The HEU Deal’s Other Objective

Today marks the 35th anniversary of an article that Tom Neff and I wrote about expanding nuclear trade with the Soviet Union, raising the possibility that even the highly enriched uranium (HEU) in Soviet nuclear warheads could be blended down for use in nuclear reactors. This is a bittersweet occasion, both because Tom passed away earlier this year and because the nuclear world as it pertains to Russia is looking much less hopeful than it did back then.

A lot has been written about the HEU Deal, including by me, but there are still some motivations behind the deal which are not well known, and have important bearings on how events have unfolded, or could have unfolded, including the situation in Ukraine.

The HEU deal was first and foremost a nonproliferation initiative, called by some the most important ever, as it resulted in the blending down of HEU in 20,000+ Russian nuclear warheads. One immediate byproduct of the HEU deal was to fund Russian nuclear scientists so they would not be tempted to take their talents elsewhere, so the deal sought to limit both the proliferation of nuclear weapons’ material as well as knowhow.

A more ambitious and potentially more consequential goal was to use the HEU deal as a mechanism to increase the economic interdependence between Russia and the West. Our article was written shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, signaling the potential for change in dealing with the Soviet Union. HEU was probably the most important asset that the Soviet Union had, the country desperately needed hard currency, and it also had to reform its economic system, opening the door for more engagement by the West.

The structure of the HEU deal, including the feed component, was such that it got Russian companies working more closely with their Western counterparts. The players had to consider the market impacts of the deal, which pushed its scope beyond that of a nonproliferation endeavor. While the blending down and tracking of HEU presented a series of problems that needed to be solved, so did the accommodation of the resulting LEU into the market.

A related objective was to encourage Russia to engage with the world at large in the pursuit of peaceful uses of the atom, primarily via nuclear energy. Tom and I both worked to this end. In April 2006, I was invited to speak at a Russian energy conference in Moscow. The title of my speech was “Atoms for Peace in a New Era.” Here I noted that, in addition to participating in the HEU deal, Russia could play a major role in the peaceful use of the atom by contributing to the expansion of nuclear power and nuclear fuel availability worldwide.

The same week that I was speaking in Moscow, Sergey Kiriyenko, then the head of ROSATOM and formerly the prime minister of Russia, was speaking at the 2006 World Nuclear Fuel Cycle conference in Hong Kong. There he spoke about restructuring Russia’s nuclear industry, growing the nation’s nuclear energy capacity, and expanding its role in nuclear energy worldwide. Whether these conferences could be considered Russia’s nuclear energy “coming out party,” it was clear that the country had intentions of expanding its peaceful nuclear footprint and, in doing so, increasing its cooperation with the West, which it eventually did.

The importance of the HEU deal in increasing commercial ties with the U.S. was echoed by Russian officials. In 2012, Anya Bryndza interviewed Alexei Grigoriev, then TENEX Director General, for the Ux Weekly. In speaking about the HEU deal, Grigoriev said “I think it has really helped us in our relations with the U.S. utilities as well as relations between our countries in general …the contract began in the early 1990s, which were difficult years for the Russian economy. Thus, the contract really helped Rosatom (which at that time was called the Ministry of Atomic Energy in the Russian Federation) to make the civil nuclear industry one of the few industries at that time that continued to increase its production.”

At celebrations in Washington marking the successful conclusion of the HEU deal in 2013, Tom relayed to me that Lyudmila Zalimskaya, who had succeeded Grigoriev as TENEX’s Director General, noted how the deal had helped TENEX make additional sales to the West and learn how to work with its competitors.

The following year, Russia invaded Crimea, setting the stage for the larger invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Once that happened, the dynamics of Russian nuclear energy were altered, perhaps irrevocably. When we exchanged emails on the situation in Ukraine, Tom bemoaned the failure of the U.S. to engage more with Russia and to pursue greater economic interdependence between Russia and the West, instead of pushing for NATO expansion.

Now we are faced with a situation where enrichment trade is being curtailed between the U.S. and Russia, a sharp contrast from the situation where much of the enriched uranium supplied to the U.S. came from erstwhile Russian nuclear warheads. More troubling than the deteriorating state of the nuclear fuel market is that Russia is bombing Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and threatening nuclear war as its invasion of Ukraine continues.

It is beyond ironic and extremely disheartening that Russia, which had a very good track record of pursuing the peaceful use of the atom, is now threatening to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, a country that willingly gave up its nuclear weapons, is highly dependent on nuclear energy, and plans to expand nuclear energy in spite of being locked in a war for its very survival.

The last 35 years have seen the nuclear situation with respect to Russia go from great promise, then to great accomplishments, and now to great peril. If we could only turn back the clock.