American strategists are confronting a problem that was once peripheral to nuclear policy: what to do about Iran’s growing stockpile of enriched uranium if conflict escalates. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies stress that airstrikes alone cannot eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability, because they do not remove accumulated fissile material or the expertise behind it. David Albright notes that uranium enriched to 60 percent leaves a state “99 percent of the way” to weapons-grade, sharply narrowing the distance to a bomb. The implication is unavoidable: the challenge is no longer just destroying facilities but dealing with the material itself.
For reporters who covered the aftermath of Iraq’s program and the movement of expertise and materials that followed, this thinking sounds familiar. In the 1990s and early 2000s, proliferation was a lived beat — scientists in exile, shadow procurement networks, and the uneasy transfer of sensitive knowledge. The idea of physically removing fissile material through intelligence, logistics and force reappears in that history under one name: Project Sapphire.
In November 1994, on a freezing night in eastern Kazakhstan, trucks moved nearly 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium — enough, US officials later confirmed, for more than 20 nuclear weapons. The covert American operation that removed the material before it could fall into the wrong hands has acquired a near-mythic status. But that telling obscures a key reality: Project Sapphire was not a raid or a seizure. It was the product of a political moment that no longer exists.
In the early 1990s Washington’s overriding concern was that nuclear weapons and materials might fall into the wrong hands after the Soviet collapse. Kazakhstan, newly independent and economically fragile, had inherited nuclear weapons and fissile material. Crucially, Kazakhstan made a strategic decision to renounce those weapons. As President Nursultan Nazarbayev later said, Kazakhstan “voluntarily renounced the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal.” That decision made Project Sapphire possible — the uranium was relinquished, not taken.
This is where comparisons with Iran break down. Iran’s nuclear program is not an unwanted inheritance; it is a deliberate national project, developed over decades and embedded in strategic thinking. Its facilities are hardened, dispersed and defended. Its leadership treats enriched uranium not as a liability but as leverage. The IAEA’s director general Rafael Grossi has warned that enrichment at these levels is “almost military.” This is not loose material awaiting recovery; it is the core of a national strategy.
In 1994 the US confronted dangers of disorder: unsecured stockpiles, economic collapse, institutional fragility. Project Sapphire addressed vulnerability and succeeded because both sides’ interests aligned. In Iran, the situation is reversed: the program is protected and cultivated, and there is no equivalent political decision to relinquish capability.
Yet the allure of Project Sapphire endures. Western strategic thinking often seeks clean technical fixes — a strike, sabotage, or a quiet extraction — to eliminate nuclear risks. Project Sapphire seems to support that belief, but in reality it contradicts it. Its success was political: consent, cooperation and a shared objective under the Cooperative Threat Reduction framework. No such framework exists with Iran today.
There is a deeper point. Project Sapphire belonged to a brief post-Cold War moment when cooperation between Washington and the former Soviet space was still possible. Kazakhstan’s renunciation reflected a wider strategic choice to integrate, stabilize and reduce risk. That world has largely disappeared. Today’s nuclear landscape is more adversarial and fragmented, less amenable to cooperative solutions. The idea that fissile material could be quietly lifted out of a hostile state belongs less to contemporary policy than to a misreading of history.
Project Sapphire removed enough uranium for dozens of weapons and ensured it would not enter the black market. It remains a remarkable achievement and a rare alignment of interests, timing and trust. But it was not a template; it was an exception.
