Rescuing a Potential Nuke from the Chile Quake

Andrew Bieniawski was in bed when the earthquake struck. On Feb. 26, Bieniawski, the assistant deputy administrator for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), had arrived in Santiago, Chile, to join a group of scientists and nuclear engineers on a top-secret mission to remove a potential nuclear bomb from the country. Around 40 lb. (18 kg) of highly enriched uranium (HEU)–with enough latent energy to destroy a portion of a city–had already been inventoried, secured and made ready for transport to a highly secure facility in the U.S. Running ahead of schedule, Bieniawski had taken his team out for dinner with the U.S. ambassador before heading to bed. Then the big one hit.

The Chilean earthquake carried the power of 10,000 Hiroshima bombs. It severed power and communication lines, closed highways, sparked looting and led the country’s President to declare a state of emergency. Within minutes of the quake, Bieniawski had gathered the NNSA officials in a hotel lobby, where the group spent the next four hours trying to make contact with two sites–a military base and research reactor–where the uranium had been stored. Unable to reach one of the sites by phone, the head of the Chilean nuclear agency, Fernando López-Lizana, eventually had to drive there himself.

After López-Lizana reported that the uranium was accounted for, the NNSA team had to shift it through a crisis zone to a port on high alert for tsunamis. And their cargo was unstable. HEU must be stored and shipped in certain geometrical configurations–long, flat sheets, for instance–so that it does not spontaneously start a nuclear chain reaction, spewing out heat and radioactive by-products. When it has been used in a nuclear reactor, as some of the Chilean HEU had been, it becomes radioactive. Twelve hours before the earthquake, the NNSA engineers had overseen the fitting of 1,500-lb. (680 kg) protective impact limiters on the material, designed to shield it from the force of an explosion–or, indeed, an earthquake–and placed an airtight cask around the irradiated uranium. They felt confident the packages would not jostle around and suddenly go critical or leak. But how to get them out of a country in chaos?

For the following four days, Bieniawski and his team plus a U.S. shipping contractor met with Chilean officials to plan an escape route. The meetings had an odd quality–aftershocks twice spilled coffee from cups. The original plan was to ship the HEU to the U.S. from the Chilean port of San Antonio, but it had been destroyed by a tsunami, so eventually the team decided to use the port of Valparaíso, 50 miles (80 km) to the north. On the evening of March 2, the officials and security teams met at the Lo Aguirre military base about 25 miles (40 km) from Santiago, which contained a military reactor built in 1977 for unspecified “defense purposes.” The power was out, and moments before the convoy pulled out, the earth shook with yet another strong aftershock, with its epicenter at Valparaíso. As the convoy left, Bieniawski took out his phone, called up the sound track for the Pirates of the Caribbean movie–his favorite “pump up” track–and hit play. “It’s time to raise our game, fellas,” he said.

Uranium for Free

For the past 14 years, U.S. teams like the one in Chile have been engaged in a race against terrorists to gain control of the global supply of HEU–the compound from which a nuclear bomb can be most easily fabricated. President Barack Obama has said preventing terrorists from obtaining an atomic weapon is his Administration’s top national-security priority, and last year he vowed that the U.S. would secure all vulnerable nuclear material within four years. On April 12, in one of the year’s most important international meetings, Obama will host more than 40 heads of state for a nuclear-security summit in Washington, where he will rally support for that goal. A main thrust will be promoting the U.S. program to make HEU safe forever by sending it to U.S. or Russian facilities where it can be engineered into a form of uranium that cannot be used in bombs.

The fact that one of the most dangerous materials known to man came to find itself in Chile is the result of one of the great gambits of the 20th century. In the mid-1950s, as the international community became seriously concerned about nuclear proliferation, states that had nuclear weapons offered the world a bargain: they would give countries HEU in exchange for an inspection regime that could verify it would be used only for peaceful research and not weapons. Atoms for Peace, as the U.S. called the program, became the founding principle of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and, later, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968. Chile received HEU from the U.S., France and Britain in the 1970s and ’80s.

All told, over several decades, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council distributed some 44,000 lbs. (20,000 kg) of HEU–enough for 800 nuclear weapons–to around 50 countries as diverse as Australia, Jamaica and Vietnam. Although that figure is a drop in the bucket compared with the estimated 4.4 million lbs. (2 million kg) of HEU in weapons and storage in the U.S. and Russia, the Atoms for Peace HEU is of particular concern because it is used in civilian reactors that are often poorly guarded and vulnerable to theft. As William Potter, director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at California’s Monterey Institute of International Studies, points out, “If you are a terrorist, you don’t necessarily go where there is the most material. You go where the material is most accessible.”

