As the Cold War ended in the late 1980s and early ’90s, a new fear arose amid the rejoicing and relief: that atomic security might fail in the disintegrating Soviet Union, allowing its huge stockpile of nuclear warheads to fall into unfriendly hands.

The jitters intensified in late 1991, as Moscow announced plans to store thousands of weapons from missiles and bombers in what experts viewed as decrepit bunkers, policed by impoverished guards of dubious reliability.

Many officials and scientists worried. Few knew what to do.

That is when Thomas L. Neff, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hit on his improbable idea: Why not let Moscow sell the uranium from its retired weapons and dilute it into fuel for electric utilities in the United States, giving Russians desperately needed cash and Americans a cheap source of power?

Last month, Dr. Neff’s idea came to a happy conclusion as the last shipment of uranium from Russia arrived in the United States. In all, over two decades, the program known as [the] Megatons to Megawatts Program turned 20,000 Russian warheads into electricity that has illuminated one in 10 American light bulbs.

Dr. Neff fathered the atomic recycling program in spite (or perhaps because) of his lack of name recognition, his inexperience on the world stage and his modest credentials in arms control. Moreover, he not only came up with the original plan but shepherded it for decades.

“I was naïve,” Dr. Neff, 70, recalled in a recent interview. “I thought the idea would take care of itself.”

In fact, it required sheer doggedness and considerable skill in applying nuclear science to a global deal freighted with technical complexities and political uncertainties. Yet in the end, Dr. Neff noted, the mission was accomplished: Uranium once meant to obliterate American cities ended up endowing them with energy.

Nuclear experts hail it as a remarkable if poorly known chapter of atomic history. The two decades of bomb recycling, they say, not only reduced the threat of atomic terrorism and helped stabilize the former Soviet Union but achieved a major feat of nuclear disarmament — a popular goal that is seldom achieved.

“It’s an amazing thing,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist who advised the Clinton White House and now teaches at Princeton. The wave of arms destruction, he said, eliminated up to a third of the planet’s atomic bomb fuel, making it “the biggest single step” in the history of nuclear arms reduction.

He called Dr. Neff an underappreciated hero, adding that in a time of governmental muddle and paralysis, his success was a striking example “of what one person can do.”

Thomas Lee Neff was born in 1943 in Oregon, the older of two boys; his family raised chickens and grew most of its own food. He studied math and physics at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, graduating with highest honors, and received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford. As a senior M.I.T. researcher, he specialized in energy studies, writing books on nuclear power, solar energy and, in 1984, the global uranium market. His timing was propitious.

In the nuclear age, the rare isotope uranium 235 has played starring roles in war and peace. When highly purified, to a level of 90 percent, it fuels atom bombs; at 5 percent, it powers nuclear reactors for electric utilities.

As the Cold War ended, Dr. Neff wondered whether these disparate worlds might be able to do business together. When Washington and Moscow announced major unilateral arms reductions in late 1991, he recalled, “I said: ‘Wow. What’s going to happen to all these weapons?’ ”

Dr. Neff, like many experts of the day, worried that the Soviet Union was ill equipped to deal with thousands of discarded bombs. The treaties and independent actions of the Cold War allowed nuclear arms taken from bombers and missiles to be kept in storage, raising the possibility of reuse, diversion and theft.

The beleaguered communist state, he feared, was already cutting back on nuclear upkeep, workers’ pay and dozens of measures meant to keep weapons safe. He also suspected that newly impoverished Russian nuclear scientists, once a pampered elite, might seek work elsewhere.

“It all sounded dangerous,” he said.

His solution was atomic recycling. The question was how to float the idea.

On Oct. 19, 1991, nuclear experts filed into the Diplomat Room of the State Plaza Hotel in Washington. The agenda of the nongovernmental meeting was demilitarization. A Soviet delegation attended, as did Dr. Neff.

Outside the conference room during a break, he approached a leader of the Soviet bomb complex, Viktor N. Mikhailov, a canny apparatchik known for his love of Western cigarettes.

Dr. Neff asked whether he would consider selling the uranium in Soviet weapons.

“Interesting,” he said Dr. Mikhailov replied, puffing away. “How much?”

