Recovering Orphan Sources
By Nino Chkhobadze
“Too many of our people were dying from being irradiated. If you organize the security systems first, you will have no one left to protect.”
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The Busiest Months
By Susan Koch
“We were entering a new era of US-Soviet/Russian relations unlike anything we had ever experienced.”
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Priorities and Mistakes
By Matthew Bunn
“We might not have several years… Have you thought about getting the stuff out of there?!”
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Language and Missiles
By Natalya Romashko
“As the missiles aged, even moving them became increasingly dangerous. Accomplishing this would require long-term cooperation between the United States and Russia and, therefore, needed English-Russian linguists.”
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Auburn Endeavor
By Peter Mamradze
“They were taken by this megalomania. Even physicists, scientists, were taken by this mythology: ‘it’s so precious, we have to keep it.'”
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Soviet Radiation Legacy
By Lia Chelidze, with Nino Chkhobadze
“We knew something was not quite right in the country when the calls started coming in from all around Georgia. It was like an unfolding and scattered disaster, one caused by orphaned radioactive sources.”
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The Mathematician
By Shelly Lesher, Shorena Lortkipanidze, and Mariam Chabashvili
“I was in the center of the project to remove fuel from Breeder-1. I was responsible for it and everything was swirling around me.”
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Tracing the Cracks
By George Japaridze
“When the mismanagement is based on running away from responsibility, it screws up very easily.”
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Science and the Soviet Era
By Shelly Lesher, George Japaridze, and Revaz Shanidze
“Science was not developing equally in the country. It was centralized. When the Soviet Union disappeared, good scientists left Moscow for the west in three months. Then the center disappeared, and the structure of science disappeared.”
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Principles and Solidarity
By Vasil (Dato) Sikharulidze
“Process is important, but objective is much more important… Principles never should be sacrificed to achieve some kind of technical agreement.”
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Cooperation at Semey
By Siegfried S. Hecker
“All he knew was the test site had serious radioactive contamination. He also lamented that it was overrun by scavengers who mined copper cables and anything else that could be removed and possibly sold on the international market.”
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Roads to and from Minsk
By William M. Moon
“Working relationships with a nuclear adversary involve years of trust building. When the relationship is betrayed, it can raise catastrophic risks. Recreating such a relationship seems impossible without looking back to see how it survived previous crises.”
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“Deconfliction” in Syria
By Robert Hamilton
“As the US and Russia pursued the destruction of ISIS in Syria, their ground forces came ever closer to one another. The US commander saw a need for a deconfliction cell to avoid inadvertent clashes. Weeks later, I flew out to take charge of the nascent cell.”
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Tailings on the Baltic
By Cheryl Rofer
“What it was was an enormous tailings pond—a kilometer long and half a kilometer wide—right on the Baltic Sea. The rain went through it and washed minerals from the pond, both radioactive and heavy metals, into the sea.”
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Mongolia’s Long Borders
By Scott Roecker
“I left this experience with a new appreciation for the generous nature of our Mongolian partners and their commitment to helping prevent nuclear materials from being smuggled across their vast and beautiful territory.”
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The Smaller Question
By Tom Countryman
“We got together in Geneva. In the very first evening consultations, you could see immediately that on the smaller question, what to do about chemical weapons, Russian and American interests lined up.”
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The Greece Deployment
By Elly Melamed
“This was an entirely new model for deploying portal monitors. And it had to completed on a tight and non-negotiable deadline. We began work in the fall of 2003, and the Olympics were held in mid-August 2004.”
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Syrian Chemical Weapons
By Andy Weber
“It sounds like it’s an ocean. 1,300 tons is an impossible amount. How do you deal with that? They did the math, and came back with the answer of about 200 truckloads. And all of a sudden, it becomes thinkable that you can accomplish this.”
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The Outside Consultant
By Dmitry Kovchegin
“Being Russian working on the American side of cooperation on a sensitive nuclear security topic, I found myself in a strange situation.”
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The Queen of Safeguards
By Laura Rockwood
“Well, Ms. Laura, everyone knows that if you want to know anything about the Additional Protocol, they have to talk to you.”
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You Have to Be There
By Daniel Salisbury
“Theory and practice often diverge in instructive ways. That is certainly the case with nuclear security. Site visits to nuclear facilities can demonstrate this, and are a hugely valuable part of nuclear security training and outreach.”
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Dialogue and Safeguards
By Tomás Bieda
“The relationship between Argentina and Brazil is undoubtedly complex, although not necessarily complicated. I witnessed firsthand how public policies can be coordinated at the bilateral level without necessarily having a unification of positions.”
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Sarov Defense Conversion
By James W. Toevs
“Working on the Nuclear Cities Initiative and its work in Sarov, home of Russia’s Los Alamos, crystalized for me some essential principles for cooperation.”
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