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Civilian Research Sites in Ukraine and Elsewhere May Be Easy Terror Targets
Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology
Iraq opened a consular office in Kharkiv in December 2000
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Major Front Page Story
The Washington Post, Washington, D.C.
Thursday, November 28, 2002; Page A01
KHARKIV, Ukraine -- In 1994, a senior Ukrainian nuclear scientist offered
U.S. officials a chance to buy a cache of weapons-grade uranium held by an
obscure defense laboratory in this city. It was a significant cache -- 165
pounds, enough for three nuclear bombs -- and the scientist said Ukraine
might be willing to give it up.
"It's lightly guarded," the scientist said, according to two Clinton
administration officials present at the meeting, "and I'm worried about it."
The deal never happened.
Eight years later, with new concerns about nuclear terrorism, the U.S.
government would like nothing better than to buy Ukraine's uranium. But the
opportunity appears to be slipping away.
Relations with Ukraine recently have taken a confrontational turn, and the
laboratory, the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, now insists the
material is urgently needed for civilian research. Meanwhile, despite
elaborate physical protections for the uranium, U.S. weapons experts see new
reasons to worry about its safety: The lab is facing extreme financial
pressure at a time when Iraqi officials have been openly pursuing trade
deals with local companies and paying visits to Kharkiv's Soviet-era weapons
factories and research centers, including the institution where the uranium
is kept. Iraq two years ago appointed an "honorary consul" in Kharkiv, a
Ukrainian exporter who keeps an office not far from the institute -- and
openly displays an Iraqi flag on the front door.
"We would be far better off today if we had just gotten rid of the stuff,"
said Matthew Bunn, a former White House nonproliferation policy adviser, who
argued unsuccessfully for a U.S. purchase of the uranium eight years ago.
"Insecure nuclear material anywhere is a threat to people everywhere."
The highly enriched uranium at Kharkiv is emblematic of a global
proliferation threat that has now become a top priority for the United
States: the vulnerability to theft or misuse of weapons-grade uranium kept
in scientific institutions, such as research reactors. An estimated 20 tons
of highly enriched uranium currently is stored at such locations in about 40
countries, from Russia and other former Soviet republics to Libya and Congo.
In the last decade, efforts to protect against the theft of nuclear
materials largely focused on military installations. But weapons experts say
that the research facilities are lightly guarded in comparison with military
stockpiles. Some terrorism experts regard them as the most vulnerable
repositories of nuclear material in the world.
"We are talking about the raw material of nuclear terrorism, stored in
hundreds of facilities in dozens of nations," former senator Sam Nunn
(D-Ga.), a longtime arms control advocate, told a conference of nuclear
terrorism experts this month. "Some of it is secured by nothing more than an
underpaid guard sitting inside a chain-link fence."
In August, the Bush administration achieved a dramatic breakthrough when it
persuaded Yugoslavia to give up 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium from
the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences near Belgrade. But the deal required
more than a year of complicated negotiations involving Yugoslavia, Russia
and the State Department. As a clincher, the United States pledged $5
million to be paid to the institute by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a
nonprofit group co-founded by Nunn and billionaire entrepreneur Ted Turner.
Afterward, the State Department announced it had targeted two dozen other
research institutions as "priority sites," most of them in Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union. But while progress has been made in the
negotiations, several countries have balked, refusing to give up what they
see as a powerful bargaining chip that could be used to extract money,
technology or other concessions, according to administration officials and
weapons experts familiar with the talks.
Two of the countries most opposed to giving up uranium -- Ukraine and
Belarus -- also happen to own some of the largest stocks of the metal. Both
countries are under increased scrutiny by U.S. intelligence officials
because of alleged attempts by local businesses to sell weapons or military
supplies to Iraq or Iran.
"They were once willing to help us, but they may not be so willing anymore,"
said Bunn, now a senior researcher for Harvard University's Project on
Managing the Atom. "We can only hope that someone eventually can put
together a package that will change the answer from 'nyet' to 'da.' "
A Dangerous Asset
The gravest nuclear threat in Ukraine is housed in a crumbling institution
that struggles in most years to pay its heating bills. Two-thirds of its
staff has been laid off, and the remaining workers scrape by on the
equivalent of about $150 a month. Scientists with two PhDs spend their days
in freezing-cold buildings, sometimes as caretakers for such technological
dinosaurs as the institute's 40-year-old linear accelerator, once the
world's largest, but now permanently idled in a building that is kept dark
to save on electricity bills.
