The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training reports how the US removed highly enriched uranium from Kazakstan. Quoting the oral history of Janet Bogue, it says:
According to Bogue, the U.S. government at first wanted nothing to do with it. Washington officials didn’t believe it could be highly enriched uranium, so Bogue’s team arranged to send samples back that confirmed the danger. Finally, the U.S. government agreed to remove the highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan to safe storage in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in a secret project dubbed “Operation Sapphire.”
“The whole project was well over a year,” Bogue continued, “including bringing over a whole crew of fellows from Oak Ridge, who lived up at the site while they did what they had to do to package up the uranium in what almost looked like little beer kegs. They are lead and make it possible for you to move it in a safe way. Then flying in C-5s, huge cargo aircraft, one of which broke down….To make a long story short, it was loaded onto the aircraft and then they flew straight to the States with midair refueling….
They landed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The material was transferred onto a truck convoy, highly protected, and taken straight to Tennessee and put deep underground. Once that was announced Secretary [of State] Christopher, Secretary Perry of the Defense Department, and Secretary O’Leary of the Energy Department all did a press conference.
“It was very late at night already in Kazakhstan, but we all converged on a colleague’s house and brought some vile, sweet Kyrgyz champagne from the champagne factory there. It really was one of those moments in your career when you felt like, ‘I actually did a concrete thing that made the world safer.’ Five hundred kilograms of highly enriched bomb-grade uranium is stuck away where whoever in this neighborhood, or whatever rogue elements, cannot get at it. That was a wonderful thing…
“It was old-fashioned human diplomacy. It was the fact that one of our guys was out skiing with the science minister, because they had developed a very friendly relationship and they liked to ski together. The science minister had developed enough confidence over time that he felt he could pose this question on behalf of his government.”
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