How Kazakhstan's Uranium Was Won, and Why Gorbachev Did Not Match SDI

David Hoffman -- the Washington Post writer on Russia's oligarchs -- has a new book out today. The Dead Hand is serialized in a couple of pieces in the Post. One of the excerpts is on the famous Project Sapphire, in which, as O&G readers know, the U.S. spirited out more than have a ton of highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The second excerpt is Hoffman's take-down of the stubborn fiction that Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was responsible for Mikhail Gorbachev's decision to call a halt to the arms race.

The Sapphire story is the first inside account of the 1993 event, and is riveting, as evidenced by the 372 Diggs (at last count) it's accumulated. It's also accurate "with a few errors," according to then-U.S. Ambassador Bill Courtney, with whom I exchanged emails this morning. That's a high mark in Courtney's lexicon.

The missile defense piece is interesting, too. As those of us who write on Russia today know, this isn't the 1990s -- it's extremely difficult any longer to access archived records of official Soviet meetings, and participants are also nowhere near as easy to speak with. Hoffman managed both to piece together his account of Gorbachev's decision not to match SDI, but instead to let the U.S. spend its billions while seeking a deep cut in nuclear arms.