It is Bieniawski’s job to convince countries to give up their HEU and send it to either the U.S. or Russia. So far, the NNSA has removed a total of 5,935 lbs. (2,692 kg) of fissile material from 37 countries and has its sights on 4,190 lbs. (1,900 kg) more. To meet that goal, Obama has asked for the program’s budget to be increased by 67% percent to $560 million next year. But many countries see HEU-fueled research reactors as symbols of prestige and don’t necessarily share U.S. and Russian concern that fissile material may fall into terrorist hands. Canada and South Africa, which both have large stockpiles of HEU, argue they need it to make medical isotopes profitably. Politics comes into play too: poor relations between Ukraine and Russia have hampered efforts to move Ukraine’s large stocks of HEU to Russian facilities.

Bieniawski says his mission is to help overcome these obstacles by “schmoozing for my country,” at which he is pretty good. (Once, he sweet-talked leaders from an African nation with HEU stocks by calling on their shared African heritage; although raised and educated in America, he was born to white parents in South Africa.) When he is unable to convince or pay countries to give up their HEU, Bieniawski offers to upgrade security around their material. That mission gained urgency in November 2007, when two teams of armed attackers stormed Pelindaba, a supposedly secure facility that houses hundreds of kilograms of weapons-grade uranium in South Africa. The attackers gained access to the facility’s control room and shot an emergency-services officer in the chest. They fled without making any effort to steal the nuclear material, and the reason for the break-in and the attackers’ identity remain a mystery. “The break-in validated what we do. Current international security guidelines are woefully inadequate,” Bieniawski says, adding that no amount of physical protection can provide total security or combat the “insider threat.” All confirmed cases of illicit trafficking of HEU in the past 20 years have involved employees siphoning off material and attempting to sell it on the black market–such as the 1992 arrest of a Russian engineer caught trying to sell 3.3 lbs. (1.5 kg) of HEU at the Podolsk train station. All the cases involved minimal amounts of HEU.

The Threat Is Real

HEU is of particular concern because of the relative ease with which it can be turned into a mushroom cloud. The uranium bomb exploded over Hiroshima was never tested, so simple was its mechanism. Peter Zimmerman, former chief scientist of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says a group of terrorists in possession of HEU could build an atom bomb using readily available hardware at a cost of around $2 million; if detonated in a city, such a bomb could kill hundreds of thousands. In Chile, I asked Bieniawski if he felt confident that al-Qaeda was still pursuing nuclear weapons rather than concentrating on struggles in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The worst day of my week is Friday,” he said. “Every Friday I receive a one-hour intelligence briefing, and I come away sobered. I assure you, the threat is real.”

Graham Allison of Harvard University, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense who recently served on the Congressional Commission on the Prevention of WMD Terrorism, believes “it is more likely than not” that a terrorist will detonate a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city by 2014. Other experts, such as John Mueller of Ohio State University in Columbus, contend that such an estimate is greatly exaggerated. But Mueller, too, supports an HEU-elimination program. “There’s no point having the stuff hanging around for no reason,” he says.

Could the Chilean HEU have fallen into terrorist hands? The afternoon before the earthquake, Paul Simons, the U.S. ambassador to Chile, pointed out that local criminal gangs ship Bolivian cocaine to the U.S. from Chilean ports and that “we recognize that Chile and its ports could be used as a funnel for other illicit materials.” At the time, of course, he could not know that four days later a bomb’s worth of HEU would be on its way to one of those ports–and in the middle of a national catastrophe.

When the convoy carrying the HEU arrived at Valparaíso, two NNSA ships were anchored a short distance from the coast; the agency had decided to split up the material so that neither ship would carry enough HEU for an atom bomb. But as long as the HEU remained on land, it was vulnerable. About a dozen dockworkers moved freely among the containers. Two of the three bottles of Champagne Bieniawski had taken along for postshipment celebrations were stolen. By 9:45 a.m., the final shipping container was ready to load onto the first ship. As it hoisted the container into the air, one of the cranes malfunctioned, sending the container hurtling out of control, yards above the deck. For a few heart-stopping seconds, it swung back and forth. The cranes groaned. “I don’t like that sight,” Bieniawski said. “Jesus, I don’t like that sight.”

In all contracts with foreign governments, the NNSA gains title of the HEU at the exact moment that the crane’s cables slacken and the container settles onto the ship. The crane operators regained control of the container, and a few moments later Chile no longer possessed a bomb’s worth of HEU. In the bright morning sunshine, the first ship sailed out of the harbor, a Chilean gunboat darting in front of it like a little duckling. Onshore, the group piled back into the embassy van, and soon the remaining bottle of Champagne was uncorked. As Bieniawski slapped backs and offered high fives, his deputy remained quiet. Chuck Messick, a Navy man, has worked on the HEU-retrieval program since its inception in 1996. The HEU, he reminded anyone who would listen, still had to find safe passage through the Panama Canal and be safely unloaded in the U.S. “The mission,” he said, “is not over yet. The mission is not over.”