Published October 4, 2013
This summer, The Project on Managing the Atom, at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, released “Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-Year Mission to Secure a Dangerous Legacy of Soviet Nuclear Testing.” In the report, I and my co-author David Hoffman tell the 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.
Although the outline of the Semipalatinsk operation had been made public before, our report filled in new details:
Hoffman and I also offer several “learning points” for those involved in nuclear security policy, including:
The cleanup at Semipalatinsk was a big success. But there is still work to do in unraveling the messy and dangerous legacy of the Cold War.