• by IPS Correspondents (amsterdam)
• Wednesday, November 23, 1994
• Inter Press Service

AMSTERDAM, Nov 23 (IPS) - The United States and Kazakhstan have completed a secret operation to ship half a tonne of weapons-grade uranium from a Kazakh warehouse to what Washington calls "safe storage" in Tennessee.

But U.S. exuberance at the successful deal masks the limited relevance of the relatively small quantity involved. Past deals to buy up weapons grade material have involved hundreds of tonnes of fissile material -- not half tonnes.

"We have put this bomb-grade nuclear material forever out of the reach of potential black marketeers, terrorists or a new nuclear regime," U.S. Defence Secretary William Perry told a Pentagon news conference Wednesday. "Now it is secure."

Perry regarded the transfer -- dubbed 'Operation Sapphire' by the post-Cold War hawks at the Pentagon -- as an enormous success. "This is defence by other means, and in a big way," he gleefully told reporters in Washington.

He calculated that the 600 kilogrammes of material was enough to make 20 nuclear bombs. Russian officials have poured cold water on U.S. exuberance, claiming that the material was not 'weapons grade'

Such deals have not always proven successful for the U.S., which has tried to remove as much weapons grade material from the ex- Soviet Union as possible since its collapse in 1991.

These deals have long been dogged by problems, despite the fact that they have been greased by vast amounts of U.S. cash. Some observers say the keen willingness of the U.S. to pay hard cash has actually exacerbated the problem.

They raise several questions about what such deals will do to the uranium market -- and whether the U.S. is being suckered into big cash deals by former Soviet bloc nuclear engineers taking advantage of U.S. paranoia about the nuclear black market.

Environmentalists say the biggest problem is not the threat that such material will fall into the hands of 'hostile states' -- but the danger of radioactive pollution from badly maintained nuclear dumps in the former Soviet Union.

Perry said only that the U.S. had picked up a 300 million dollar bill for airlifting the materials to the United States and trucking them on to storage in Tennessee. But he did say that Kazakhstan was to get unspecified U.S. aid to further reduce and clean up nuclear weapons stockpiles left over from the Soviet era.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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