David Hoffman: The Dead Hand

10 Braithwaite journal entries for these dates.

11 Komsomolskaya Pravda , May 27, 1992, p. 2.

12 “Text of President Yeltsin’s Address to US Congress,” TASS, June 17, 1992.

13 The drafts were discussed June 4, June 15 and July 28, primarily with officials in the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, according to records made available to the author. Also, R. Jeffrey Smith, “Russia Fails to Deter Germ Arms; U.S. and Britain Fear Program Continues in Violation of Treaty,” Washington Post , Aug. 31, 1992, p. 1.

14 Frank Wisner, interview, Aug. 12, 2008. See TNSA EBB 61, doc. 32, for Wisner’s talking points. For this account I have also relied on an authoritative confidential source.

15 “A Deputy’s Request,” Larissa Mishustina, undated. Alexei Yablokov, letter to Yeltsin, Dec. 3, 1991. Spravka , signed by Yablokov, Dec. 6, 1991. All three documents courtesy Meselson archive. Yablokov says in both the spravka and the letter to Yeltsin that documents on the Sverdlovsk case were destroyed by instructions from the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union on Dec. 4, 1990, No. 1244-167, “On Works of Special Problems.”

16 Guillemin was at the time a professor at Boston College and has since become a senior fellow at the Security Studies Program at MIT in the Center for International Studies. The story of the expedition is told in greater detail in her book. She and Meselson are married.

17 Meselson conveyed this paper to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where it was published. Faina A. Abramova, Lev M. Grinberg, Olga V. Yampolskaya and David H. Walker, “Pathology of Inhalational Anthrax in 42 Cases from the Sverdlovsk Outbreak of 1979,” PNAS, Vol. 90, pp. 2291–2294, March 1993.

18 Meselson et al., Science , vol. 266, no. 5188, November 18, 1994.

19 Alibek, pp. 244–256.

20 Confidential source, and David Kelly, “The Trilateral Agreement: Lessons for Biological Weapons Verification,” Chapter 6 in Verification Yearbook 2002 (London: Verification Research, Training and Information Center, December 2002).

21 Kelly interview with Joby Warrick of the Washington Post , June 17, 2002. Warrick notes. In fact, the Pokrov plant was a standby factory for producing smallpox and anti-livestock diseases in the event of war mobilization. According to a confidential source, the plant was capable of producing ten tons a year of smallpox agent. Joby Warrick, “Russia’s Poorly Guarded Past; Security Lacking at Facilities Used for Soviet Bioweapons Research,” Washington Post , June 17, 2002, p. A1.

22 Letter from President Clinton to Congress, Nov. 12, 1996. State Department press guidance for worldwide embassies on July 7, 1998, said, “In November, 1995, the United States imposed sanctions on a Russian citizen named Anatoly Kuntsevich for knowingly and materially assisting the Syrian CW program.” State Department cable 122387, released under FOIA to author.

1 Gerald F. Seib, “Kazakhstan Is Made for Diplomats Who Find Paris a Bore—At Remote New Embassy, They Dodge Gunmen, Lecture on Economics,” Wall Street Journal Europe , April 22, 1992, p. 1. This account of Project Sapphire is based on interviews with Weber; Jeff Starr; a personal communication from Elwood H. Gift, Oct. 22, 2008; and “Project Sapphire After Action Report,” Defense Threat Reduction Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, declassified to author under FOIA, Sept. 21, 2006. Several other useful published sources were William C. Potter, “Project Sapphire: U.S.-Kazakhstani Cooperation for Nonproliferation,” in John M. Shields and William C. Potter, eds., Dismantling the Cold War: U.S. and NIS Perspectives on the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program , CSIA Studies in International Security (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); and John A. Tirpak, “Project Sapphire,” Air Force magazine, Journal of the Air Force, vol. 78, no. 8, August 1995; and Philipp C. Bleek, “Global Cleanout: An emerging approach to the civil nuclear material threat,” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, September 2004, available at www.nti.org .

2 Embassy of Kazakhstan and Nuclear Threat Initiative, Washington, D.C., Kazakhstan’s Nuclear Disarmament , 2007, see illustration after p. 80.

3 Martha Brill Olcott, Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), p. 204.

4 Gulbarshyn Bozheyeva, “The Pavlodar Chemical Weapons Plant in Kazakhstan: History and Legacy,” Nonproliferation Review , James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, California, Summer 2000, pp. 136–145.

5 Embassy of Kazakhstan, p. 94.

6 Olcott, Ch. 1, “Introducing Kazakhstan.”

7 After some initial hesitation, Nazarbayev agreed to removal of all the strategic weapons back to Russia, and Kazakhstan ratified the Start 1 treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

8 Mikhailov interview with Nukem Market Report , a monthly published by Nukem, Inc., based in Stamford, Connecticut, and one of the world’s leading suppliers of nuclear fuel. Earlier estimates were about six hundred tons, but there was a high degree of uncertainty. Oleg Bukharin estimated independently in 1995 that Russia had thirteen hundred metric tons of HEU. Bukharin, “Analysis of the Size and Quality of Uranium Inventories in Russia,” Science and Global Security , vol. 6, 1996, pp. 59–77.

9 Jeff Starr, interview, Aug. 26, 2008.

10 “The President’s News Conference with President Nursultan Nazarbayev,” Public Papers of the Presidents, 30 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 289.

11 Norman Polmar and K. J. Moore, Cold War Submarines: The Design and Construction of U.S. and Soviet Submarines (Dulles, Va.: Brassey’s, 2004), pp. 140–146. Gerhardt Thamm, “The ALFA SSN: Challenging Paradigms, Finding New Truths, 1969–79,” Studies in Intelligence , vol. 52, no. 3, Central Intelligence Agency, Sept. 2008.

12 “Analysis of HEU Samples from the Ulba Metallurgical Plant,” E. H. Gift, National Security Programs Office, Martin Marietta Energy Systems Inc., Oak Ridge, Tennessee, initially issued July 1994, revised May 1995.

13 Gift and others said they saw the crates labeled “Tehran, Iran,” and were told it was beryllium, but none was actually shipped.

14 See Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventive Defense (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), p. 73.

15 Fairfax said these nuclear materials were often much harder to track than warheads. Fairfax, interview, Sept. 3, 2008, and communication with author, Sept. 9, 2008. Nearly all the seizures of stolen HEU or plutonium to date have been such bulk material. Matthew Bunn, communication with author, Oct. 11, 2008.

16 The remark was made by Nikolai Ponomarev-Stepnoi, an academician and vice chairman of the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, in a meeting with a delegation headed by Ambassador James Goodby, March 24, 1994. State Department cable Moscow 08594, declassified for author under FOIA.

17 On the glove episode, “Status of U.S. Efforts to Improve Nuclear Material Controls in Newly Independent States,” U.S. General Accounting Office, March 1996, report GAO/NSIAD/RCED-96-89, p. 25. On the navy case, Mikhail Kulik, “Guba Andreeva: Another Nuclear Theft Has Been Detected,” Yaderny Kontrol , no. 1, Spring 1996, Center for Policy Studies in Russia, pp. 16–21.

18 For his cables on the fissile materials crisis, Fairfax received the State Department’s 1994 award for excellence in reporting on environment, science and technology issues by the Bureau of Oceans, Environment and Science. Also, “Diversion of Nuclear Materials: Conflicting Russian Perspectives and Sensitivities,” State Department cable, Moscow 19996, July 14, 1994.