Five hundred metric tons, Dr. Neff said, giving what he considered a high estimate for the quantity of Soviet bomb fuel soon to become surplus. “If I had known how much they really had,” he recalled, “I would have said 700 tons.”

Even so, 500 metric tons was a lot: 1.1 million pounds, heavier than a fully loaded 747 jetliner.

Five days later, Dr. Neff made his idea public in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, “A Grand Uranium Bargain.” The illustration showed a kitchen pot and spoon floating eerily above a countertop and — just behind — an open window. Outside was a bomber.

“If we do not obtain the material,” he warned, shadowy agents in the former Soviet Union, perhaps uncontrolled by central authority, might seek to “sell weapons-grade materials to the highest bidders.”

The idea gained support in both Washington and Moscow. Carrying it out, through a tangle of conflicting state and commercial interests, was another matter. Dr. Neff was there to prod it along at almost every turn. In late December 1991, he was among the last Westerners to see the Soviet hammer and sickle flying over the Kremlin.

The first shipment of uranium arrived in 1995; 250 more followed over the next 18 years. Last month, a freighter sailing from St. Petersburg to Baltimore delivered the last shipment. Strapped into transport pallets were giant steel drums, each holding about two bombs’ worth of diluted uranium.

Colorful signs on the drums showed fluttering Russian and United States flags, with a message in large type: “20,000 Nuclear Warheads Eliminated.”

Dr. Neff estimates that he flew 20 times to Russia and other former Soviet states to work on the original deal and its amendments. He says a book he is writing draws on thousands of documents.

Thomas B. Cochran — a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington who helped organize East-West interactions at the Cold War’s end, including the gathering where Dr. Neff met the Soviet official — said the American physicist deserved “99 percent of the credit” for the uranium deal. Its most important result, he added, was simply improving the relationship between the United States and Russia at a critical moment in history.

Last month, the Russian Embassy in Washington held a reception to mark the end of the Megatons to Megawatts program. Dr. Neff was an honored guest.

A brochure handed out at the reception reprinted his Op-Ed article, praising the commercial deal as a first for nuclear disarmament. It put the overall cost of the transaction at $17 billion.

Uranium from the dismantled weapons, it said, was diluted into 15,432 tons of low enriched uranium. The resulting reactor fuel supplied half of all American nuclear power plants.

The total electric power, it said, could illuminate the whole of the United States (roughly 20,000 cities and 115 million households) for about two years — or Washington, D.C., for 185 years.

The atomic sale, the brochure said, “is widely held to symbolize the end of the era of confrontation between the two major nuclear powers.”

In an interview, Ernest Moniz, the federal secretary of energy and a former colleague of Dr. Neff’s at M.I.T., praised him for not only proposing the plan but helping guide it for more than two decades.

“If he hadn’t stuck with it,” Dr. Moniz said, “it could have very easily been one of these great ideas that ends up just spinning its wheels.”

Millions of idealists, from President Obama on down, have sought a world without nuclear weapons. Dr. Neff, despite doing more than almost anyone to advance that goal, is circumspect about what he accomplished.

He made no mention of energy windfalls, geopolitical realignments or the biblical injunction to turn swords into plowshares.

The lesson of the story, he remarked in an interview, “is that private citizens can actually do something.”

Frank von Hippel is a Senior Research Physicist and a Professor emeritus of Public and International Affairs in Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He has a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Oxford University (1962). He has worked on nuclear policy issues for almost half a century and has been praised by his fellow physicists “for his outstanding work and leadership in using physics to illuminate public policy in the areas of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, nuclear energy, and energy efficiency” (American Physical Society 2010). The publisher of a collection of his essays, described him as “at the forefront of those scientists grappling with the troubled legacy of our Nuclear Age” and as offering “insights about the choices we must make and how science can help us to make them” (Springer Nature 1991).

