DA LAT, VIETNAM — Over the last three years, two U.S. nuclear weapons experts have quietly crisscrossed the globe, racing to secure bomb-grade uranium before terrorists can lay their hands on a single kilogram.
Andrew Bieniawski, 40, a boyish-looking immigrant from South Africa, has led the effort by the National Nuclear Security Administration, slogging from reactor to reactor trying to persuade foreign scientists and government officials to give up their highly enriched uranium fuel.
Igor Bolshinsky, 49, an affable Ukrainian immigrant who works for Idaho National Laboratory, is Bieniawski's right-hand man. He is away from his family in Milwaukee even more often than his boss, frequenting places like Uzbekistan, Libya and Kyrgyzstan.
"What is it, September? It's been 18 trips this year," Bolshinsky said.
What may seem like a simple idea to make the world safer by locking down nuclear bomb materials is actually a tangle of political details, technical arguments about transportation safety and complex international shipping licenses.
Knowing how to schmooze turns out to be an invaluable skill in the war on terrorism.
The two engineers scored their latest success less than two weeks ago: They moved nearly 10 pounds of highly enriched uranium from a reactor in Vietnam to Russia, where it will be blended down into commercial reactor fuel.
At the Da Lat reactor, Bolshinsky climbed on top of the yellow concrete core, watching rubber-gloved technicians carefully loading new fuel rods of lower-grade uranium into the cooling water. That night, he was up late in his hotel room composing a formal protocol for the fuel exchange the next day.
Meanwhile, Bieniawski, in a crisp, white shirt with an open collar, walked with his arm on the shoulder of Vietnam's senior nuclear scientist, assuring him that he was following the same path as U.S. and other Western research directors, helping to make the world safer.
The Vietnam trip, like many others, also required overcoming a few old antagonisms. In shipping the uranium out of Vietnam, it was the first time Americans had set foot on the old Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Ho Chi Minh City "since you bombed us," a Vietnamese military official lectured.
Bieniawski's team has conducted 13 missions to civilian reactors in former Soviet Union republics and client states, securing enough fissile matter to build 20 nuclear bombs.
