David Hoffman and Eben Harrell have published an amazing account (“Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-year mission to secure a dangerous legacy of Soviet nuclear testing“) of the three operations to secure orphaned plutonium at the Semipalatinsk test site — Operations Groundhog, Matchbox and Nomad. (I had known only of Groundhog.)
Hoffman apparently had a fair amount of the story at the time he wrote the Dead Hand, but held off publishing the story until the operations were completed. In the process, he got a bit scooped by Ellen Barry in 2011 who learned that scavengers were reopening sealed tunnels. (Barry has also has a piece on Harrel and Hoffman monograph.)
But if you can’t be first, you can still be best — particularly if you don’t have to labor under the space constraints of a daily newspaper. Hoffman and Harrell’s monograph is a comprehensive history of the effort to secure plutonium at Semipalatinsk. (Harrell and Hoffman also have a companion piece in the Post.)
For example, footnotes. After I read Barry’s excellent story, I was struck by the fact that the scavengers were able to pop open the tunnels. Some scavengers, I wrote. Some scavengers, indeed. It turns out the scavengers appear to have been the very same people that sealed the tunnels in the first place:
Ristvet and other U.S. officials interviewed suspect that the scavengers were likely the same construction crews that had worked on constructing the dome the previous year. According to Ristvet, DTRA officials encountered scavengers brazenly using Degelen Mountain Enterprises mining equipment, though Ristvet could never prove that the company’s management was aware of such security breaches.
The monograph is a great read.