The edited and footnoted interviews published here are von Hippel’s account of his years of engagement with a series of nuclear policy problems – mostly as an outsider but also as a White House official. He began by trying to strengthen nuclear-safety regulation in the United States. He and his colleagues then fought successfully to stop the US Atomic Energy Commission’s planned “plutonium economy.” As the chairman of the Federation of American Scientists, he worked with a group of physicists advising Mikhail Gorbachev in his successful efforts to end nuclear testing, reverse the nuclear arms race, and dismantle the tank confrontation across the Cold War boundary dividing Germany. After the Soviet Union collapsed, von Hippel worked in the White House to help launch cooperative programs to secure nuclear materials in Russia from theft and to eliminate the stocks of highly enriched uranium and plutonium resulting from the drastic down-sizing of the US and Soviet Cold War nuclear arsenals. In 2006, he co-founded the International Panel on Fissile Materials, which seeks to end the production and use of highly-enriched uranium and separated plutonium for both weapons and non-weapons purposes.

In a sense, von Hippel inherited the problem of nuclear weapons from his grandfather, James Franck, who participated in the US World War II nuclear-weapon project, overseeing the development of the process to separate plutonium from irradiated uranium. In the spring of 1945, Franck convened the group that produced the Franck Report, which became famous after the end of the war because it had warned of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union if the US used the new weapon in a surprise attack on Japan.

Von Hippel initially proceeded down the career path of a theoretical physicist until he was an assistant professor at Stanford. There, because of the Vietnam War and revelations that many consequential government decisions for technology had been based on political calculations rather than considerations of effectiveness or the public interest, he decided to change his career to focus on public policy. He and Joel Primack, a younger activist physicist, co-authored a book on the roles of scientific insiders and outsiders in influencing government policy. Von Hippel then opted for the outsider role for himself, starting in 1974 by organizing a study of reactor safety sponsored by the professional society of American physicists.

The impact of that study resulted in an offer to continue his research at Princeton. There, he learned from a colleague, Harold Feiveson, of the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC’s) proposal to base the world’s future energy system on plutonium breeder reactors. India had just tested a bomb using plutonium that had been separated for supposedly peaceful purposes with AEC assistance. Feiveson, von Hippel and a third colleague, Robert Williams, organized a group that critiqued the AEC’s proposed “plutonium economy.” Their work helped provide the analytical basis for the Carter Administration’s 1977 decision to try to shut down the program, which Congress finally agreed to five years later.

In 1979, von Hippel was elected chairman of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a group created in 1945 by veterans of the US World War II nuclear-weapons program to try to prevent a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. Two years later, the Reagan Administration took office asserting that the Soviet Union believed it could fight and win a nuclear war. The Reagan Administration asserted that the only way for the US to deter nuclear war was to develop a similar posture. The public’s reaction was the Nuclear Weapons Freeze movement. Von Hippel joined the movement, focusing his efforts on ending nuclear testing and the production of “fissile” materials for nuclear weapons.

In 1983, in response to public concerns, President Reagan announced a program to develop a system to protect the US from a Soviet ballistic-missile attack – quickly labeled “Star Wars” by critics. A group of Soviet academicians wrote an open letter to US scientists asking whether they had changed their view that the proposed ballistic missile defenses (BMD) could easily be overcome by countermeasures and would provoke an offense-defense arms race. The FAS leadership responded that it had not changed its views and was invited to Moscow to brainstorm with a small group of the academicians on how to end the nuclear arms race. Two years later, Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union and the FAS group learned that the Soviet academicians they had been brainstorming with were advising Gorbachev.

During the ensuing five years, von Hippel found himself and his colleagues swept up in a head-spinning series of Gorbachev initiatives to end the nuclear arms race:

• A unilateral nuclear test moratorium, verified by the US Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) because the Reagan Administration refused to reciprocate;
• A decision, after a public debate, that President Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative would collapse under its own weight (which it did), and therefore the Soviet Union could agree with the United States in the INF and START Treaties on the bilateral elimination of their land-based intermediate-range missiles and the withdrawal from deployment of half of their strategic warheads;
• The unilateral withdrawal of 5,000 Soviet tanks from eastern Europe, and an agreement to further Soviet reductions in the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe;
• “Glasnost” (“openness”) visits to the Soviet Union’s first plutonium-production city, its ballistic missile defense (BMD) test site, and demonstrations of the detectability of the radiation from a Soviet cruise-missile warhead on a Soviet missile cruiser in the Black Sea off Yalta; and
• Just before the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991, denuclearization of the Soviet Army and withdrawal of nuclear weapons from all Soviet surface ships in parallel to similar actions by the United States.

In 1993, von Hippel was invited in as an advisor on the Clinton Administration’s plan to end US nuclear testing. Later that year, he was invited to join the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy where he became involved in launching programs to secure nuclear materials in Russia and to stabilize Russia’s nuclear cities. He was also responsible for supervising the process of deciding how to dispose of excess US weapons-grade plutonium, and pushed to expand programs to end the use of weapon-grade uranium as a reactor fuel.

Back in Princeton, von Hippel co-founded Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security and the International Panel on Fissile Materials. His research since has focused primarily on ending the production and use of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium as reactor fuels worldwide and dealing with Iran’s nuclear program along with the longer-term goal of total nuclear disarmament. He also has been working with citizens groups to educate the US Congress and the public on opportunities to advance nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.

[...] The APS Reactor Safety Study

That year, 1974, Wolfgang (Pief) Panofsky, was president of the American Physical Society. He had been one of the younger physicists in the Manhattan Project and was in the observational aircraft that accompanied the bomber that destroyed Nagasaki. He was one of the original members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, which President Eisenhower created after the surprise of Sputnik in 1957 and he was a leading advisor on nuclear arms control for the following half century. My favorite recollection of Panofsky is toward the end of his life when we were standing at adjoining urinals at the National Academy of Sciences and he turned and said to me, “Frank, this is the only place where people know what they are doing!”

Panofsky chose Harold (Hal) Lewis as chairman for this APS study. For some reason, I took an immediate dislike to Lewis. I decided that his interest in the issue was to prepare himself to become a consultant to the nuclear industry. It is very difficult for me to conceal my feelings so the situation quickly escalated into one in which Panofsky felt he had to intervene. Somehow, with the help of Panofsky and Tom Neff, who had taken a class with me at Stanford and was acting as Panofsky’s assistant during Panofsky’s year as APS President, Lewis and I papered over our mutual dislike sufficiently to proceed.

Again, the summer study was at Los Alamos but this time it was for a month.

While we were there, I met Harold Agnew, the director of of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He had worked on Fermi’s reactor at the University of Chicago in 1942 and had been on the observation plane that had accompanied the bomber that destroyed Hiroshima .

[...]

• [ Wolfgang Kurt Hermann Panofsky (born 1919) ] - German-born American physicist who led the construction and operation of the two-mile-long electron accelerator at Stanford. Panofsky also was a leading government advisor and educator on nuclear arms control issues. The “Panofsky Ratio” I had measured as an MIT undergraduate was named after him because he had made the first measurement.
• [ Harold (Hal) Lewis } - An Oppenheimer student who was a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by the United States Government. Neither the United States nor the

United States Department of Energy, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trace name, mark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommenda- tion, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof.

Uranium is also the subject of international security concerns because of its association with the proliferation of nuclear weapons

These security concerns are related to the nature and behavior of the international market for nuclear fuels. For example, political aspects of security become more salient if the uranium market is tight, or if there is little flexibility in supply arrangements. Conversely, an oversupply situation--or growing diversity of supply--lessens the impact of political and other constraints.

