Get the latest tech news
Project Sapphire 20th Anniversary (2014)
Project Sapphire 20th Anniversary
"Project Sapphire" was the first major operation by the United States to secure vulnerable nuclear material in the former Soviet Union under the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, known as Nunn-Lugar for its principal sponsors, Senators Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Richard Lugar (R-Indiana.) Today's posting is part of a series on the history of the Nunn-Lugar program prepared by the National Security Archive, building on the groundbreaking research in the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy(New York: Doubleday, 2009). This excerpt from David Hoffman's Pulitzer-prize winning book describes in detail how Andy Weber learned of the existence of the weapons-grade uranium in Kazakhstan and how the operation fit into the larger context of worries about fissile material security in the former Soviet Union at the time.
Or read this on Hacker News
