Project Sapphire

Andy Weber
It was a very cold day. It was in early March, but it was a long winter that year, and there was ice on the ground. And we went to this nondescript warehouse-looking small building. It was guarded by a woman armed with a nine millimeter Makarov pistol. And the factory director arranged to open the building. It was behind the doors. It was sort of like prison bars that were locked with a, what looked to me like a civil war era padlock. And they got the key and opened it up. I went into this very large room with a dirt floor and cinder blocks with plywood on top. And these stainless-steel metal buckets, all different configurations. And then we picked out some of these buckets, opened them to verify the contents and it was just metal. And to think that this metal, which I held in my hand, could potentially have the destructive power to destroy entire cities, kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, that just was an emotional, emotional day for me to understand there was that much material there.

Lisa Perry
I'm Lisa Perry. And you're listening to At the Brink, a podcast about the dangers we face from nuclear weapons and the stories of those who are fighting to protect us.

In this episode, we're talking about what it would take to make a nuclear weapon and what could happen when the right material gets into the wrong hands. You were listening to Andy Weber describing an experience he had in Kazakhstan in 1994, two years after it had gained independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The poorly guarded warehouse Andy entered that cold day in March was filled with highly enriched uranium, the key component for building a nuclear bomb. This is the story of how an unusual offer from an auto mechanic led to the discovery of a treasure trove of nuclear material. This is the story of how the United States mounted a fiendishly complicated top-secret mission to keep that material out of the hands of terrorists. This is the story of Project Sapphire.

Andy Weber
Well, it started when my automobile mechanic named Slava approached me and asked me if I might be interested in buying some uranium. This is right after the Soviet Union collapsed. Kazakhstan was a new country, and there were a lot of strange things happening, a lot of scams, people trying to sell all sorts of things. So it was interesting enough that it was worth following up on. So I did.

Lisa Perry
At the time, Andy was working as a foreign service officer at the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan. Having spent considerable time in his career on nuclear issues, he was immediately aware of the significance of this offer.

Andy Weber
Slava introduced me to the director of a factory in Northeastern Kazakhstan called the Olba metallurgical factory. And I got to know him, we became friends. He invited me on a hunting trip in East Kazakhstan near the border with Mongolia, Russia, and China. We killed a moose together, bonded in the Russian sauna or banya, drank some vodka together. And over a period of several months, I earned his trust. And eventually he informed me that they had weapons grade uranium that had been left over in his factory from a secret Soviet submarine reactor program. I kept pressing him for specifics, how much, what's the enrichment level. And on a snowy day, I remember, Slava came by the embassy and said, somebody wants to see you. And he passed me a small piece of paper folded in half. And I

opened it, and I looked down and it said, 600 kg, 90%, U-235. And my jaw dropped. I quietly put the note into my pocket, and that is the material that could make dozens and dozens of nuclear weapons. And that really was the first time I reported this back to Washington

Lisa Perry
To better understand the significance of this huge cache of weapons grade uranium, it's important to consider the context. Kazakhstan was one of four formerly Soviet republics, which had become nuclear nations overnight with the fall of the USSR. Each inherited large stockpiles of weapons and fissile material. In the chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union, these fledgling nations had very little money to secure their nuclear stockpiles, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. The U.S. was concerned that these so-called loose nukes might be a magnet for aspiring nuclear countries looking to jumpstart their programs. So Andy understood that the U.S. had to investigate this alarming offer before word got out to anyone else. When Andy reported this offer to the Defense Department, Jeffrey Starr was working in the Pentagon as the principal director for threat reduction policy.

Jeffrey Starr
Over time, everything was for sale in the former Soviet space. There became a great fear and concern that materials would be sold. When the Kazakhstanis discovered the presence of this uranium, they didn't quite know what to do with it. They didn't really have the resources to protect it. Yet an Iranian purchasing agent tried to go to Ust'-Kamenogorsk to make a purchase of metallurgical products, which included uranium. And the story is, that the Iranian purchase agent didn't have quite all his documents in order, and was turned away until he came back with the right documents. And somehow the central government found out about this and decided, well, we can't let that happen.

