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Plutonium Mountain: The 17-year mission to guard remains of Soviet nuclear tests
The Belfer Center’s Eben Harrell and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David E. Hoffman for the first time report the details of one of the largest nuclear security operations of the post-Cold War years — a secret 17-year, $150 million operation to secure plutonium in the tunnels of Degelen Mountain.
It began in 1995, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when experts from the Los Alamos National Laboratory were told during a visit to Kazakhstan that plutonium residue in recoverable form was likely to have been abandoned at the test site. For example, although Kazakhstan signed the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in 1993 and had a legal obligation to declare all the fissile material on its territory, the three countries overseeing the operation decided not to formally notify or involve the International Atomic Energy Agency. Now, the IAEA and Kazakhstan face long-term uncertainties about whether the material can be safely left in its current form forever, or whether it may pose a risk that someone might seek to recover it someday, or that it could cause environmental contamination beyond the radiation already polluting some portions of Semipalatinsk.
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