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.