#17
Rocky Mountain News
February 22, 2003
At Mayak, Lax Security Worries U.S.
By Ann Imse
(for personal use only)

Imagine these news stories coming out of Rocky Flats:

A security guard kills two colleagues and flees with their guns and ammunition.

Three guards desperate to get drunk poison themselves with antifreeze.

Thieves steal a ton of metal from the high-security site, then try to sell it at a scrap yard that notices 500 times the normal level of radioactivity. The crooks dump their "hot" commodity into a river.

Other thieves attempt to pilfer enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. Officials say they disrupted the plot, but release no further details.

All of these security breaches have occurred during the past four years at Mayak -- the Russian version of Rocky Flats -- a nuclear weapons complex hidden deep in a forest in the heart of Russia.

Tucked behind trees and fences, partially buried under earth and lakes, the 77-square-mile complex was once so secret even the neighbors didn't know what it did.

Today, Mayak's Russian neighbors still aren't allowed inside the company town, Ozersk. Signs warn foreigners they could be arrested just for coming within miles of the place, although residents say it's easy to bribe a guard to break the rules.

Security is weak inside Mayak, too.

Rose Gottemuller, the Clinton administration's deputy undersecretary of energy for non-proliferation, has seen pails of plutonium stored in a Mayak warehouse with broken wooden doors and glass windows.

"They bent down and pulled out a bucket of plutonium and handed it to me," she said, still shocked.

The contradictory security -- incredibly tight yet unbelievably lax -- resulted from the collapse of the dictatorship that ran the Soviet Union until 1991.

Security was simple when no foreigner could get near the place, and every insider informed on his neighbor, said Laura Holgate of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Ted Turner-funded program aimed at reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

But now Russians and foreigners alike can travel the country without being stopped every few miles for a document check. And Mayak employees -- poorly paid and susceptible to bribes from drug runners feeding the closed city's growing narcotics problem -- are seen by the United States as the weakest link in the security chain.

Mayak security has improved since 1998, when Russia's financial meltdown saw unpaid nuclear plant guards leaving their posts to forage for food and refusing to patrol because they didn't have winter coats, said Matthew Bunn, a Harvard expert on nuclear non-proliferation.

The Russian government says guards are now paid about $300 a month. But Bunn is still worried. He said the theft of a ton of steel from inside the plant "suggests that it wouldn't be that hard to steal plutonium."

Ministry of Atomic Energy spokesman Nikolai Shingarev dismisses the security breakdowns at Mayak. "Such incidents happen everywhere," he said.

The worries about security have prompted American officials to intervene. U.S. taxpayers are spending $458.2 million at Mayak to prevent allies of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from hiring someone to snatch a nuclear weapon or the critical ingredients.

Much of the money is going to securing the world's largest store of plutonium, a nuclear bomb ingredient coveted by dictators around the world.

At least $350 million is going to the U.S. construction company Bechtel and its Russian subcontractors for a huge high-security warehouse, which Americans call the "plutonium palace."

American security strategy is designed to slow thieves long enough for them to be stopped, according to Gottemuller. The plutonium she saw in easily snatched pails in a Mayak warehouse is now covered with huge slabs of concrete. "They can't be moved without a crane," she said. But Congress has only barely supported the program to improve Russian security, even though half of Russia's weapons-grade plutonium and uranium is still considered insecure.

Since the budget of the Ministry of Atomic Energy remains secret, some members of Congress fear that the Russians are spending American dollars on weapons research.

Mayak also is one of several Russian nuclear plants involved in a program that dilutes weapons-grade uranium so that it can be used as nuclear power plant fuel, but not in bombs.

American power plants are committed to buy $12 billion of this fuel over 20 years, and effectively burn up Russian nuclear bombs to make U.S. electricity. Altogether, the program has eliminated weapons-grade plutonium for 6,000 warheads.

Pavel Oleinikov, who grew up in a closed city near Ozersk and now works in non-proliferation in the United States, worries that the U.S. programs will leave gaping holes in Russian nuclear security.

"A high-level manager can supersede all regulations, and say, 'Let's ship it to our new commercial partner in North Korea,' " he said.

"It's unlikely anyone would challenge him. For every low-level soldier to perform his duty, there must be a spirit of democracy."

American officials say that even as American taxpayers spend huge sums on Mayak, the Russian government has repeatedly hassled those sent to check on the program. In 1999, Americans were stopped 25 times.

Recently, the ministry barred a Rocky Mountain News team from the plant, the town, and even the U.S.-financed construction site.

"You're not the only one with these problems. No one is allowed in," said ministry spokesman Shingarev.

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