Lisa Perry
But the threat of other nations obtaining this fissile material was not their only fear. Andy Weber was aware that if terrorists were able to get their hands on this stockpile of highly enriched uranium, they would be able to build an improvised nuclear weapon with catastrophic consequences.

Andy Weber
But it wouldn't be a dirty bomb, which only spreads radiation. This material could have been used in an improvised nuclear explosive device that terrorists could fabricate, but it would have yield potentially comparable to Hiroshima or even bigger than that.

Lisa Perry
The United States had been concerned about unsecured nuclear material in former Soviet states for several years. In 1991, Senators Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar got Congress to pass the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to deal with the issue of loose nukes. We explored the Nunn Lugar program in episode three. When Andy's report reached the Pentagon, my grandfather, Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, immediately recognized that this was exactly the type of situation that the Nunn-Lugar team team at the Pentagon was created to deal with. The team was led by Assistant Secretary Ash Carter, who chose Jeffrey Starr as the coordinator for this international effort to rescue the unsecured uranium. They named this top-secret mission Project Sapphire. They had their work cut out for them.

Jeffrey Starr
The outline of events was number one, figure out what we're actually dealing with. Number two, what are our options for securing the uranium. Number three, negotiating with the government of Kazakhstan an agreement that would allow us to do this since we'd never done it before. And it was a compartmentalized program, we classified it top secret compartmentalized so that people who showed up to the meeting could not necessarily debrief their bosses on what they were doing at this meeting. We had tremendous fear that this was going to leak to the newspapers and therefore it put at risk the uranium, because we didn't know who knew about the uranium.

Lisa Perry
This large cash of highly enriched uranium was being stored in a dirt floor warehouse guarded by a single guard with a pistol, as we heard Andy describe in the beginning of this episode. The safeguards for the material inside were no better. Highly enriched uranium itself is actually relatively safe to handle, with a crucial exception: when samples of HEU are brought together in a great enough volume, called a critical mass, this will cause a chain reaction, triggering a spontaneous nuclear explosion. The only safeguard that had been put into place to prevent such a catastrophe was to scatter the uranium randomly throughout the factory in steel buckets, not exactly standard safety procedures.

Lisa Perry
Jeffrey arranged for an American nuclear scientist to travel to Kazakhstan to assess the situation.

Jeffrey Starr
He came back with chilling stories about the quantity of uranium. He had done some initial assaying to verify that it was highly enriched. He debriefed us on the deteriorating quality of the storage containers that the uranium was in. The uranium was oxidizing, which means it was becoming unstable. He could not transport it in the Soviet containers that the uranium was currently in at that time, we'd have to take it out of those Soviet containers and put it into American containers, which was going to be a major operation that was going to take weeks to accomplish. And he told us about the security: the room in which the uranium was located was guarded by a padlock, right next to a rail spur, because they had supply lines. So getting this stuff out meant breaking a door down with a padlock on it and bringing a train right up to the building right next to it, and just pushing it off into the rail car and then driving away with it. I mean, it was that vulnerable.

Lisa Perry
Because Kazakhstan did not have the resources or the capability to properly secure the material, the team created a plan to secretly transport the uranium back to the U.S.

Lisa Perry
The large quantity and the instability of the stockpile created a unique logistical dilemma. They had to find a balance between a sense of urgency and the need to safely secure the material for transit. An endeavor this complex would take considerable time to execute.

Andy Weber
We did the first secret visit in March of 1994, but it wasn't until October that the Air Force flew C5 Galaxy transport aircraft to this remote location in Northeastern Kazakhstan, and delivered the special Department of Energy team that was responsible for packaging the material safely.

