Citizen Scientist: Frank von Hippel’s Adventures in Nuclear Arms Control PART 4. Soviet Nuclear Transparency, the Collapse and After

Abstract

von Hippel describes a transparency tour during the summer of 1989 to the Soviet Union’s first plutonium-production complex in the Urals and to the Soviet test site for anti-satellite lasers in Kazakhstan. In December 1991, immediately after Ukraine declared independence, he participated in a mission to persuade it to return its nuclear weapons to Russia. He describes the thus far unsuccessful effort to dispose of the weapons plutonium that the US and Soviet Union declared excess at the end of the Cold War. The discussion then turns to the US-Russian lab-to-lab program in which the US nuclear-weapon laboratories helped Russia upgrade the security of its plutonium and highly-enriched uranium for the new and more open environment and to the failed US Government attempts to help Russia downsize its huge nuclear weapons complex. Also, in 1991, a summer school was hosted at the Moscow Physics and Technology Institute (MPTI) for young scientists interested in nuclear arms control that has been an annual event ever since and also led to the creation of an arms control center at MPTI. In 1988, von Hippel was involved in a first seminar on nuclear arms control with China’s nuclear-weapons establishment. Finally, he describes a 1993 meeting with President Clinton’s new Secrtary of Energy, Hazel O’Leary, that laid the basis for the president’s decision that the US could sustain its nuclear weapons without testing.

Keywords

• plutonium production
• plutonium diaposal
• us-russian lab-to-lab program
• russian nuclear cities program
• nuclear arms control and china
• comprehensive (nuclear) test ban