Project Sapphire: U-235
“Go get this stuff out of Kazakhstan”
Introduction
On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and broke up into 15 independent nations. On Christmas Day, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin took power in the Russian Federation. President George H.W. Bush was in charge in Washington.
A dominant problem facing the US had to do with the USSR’s nuclear arsenal. The US sought to promote stability. It recognized all the independent republics and established diplomatic relations with each one.
In his book, David Hoffman, The Dead Hand, reminds us of the state of the former USSR in the early 1990s,
- “The Russian nuclear establishment was showing the same signs of deterioration as the rest of the country. Some of the worst conditions were at facilities … which held large quantities of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium. The materials were so poorly protected that they were vulnerable.
- “Almost everyone in the (Soviet) atomic sector, from maintenance workers to world-class scientists, was in distress.
- “Viktor Mikhailov, the Russian atomic energy minister, revealed in the summer of 1993 that Russia had accumulated much more highly-enriched uranium, up to twelve hundred metric tons, than was previously thought.
- “All the former Soviet lands were awash in scams and deceptions-people offering to sell MiGs, missile guidance systems or fissile material, real and imagined. There was such a frenzy to strike gold that it was hard to detect what offer was genuine.”
Russian President Yeltsin visited Washington in May 1992. Secretary of State James Baker devoted considerable attention to securing the Soviets’ nuclear weapons.
This report focuses on the Ulba Metallurgy Plant, about 20 miles outside the northern Kazakhstani city of Ust-Kamenogorsk. It was one of several nuclear research, production, and storage facilities in the USSR. Established in 1949, after WWII, it was known as “Mailbox 10.”
In the early 1990s, Ulba was fighting to stay afloat, the victim of the USSR's collapse and the attempts by the new Russian oligarchs to implement a capitalist economy to their own benefit. Among other products, Ulba had been fabricating highly enriched uranium (HEU) but had stopped in the 1980s.
Togzhan Kassenova wrote,
“Most of (Ulba’s) production lines had to be frozen, with no orders coming from Russian facilities. Ulba’s employees went without salaries for months … But Ulba wasn’t just any industrial plant. It used to be the flagship of the Soviet nuclear industry and supplied almost half of all fuel pellets used in Soviet-type nuclear power reactors.”
Project Sapphire “was a sensitive and covert mission to repackage and transport 600 kg of uranium-235 (U-235) from the Ulba Metallurgy Plant in Kazakhstan to the Y-12 Plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee for storage under IAEA (International Atomic Energy Association) safeguards.”
Let’s get into it.
Ulba’s contribution to the Alfa submarine
The Ulba Metallurgy Plant in Kazakhstan was established in 1949 and during the 1950s became a manufacturer of uranium, beryllium, tantalum, and niobium products. Back then, it was a hush-hush facility in what one author termed a “closed city because of the highly sensitive work done there. Even local authorities had been kept in the dark about the plant.”
The Ulba Plant provided uranium oxide-beryllium in the form of ceramic fuel rods to power the Soviet Alfa submarine’s nuclear reactor.
In the 1970s, the Alfa-class submarine was a big deal. A CIA report now available online discusses the Soviet development of the Alfa-class submarine (NATO classification), Soviet Project 705, and describes how many in the US Navy were naysayers until dogged analysts convinced them of its capabilities.
This awakening began in 1969, when a small, strange-looking submarine was spotted at Leningrad’s Sudomekh Submarine Shipyard. The shipyard had long been known for producing diesel-electric Foxtrot-class submarines.
But this submarine had an unusually streamlined hull. Furthermore, the pressure hull sections were “highly reflective,” which sparked considerable curiosity.
Painstaking analysis revealed that the Soviets were using titanium plates welded together for the inner hull to withstand extreme pressures at great depths. This allowed the outer hull and sail to be streamlined. Furthermore, the submarine was small, which required a high-density nuclear power plant, i.e., enormous power generation in a small volume.
It took years for analysts to convince themselves and senior naval officers that the Soviets had overcome the obstacles to welding titanium.
The CIA report said,
“The Soviets had made a quantum leap in submarine technology by combining several high-risk options in one class of submarine.”
It turned out that the Alfa was a nuclear-powered submarine able to travel at 40 knots underwater, faster than any US submarine, and it could dive deeper.
Ulba surreptitiously connects with the US
David E. Hoffman, in his book The Dead Hand, highlights Project Sapphire, the covert operation to get highly-enriched uranium out of Kazakhstan.
Andrew Weber, then a foreign service officer, jumped at the chance to serve at the new US embassy in Almaty, established in 1991, shortly after Kazakhstan gained independence from the USSR.
Weber held the political-military portfolio. As fortune would have it, Weber was served by a Kazakh auto mechanic and jack-of-all-trades named Slava. Slava was an avid hunter, and Weber went hunting with him. At some point, Slava told Weber, “Someone wants to meet with you.” Intrigue was everywhere.
Slava picked Weber up at an Almaty street corner and took him to a building in an apartment complex that sold hunting equipment. Inside, Weber met Vitaly Mette, a former Soviet submarine commander and the current factory director of the Ulba Plant. Mette told Weber he wanted to sell uranium stored at the Ulba Plant to the US and to meet the US ambassador, William H. Courtney. Weber arranged it.
When Mette met Courtney, he would only tell him he was selling uranium and would not go into detail about what kind.
Kazakhstan had been at the heart of the USSR’s nuclear, biological, and chemical production and testing programs. However, the times had changed. Kazakhstan was now independent and rich in natural resources, and its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, wanted nothing to do with the weapons developed and stored in Kazakhstan.
Ambassador Courtney commented,
“Kazakhstanis had developed nuclear neuralgia. Decades of careless nuclear testing in the northeastern region of Semipalatinsk had caused untold health and environmental damage.”
In 1993, a former Soviet atomic energy minister revealed that the Russian Federation as a whole had as much as 1,200 metric tons of highly enriched uranium. It was also known that Iraqis and Iranians were seeking such material to build a nuclear bomb. Furthermore, people in the former USSR were involved in all kinds of illicit deals.
One writer noted,
“There was a Wild West atmosphere in this brand-new country, with lots of black market activity and scams.”
In December 1993, during Vice President Al Gore’s visit, Kazakh Colonel Korbator, a former KGB (State Security) border guard, arranged through Slava a meeting with Weber. The colonel took Weber for a walk outside and handed him a piece of paper stating that there were 600 kilograms of ninety percent enriched U-235, termed “highly enriched uranium” (HEU or HIEU), an essential ingredient for nuclear weapons.
Six hundred kilos comes to about 1323 lbs, enough for 24 nuclear bombs. As you would expect, Weber notified the State Department.
The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation noted,
“The dismal standard of safety and security of nuclear material at the fall of the Soviet Union lends to the fact that the threat of nuclear war isn’t our greatest danger; loose nuclear material and weapons are.”
That was the case at Ulba.