Jeffrey Starr
They arrived around Columbus Day weekend in Ust'-Kamenogorsk. Their task was to set up a lot of U.S. equipment that would essentially remove uranium from Soviet canisters, so then it could be put into U.S. containers and eventually loaded onto C-5 Galaxy transport planes. But you couldn't load too much on the plane at one time because you might form an inadvertent critical mass.

Andy Weber
We were racing against winter. In that part of Kazakhstan, which is just over the border from Siberia, winter starts early and the packaging took several weeks longer than we had planned. I remember right before Thanksgiving, the workers from the Oak Ridge plant in Tennessee were homesick. It was such a secret project, they were not allowed to communicate with their families or tell their families where they had gone.

Lisa Perry
But homesickness was the least of their problems. The team was concerned that their slow progress and the deteriorating weather might affect the complicated logistics of their plan. Jeffrey was monitoring the situation from Washington and he was worried.

Jeffrey Starr
Oh my God, it was potential disaster written all over this. So on the day that the planes were going to go back over to Kazakhstan, to pick up the uranium and bring it all back, one of them broke on the way in, and there was an ice storm that hit Ust'-Kamenogorsk. This is a small airport. This airport had never seen aircraft as big or as heavy as C-5 Galaxies.

Lisa Perry
Finally, the planes arrived, and the team was ready to go. Now, they could only pray that the weather would cooperate.

Andy Weber
So about three in the morning, we went on the road and it was a terribly cold night. There was black ice on the road and we had these big Soviet trucks. And I was in the command vehicle with the KGB Colonel and the trucks were sliding on the ice and I was worried that we weren't going to make it to the airport, that a truck would slide off an icy bridge into the Irtysh river. And I'd have to report to Washington that the material was floating down the river.

Jeffrey Starr
So there was a heavy security convoy going from the factory to the airport in the midst of an ice storm where the runaway was frozen and the Kazakhstani de-icing equipment, wasn't up, to say, Air Force standards. And so the Kazakhstanis had to jury-rig a MiG engine on top of a flatbed truck to heat up the ice on the runway to turn it back into water so that the aircraft could take off. And I got a phone call from Andy, like three in the morning describing the situation, go or no go. And he described and said go.

Andy Weber
Never before had our military transport aircraft flown such a great distance. And on the flight back from Kazakhstanm because of the cargo, they couldn't land anywhere. So they did aerial refuelings the whole way. This is halfway around the planet.

Jeffrey Starr
I remember years and years ago, talking to some people in the Air Force, one of whom was on one of the planes was joking, “yeah, we were all writing our Tom Clancy novels in our heads when we were going through this.”

Lisa Perry
After being hounded by problems every step of the way, and making the longest flight by a C5 aircraft in history, they finally made it to the U.S. More than a year after Andy received that mysterious offer from his mechanic, the secret cargo arrived safely at the Oak Ridge facility.

Jeffrey Starr
The uranium reached Oak Ridge, as I recall, on Tuesday night, and we had the simultaneous press conferences in the U.S. and in Kazakhstan, we wanted this to be a joint announcement. Not that the U.S. had done something great, but that the U.S. and Kazakhstan together had done something great, cooperatively. And we had a press conference at the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Perry was there, and we jointly announced the outcome of the project

William Perry
Yesterday, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy completed a high priority, extremely sensitive mission, which we called Project Sapphire, intended to help stem the spread of nuclear weapons and material. We have just transferred approximately 600 kilograms of weapons grade, highly enriched uranium out of Kazakhstan at the request of the government of Kazakhstan and delivered the material to the Department of Energy's Y12 plant in Oak Ridge in Tennessee for safe and secure storage. In other words, we have just placed in safe hands, enough nuclear material from the former Soviet arsenal, to make more than 20 nuclear devices.

Lisa Perry
That was my grandfather, Bill Perry announcing the successful conclusion of Project Sapphire. 25 years later, he recognizes that this mission was even more important than they knew at the time.

