A container filled with highly enriched uranium in a factory in Kazakhstan in 1994.
Kazakhstan has offered to host Iran's enriched uranium in order to streamline a potential peace deal between Tehran and Washington. The offer comes more than 30 years after a massive haul of weapons-grade uranium was taken out of the Central Asian country and flown to the US.
If Tehran accepts Kazakhstan’s recent offer to store Iran’s uranium stockpile, at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, as part of a peace deal with the United States, it would not be the first time the Soviet-era facility has handled a high-stakes transfer of nuclear material.
A section of the Ulba Mettalurgical Plant in northeast Kazakhstan as it looks today
In 1993, Andy Weber, a young American diplomat beginning a posting in newly independent Kazakhstan, was approached by Vitaly Mette, the director of the metallurgical plant in the northeastern city of Ust-Kamenogorsk, known today as Oskemen.Mette offered to sell what he claimed was 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium -- enough for dozens of nuclear warheads.The uranium, the industrialist said, had been gathering dust in his factory since a Soviet nuclear submarine project was ended in 1981. Moscow had apparently forgotten about the uranium -- made to fuel the attack submarines -- and the Kremlin no longer had jurisdiction over the plant.
