Iran crisis: Should Iran’s N-weapons be taken out, like once in Kazakhstan

American strategic planners are now confronting a problem that once belonged to the fringes of nuclear policy: what to do about Iran’s growing stockpile of enriched uranium if conflict escalates.

At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, analysts examining military options have stressed that airstrikes alone cannot eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability, since they do not remove accumulated fissile material or the expertise behind it.

The scale of that material is itself a concern. Nuclear expert David Albright has noted that uranium enriched to 60 per cent leaves a state “99 per cent of the way” to weapons-grade capability, a technical threshold that sharply narrows the distance to a bomb.

The implication — not stated, but unavoidable — is that the problem is no longer simply how to destroy facilities, but how to deal with the material itself.

For reporters who covered the aftermath of Iraq’s nuclear programme and the traffic in expertise and materials that followed, this line of thinking has a familiar ring.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, proliferation was not an abstraction but a lived reporting beat, one that involved scientists in exile, shadow procurement networks, and the uneasy movement of sensitive knowledge across borders. The notion that fissile material might be removed — physically extracted from danger through a combination of intelligence, logistics and force — has appeared before.

Its name was Project Sapphire.

In November 1994, on a freezing night in eastern Kazakhstan, trucks carrying one of the most dangerous cargos on earth began to move.

They held nearly 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, material that, as US officials later confirmed, was enough for more than 20 nuclear weapons. What followed has since acquired an almost mythic quality: a covert American operation that quietly removed weapons-grade uranium from a vulnerable state before it could fall into the wrong hands.

But that telling obscures the essential reality.

Project Sapphire was not a raid. It was not a seizure. It was the product of a political moment that no longer exists.

In the early 1990s, Washington’s overriding concern was the danger that nuclear weapons and materials might fall into the wrong hands. Senator Sam Nunn, co-architect of the Cooperative Threat Reduction programme, warned repeatedly of that risk in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.

Kazakhstan stood at the centre of that vacuum. Newly independent and economically fragile, it had inherited both nuclear weapons and fissile material from the Soviet arsenal. Crucially, it made a strategic decision. As President Nursultan Nazarbayev later declared, “Kazakhstan voluntarily renounced the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal.”

That decision made Project Sapphire possible.

The uranium that left Kazakhstan in 1994 was not taken. It was relinquished.

This is where comparisons with Iran collapse.

Iran’s nuclear programme is not an unwanted inheritance. It is a deliberate national project, developed over decades and embedded in its strategic thinking. Its facilities are hardened, dispersed and defended. Its leadership does not view enriched uranium as a liability but as leverage.

The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 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.

The contrast with Kazakhstan is therefore not simply one of degree, but of kind.

In 1994, the United States confronted the dangers of disorder: unsecured stockpiles, economic collapse, institutional fragility. Project Sapphire addressed a problem of vulnerability. It succeeded because the interests of both sides aligned. Kazakhstan wanted the uranium gone; the United States wanted it secured.

In Iran, the situation is reversed. The programme is not vulnerable but protected; not unwanted but cultivated. There is no equivalent political decision to relinquish capability — and no indication that such a decision is forthcoming.

Yet the appeal of Project Sapphire endures.

There remains a persistent temptation in Western strategic thinking to search for clean, technical solutions and the belief that nuclear risks can be eliminated through precision: a strike, a sabotage campaign, or, in its most seductive form, a quiet extraction.

Project Sapphire appears, at first glance, to support that belief.

In reality, it does the opposite.

Its success was not operational but political. It depended on consent, cooperation and a shared objective. The Cooperative Threat Reduction programme worked because it brought former adversaries into a framework of mutual interest.

No such framework exists today with Iran.

There is also a deeper historical 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 decision to renounce nuclear weapons reflected a wider strategic choice to integrate, stabilise and reduce risk.

That world has largely disappeared.

Today’s nuclear landscape is more adversarial, more fragmented and more resistant to cooperative solutions. The idea that fissile material could be quietly lifted out of a hostile state under cover of night belongs less to contemporary policy than to a misreading of history.

Project Sapphire removed enough uranium for dozens of nuclear weapons and ensured it would never 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.