William Perry
So the story had a very happy ending, but there were some very tense days there between the time we heard the news and the time we actually had the uranium out of Kazakhstan. When Project Sapphire occurred, our main drive was to keep it out of the hands of a rogue nation. And a bonus, then, was it, if there were a terror group trying to get it, stop them too, but that was not a primary motivation at the time. In retrospect, it should have been, but we didn't know that then.

Lisa Perry
In the cultural consciousness of our nation, there is a dividing line, a defining moment that shifted our understanding of the world around us and the danger it posed. Like all who lived through it, I remember where I was when I first learned about the 9-11 attacks, sitting in my ninth grade geometry class in a suburb outside of Washington, DC, where I had grown up. Walking home from school that day, and looking up to see a military plane flying overhead, I knew, like we all did, that everything was about to change. In the world of nuclear security, 9-11 marked a dramatic shift in the risk calculus. Suddenly the threat of a nuclear terror attack was no longer unthinkable. Corey Hinderstein, an expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, explains that despite the risk of terrorism existing well before 9-11, this attack changed how experts evaluated the legitimacy of the threat.

Corey Hinderstein
Prior to 9-11, nuclear terrorism wasn't really taken seriously. We didn't think that a terrorist organization who usually had political motives would be interested in doing something that would be so devastating that they would not only not get their political point across, but they might lose followers as opposed to gain followers. After 9-11, we really, as a society, recognized that the reality of fundamental society-changing actions on the part of terrorist groups was actually maybe within their, not just their interests, but had risen to be a high priority. You know, terrorist groups now talked about killing people in the millions, as opposed to doing the minimum that they could do to get the attention or the decision that they wanted out of a government.

Lisa Perry
Brian Jenkins, American terrorism expert, and author Will Terrorists Go Nuclear, explains that although society at large was not focused on the risk of nuclear terrorism, there was significant evidence that some groups had been seeking deadlier and more dramatic results for years.

Brian Jenkins
We go back to the 1990s, critical period, two developments were reaching a confluence. One was this escalation in terrorism. The second was the fall of the Soviet Union, which suddenly left this vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and mountains of fissile material in a perilous state. What would happen to this fissile material? Now we're talking about bin Laden, and he clearly was out to obtain a nuclear capability. We looked at Al Qaeda, they elicited fatwas, that would give them permission to kill 4 million people, men, women, and children. And so we were seeing a desire to kill ever greater numbers of people, not necessarily because it gave the group leverage, but rather because it was simply what they saw as an instrument of punishment mandated by a God.

Lisa Perry
The idea of a nuclear terror attack is understandably frightening to consider, but what exactly would nuclear terrorism look like? Corey Hinderstein draws a distinction between two very different threats.

Corey Hinderstein
Nuclear terrorism can really be thought of in two broad categories, nuclear weapons terrorism, and radiological weapons terrorism. And what we mean by that is, a nuclear weapon used by

a terrorist would be like Hiroshima. You're thinking about the big mushroom cloud, immediate devastation, both in human life, to cities, environmental impacts, et cetera. Then we also think about radiological terrorism or radioactive terrorism. Sometimes people use the shorthand of a dirty bomb. And that could be something where there is some radioactive material, and it's dispersed through an explosive.

Lisa Perry
A dirty bomb would cause far fewer casualties than a nuclear bomb, but there's a higher risk of such an attack. This is in part because of material needed to make a dirty bomb is much easier to obtain than the material needed to make a nuclear bomb. Radioactive material is used widely around the world in medical and commercial settings. And it's accessible enough that my grandfather actually wonders why haven't had such an attack yet.

William Perry
For a terror group, by far the easiest of those is getting radioactive material and making a so-called dirty bomb. All they have to do in that case is steal the radioactive material. And the radioactive material is stored in hundreds of places in the United States, as well as in other countries and not under the heavy guard that you would find with fissile material. Our country in the last number of years has been taking a number of steps to try to make that harder. But even so that's something that could be done by a terror group. And to me, I've always been surprised that a terror group has not already done that.

