Plutonium Mountain - Belfer Center for Science and International ...

infrastructure and detritus of their mammoth Cold War weapons machine—the biological weapons
factory at Stepnogorsk and the contaminated biological testing ground at Vozrozhdeniye
Island, the chemical weapons facility at Pavlodar, and the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing polygon,
among many others. In the case of Semipalatinsk, excessive secrecy prevented accountability
within the Russian system so that materials were left unattended in the first place; it enabled
complacency about the terrorism and proliferation risk posed by the unattended materials since
very few people knew what was left behind and what risks it could pose; and it prevented key
Russian decision makers from seizing the opportunity to act expeditiously when the US offered
assistance.
One of the great challenges of carrying out threat reduction in the years after the Soviet collapse
was penetrating this secrecy and discovering the source of potential threats. It was a long,
arduous process often made even more difficult by lack of cooperation or simple disorganization
on the part of Russian authorities. Cooperation to beef up security at some sites was delayed
by months or years over disputes over American access to the sites and what secrets might be
revealed. Even today, continuing secrecy has blocked all cooperation to improve security at Russia’s
nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facilities, and there are no transparency measures
for Russia’s giant fissile material storage facility at Mayak, leaving the United States in the
dark as to its use, although it was largely built with U.S. funds.
Many of the Russians were well aware of the dangers. At least some of them were interested in
overcoming the mistrust of the past and addressing the threats. Through a step-by-step process
of trust-building, many barriers were overcome; U.S. security experts visited and helped improve
security at all but a few of the facilities in Russia where nuclear weapons and nuclear materials
reside. But there were strong countervailing forces in Russia—institutional and bureaucratic inertia,
fears about spying, and a sense of national humiliation—that lingered long after the Soviet
Union collapsed. The secrecy remained through the Yeltsin era and has become more intense
in the Putin era in Russia. In the last two decades, there was never a thorough overhaul of the
Soviet-Russian military-industrial complex, nor of the nuclear weapons complex or the secrecy
in which they are shrouded.
In the years immediately after the Soviet collapse, the Russians did not bother to alert Kazakhstan
to the plutonium left behind at Degelen Mountain because it was a problem they did not
want to address. They did not see it as a risk, at least until Hecker showed them the photographs
of the metals scavenging. The secrecy alleviated the need for Russia to contribute financially to
the clean-up. Although Russia could ill afford the expense of a clean-up in the 1990s, its finances
recovered in the 2000s and Russia could have made a major financial contribution. As successor
to the Soviet nuclear arsenal, Russia must share responsibility for the site.
An important lesson of the Degelen Mountain operation—a lesson that reverberates through all
of the Cold War years—is the value and importance of seeking transparency. Facing the past is
not easy for a country like Russia that suffered such an abrupt and turbulent collapse. It is hard to
accept the idea of cooperation with a rich and powerful rival.
Our point here is not to criticize those in the U.S. and Russia who have labored for years on
threat reduction in the former Soviet Union—a two-decade-long effort that continues—but rather
to highlight the lessons from their experiences. These lessons will be important for the next
36
Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-year mission to secure a dangerous legacy of Soviet nuclear testing