Uranium - 1,300 pounds of it

Fascinating article on the discovery of 600 Kilograms of weapons grade Uranium 235 found in Kazakhstan. From The Washington Post:

Half a Ton of Uranium -- and a Long Flight
On a snowy day in December 1993, just months after Andy Weber began his diplomatic job at the U.S. Embassy in Almaty, Kazakhstan, he met with a tall, bullet-headed man he knew only as Col. Korbator.

"Andy, let's take a walk," the colonel said. As they strolled through a dim apartment courtyard, Korbator handed Weber a piece of paper. Weber unfolded it. On the paper was written:

U235
90 percent
600 kilos

Weber did the calculation: 1,322 pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough to make about 24 nuclear bombs. He closed the note, put it in his pocket and thanked the colonel. After several months of patient cultivation of his contacts, Weber finally had the answer he had been seeking.

A bit more:

This is the story of Project Sapphire, the code name for an early pioneering mission to secure a portion of those nuclear materials before they could fall into the wrong hands. New documents and interviews provide the fullest account yet of this covert operation to remove the dangerous uranium from Kazakhstan and fly it to the United States. When it was over, the U.S. government paid Kazakhstan about $27 million for the cache.

Efforts to lock up nuclear materials scattered around the globe are still underway. This week, at the U.N. Security Council, President Obama will chair a high-level meeting on the continuing dangers of proliferation.

Weber first learned of the uranium in Kazakhstan during the summer of 1993, when Vitaly Mette, a former Soviet navy submarine commander, discreetly set up a meeting by leaving a message for Weber with his handyman and car mechanic. Mette, who wore a leather jacket and kept his thick hair combed back from his angular face, told Weber that he wanted to sell uranium to the United States. But he was vague about the uranium's enrichment level. The uranium was stored at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, an enormous industrial complex that fabricated reactor fuel in the grimy city of Ust-Kamenogorsk, in Kazakhstan's northeast. Mette was the director.

A bit more:

In 1993, two years after the Soviet Union's collapse, its former republics were brimming with highly enriched uranium and plutonium. That summer, Viktor Mikhailov, the Russian atomic energy minister, revealed that Russia had accumulated up to 1,200 metric tons of highly enriched uranium, more than was previously thought. The Iranians and the Iraqis were casting about for material to build nuclear bombs. "We knew that Iran was all over Central Asia and the Caucasus with their purchasing agents," recalled Jeff Starr, who was then director for threat reduction policy at the Pentagon.

But the former Soviet lands were also awash in scams and deception -- people offering to sell MiGs, missile guidance systems or fissile material, real and imagined. When Weber filed his initial reports on his meetings with Mette, he recalled, "A lot of people thought it was a scam."

Makes our "wild wild west" look positively tame by comparison. One more excerpt:

At 3 a.m., with the plane on its way, the uranium was driven from the Ulba plant to the airport, with Weber in the lead security car, a Soviet-era Volga. "It was black-ice conditions," he recalled. "And these trucks were sliding all over the place, and I'm thinking, 'I don't want to make the call to Washington saying one of the trucks with highly enriched uranium went off the bridge into the river, and we're trying to locate it.' But somehow, miraculously, we made it all safely to the airport."

It took three hours to load the plane. But before it could take off, the runway had to be cleared of snow. Sleet, ice and rain blanketed the airfield, a pilot later recalled. There were no plows to be seen. Finally, airport workers brought out a truck with a jet engine mounted on the back. They fired up the engine and blasted the runway free of snow.

The C-5 heaved itself into the sky. The next day, two more C-5s flew in and back out with the remaining uranium, the gear and the team. The enormous transports, operating in total secrecy, flew 20 hours straight through to Dover with several aerial refuelings, the longest C-5 flights in U.S. history. Once on the ground in Delaware, the uranium was loaded into large, unmarked trucks specially outfitted to protect nuclear materials during the drive to Oak Ridge.

Like the dynamite truck in Sorcerer Using jet engines on a truck for snow removal is actually not uncommon: