Project Sapphire: U-235
“Go get this stuff out of Kazakhstan”
The birth of Project Sapphire
In January 1994, Ashton Carter, an assistant secretary of defense, told Jeff Starr, the principal director for threat reduction in the Department of Defense (DoD), to take charge of this matter, saying,
“Go get this stuff out of Kazakhstan … Whatever you need, do it.”
Carter told Starr he had a month to get it done. As you’ll see, he could not get the job done in one month, but he did get it done.
Starr assembled a “Tiger Team” from across the US government. In the meantime, President Nazarbayev visited Washington in February 1994. Ambassador Courtney and Weber visited him at Blair House and asked if it would be acceptable to send an expert to examine the uranium. The President agreed but cautioned that they do it quietly.
Elwood Gift, a nuclear engineer from the National Security Programs Office at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, was selected to make the trip.
Gift arrived in March 1994. The Department of Energy had tasked him with confirming that the uranium was HEU and and told him to develop a conceptual plan to remove the HEU from Ulba. There were several technical questions about how the material was stored at Ulba and how it would need to be stored for transport to the US.
Gift and Weber went to the plant and saw that the uranium was stored behind locked doors, secured with a “Civil War padlock.” The storage system was rudimentary at best.
While at the Ulba Plant, Gift observed mass spectroscopy analysis of samples he was given, and the assessment was that the samples were U-235 of about 90 percent weapons-grade material. In short, it was HEU.
Gift took some samples and returned to Almaty. Gift confirmed to the ambassador that the goods were the real McCoy, and the ambassador notified Washington.
In March 1994, a USAF C-130 transport on a routine embassy resupply flight later arrived with some boxes for Gift to use to pack the uranium samples.
The samples made it to the Y-12 Plant at Oak Ridge in early April 1994 for analysis. The conclusion was,
“All samples had significant quantities of U-236 … consistent with the enrichment of near natural uranium from plutonium production reactors as a portion of the feed. These concentrations for both U234 and U-236 are well within the range of HIEU (highly enriched uranium) stored at Y-12 and that used in US nuclear weapons.”
For our purposes, the difference between U235 and U236 is that the former is natural while the latter is artificial.
There was considerable discussion and debate in Washington and at Oak Ridge about what to do. For example, who would pay compensation to Kazakhstan, and Project Sapphire expenses, and any payments that might be made to Russia?
Furthermore, there was discussion of environmental issues. One such issue concerned the importation of this type of Kazakh material into Tennessee and how the state government would respond. Fortunately, Vice President Gore was from Tennessee, and he reassured the state.
Another consideration was that the US would have to notify the Russians, if for no other reason than that the aircraft used to fly the uranium out would have to overfly Russia.
The Plan
The Project Sapphire plan was to use five USAF C-5 Galaxy transports to ferry the uranium, the US Tiger Team, and equipment out of Kazakhstan and back to Oak Ridge. President Clinton authorized the airlift operation on October 7, 1994.
A small team went to Ust-Kamenogorsk, the city hosting the Ulba Plant, to assess whether its airport could handle C-5s. The team also examined the containers holding the HEU at Ulba to help plan their transport. The team concluded that the airport could handle the C-5, but considerable preparation was needed to use improved containers for the HEU.
The Clinton administration decided that Vice President Gore should raise the matter with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin on his trip to Moscow in June. Gore did that, and Chernomyrdin did not object. To make sure the plan was on course, Kazakh President Nazarbayev called Russian President Yeltsin to inform him of the transfer. Yeltsin agreed not to thwart it.
On October 8, 1994, three C-5s departed Dover AFB, Delaware, and stopped at Incirlik AB, Turkey. They then proceeded to Ust-Kamenogorsk, which had a rugged 8,000-ft. runway. The C-5s needed 6,000 ft. of that runway. Lt. Colonel Mike Foster, the operations officer of the 9th Airlift Squadron at Dover, was in charge of the C-5 flights and flew lead. He described the runway as “like a bucking bronco.” But it would do.
One of the C-5s carried the equipment they would need to upload the uranium canisters, as well as the Tiger Team, support crews, and Air Force security police. Furthermore, USAF pilots fluent in Russian came along.