By almost every measure, the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, or
KIPT as it is known, bears scant resemblance to the bustling weapons lab
that existed here in Soviet times. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union,
the lab had 6,000 workers and a mission to develop special materials for the
most advanced weapons in the Soviet arsenal -- from nuclear warheads to the
missiles that carried them. The institute's two campuses were part of a
larger weapons-research complex in Kharkiv that collectively employed 50,000
scientists, giving this otherwise dreary city of 2.5 million the distinction
of having one of the greatest concentrations of weapons expertise in the
world.
Exactly how the institute came to acquire 165 pounds of highly enriched
uranium is unclear. The lab has never owned a nuclear reactor and was never
directly involved in weapons fabrication. In contrast with similar labs in
other former Soviet republics, the Kharkiv institute has clung to a
tradition of secrecy about many aspects of its past, and will not even
discuss the amount of uranium it has.
This much is clear: More than a decade after the institute was converted to
civilian research, the uranium remains one of the lab's most significant and
dangerous assets.
"The uranium at Kharkiv has at best little relevance to Ukraine's peaceful
nuclear energy needs, and has been untouched for over a decade," said
William Potter, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a
Monterey, Calif., weapons think tank that has studied the lab and its
holdings. "It represents a major terrorist and proliferation target, and
also poses a residual 'breakout' threat, should Ukraine ever seek to
repudiate its commitments" renouncing nuclear weapons.
Energy Department officials apparently shared those concerns, agreeing in
1995 to help the U.N.-chartered International Atomic Energy Agency build a
multimillion-dollar security system for the uranium. In 1999, the agency
completed work on a double vault -- an outer shell of concrete, an inner
shell of hardened steel -- and installed security cameras and fences to
guard against intrusion. Once a month, IAEA inspectors check the uranium to
ensure none is missing.
Today, officials at the institute cite security concerns in refusing to
allow visits to the storage facility, even by Ukrainian government
ministers. They boast of a fail-proof system equal to the finest in Europe
and North America.
"It is not possible to remove from our institute even one single milligram,"
deputy director Alexei Yegorev said in an interview at the lab's main
administration building, an office tower in a suburb of Kharkiv.
Energy officials familiar with the upgrades agree -- to a point. But they
assert that there is no reliable defense against a future government
decision to thwart the safeguards.
"It's just like the bank manager who turns off the alarm and takes the
money," said an official of the Energy Department's National Nuclear
Security Administration. "There's no system in the world that can protect
against that."
The Iraq Connection
From the start of Iraq's quest for a nuclear bomb in the 1970s until the
present, the main obstacle has been the lack of fissile material -- enriched
uranium or plutonium needed for a nuclear explosion. Western intelligence
agencies estimate that if President Saddam Hussein could buy or steal a
quantity of fissile material one-third the size of Kharkiv's 165 pounds of
uranium, Iraq could become a nuclear power in less than a year.
The possibility that Iraq might try to cut a deal for the uranium partly
explains the intense U.S. interest in recent Iraqi trade missions to this
city. Encouraged by Kharkiv businessmen, Iraq opened a consular office in
this city in December 2000 and dispatched at least three official
delegations since 1998 to explore trade opportunities. At least one of the
delegations toured the institute, laboratory officials confirmed.
"The Iraqis were interested only in an overview -- they made no requests,"
said Yegorev, the institute deputy director.
Yegorev said there were no other official contacts with the Iraqis, although
individual scientists recalled being approached by Middle Eastern
businessmen who claimed to represent Iraq or Iran.
Concerns about possible Iraqi overtures to the institute first arose in the
early 1990s, when documents obtained by U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq
pointed to alleged trafficking of weapons materials between Kharkiv and
Baghdad.
The key Ukrainian figure in the documents was Yuri Orshansky, a businessman
with a PhD in electrical engineering. At the time, Orshansky was the head of
a loose confederation of Ukrainian businesses called Montelekt that included
several of the KIPT's sister institutions in Kharkiv. Documents found in
Iraq included an agreement signed by Orshansky and Iraqi Brig. Gen. Naim
Bakr Ali, then one of the leaders of Iraq's ballistic missile program, to
provide Iraq with guidance systems and parts for advanced missiles,
according to Timothy V. McCarthy, a former U.N. weapons inspector who
investigated Iraq's Ukrainian connections in the mid-1990s. A third party to
the protocol was a Kharkiv company, Khartron, a neighbor of the KIPT and an
institution best known for designing Soviet ballistic missiles.
"We found a copy of Orshansky's passport in Baghdad with the documents
describing the deal," said McCarthy, now the director of the Proliferation
Research and Assessment Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
"The Iraqis basically gave him up."
McCarthy said U.N. inspectors never were able to determine whether missile
parts actually were delivered -- nor could the inspectors directly link
Orshansky to any other technology sales to Iraq. The chances of finding hard
evidence linking any foreign supplier to Iraq are always small, he noted,
because Iraqi officials often use middlemen and obscure delivery routes to
mask smuggling.