• At the April meeting in Washington, DC, APS will give the Leo Szilard Award for Physics in the Public Interest to Thomas Neff, a senior member of MIT's Center for International Studies. Neff is being cited "for proposing and working to keep on track the historic agreement for the US to purchase uranium from the former Soviet Union weapons stockpile and to transform it from highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium for civilian purposes, thereby significantly reducing the numbers of nuclear weapons." According to Frank von Hippel (Princeton University), this agreement has also helped to stabilize Ukraine's decision to become a non-nuclear-weapon state by giving that new nation an economic interest in disarmament.
• After receiving his PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford University in 1973, Neff held postdoctoral positions at Berkeley, Stanford and MIT. At Stanford, he worked as an assistant to Wolfgang Kurt Hermann Panofsky (born 1919) , who was APS president at the time, on matters of science and public policy, helping with the first studies of these topics and assisting in the formation of the Panel on Public Affairs. From 1977-85, Neff was manager and director of MIT's International Energy Studies program. He has been an advisor to numerous US government agencies as well as to governments and companies around the world.
• Over the years, Tom has worked on issues of energy policy and nuclear nonproliferation. He was a senior staff member of the Ford Foundation's study, "Nuclear Power Issues and Choices." He has written books and articles on oil and nuclear fuel markets and on solar energy.
• In a New York Times Op-ed on 24 October 1991, Neff proposed the purchase of Soviet weapons-grade uranium by the US government. The Government picked up his idea and agreed in January 1994 to purchase 500,000 kilograms of Soviet weapon-grade uranium after it has been blended down to low-enriched uranium for use in power-reactor fuel. Since then Neff has worked creatively and successfully to help devise strategies to overcome the obstacles to the agreement as they have arisen. The obstacles have ranged from trivial to profound commercial and policy problems on both the Russian and US sides of the deal. In Neff's words, "I've had to become part of the interagency process in Russia as well as the US, broker a deal between the US Administration and Congress (the Domenici legislation) and keep the commercial players true to the terms of the deal. The larger issue is that policy processes and institutions still reflect the cold war, rather than being redesigned to undo it. I hope to talk about this in Washington."

VANCOUVER, BC -- U3O8 Media Inc., in association with Carriere Consulting Group and Academy & Finance SA, are pleased to present Uranium Investor Forums in Zurich (March 27, 2007) and Geneva, Switzerland (March 29, 2007).

Experts, including Dr. Thomas L. Neff, senior researcher at MIT's Center for International Studies since 1975 and President of Nuclear Security Associates, LLC, will provide valuable information to help investors understand the uranium industry, uranium supply and demand to 2025, and the relation between production and uranium enrichment, and the investment opportunities in enrichment capabilities.

Investors will also hear from experts on subjects ranging from U.S. uranium consumption, factors likely to influence U.S. nuclear power plant construction, the ever-changing political climate toward nuclear energy and what new opportunities have been created by the trend toward nuclear energy in the U.S. International investors will learn how to invest and benefit from these trends by investing in uranium exploration and development companies.

In addition, forum attendees will learn about investment opportunities in promising junior, mid-tier and near-production uranium companies. Senior executives from ten of the fastest growing uranium companies will be on hand to answer investor questions about investing in the burgeoning uranium exploration industry.

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"Investors will gain insight on the market from industry experts and have the opportunity to meet with management of some of the world's most dynamic uranium companies."

The ten invited participating companies are Augen Capital Corp. (TSX-V: AUG), Bayswater Uranium Corp. (TSX-V: BAY), Crosshair Exploration & Mining Corp. (TSX-V: CXX), Forum Uranium Corp. (TSX-V: FDC), Forsys Metals Corp., Monster Copper Corp., Powertech Uranium Corp., Strathmore Minerals Corp., Uranium Energy Corp., and Xemplar Energy Corp.

Limited supplies of fuel for nuclear power plants may thwart the renewed and growing interest in nuclear energy in the United States and other nations, says an MIT expert on the industry.

Over the past 20 years, safety concerns dampened all aspects of development of nuclear energy: No new reactors were ordered and there was investment neither in new uranium mines nor in building facilities to produce fuel for existing reactors. Instead, the industry lived off commercial and government inventories, which are now nearly gone. worldwide, uranium production meets only about 65 percent of current reactor requirements.

That shortage of uranium and of processing facilities worldwide leaves a gap between the potential increase in demand for nuclear energy and the ability to supply fuel for it, said Dr. Thomas Neff, a research affiliate at MIT's Center for International Studies.

"Just as large numbers of new reactors are being planned, we are only starting to emerge from 20 years of underinvestment in the production capacity for the nuclear fuel to operate them. There has been a nuclear industry myopia; they didn't take a long-term view," Neff said. For example, only a few years ago uranium inventories were being sold at $10 per pound; the current price is $85 per pound.

Neff has been giving a series of talks at industry meetings and investment conferences around the world about the nature of the fuel supply problem and its implications for the so-called "nuclear renaissance," pointing out both the sharply rising cost of nuclear fuel and the lack of capacity to produce it.

