RISKY STASH OF URANIUM SECURED

[Susan L Gawarecki <loc@icx.net>]

RISKY STASH OF URANIUM SECURED

U.S., Russia Remove Weapons-Grade Nuclear Material From Yugoslavia



By Joby Warrick

Friday, August 23, 2002; Page A01

from The Washington Post

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51269-2002Aug22.html>



U.S. and Russian officials whisked away 100 pounds of weapons-grade

uranium

from an aging nuclear reactor in Yugoslavia yesterday in a dramatic,

military-style operation described as the first of a series of

preemptive

strikes against the threat of nuclear terrorism.



The uranium -- enough to make up to three nuclear bombs -- was spirited

out

of Belgrade's Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences before daybreak with

an

escort of Yugoslav army helicopters and 1,200 heavily armed troops. With

U.S. officials looking on, the uranium was loaded onto a plane and flown

to

Russia to be converted into a form that cannot be used in weapons.



The mission, planned in secrecy over a year, was organized to eliminate

what many weapons experts regarded as one of the world's most dangerous

nuclear repositories -- a large and unusually vulnerable stash of the

kind

of weapons-grade uranium that would be prized by the governments of

Iraq,

Iran and North Korea and terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.



The extraction was hailed by the Bush administration and

nonproliferation groups as one of the most significant actions since

Sept. 11 to prevent nuclear proliferation. It also was described as

evidence of a new level of cooperation with Russia, the original source

of the material decades ago. Moscow had previously resisted calls to

accept responsibility for Soviet-era nuclear material now stored at

dozens of facilities around the world.



"This stuff is the raw material for catastrophic terrorism," said former

Democratic senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, a longtime advocate for

safeguarding nuclear stockpiles who helped secure Yugoslav approval of

the operation. "This is exactly the kind of work that countries of the

world have to come together on."



The removal of nearly 6,000 ingots, or "slugs," of highly enriched

uranium was carried out over 17 hours by a cast of hundreds --

predominantly Yugoslav scientists and government officials with

technical support from the U.S. departments of State and Energy,

Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, or Minatom, and the United Nations'

nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. A private U.S.

group, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, provided much of the financial

backing.



Although they were aware of no specific threat, the planners said they

feared the uranium might be hijacked in transit. Yugoslav scientists

locked down the 44-year-old reactor late Wednesday as the uranium was

loaded into a truck. In the predawn hours yesterday, three trucks -- two

of them decoys -- left the facility with heavy military escorts and

headed for Belgrade's international airport. Police sealed off several

of the city's major highways for hours and positioned marksmen on

rooftops to guard against a possible attack, according to State

Department officials familiar with the operation.



At the airport, U.S. Energy Department and Minatom officials supervised

the loading of the nuclear cargo onto a Russian plane. At 8:04 a.m, the

aircraft departed for Dimitrovgrad, about 520 miles southeast of Moscow,

home to a Russian processing plant that specializes in converting

weapons-grade uranium into the variety used by commercial nuclear power

plants.



State Department officials praised the Russians for their role. Minatom

not only worked closely with its American counterparts over many months

of planning, but it also quickly agreed to accept the uranium, something

Russia had been unwilling to do previously.



For instance, Moscow offered no such help in 1994, when the Clinton

administration quietly removed 1,320 pounds of nuclear fuel from

Kazakhstan in an episode later dubbed Operation Sapphire. That uranium

was also originally supplied by the Soviet Union.



"There has been a sea change," said Janet L. Bogue, deputy assistant

secretary of state for European affairs. "The Russians were eager to get

this done. They are just as acutely aware of the risks as we are."



Minatom officials could not be reached for comment.



Russia's and Yugoslavia's willing participation also raised hopes that

other vulnerable nuclear stockpiles around the world can be dealt with

in a similar fashion, she said.



"This was a ground-breaking event," Bogue said.



