In late November, the United States government disclosed that it had recently completed an airlift, dubbed Operation Sapphire, to transport about 600 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium from a nuclear fuel fabrication facility in Kazakhstan to the U.S. In the confusion of the Soviet collapse, enough suitable material to make twenty-five bombs of the type dropped on Hiroshima was left at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk. The U.S. moved in to purchase the material in order to prevent it from being sold to any other country. Reportedly, the CIA had learned that Iranians had already visited the plant, possibly in order to investigate the possibility of purchasing the material themselves.
President Clinton approved the operation on October 7, 1994, and within hours a team of 31 specialists were heading to Kazakhstan to begin to secure the material for transport. The Americans involved witnessed first hand the primitive state of Soviet nuclear safeguards. Wooden doors -- sometimes without even padlocks -- secured weapons-grade nuclear material. In order to minimize the potential for word getting out that so much uranium was available at Ulba to potential nuclear states, terrorists, or black marketeers, the entire operation was conducted in secret, under the guise of assisting Kazakhstan with meeting its International Atomic Energy Association obligations.
The actual shipment involved placing the uranium at Ulba into 1,300 I.A.E.A. steel transport drums, which were trucked 18 miles to the Ust-Kamenogorsk airport under special security precautions. Bad weather delayed the operation, preventing Air Force cargo planes from landing until November 20. When the weather broke, a chain of C-5 cargo planes picked up the canisters and flew them to Dover Air Base in Delaware. From there, the bomb-grade material was transferred to heavily-armed, unmarked Department of Energy tractor-trailers and trucked to the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee for interim storage. The uranium will eventually be diluted to a lower enrichment level suitable for use as commercial reactor fuel. The price the U.S. paid for the uranium remains classified, but it is estimated to be from $10 million to $20 million dollars including both cash and in-kind assistance.

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