Eliminating Kazakhstan’s Nuclear Secret
Foreign Service Officer Janet L. Bogue joined our embassy in Kazakhstan at a crucial time in history. When the Tacoma, Washington native took over the Political and Economic Section in 1994, the State Department was focused on securing the nuclear assets of the Soviet Union’s successor states. The nuclear arsenal that Kazakhstan inherited was being transferred to Russia, so the situation seemed well controlled – that is, until the newly independent nation’s Science Minister went skiing with one of Bogue’s colleagues and asked, “Do you mind if I tell you a secret?”
The minister explained that Kazakhstan had an additional 581 kilograms of warhead-ready highly enriched uranium, and they wanted the United States “to box it up and take it away,” Bogue recalled. “…All done quietly so that nobody grabs it in the meantime or starts bidding for it.”
“It really was one of those moments in your career when you felt like, “I actually did a concrete thing that made the world safer.”
Janet L. Bogue
According to Bogue, the U.S. government at first wanted nothing to do with it. Washington officials didn’t believe it could be highly enriched uranium, so Bogue’s team arranged to send samples back that confirmed the danger. Finally, the U.S. government agreed to remove the highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan to safe storage in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in a secret project dubbed “Operation Sapphire.”
“The whole project was well over a year,” Bogue continued, “including bringing over a whole crew of fellows from Oak Ridge, who lived up at the site while they did what they had to do to package up the uranium in what almost looked like little beer kegs. They are lead and make it possible for you to move it in a safe way. Then flying in C-5s, huge cargo aircraft, one of which broke down….To make a long story short, it was loaded onto the aircraft and then they flew straight to the States with midair refueling….
They landed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The material was transferred onto a truck convoy, highly protected, and taken straight to Tennessee and put deep underground. Once that was announced Secretary [of State] Christopher, Secretary Perry of the Defense Department, and Secretary O’Leary of the Energy Department all did a press conference.
“It was very late at night already in Kazakhstan, but we all converged on a colleague’s house and brought some vile, sweet Kyrgyz champagne from the champagne factory there. It really was one of those moments in your career when you felt like, ‘I actually did a concrete thing that made the world safer.’ Five hundred kilograms of highly enriched bomb-grade uranium is stuck away where whoever in this neighborhood, or whatever rogue elements, cannot get at it. That was a wonderful thing…
“It was old-fashioned human diplomacy. It was the fact that one of our guys was out skiing with the science minister, because they had developed a very friendly relationship and they liked to ski together. The science minister had developed enough confidence over time that he felt he could pose this question on behalf of his government.”