The secret effort to secure nuclear material at an abandoned Soviet test site

This is pretty amazing. The report Plutonium Mountain has just been released by the Belfer Center at Harvard. It describes the remarkable effort the US made to get the Russians to recognize the nuclear proliferation risk they left behind at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test when the Soviet Union collapsed. In this interview with Siegfried Hecker, he describes how he and other scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory recognized the risk to world security, as the Semipalatinsk site became overrun with metal scavengers. It's a great story.