Lisa Perry
Samantha Neakrase, an expert on nuclear materials also at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, points out that the radioactive material used for medical procedures is particularly vulnerable to theft.

Samantha Neakrase
There's a couple of dangerous radioactive sources that we worry about. One is the cesium-137, another is cobalt-60. These types of sources are used in many different applications. The one that most people might be familiar with is in a hospital setting where they're used to irradiate blood. They don't have armed guards, you know, looking to make sure that no one's stealing these materials. So they're widespread, they're in over a hundred countries, in the U.S., they're all over the place. This is something that most people are not thinking about. And even hospitals are not necessarily aware of these risks. We haven't seen the use of a dirty bomb so far, but we can't just rely on luck. We need to do what we can to reduce these threats, secure these sources, or replace them when we can.

Lisa Perry
Corey Henderstein also points out that it's important to weigh the probability of an attack against the consequences of that attack.

Corey Hinderstein
So when we think about nuclear terrorism, the nuclear weapons terrorism is very high impact, high consequence, but the likelihood is much smaller. When we think about radioactive terrorism or radiological terrorism, the likelihood could be higher because these materials are much more broadly used in the world, but the impact would be smaller.

Lisa Perry
The chances of a terror group being able to detonate a nuclear bomb may be remote, but the consequences would be so devastating that we cannot afford to ignore the risk. There are a few ways that a rogue group might be able to achieve this terrible goal.

Corey Hinderstein
When we're talking about nuclear weapons and the idea that a terrorist might use a nuclear weapon, one path would be for them to acquire a whole weapon with the ability to detonate it. Now that is probably the hardest task for a terrorist because nuclear weapons are in general, much

more well secured. And also many of them, especially in the advanced nuclear states, have measures built in that keep them from being ever exploded by an unauthorized person. There's a lot of redundant security and safety systems. We also think about could a terrorist build a weapon from scratch, and in order to do that, the one piece that is highly unlikely, I would say near impossible for them to do by themselves would be to produce that fissile material core. And what I mean by that is the material that actually makes the nuclear explosion, that nuclear fission.

Lisa Perry
As my grandfather explains, producing fissile material is not a walk in the park.

William Perry
As we demonstrated at the end of World War II, making a nuclear bomb is very, very difficult. It took a huge enterprise, a huge industrial enterprise, very large factories, thousands of people working on it. So you couldn't imagine a terror group being able to do that, but the big difficulty was making the fissionable material, the highly enriched uranium or the plutonium.

Lisa Perry
Nuclear weapons can only be made with either plutonium or highly enriched uranium, often abbreviated to HEU. Because neither of these metals occurs in nature and producing them is logistically complicated and expensive, the practical result is that only the most technologically advanced nations are capable of making fissile material.

Lisa Perry
However, if a group was able to steal enough fissile material, or even buy it on the black market, they could potentially construct their own weapon.

William Perry
Once we concluded that terror groups were seeking fissile material, that is were seeking a nuclear bomb, then we recognized that we had to do everything we could to protect the fissile material. That was the barrier to entry to a terror group. And that's why Project Sapphire was so important in that here was the fissile material ready made, just sitting in a warehouse, waiting to be stolen.

Lisa Perry
Some experts argue that even with sufficient fissile material, it is still highly unlikely that rogue agents would be able to construct a functional nuclear weapon. But in our modern information age, designs for such a bomb using HEU can now be easily found on the internet. And most knowledgeable physicists agree that the technical and engineering challenges could be overcome.

William Perry
If they could get just the fissile material, then they could make a homemade bomb. People have referred to these homemade bombs sometimes as crude devices, which they would be. But one should not underestimate the destruction one of these crude devices could cause. If a terror group could get the fissile material and make a crude nuclear weapon, it would be crude and it could not be deployed easily, but it could do the same damage as the Hiroshima bomb. It would be just as destructive. So it's crude in that sense, but it goes off with the same destructive power as the sophisticated bombs which we have in warheads and missiles.

