Scientists and engineers from the United States, Russia, and Kazakhstan overcame deep-rooted suspicions in their governments to find technical solutions to the plutonium threat at Degelen Mountain. The operation was based almost entirely on ad-hoc agreements struck at a lower level, and was carried to a conclusion without elaborate, negotiated state-to-state agreements of the kind used for arms control during the Cold War. Each country played a crucial role.
The operation took 17 years to complete, a period in history that saw the rise of al-Qaeda and its nuclear ambitions, the 9/11 attacks, and spanned three different US administrations, the latter two of which proclaimed nuclear terrorism the greatest threat to US security and spent billions of dollars to prevent it. Serious logistical difficulties were just one reason the Semipalatinsk operation took so long. Another was lingering mistrust, inertia and excessive secrecy. Until prodded by the scientists, the governments had done very little about the plutonium abandoned at the test site.
The informal approach was effective, but slow, and it left some issues unresolved or partly unexplored. For example, although Kazakhstan signed the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in 1993 and had a legal obligation to declare all the fissile material on its territory, the three countries overseeing the operation decided not to formally notify or involve the International Atomic Energy Agency. Each country felt it had good reasons for excluding the IAEA. They shared a concern that information leaks from the agency would compromise the secrecy of the operation. Now, the IAEA and Kazakhstan face long-term uncertainties about whether the material can be safely left in its current form forever, or whether it may pose a risk that someone might seek to recover it someday, or that it could cause environmental contamination beyond the radiation already polluting some portions of Semipalatinsk.
This paper begins with a narrative reconstruction of the threat reduction work at Semipalatinsk. It is based on interviews with US, Russian, and Kazakh scientists and officials — conducted in the United States and Kazakhstan — and is supported by documents provided to the authors. It concludes with observations about the lessons for future efforts to reduce and ultimately eliminate the threat posed by nuclear weapons and the essential nuclear materials needed to construct them.
A PDF of the full report is available here:
- Plutonium Mountain-Web.pdf (1.8 MB PDF)
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