Currently, much of the uranium used by the United States is coming from mines in such countries as Australia, Canada, Namibia, and, most recently, Kazakhstan. Small amounts are mined in the western United States, but the United States is largely reliant on overseas supplies. The United States also relies for half its fuel on Russia under a "swords to ploughshares" deal that Neff originated in 1991. This deal is converting about 20,000 Russian nuclear weapons to fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants, but it ends in 2013, leaving a substantial supply gap for the United States.

Further, China, India, and even Russia have plans for massive deployments of nuclear power and are trying to lock up supplies from countries on which the United States has traditionally relied. As a result, the United States could be the "last one to buy, and it could pay the highest prices, if it can get uranium at all," Neff said. "The take-home message is that if we're going to increase use of nuclear power, we need massive new investments in capacity to mine uranium and facilities to process it."

Mined uranium comes in several forms, or isotopes. For starting a nuclear chain reaction in a reactor, the only important isotope is uranium-235, which accounts for JUST 7 out of 1000 atoms in the mined product. To fuel a nuclear reactor, the concentration of uranium-235 has to be increased to 40 to 50 out of 1000 atoms. This is done by separating isotopes in an enrichment plant to achieve the higher concentration.

As Neff points out, reactor operators could increase the amount of fuel made from a given amount of natural uranium by buying more enrichment services to recover more uranium-235 atoms. Current enrichment capacity is enough to recover only about 4 out of 7 uranium-235 atoms. Limited uranium supplies could be stretched if industry could recover 5 or 6 of these atoms, but there is not enough processing capacity worldwide to do so.

Like most Americans born in the 1940s, Thomas Neff BA ’65 remembers the “duck-and-cover” days. He recalls the siren tests, the Civil Defense ads, the emergency broadcast system, and Life magazine stories about nuclear fallout shelters. This was the national Cold War anxiety that Neff absorbed as a child in Portland, where his father taught at Lewis & Clark.

Even though Neff says Portland was “kind of remote” in the 1950s, “we had to go through all these nuclear attack drills in grade school and high school. At the time, I really didn’t understand how getting under my desk was going to do any good.”

Thomas NeffDecades later, as the Cold War angst of Neff’s youth was defused by détente, a different form of nuclear anxiety emerged. As the Soviet Union broke apart, many feared that cash-strapped Russia would sell or lose control of thousands of “loose nukes” then deployed across the former Soviet Union—and that its underemployed nuclear scientists and technicians would offer their knowledge and skills to the highest bidder. Nuclear weapons expert Rose Gottemoeller—now under secretary of state for arms control and international security—describes American policy-makers in 1991 as fearing “nuclear mayhem.”

For Tom Neff, it was not a time to duck and cover. A scheme he proposed in an October 24, 1991, New York Times op-ed became a win-win solution to the nuclear weapons problem. And not only did he conceive of it, he put himself in a position to pitch it to a key Soviet official—a meeting that came about both by chance and by design.

Neff’s idea was so simple that it was almost dismissed as an impossibility by Washington. In essence, he based his plan on Russia’s economic self-interest. Neff calculated that the highly enriched uranium in a typical nuclear weapon could be “blended down” to make low-enriched fuel for nuclear reactors that was worth about $500,000 per weapon. If the United States were to buy this fuel, the Russians would be motivated to continue guarding their massive arsenal and paying their many nuclear scientists and technicians—not to build and maintain nuclear weapons but to dismantle them.

Under Secretary Gottemoeller calls Thomas Neff “the genius who pulled this whole thing together in a very skillful way. He had the idea, communicated it well, and sold it to top people on both sides.” Neff was “the complete package in terms of crystallizing the concept. Although there were years of implementation work and some difficult issues to work out, the idea itself was inherently so good that it survived all of this. And it has fulfilled its original promise—an amazing nonproliferation program with important benefits for both sides.”

“Thomas Neff was the genius who pulled this whole thing together. He had the idea, communicated it well, and sold it to top people on both sides.”Rose GottemoellerUnder Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security

During the next 22 years—with Tom Neff’s constant attention —what came to be called the Megatons to Megawatts program actually worked. More than 20,000 Russian warheads—any one of which could have destroyed an American city—were converted into U.S. electricity, a deal ultimately worth $17 billion.

