IDEAS The Bombs That Never Went Off The fall of the Soviet Union left behind a grim legacy of nuclear danger After 30 years the last weapons-grade uranium has been eliminated MARCH 27 2021 David Frum Staff writer at The Atlantic TODD P CICHONOWICZ U S NAVY MILITARY COLLECTION ALAMY You were probably busy with other things in September 2020 Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died The raging COVID-19 pandemic had erupted at the White House President Donald Trump had debated Joe Biden So you might have missed a news item from Kazakhstan the elimination of the last weapons-grade uranium in that country In a program jointly operated with the United States Kazakh scientists ground 2 9 kilograms of highly enriched uranium into a fine powder They then mixed that powder with enough low-enriched uranium powder to render the whole batch useless for bomb-making And with that operation Kazakhstan’s career as a nuclear state came to an end Read Kazakhstan’s painful nuclear past looms large over its energy future Your taxes covered the cost of much of that transition The crack-up of the Soviet Union left behind a grim legacy of nuclear danger The former Soviet arsenal was shared among four post-Soviet successor states Russia Belarus Kazakhstan and Ukraine Even before the Soviet collapse the security of the arsenal had been poor by U S standards for reasons explained by David Hoffman in his Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the Soviet nuclear aftermath The Dead Hand In Soviet times the nuclear security system depended upon closed fences closed borders a closed society as well as the surveillance and intimidation of everyone by the secret police … People were under stricter control than the fissile materials When the material was weighed or moved it was tracked in handwritten entries in ledger books If material was lost it was just left off the books no one wanted to get in trouble for it And factories would often deliberately keep some nuclear materials off the books to make up for unforeseen shortfalls When the surveillance and intimidation stopped much of that off-the-books material was stashed in tumbledown buildings sealed by padlocks that could be snipped by ordinary bolt cutters The scientists and technicians who knew how to access the material—or knew how to make more of it—saw their incomes collapse to a few dollars a month THE DESTRUCTION OF A SOVIET-ERA NUCLEAR TESTING SITE IN KAZAKHSTAN IN 2000 SHAMIL ZHUMATOV REUTERS A terrifying opportunity gaped open for rogue states and terrorists The end of the Cold War had perversely heightened the risk that a Soviet-made bomb might be used against an American target That risk summoned an inspired response by the U S government and its new postSoviet partners Russia and only Russia would remain a nuclear-weapons state Belarus Kazakhstan and Ukraine would repudiate their nuclear inheritance and also their biological and chemical weapons The United States would absorb the costs— and support scientists who would otherwise lose their employment The law that funded the build-down was formally called the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991 It is universally known by the names of its two Senate sponsors Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Nunn-Lugar defrayed the costs of safely decommissioning thousands of ex-Soviet nuclear weapons It paid to destroy terrifying biologic agents And it also underwrote less spectacular needs Here’s a recollection from the memoir of William Perry secretary of defense during President Bill Clinton’s first term Ukrainian and Russian law mandated that officers discharged from military service be provided housing but housing was not available and the Ukrainian government had no resources for building the needed houses With the help of Senator Nunn we had obtained a design for prefabricated homes from an American contractor and converted a Ukrainian defense factory into a plant for making them its first task to provide housing for the retired missile officers By Senator Lugar’s tally in a 2014 article altogether 537 land-based intercontinental missiles were put out of action along with 496 submarine-launched ballistic missiles 128 bombers and many hundreds of shorter-range weapons Each of those weapons platforms carried multiple nuclear warheads Fourteen hundred of those warheads were removed from Kazakhstan alone In addition the United States cooperated with the former Soviet states to create meaningful peaceful work for scientists who might otherwise have been tempted to sell their skills to malevolent bidders From the July August 2015 issue The cold war never really ended The hardest problems involved nuclear material that had not yet been installed into a warhead As the center of the Soviet nuclear-testing program Kazakhstan suffered a special and intractable burden of unused unwanted nuclear-weapons material Belarus and Ukraine could simply put their warheads on trains and then scrap the missiles that had housed them Kazakhstan had to deal with the chaotic residue of the Soviet testing program At the Semipalatinsk Test Site in eastern Kazakhstan the U S S R had conducted 456 nuclear tests About one-fourth of those tests had spewed radioactivity into the open air the remainder had been conducted underground leaving poisonous remains— including enough plutonium to make dozens of bombs In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse scavengers went hunting beneath this “plutonium mountain” to obtain plutonium for resale It took a team of American Russian and Kazakh scientists 17 years to entomb the plutonium beyond reach The project cost $150 million or about the same as U S taxpayers spent on four years of President Trump’s golf vacations This work was completed in 2012 The nuclear waste beneath Kazakhstan could have proved a sinister asset for the wrong kind of regime Fortunately—and despite all its many faults of authoritarianism and corruption—Kazakhstan has proved a good actor on nuclear and biological weapons The material that could not be removed to Russia has been encased in thickwalled concrete silos that stud the steppe patrolled from space by U S satellites The worst bias in media is the bias against things that work As the saying goes nobody reports on the planes that land safely—or the nuclear bombs that don’t get lost and that don’t fall into the hands of terrorists Yet newsworthy or not you have been living more safely these past three decades thanks to the Nunn-Lugar program—and thanks to the hard work of hundreds of career federal employees whose names you will never know Read 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union In 1996 a high-level American delegation visited the former Soviet Union to observe the denuclearization program The delegates watched American-funded machinery rip apart old Soviet nuclear submarines—an especially tricky task because of the risk that the subs’ antique nuclear engines might leak radiation into the air or water Senators Nunn and Lugar joined the visit Afterward Nunn told CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre I’ve voted for missiles I’ve voted for bombers I’ve voted for submarines All of them in my view were necessary for our defense But the best money I ever voted for was the money that is now allowing us to work together to tear down these weapons of mass destruction and to do it safely Russia turned inward authoritarian and aggressive under the regime of Vladimir Putin It withdrew from the cooperative structures of Nunn-Lugar in 2012 By then though the most important work to fasten down the once-terrifying “loose nukes” of 1991 had been accomplished What was left was tidying up a job effectively completed with the downblending of those last three kilograms of Kazakh weaponsgrade uranium this past fall Kazakhstan marks the 30th anniversary of its independence in December In ways few Americans fully understand—and despite the cruel slurs of the Borat movies—the Kazakh state has proved one of the most helpful friends the United States has ever had The program that did so much to mitigate post-Soviet hazards has faded into history The civilization-saving job is done Remembrance and gratitude are due is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse Restoring American Democracy 2020 In 2001 and 2002 he was a speechwriter for President George W Bush DAVID FRUM