Alfa Class Submarine - Project Sapphire

Project Sapphire

Project Sapphire was a covert United States military operation to retrieve 1,278 pounds (over one half ton) (581 kilos) of very highly enriched uranium fuel for Lira class submarines from a warehouse at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant outside Ust-Kamenogorsk in far eastern Kazakhstan, where it was stored with little protection after the fall of the Soviet Union. The material, known as uranium oxide-beryllium, was produced by the Ulba plant in the form of ceramic fuel rods for use by the submarines. "The Kazakh government had no idea that this material was there", Kazakh officials later told Harvard's Graham Allison, a national-security analyst. In February 1994 it was uncovered by Elwood Gift, an engineer from the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, stored in quart sized steel cans in a vault about twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. Some of it was on wire shelves while others were sitting on the floor. The cans were covered with dust. Word soon came that Iran had officially visited the site looking to purchase reactor fuel. Washington set up a tiger team and on 8 October 1994 the Sapphire Team flew out of McGhee Tyson Air National Guard Base in three blacked out C-5 Galaxy cargo planes with 130 tons of equipment. It took the team six weeks, working twelve hour shifts, six days a week, to process and can the 1,050 cans of uranium. The Sapphire Team finished recanning the uranium on 18 November 1994 at a cost of between ten and thirty million dollars (actual cost classified). The cans were loaded into 447 special fifty-five gallon drums for secure transport to the United States. Five C-5 Galaxys were dispatched from Dover Air Force Base, Delaware to retrieve the team and the uranium, but four were forced to turn back because of bad weather. Only a single C-5, carrying 30,000 pounds of supplies Tennesseans had donated for Ust-Kamenogorsk area orphanages, got through. Eventually a second C-5 arrived, and the two planes carried the uranium to Dover, from where it was transported to Oak Ridge to be blended down for reactor fuel.