The nuclear reactor at Vinca is one of nearly 350 research reactors in

58 countries that use highly enriched uranium fuel. A study last spring

by Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom described such

reactors as one of the gravest and most under-addressed proliferation

threats, because they are vulnerable to theft.



Matthew Bunn, a nuclear proliferation expert and co-author of the

report, said security at the reactors "varies widely, from excellent to

appalling.



"In some cases security is provided by a single sleepy watchman and a

chain-link fence. Yet, vulnerable nuclear material anywhere can be

stolen and made into a terrorist bomb."



Vinca's uranium stockpile was near the top of Bunn's list of most

vulnerable targets. Not only was it unusually large, but it also was of

a type that is especially easy to convert for use in weapons. The

11-inch-long ingots were also unusually accessible, stored in their

original metal shipping crates in a decaying, civilian-run institute

guarded by a handful of lightly armed security officers, according to

U.S. officials familiar with the site.



When it was built, in 1958, the Vinca reactor was envisioned as the

cornerstone of an ambitious Yugoslav program that would ultimately

produce nuclear weapons. Secret weapons research was reportedly carried

out over decades under the instructions of dictator Tito. "We must have

the atomic bomb. We must build it even if it costs us one-half of our

income for years," he told aides in 1950, according to histories of the

period.



A Yugoslav bomb never materialized, but Tito's nuclear program left

several troubling legacies in addition to the unused uranium fuel lying

around after the Vinca reactor stopped operating in 1984, said William

C. Potter, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in

Monterey, Calif.



"You still have at Vinca many of the scientists who had been involved in

this covert nuclear weapons program," Potter said. "Whatever technical

know-how is needed for a weapon, you have that in spades at Vinca."



Western governments had long worried that both the uranium and the

scientific expertise at Vinca could be misused or commandeered by rogue

elements within Yugoslav's armed forces; that concern eased only

slightly after Slobodan Milosovic's removal as Yugoslav president in

October 2000. Outside Yugoslavia, a number of foreign governments and

groups had become interested in the uranium, according to Belgrade press

accounts -- including Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who sent numerous

emissaries to Belgrade during the waning years of the Milosovic

government.



Acutely aware of the rising interest in the uranium, both Yugoslav's

newly pro-Western government and Vinca's nuclear scientists had begun

publicly expressing an interest in getting rid of it.



"By disposing of the hazardous material, which could be used to make

nuclear weapons, Vinca is no longer a potential target for possible

terrorist attempts to get hold of this fuel," a Yugoslav government

spokesman said in a prepared statement after the uranium-laden plane

departed Belgrade for Russia.



Despite more than a year of planning and negotiation, the cost to the

U.S. government was small: about $2 million used to pay for

transportation and related expenses.



But in an unusual twist, State Department negotiators turned to a

private group to provide millions of dollars needed to close the deal.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group co-founded by Nunn and

Ted Turner, the media entrepreneur from Atlanta, agreed to pledge $5

million to help Yugoslavia clean up environmental problems stemming from

the reactor's operation -- including more than two tons of radioactive

waste. Some of the money will help keep Vinca's scientists employed.



State Department officials were forced to seek outside funding because

of a congressional directive that strictly limits how nonproliferation

money can be used.



Nunn recalled that his group was approached with the funding request

last summer and given a five-day deadline to decide whether it could

provide the money. The matter was settled within a few minutes in a

three-way phone call among Nunn, Turner and Charles Curtis, president of

Nuclear Threat Initiative and a former Energy Department undersecretary.



"Ted's first question was, 'Why can't the government pay for this?' "

Nunn recalled. "I explained the situation and he readily understood. He

just said: 'Sign us up.' "



Correspondent Peter Baker in Moscow contributed to this report. 

-- 

.....................................................

Susan L. Gawarecki, Ph.D., Executive Director

Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee

102 Robertsville Road, Suite B, Oak Ridge, TN 37830

Toll free 888-770-3073 ~ www.local-oversight.org

.....................................................

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