There was concern about the potential impact of ice on the runway and some disquiet about whether de-icing equipment would be available at the Ust-Kamenogorsk airport. Foster spoke with the U.S. military attaché in Kazakhstan to address the major issues.
The planners were aware that sending such a large team and their equipment aboard C-5 Galaxy aircraft to Ust-Kamenogorsk would inevitably attract attention, especially since the team of experts would remain for six weeks. Cover stories were therefore developed.
The C-5s landed without incident, unloaded their equipment, and returned to Dover, leaving the Tiger Team behind in Ust-Kamenogorsk.
The Tiger Team had a significant amount of work ahead of it. It was led by Alex Riedy, an Oak Ridge technician. The team had assembled what would become a processing facility in the US and brought it to Kazakhstan. That was the task: process the uranium and prepare it for shipment aboard C-5s.
David Roza has provided a glimpse into the enormity of the processing task. The team had to make the uranium transportable. They had to remove the HEU material from some 1,000 canisters such as shown here, and from 6,000 sample bottles, remove water and oils, place them in special metal containers, and put those into 55-gallon drum canisters. These canisters were safe to handle and would have to be driven by truck to the airport under tight security and on ice.
The team commuted between its hotel in Ust-Kamenogorsk and the Ulba Plant, an 18-mile journey.
It was late November 1994, more than a year after Weber was first approached by Mette and eleven months after Secretary Carter instructed Jeff Starr to get the job done in one month. Furthermore, it was winter in Kazakhstan, when temperatures could plummet to minus 31 degrees F.
As is the case with all USAF missions, there was a plan,
- Four C-5s would depart from Dover AFB and stop in Turkey, at Incirlik AB, and then proceed to Ust-Kamenogorsk on November 16, 1994.
- The fourth would remain in Turkey as a ready spare.
- A fifth would land in Rota, Spain, to serve as a standby.
The weather forecasts were outdated and inaccurate, and the weather was not good for these flights. The Defense Attaché provided weather information to the pilots as best he could. Command and control centers were unaware of the deployment of five C-5s.
The net result was that only one of the C-5s reached Ust-Kamenogorsk on November 19, three days late. The other three diverted to alternate bases, with one in Spain.
The first C-5 landed at 4 am, at which time half of the trucks carrying the canisters departed the Ulba Plant, escorted by Kazakh Special Forces, for the 18-mile trip. A second convoy remained at the Ulba Plant, waiting for another C-5 to arrive in Ust-Kamenogorsk.
A USAF team loaded the canisters. Despite the terrible weather, sleet, ice, and rain, this first C-5, on November 20, 1994, got off for a 20-hour flight to Dover, a flight that required five air refuelings. The canisters were then transported by other means to Oak Ridge and safely stored.
The second and third C-5s landed on November 20 at about the time that the team had finished uploading the uranium canisters to the first aircraft.
The other two C-5s were uploaded and also made a successful trip home on November 21.
The C-5s did not want to stop anywhere on the way back to Dover, given their load. Obtaining approvals to land in foreign countries could have posed numerous problems.
As a retired Air Force member, I have to tip my hat to the aircrews, top to bottom, for fulfilling this mission; consider the terrible weather, the distance, which I believe was over 6,000 miles, the nature of the load, and the general sense of foreboding when handling nuclear material.
Dr. William C. Potter, an expert in non-proliferation, wrote,
“It is doubtful that more than a handful of officials from the newly independent state of Kazakhstan were familiar with the (HEU) cache either. In any case, little attention appears to have been paid to the significance of the HEU, if indeed anyone remembered that it existed.”
Potter cited an August 1992 CIA report stating that Iranian nuclear experts had visited the Ulba Plant and that, by 1993, Iran was considering opening a consulate in Kazakhstan. There was also solid evidence that canisters stored in a room adjacent to the HEU were addressed to Tehran.
Togzhan Kassenova, a security researcher, commented,
“With only a couple of years’ worth of diplomatic relations, the two countries dealt with serious political, technical, security, and logistical challenges.”
While it appeared this story had a happy ending, Dr. Potter suggested,
“The relevant question to ask is not if any more forgotten caches of fissile material exist, but how many there are and where they are located.”
Note Bene: The National Security Archive held at George Washington University in Washington, DC has an extensive group of official, declassified, and relevant documents about Project Sapphire. I commend this collection to you.
