August 2013 Plutonium Mountain Inside the 17-year mission to secure a dangerous legacy of Soviet nuclear testing By Eben Harrell & David E. Hoffman Project on Managing the Atom
Yüklə 333,26 Kb. Pdf görüntüsü
|
- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- The Mountain and its Legacy
Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-year mission to secure a dangerous legacy of Soviet nuclear testing 2 Two years later, in 1997, Siegfried S. Hecker, just retiring as director of Los Alamos, decided to look more closely. Hecker, who helped pioneer cooperation with his counterparts in the Soviet and later Russian nuclear weapons laboratories, used personal connections to push for action. He succeeded in enlisting the cooperation of Russian nuclear scientists who had been involved in the testing program in Kazakhstan before the Soviet collapse. Source: U.S. Department of Defense
Scientists and engineers from the United States, Russia, and Kazakhstan overcame deep-rooted suspicions in their governments to find technical solutions to the plutonium threat at Degelen Mountain. The operation was based almost entirely on ad-hoc agreements struck at a lower level, and was carried to a conclusion without elaborate, negotiated state-to-state agreements of the kind used for arms control during the Cold War. Each country played a crucial role. The operation took 17 years to complete, a period in history that saw the rise of al-Qaeda and its nuclear ambitions, the 9/11 attacks, and spanned three different U.S. administrations, the latter two of which proclaimed nuclear terrorism the greatest threat to U.S. security and spent billions of dollars to prevent it. Serious logistical difficulties were just one reason the Semipalatinsk op- eration took so long. Another was lingering mistrust, inertia and excessive secrecy. Until prodded by the scientists, the governments had done very little about the plutonium abandoned at the test site. The informal approach was effective, but slow, and it left some issues unresolved or partly unex- plored. 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 coun- tries overseeing the operation decided not to formally notify or involve the International Atomic Energy Agency. Each country felt it had good reasons for excluding the IAEA. They shared a concern that information leaks from the agency would compromise the secrecy of the operation. 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
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs | Harvard Kennedy School 3 recover it someday, or that it could cause environmental contamination beyond the radiation al- ready polluting some portions of Semipalatinsk. This paper begins with a narrative reconstruction of the threat reduction work at Semipalatinsk. It is based on interviews with U.S., Russian, and Kazakh scientists and officials—conducted in the United States and Kazakhstan—and is supported by documents provided to the authors. It con- cludes with observations about the lessons for future efforts to reduce and ultimately eliminate the threat posed by nuclear weapons and the essential nuclear materials needed to construct them. Source: Autonavi / Basarsoft / Google
Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-year mission to secure a dangerous legacy of Soviet nuclear testing 4
The town once known as Semipalatinsk-21 is an isolated, misbegotten city built at great human cost on the steppes of eastern Kazakhstan by prisoners between 1947-1949 for the purpose of providing a staging ground for Soviet nuclear weapons testing. 4 In the post-Soviet vacuum of the early 1990s, the conditions at Semipalatinsk-21 resembled the apocalypse that nuclear weapons have long portended. A city of 40,000 that was once serviced by two daily direct flights from Moscow had been transformed into a dystopia of a few thousand stragglers and feral dogs whose main challenge was finding food and warmth. 5 Many regions of the former Soviet Union were impoverished in the first years after the collapse; this one was so poor and lawless that people who lived there resorted to scavenging the nuclear testing infrastructure. Even the highest-rank- ing officials were desperate. The Russian director of Semipalatinsk-21 was dismissed in 1993 on charges of selling equipment from the site’s facilities. 6
equivalent of a nuclear battlefield, detonating 116 nuclear blasts in the atmosphere. 7 The last Soviet air test was in December, 1962. Following a global outcry over the ecological and health effects of atmospheric testing, the Soviets moved the testing program underground, where they conducted 340 underground explosions. The United States had conducted atmospheric testing in Nevada, and primarily in the Pacific. The United States similarly shifted to underground testing in this period, and ceased atmospheric testing in 1963 upon entering into a limited test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. At Semipalatinsk, a sprawling network of tunnels built under a series of hills near Semi- palatinsk-21 known locally as Degelen Mountain became a central location for the un- derground testing program. A ragged mound of granite, De- gelen Mountain rises from the prairie grass of the steppes like the crested back of a half-sub- merged, prehistoric beast. To many local Kazakhs, the tests imbued it with a sinister air. “Out there,” one senior Kazakh scientist once told a reporter, 4 After Kazakhstan’s independence, the city was renamed Kurchatov City. 5 See: Russian Television Network, April 28, 1994, in JPRS-TND-94-012, “Reduced Staffing Causes Problems at Semipala- tinsk,” June 7, 1994, p. 34 and “Glowing, But Not With Health,” The Economist, July 25, 1998, pp. 3-4. 6 See: Izvestiya, “Semipalatinsk Chief Removed from Test Site,” December 28, 1993, in FBIS-USR-94-001, January 5, 1994, p. 31. 7 Hecker, “Dealing with Kazakhstan’s Nuclear Legacy,” p. 16. Source: Carl Willis Abandoned building in Center of Kurchatov City, 2012. Yüklə 333,26 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|