Lisa Perry
A nuclear detonation would undoubtedly cause terrible mass casualties and devastation. But Brian Jenkins explains that the effects of a terrorist nuclear attack would go well beyond the immediate destruction.

Brian Jenkins
A nuclear explosion in any city in the United States, for example, would immediately lead to the presumption that more devices were in place about to go off. Cities might start spontaneously

self-evacuating. There would be as a consequence of that panic, social disorder, invariably looting. There was a high ranking military officer that said if a nuclear device went off in a major American city, with the possibility of more going off, the constitution might not hold

Brian Jenkins
A post nuclear terrorism world is not going to be the same as the world is today. We're not the only people on the planet making these decisions and making these calculations. A nuclear explosion in an American city is going to lead to presumptions and calculations in other capitals. We might see alerts taking place in Israel, in Iran, in Pakistan, and if Pakistan does something, then the Indians are going to go to alert. The lids would be coming off the silos, the launchers would be coming up, the planes would be loaded on the runways in a number of places around the world.

Lisa Perry
It's really hard to process how truly catastrophic a nuclear terror attack would be. There would be no way of going back to a world before such an attack. Our only hope lies in creating a world where it can never happen. The success of Project Sapphire was a huge win towards creating that world, but there are still other sources of fissile material in existence. And some of it is still vulnerable to being targeted by bad actors. Experts who study these vulnerabilities are largely concerned about highly enriched uranium, for reasons that have to do with nuclear physics.

Corey Hinderstein
We are aware of what countries we believe have highly enriched uranium. And that's mostly because the production technology that it takes to produce that material is held in the hands of a small handful of countries. Because we are watching the technology, then we know who has the actual highly enriched uranium product, and the places that have that around the world are those that either have nuclear weapons programs or those countries that are running a very specific kind of nuclear reactor for which the highly enriched uranium is the fuel for those reactors. And those reactors are big buildings, very obvious. We know what they look like and where they are.

Lisa Perry
As Corey points out, HEU actually has other uses than just bomb making material. In fact, the uranium secured by Project Sapphire was initially intended to be used for a nuclear submarine propulsion program.

Corey Hinderstein
Highly enriched uranium is used in the world for some nuclear reactors, not to produce electricity, but they're what we call research reactors. The other major area where highly enriched uranium is used outside of nuclear weapons is in naval propulsion

Lisa Perry
While access to military HEU is highly controlled, the security of civilian sources is more uncertain. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, where both Corey Hinderstein and Samantha Neakrase work, attempts to track security incidents with nuclear material. But currently there is no global system monitoring these substances. Samantha tells us that every year there are reports of lost material, both of the type which could be used for a dirty bomb, as well as fissile material that could be used to make an improvised nuclear device.

Samantha Neakrase
What we can tell from available information is that there seems to be significant demand or at least perceived demand for a lot of these materials. In 2019 alone, there were 189 incidents involving nuclear or radioactive sources. And so you're seeing every single year, a couple of hundred incidents where materials have been either lost, reported stolen, found somewhere where they shouldn't be. And those numbers indicate that there's buyers out there, potential buyers out there

Lisa Perry
Today, some 20 countries possess fissile material and many more have radioactive material. It may seem like an impossible task to secure all of this, spread across so many different nations and facilities, but in a world that feels like it's coming apart at the seams sometimes, our efforts to stem the risk of nuclear terrorism have actually been surprisingly successful. While 20 nations with highly enriched uranium may seem like a high number, just a decade ago, that number was much larger.

Corey Hinderstein
There've been more than 30 countries that have gotten rid of their highly enriched uranium stockpiles. Sometimes a country has gotten rid of HEU because they realize that's a burden they don't want to accept. And it's really coincided with our greater understanding about the risks of nuclear terrorism.

Lisa Perry
When the consequences of a nuclear terror attack could potentially impact the entire world, all countries have an intrinsic motivation to make sure that this material is safeguarded from abuse.