The final shipment of Russian fuel-grade uranium arrived in Baltimore in late 2013. Shortly thereafter, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported the little-known fact that “nearly half of the uranium burned in U.S. power plants during the past 20 years came from decommissioned Russian weapons.” This fuel supplied roughly 10 percent of all U.S. electricity during that period. And while the United States and Russia continue to spar today in what some have called a new Cold War, those nukes never got loose.

Neff, who is currently writing a book about his experiences, remembers 1950s Portland as a working-class town where “everybody around me was pretty much blue collar, working on just getting through life.” His father taught business courses at Lewis & Clark and was a small-time entrepreneur—starting several businesses and managing an apartment house that he built in nearby Lake Grove (now Lake Oswego).

Tom went to work at an early age, picking berries and beans. “Before migrant labor,” he recalls, “they let school out to pick the crops. By the time you were 12, the school bus would come and take you to the fields. You’d see all your classmates on the bus, and from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. you’d pick—a nickel a flat for strawberries.”

A good student, Neff graduated from Lake Oswego High School in 1961. He applied to Harvard, but his father wouldn’t fill out the financial aid forms. As a result, Neff ended up living at home and attending Lewis & Clark tuition free due to his father’s position. At the college, he took a wide range of courses while majoring in math and physics. He feels privileged to have had Elvy Fredrickson as a mathematics professor, observing that “she could have been at MIT or Stanford.” (Fredrickson taught at Lewis & Clark from 1946 until 1980. She passed away in 2008.)

A key mentor was Robert Dusenbery, a published poet who built the college’s English department in the decades following World War II, hiring fellow poets William Stafford and Vern Rutsala, both of whom taught Neff. Dusenbery stopped Neff on campus during the fall of his senior year to ask whether he might nominate him for a Danforth Fellowship—a full graduate-school scholarship. It turned out to be Neff’s long-awaited ticket out of Portland. After graduating at the top of his class in 1965, he moved to California to begin a doctoral program in physics at Stanford University

So how does a Cold War kid from Portland end up imagining a key international deal that ends up destroying one-third of the world’s nuclear weapons arsenal? How did Thomas Neff become the right person in the right place at the right time— with such an elegant but practical idea? Looking back, nearly every aspect of his intellectual and social formation seemed to contribute to his being the right person. And every twist of his career seemed to carry him toward the right time and place— his October 19, 1991, encounter with Viktor Mikhailov, deputy minister of atomic power and industry and head of the Soviet nuclear weapons complex.

Academically at Stanford, he says, “I was in way over my head.” (He had actually completed his physics major at Lewis & Clark through self-study and a set of examinations.) The summer before leaving for Palo Alto, he says he acquired the physics books that were being used at Stanford and “worked through them.”

“It was the math I got at Lewis & Clark that saved me,” he says with a nod to Professor Fredrickson, “along with good physical intuition.” He earned a PhD in 1973 and went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, planning an academic career.

Yet just as he had the right teachers and mentors at Lewis & Clark, Neff attracted some important attention at Stanford. “Out of the blue one day came something that really changed my life long term,” he says. It was a call from Wolfgang Panofsky, an internationally renowned particle physicist and director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Panofsky (known as “Pief”) was president-elect of the American Physical Society (APS) and was looking for an executive assistant. Would Neff take the job?

“I thought long and hard about that,” Neff says. “It meant putting my physics career on hold. But it was really about the best thing that ever happened to me.”

The “half-time” job thrust 29-year-old Tom Neff into the world of national science policy. “Pief didn’t have time to be president-elect of the APS, let alone its president, so he would send me to his meetings,” Neff says. “He was also an advisor to various parts of the government and a member of the Association of Presidents of Scientific Societies—where there were all these famous gray-beard guys—so I would go to those meetings for him too. I had to buy a suit for the first time, but I kept wearing my sandals.”

In the course of his work with Panofsky, Neff helped draft the legislation that led to the creation of the Department of Energy. And when Panofsky launched the APS Panel on Public Affairs in 1974, Neff became its program coordinator. In 1975, he moved to the Center for Theoretical Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he continued physics research and assisted the next two chairs of the APS panel, Philip Morse and Herman Feshbach. During this period, he also served as chief staff officer for the Ford Foundation’s comprehensive Nuclear Energy Policy Study, which he later helped present to President Jimmy Carter and members of his cabinet.