"Getting the goods into Iraq is never the problem," McCarthy said.
Meanwhile, Orshansky's continuing efforts to build ties between Iraq and
Kharkiv businesses earned him two years ago the special title of "honorary
consul" of Iraq in Kharkiv. In an interview last year with the Ukrainian
defense news service, Defense Express, Orshansky boasted of making 40 trips
to Baghdad since 1993, and said he had embarked on a "constant study of
Iraq's needs in all areas," working within the boundaries of Ukraine's
export laws.
"On some issues we have begun to work with Iraq in order to create
conditions so that orders are placed with Ukraine," Orshansky was quoted as
saying. "Even if they want to create a nuclear bomb, we will study this."
In the months following U.S. allegations of illegal sales of Ukrainian air
defense radars to Iraq, Orshansky has kept a lower profile. Contacted at his
Kharkiv office last month, he declined to meet with a Washington Post
reporter or
discuss any aspect of his business ties with Iraq. "If you've come to talk
about Montelekt, I have nothing to say," he said, referring to the Ukrainian
business confederation.
Orshansky's choice of office decor, however, was itself a bold statement. In
the place of a sign announcing the name of his company, Orshansky displayed
a large tricolor Iraqi flag with the familiar stars and the words "God is
Great" written in Arabic. Above the door was an Iraqi eagle, the preferred
symbol for Saddam Hussein's Baathist government.
In 1994, a chance to eliminate the risks posed by the Kharkiv institute's
enriched uranium was briefly dangled before Clinton administration
officials, some of whom had never heard of the facility. The possibility of
a sale grew out of a meeting in Washington with a visiting Ukrainian nuclear
scientist who mentioned the KIPT's supply of weapons-grade nuclear material
in a discussion of problems facing Ukraine's nuclear industry. Security for
the enriched uranium was a big worry, the Ukrainian scientist said,
according to those who heard him. "But your people already know this."
Bunn, then an adviser on nuclear terrorism in the Clinton White House's
Office of Science and Technology Policy, made a few phone calls and learned
that Energy Department officials had indeed visited the facility and had
agreed to an IAEA plan that called for securing the material, not removing
it. The notion of a deal to purchase the uranium was initially welcomed by
State Department officials but ultimately went nowhere. At the time, Bunn
explained, the administration was more concerned about removing the Soviet
nuclear warheads still on Ukrainian soil.
"The wheels of bureaucracy failed to turn," Bunn said.
Today, much has changed. The former Soviet republics outside Russia have
given up their nuclear warheads and delivery systems. The United States is
spending billions of dollars to help Russia dismantle nuclear weapons. Now,
fresh attention is being devoted to new threats, such as the fissile
material in Kharkiv. The United States favors removing enriched uranium from
dozens of research reactors around the world, using a combination of money,
technology transfers and political pressure as leverage. Energy Secretary
Spencer Abraham said in a speech Nov. 14 that a major factor in the new
approach is that Russia has agreed to accept nuclear fuel returned from
Soviet-designed reactors around the world.
"This fuel needs to be repatriated to Russia, where it will be safer from
the risk of theft or diversion," Abraham said.
So far, such arguments have failed to sway the keepers of Kharkiv's uranium.
Top managers of the Kharkiv institute said there is no interest in selling
the uranium because it is vital to the institute's plans to develop a new
line of commercial fuel for nuclear power.
"It is not possible for us to sell it," said Yegorev, the deputy director.
"You would not only need a special order of the Ukraine government but
special permission of the IAEA, because it is under their control. Without
this we can do nothing."
U.S. officials aren't convinced that this is the final word. Although
relations occasionally have been rocky, Ukraine's leaders have almost always
sided with the United States and NATO in deciding whether to scrap weapons
systems that are deemed proliferation threats. Earlier this month, senior
Ukrainian officials stood with their U.S. counterparts to watch the
destruction of the first of Ukraine's 225 Soviet-built Kh-22 missiles,
medium-range weapons that potentially can carry nuclear, biological or
chemical warheads.
"You'll hear mumbling now and then from the military, but ultimately the
cooperation is always fairly good," said a U.S. official. "Ukraine doesn't
need these weapons anymore. And as the leaders know, if you let something
lay around long enough, eventually it will disappear."
The Washington Post Company, Washington, D. C.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48663-2002Nov27.html
Photo with the story: Alexei Yegorev of Ukraine's Kharkiv Institute of
Physics and Technology says the center intends to keep its supply of uranium
for research purposes. (Jo Warrick -- The Washington Post)
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