Prague Ships Its Nuclear-Bomb Fuel to Russian Storage

The New York Times ^ | September 28, 2005 | C. J. CHIVERS

[eks41]

PRAGUE, Sept. 27 - The special police unit arrived in the darkness, carrying submachine guns and taking positions around an unmarked cargo truck parked beside a nuclear reactor. The doors to the reactor swung open and a forklift hurried three large steel casks onto the truck.

Each container held several fuel rods of highly enriched uranium, potent enough for use in a nuclear bomb.

As the city slept, the truck and its armed escorts slipped away from the reactor, at a Czech Technical University campus on the outskirts of the city, and passed through deserted streets, stopping at last near a runway at the capital's airport. Soon a Russian cargo plane landed to carry the uranium to a more secure storage center in Russia.

The nuclear reactor at the campus, which for 15 years had stored nuclear material in a lightly guarded setting, was now free of a fuel that terrorists might covet. As the cargo plane's rear hatch locked shut, a team of American nonproliferation officials watched with approval.

"It's now Russian property," said Andrew Bieniawski, head of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, a division of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the semiautonomous agency that directs the Department of Energy's nonproliferation work. "That's it. We're done."