In 1977, Neff was appointed director of MIT’s International Energy Studies program, a position he held until 1985, when he became a senior member of the institute’s Center for International Studies. Thus, when the time came to find a way to contain and destroy thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons, no one was better positioned to see the big picture than Tom Neff.

The deal wasn’t a slam dunk. But Neff’s Times op-ed, which he had circulated to key actors in advance of publication, got him an invitation to a nongovernmental bilateral meeting between American nuclear scientists and their Soviet counterparts. The Russians, led by Deputy Minister Mikhailov, were in Washington to discuss the technical details of implementing START 1— the historic July 1991 agreement to radically reduce the number of nuclear weapons deployed by the U.S. and Soviet Union.

The Soviet empire was financially ruined and on the brink of falling apart—mere weeks from its December 1991 demise— and the Russians were also in Washington looking for help.

Neff made sure he was in the right place to pitch his idea to the person who mattered. Following a short break in the talks, Neff noticed that Mikhailov had remained in the hallway with his interpreter—chain smoking. Seeing an opportunity to talk to the top Russian, Neff also stayed out of the meeting.

“I approached him in the hall to make my proposal, simply asking if he would be willing to sell fuel derived from [highly enriched uranium] in destroyed weapons to support his program,” Neff writes in a draft of his book. “Mikhailov’s response was that he was interested. I handed him a draft of the op-ed and the summary I had prepared, which Mikhailov folded and put into his suit coat pocket. As I turned to go, he suddenly asked a question through his interpreter: ‘How much could I sell?’ ”

Neff had not anticipated this question—and he had no idea how much highly enriched uranium could be harvested from decommissioned Soviet weapons. “So I said 500 metric tons. Mikhailov thought for a minute and surprised me by saying he thought he could do that.”

Earlier that day, Mikhailov had invited the American scientists to come to Moscow and Kiev in December for further talks, and Neff became part of that delegation. On October 24, his op-ed,

“A Grand Uranium Bargain,” was published. He hoped the idea would take hold in Washington—“that someone in power would actually do something about it, the so-called decision makers,” he says. “My great discovery was that that there aren’t many real decision makers in Washington. But I had met a bunch of Russians. I had their business cards.”

The idea was relatively easy to sell to the Russians, Neff says. In the confusion surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union, a business deal made more sense than a treaty. Cash could accomplish more in the starving post-Soviet economy than could American diplomacy.

However, in the United States, many were still in a Cold War mindset, even as President George H.W. Bush was declaring that America had “won the Cold War.” Regarding the Russian nukes, the State Department had a different view than the Energy Department, which had a different view than the National Security Council. And few in government, particularly Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, could imagine that the Russians could safely collect and dismantle their own weapons without U.S. assistance.

In the confusion surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union, a business deal made more sense than a treaty.

Russia’s minister of atomic energy, Aleksandr Rumyantsev (second from left), at a 2002 dinner for Thomas Neff (second from right). Rumyantsev and Neff worked together on the uranium purchase agreement.

“A lot of U.S. government and military people wanted to stick their noses in to tag, seal, and track everything,” Neff says. “That wasn’t possible. The Russians were not going to let in a lot of ‘spies’ to play with their weapons. I figured they would find a way to keep them safe, just to harvest the reward of taking them apart and selling stuff off.”

Trading megatons for megawatts was a way around the diplomatic and geopolitical impasse—but Neff had to make one final adjustment before his idea could get a fair hearing in Washington: He convinced the Russians to propose it. Once a concrete proposal came from the Russian side, the United States was compelled to respond and negotiate. An interagency group concluded that the deal had merit and, after some haggling over quantities and prices, an agreement to “recycle” 500 metric tons of weapons-grade uranium was signed in early 1993. The first shipment of fuel-grade uranium arrived in the United States in 1995.

With his scientific mind and the practical wisdom of his Oregon upbringing, Tom Neff saw an opportunity to propose and propel change. “I think there are always opportunities,” he says. “There are always people who see something that can be fixed. The average college graduate will probably have an opportunity in his or her life to do something that actually improves things.

“But the trick,” he says, “is recognizing it.”