In 1998, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico visited Degelen Mountain, part of the Soviet Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan. The site had been abandoned by the Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and scavengers were searching the site for metals they could sell. That included copper from electrical wiring and rails used to carry nuclear devices underground for testing. The Los Alamos official filed a report saying that the site contained another metal–an estimated 440 pounds of plutonium, or enough to build a dozen or more nuclear weapons.
The tale of the 17-year, $150 million effort to secure that plutonium, which involved "a complex mix of intelligence, science, engineering, politics and sleuthing," was told by David E. Hoffman and Eben Harrell in The Washington Post on Aug. 16. Their narrative suggests that the plutonium came dangerously close to falling into the hands of rogue miners, who were engaged in an industrial-scale effort to extract anything of value from the site. It's a compelling narrative.
The story was also cross-posted on the website of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which gave Hoffman and Harrell a grant to cover some of the travel the story required. Harrell, a former foreign correspondent for TIME magazine, and Hoffman, a former White House and foreign correspondent for the Post, also wrote a 40-page monograph on their research for the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, where Harrell has an appointment.
-Paul Raeburn
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