Sapphire's Hot Glow

By MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON /

Many of the Americans had never been out of the U.S. before, much less part of a hazardous clandestine operation. Suddenly, they were being whisked aboard C- 5 transports for the flight to Kazakhstan, the huge and barren former Soviet republic. Their mission: to pack more than 1,300 lbs. of highly enriched uranium into barrels for shipment back to the U.S. to prevent the material from falling into the wrong hands. They had only a few weeks to perform the delicate procedure. The harsh Central Asian winter was coming, and once it arrived, it would be difficult to fly out of the desolate Kazakh site.

Secrecy was tight. "We worked in a separately secured area within the plant; so only those intimately involved in this operation knew we were there," said engineer Alex Riedy, 36, the leader of the 31-person U.S. team at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant. "We'd be transported in by bus before dawn and back again at night." If asked, they had a cover story: "We were part of an International Atomic Energy Agency commission there at the invitation of the Kazakhstan government, supposedly doing an inventory of nuclear materials."

Last week the Kazakhstan inventory of uranium was half a ton lighter as officials in Washington and the Kazakh capital of Almaty (formerly Alma-Ata) announced that the team, after six weeks of feverish activity, had successfully moved the material to the Oak Ridge nuclear-storage facility in Tennessee. Over the next several months, the Energy Department will entertain offers from private industry to turn the highly enriched uranium into lower- grade commercial reactor fuel. The Administration touted the mission as a good reason to keep money flowing to the beleaguered Nunn-Lugar account. The fund -- named for sponsors Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana -- is a congressional appropriation that finances denuclearization in the states of the former Soviet Union. It is likely to face opposition next year as the G.O.P. takes over Congress.

U.S. experts who had visited Kazakhstan in February were astonished by the samples they brought back: the uranium was 90% enriched. "Saddam Hussein was trying very hard to get material of this kind," a senior Pentagon representative said. The mission that ended last week actually began more than , a year ago, when U.S. officials heard a disquieting report from Kazakh officials. The collapse of the Soviet Union, they said, had stranded about 1,300 lbs. of uranium at the sprawling Ulba Metallurgical Plant on the windswept steppes, 20 miles outside the city of Ust-Kamenogorsk. The material had been sent to the plant in the 1970s to be made into fuel rods for Soviet naval vessels. While the Soviets had abandoned it as their union collapsed in 1991, it remained quite a prize: there was enough nuclear material there to spawn as many as 36 atom bombs.

After a series of meetings with U.S. representatives from the State Department, the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, the Kazakh government secretly asked the U.S. earlier this year to help rid the newly independent nation of its unwanted legacy. Protecting the uranium was a financial drain on the country, it said. Furthermore, Kazakhstan has pledged to be nuclear free by the turn of the century.

American and Kazakh officials feared that the stash might fall into the wrong hands if word of its location and potency leaked out. Iran had reportedly bought some low-grade uranium from the plant in 1992. News that Tehran or other outlaw regimes may have been sniffing around for the high- grade cache compelled action. "The concern about security was the driving factor," said Defense Secretary William Perry. After extensive negotiations, the U.S., according to a Pentagon source involved in the deal, agreed to pay Kazakhstan about $100 million in cash and other forms of assistance for the uranium.

Only one hurdle remained. The nuclear material was made in Russia, and both Washington and Almaty knew they had to gain Moscow's approval for the unprecedented transfer. It did come, and apparently without rancor, in June. "We didn't want this material," said Vitaly Nasonov of Moscow's nuclear- power ministry after the deal was disclosed. "We produce enough of it ourselves." So back in the U.S., a team from the Energy Department's Oak Ridge nuclear-storage facility planned its unusual post-cold-war mission.

President Clinton approved the $7 million transfer operation -- christened Project Sapphire -- on Oct. 7. Within hours, three Air Force C-5s, laden with 29 men and two women, their nuclear laboratory and nearly 500 foam-filled, stainless-steel drums, were winging eastward. The team consisted of 25 scientists and technicians, a communications expert, a doctor and four military men, including three Russian-speaking interpreters.

The Americans spent their first four days in Kazakhstan setting up their chemical-assay lab inside one of the plant's 20-ft. by 40-ft., unheated World War II-vintage brick vaults. Until their arrival, one of the vaults had held freshly minted Kazakh coins, unused because inflation had rendered them nearly worthless. The Americans set up three "glove boxes," long plastic tubes, each with five or more pairs of special gloves protruding into the boxes, with which technicians could safely handle the uranium while processing and packing the material into the transport containers.

"It was a very big endeavor. We had about 1,050 nuclear containers to empty," said Riedy, who works for Martin Marietta, the company that runs the Oak Ridge storage site. Once out of its old containers, the uranium was assayed and, in some cases, baked to remove moisture that might make the material dangerous during transport. Ultimately, the uranium was repackaged into 1,400 qt.-size steel cans, which, in turn, were placed into the special 55-gal. drums. The teams worked up to 14 hours a day, six days a week, trying to beat winter's approach. The Americans, said Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, "spent six weeks doing six months of work."

While the suitability of most of the material for nuclear weapons was questioned in Moscow and Almaty, U.S. officials and several nuclear experts said nearly all of it could be processed for use in nuclear weapons. "It would be a relatively simple process," said Spurgeon Keeny, president of the Arms Control Association in Washington, a private group. "Anyone capable of making a bomb is capable of that."

After being delayed for two days by snow and bad weather, the nuclear exodus from Kazakhstan finally began late on the afternoon of Nov. 20, when the first of two C-5s ferrying the nuclear material lifted off. Their flights home were nonstop, made possible by extra pilots aboard and aerial refuelings over the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. "As soon as the wheels left the ground," said Navy Commander Paul Shaffer, the top military man on the mission, "everyone was cheering and clapping." More than 20 hours later, they landed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the cargo was then shipped to Oak Ridge aboard four nondescript but heavily defended three-truck convoys.

"We have put this bomb-grade nuclear material forever out of the reach of potential black marketeers, terrorists or new nuclear regimes," Perry said just after the last convoy rolled in to Oak Ridge. "This is defense by other means and in a big way." While U.S. officials said the challenge of the mission was unique and unlikely to be repeated, they conceded that if faced with a similar situation, they would probably do the same thing again. For team member Richard Taylor, a 20-year Oak Ridge employee, the sense of accomplishment was exhilarating. "How many times do you get to cross 11 time zones, spend a month and a half in a foreign country and get to perform a secret operation?"

With reporting by Elisabeth Kauffman/Knoxville