Brian Jenkins
Countries may have differences about proliferation, about who gets to have nuclear weapons and who doesn't, but it's in no one's interests and that there'd be loose nukes or available nuclear material, fissile material. That in fact is the biggest single measure we have that prevents nuclear terrorism.

Lisa Perry
One of the greatest successes towards this goal was achieved by a series of international summits on nuclear security initiated by President Obama.

Samantha Neakrase
In 2010, he hosted the first nuclear security summit in Washington. There's approximately 50 countries that were included in this summit. And it was really the first time that world leaders got together and focused on this issue and the importance of kind of building political awareness around this issue. You're seeing countries being more transparent and talking about what they're doing, reporting and sharing information about what they're doing, understanding that it's important to share information, to build confidence in other countries, that your country is doing what it should to secure materials. That's because material stolen in one country can be used to build a bomb to use in another country. So we all have this stake in what everybody else is doing. That concept was fairly new and in the summits became, sort of, an accepted idea that countries need to care about what other countries are doing, and we have a responsibility to each other.

Lisa Perry
In all, President Obama hosted four Nuclear Security Summits. While the summits have not continued, they did create a critical paradigm shift, emphasizing the need for cooperative action to tackle this threat.

Corey Hinderstein
The Nuclear Security Summits did focus on both nuclear, meaning highly enriched uranium and plutonium, as well as radioactive sources. And that really started to build a higher baseline of expectation, not just on what any individual facility would do, but what the countries have to do at the national legislative and governing level. And then what all countries should be doing, not just asking of themselves, but asking of their neighbors. And I think really in the last 20 years, we know that it is my business what's happening in my neighbor's country when it comes to nuclear or radiological material, because if something were to happen, that doesn't stop at the border, you know, a cloud doesn't stop at the border, water doesn't stop at borders, people don't stop at borders. So it’s that collective interest in nuclear security has really changed.

Lisa Perry
President Obama and his team were able to convince most countries with stockpiles of fissile and radioactive material to work together, to begin to bring these materials under tighter controls. But beyond reinforcing security measures, the best way to lower the risk is to not have them at all. Currently, experts are trying to solve the problem of how to move away from relying on these dangerous materials and towards safer alternatives, but that will take some very creative problem solving, as Corey explains

Corey Hinderstein
In a perfect world, we wouldn't need highly enriched uranium for any of these missions, but where we are right now, globally, is that there is a longstanding use of highly enriched uranium that only in the last couple of decades have we tried to reverse.

Lisa Perry
Security experts have also been pushing for alternatives to the radioactive material found in universities, hospitals and industry, which could be used in a radiological attack.

Corey Hinderstein
So for something like a blood irradiator, it uses cesium-137. It's one of the most concerning radiological materials out there because it's not just in quantities and with a radioactive impact that would be extremely significant, but it's in a form that can be more widely distributed. And those blood irradiators are used in blood banks and in hospitals. We're now in a position technology-wise that we know that we can replace that function with X-ray. So these are areas where science and technology conversations really have to go together with nuclear security and nuclear terrorism conversations so that we can say, let's solve both our problems at once.

Lisa Perry
The concept of nuclear terrorism can feel pretty remote from our everyday lives. And it's easy to dismiss it, thinking that it'll never happen or that you can't do anything about it. But in fact, there are very real and concrete actions that we can take to lower the risks. Both Samantha and Corey have worked on this issue for years, and they've witnessed the progress that we've made when we focus our attention and refuse to accept catastrophe as an inescapable possibility. They're inspired by the energy of those people working to shift the security landscape, not just for one nation, but for the world as a whole.

Samantha Neakrase
I would say that I am more of an optimist.And the reason I say that is because there are these bright, young, new, fresh voices out there working in governments around the world who are committed to this issue, committed to strengthening nuclear security in their own countries and committed to enhancing the global attention to this issue. I see that things are going in the right direction. And that gives me hope.

