17-Year Collaboration Secures Dangerous Soviet Nuclear Site

In October, 2012, at the foot of a rocky hillside in eastern Kazakhstan, a group of American, Russian, and Kazakh nuclear scientists and engineers gathered for a ceremony marking the completion of a secret 17-year, $150 million operation to secure plutonium in the tunnels of Degelen Mountain—an abandoned site of Soviet underground nuclear testingl.

The Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) released a report in August titled “Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-Year Mission to Secure a Dangerous Legacy of Soviet Nuclear Testing.” The report, by Eben Harrell, associate with MTA, and Pulitzer Prize winning author and Washington Post reporter David E. Hoffman, provides details of one of the largest nuclear security operations of the post-Cold War years. It is a story of how dedicated scientists and engineers in three countries overcame suspicions, secrecy, bureaucracy, and logistical obstacles to secure more than a dozen bombs worth of plutonium that had been left behind at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Based on documents and interviews in the U.S. and Kazakhstan with scientists and officials, Harrell and Hoffman tell how American nuclear experts learned of the unsecured test site and discovered that large-scale scrap-metal scavenging operations were coming within yards of plutonium that could be stolen and sold for nuclear devices.

The authors suggest that the operation’s success was a “very close call.”

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Senator Richard Lugar, co-sponsor of Nunn-Lugar initiative, praises "Plutonium Mountain" --

In a letter to Belfer Center Director Graham Allison, former Senator Richard Lugar wrote, "I have just completed reading a truly remarkable report entitled 'Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-Year Mission to Secure a Dangerous Legacy of Soviet Nuclear Testing,'...I simply write to congratulate you and your associates, once again, for another vital contribution to non-proliferation scholarship."