made of steel and concrete. The size and weight of these 61 casks, which weighed 100 tons each, would make it extremely difficult for unauthorized actors to move or access the materials. Until they were to be moved, the casks stood on a temporary concrete pad that was well secured and monitored. Later, Kazakhstan transported the material across 1,860 miles, in part by train and in part by trucks. Kazakhstani and U.S. experts conducted vulnerability studies to mitigate the risks of this movement, which took 12 shipments over the course of one year.
As with Project Sapphire, weather was a challenge at times. At one point, extreme flooding near the Kurchatov Rail Transfer Site, which had to be specially constructed to move the casks from rail cars to the trucks, threatened progress.
A 1998 Philadelphia Inquirer article described this work well in its headline “The Operation will be
Complex.” Completed in November 2010, it required extensive logistical and security planning, the
procurement of communications and surveillance systems, conduct of a dry run of the transport, and IAEA monitoring throughout. It required building multiple facilities and storage sites and expanding the rail infrastructure to be used in moving the materials.
After the project’s completion, longtime National Nuclear Security Administration official Anne Harrington described other challenges encountered: “Preparing a decommissioning plan, decontaminating the primary sodium coolant, and forming the process and design for the final waste from the sodium processing operations were all major scientific challenges that required teamwork and cutting edge ideas to complete.” Kazakhstani, U.S., and international scientists and technical advisors collaborated on research projects and the development of technical solutions to overcome these types of issues.
As this project progressed over more than a decade, another successful effort focused on removing and
blending down additional highly enriched uranium left at Aktau. Between 2001 and 2005, this project
involved a partnership between Kazakhstan and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that contributes to global nonproliferation work. Aside from the material described above, Aktau held 2,900 kilograms of fuel enriched up to 26 percent that then-Vice President of NTI Laura Holgate described as “falling through the cracks’’ of the larger project.
Kazakhstan and NTI agreed to co-fund moving this uranium from Aktau to the Ulba Metallurgical Plant by rail and blending it down to an enrichment level of use only for civilian purposes. The project included upgrades to allow Ulba to securely store and convert weapons-grade nuclear materials, capacities that Kazakhstan has maintained in the hope of contributing to future global efforts to do the same. This successful example of a public-private partnership involved the IAEA and kept U.S. government agencies informed.
In Part 2 we will discuss the conversion of the bioweapons left in Kazakhstan from the Soviet era, b’ezras Hashem.
לזכות שמעון אברהם בן רחל