Corey Hinderstein
It is overwhelming to think about nuclear terrorism or radiological terrorism, because it feels very out of our control. And I think that the core message I would want to give is, nuclear security is in our control. The thing about nuclear terrorism, as opposed to looking at a natural disaster, is we know what contributes to nuclear terrorism. And there is a lot to deal with on the demand side, but on the supply side, it's highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and it's a set of very specific radioactive materials. And so if we know that that's the problem, we can bound it. We can address it. We can do our best to deal with it. No security system is ever a hundred percent, but we have every motivation to make it as strong as possible. And so we have to keep talking about it, because I like to say that the security of nuclear material has to be right every day. A nuclear terrorist only has to get it right once. So our job is to sustain, maintain, and continue to evolve our attention on nuclear security and not see this as a static problem.

Lisa Perry
Project Sapphire laid the groundwork for the current international efforts to control nuclear material. The work of Andy Weber, Jeffrey Starr, and the Nunn-Lugar team, provided the world with a critical example of how we must work alongside other nations to tackle this threat. At the same time, it also revealed how much work is left to be done

Andy Weber
At that time, about 50 countries had significant bomb quantities of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. That number has been reduced to about 20. Also, at the sites that have the material, large investments have been made in enhancing security, reducing the number of sites. And we have a lot of progress, but the risks are still out there. So we need to be vigilant, we need to continue to do everything we can to reduce the amount of bomb-usable material and weapons that are stored around the world. This has to be a generational effort and the vision that Presidents Reagan and Obama laid out of a world without nuclear weapons is the right one. And it's going to take a lot of work to get there, a lot of cooperation between countries, but we have to continue working in that direction.

Lisa Perry
My grandfather has often been called a prophet of doom for attempting to sound the alarm about nuclear dangers, but he's actually an optimist at heart. He's the one who gives me hope when this work feels like an endless uphill battle. It's why he continues to do this work at the age of 92, still teaching courses, writing books, and traveling the world to talk about nuclear risks. He's also a realist. He believes that we have escaped a nuclear catastrophe as much by good luck as by good management. So he has dedicated his life to removing luck from the equation, by doing everything in our power to lower the odds of such a catastrophe.

William Perry
A few years after 9-11, Graham Allison, a professor at Harvard, wrote a book called Nuclear Terrorism, in which he described the danger. And in his book, he said he thought the probability of a nuclear terror attack happening in the United States in the next 10 years was about 50-50. Well, it's been quite a bit more than 10 years since then, and it has not happened. And the question was, was Graham just being overly pessimistic? I think not. I think what happened is that we have reacted to the concern and taken steps to lower the danger. Project Sapphire was, of course, one very significant example of that, but there are many others as well. We've gone quite a distance from where we were after 9-11. And I think more than anything, that's the reason we have not seen a nuclear terror attack to this point. We have made it very difficult, much more difficult than it was at the time of 9-11. And we should continue making it more difficult.

Lisa Perry
That's our show. If you'd like to learn more about efforts underway to combat the threat of nuclear terrorism, or check out some behind the scenes photos from the Project Sapphire mission, go to our website: atthebrink.org. There you can also watch Bill Perry’s DC Nuclear Nightmare, a short video depicting what might happen if a nuclear terror attack were to occur in Washington, D.C.

If you liked our show and want to help raise awareness about these issues, please subscribe, review and share our show with your friends. Thank you to Andy, Jeffrey, Brian, Corey, and Samantha, for all of your amazing work, and for taking the time to talk with us. At the Brink is made possible by the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. These organizations work tirelessly to combat the global threat of nuclear weapons. This podcast is a creation of the William J. Perry Project. This episode was produced by Jeff Large and Maggie Fisher from Come Alive Creative, and Ryan Hobler is our composer and audio engineer. Thank you to our listeners. You're helping us to try and save the world one podcast at a time. I'm Lisa Perry. Thanks for listening.