WASHINGTON — Working under extraordinary secrecy, the U.S. and Kazakh governments have moved nuclear material in the past year that could have been used to make more than 770 bombs. It was taken from a location feared vulnerable to terrorist attack to a new high-security facility.
In the largest such operation ever mounted, officials transferred 11 tons of highly enriched uranium and 3 tons of plutonium about 1,890 miles by rail and road across the Central Asian country.
The transfer culminated a project spanning three U.S. presidencies to prevent the material from falling into the wrong hands.
The last of 12 shipments arrived Monday at the new state-of-the-art storage facility in remote northeastern Kazakhstan, near the border with Russia and China.
