ENVIRONMENT-YUGOSLAVIA: A Nuclear Dream Ends

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Sep 2 2002 (IPS) - The night was buzzing with questions as about 1,200 soldiers escorted a column of trucks to Belgrade airport last week under cover of dozens of helicopters.

The secret was revealed the next morning when Serbian Science Minister Dragan Domazet announced that about 6,000 rods of highly enriched uranium from the Vinca Institute, just 12 kilometres from Belgrade, had been loaded into a plane bound for Russia. The former Soviet Union had delivered the rods decades ago.

“They were enough for two nuclear bombs” Domazet said at a press conference. “The transportation marked the end of an era, and the country’s contribution to the international battle against terrorism.”

The fuel was sent to a facility of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy in Dimitrovgrad about 700 kilometres from Moscow, Domazet said. The highly enriched uranium will be processed into low grade fuel unsuitable for nuclear weapons, he said.

The mission had been planned for more than a year. It was carried out with the help of the State Department in the U.S., Russia’s Ministry of Atomic Energy and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the United Nations, at a cost of about two million dollars.

Most people in Belgrade did not know that Vinca housed a nuclear reactor. The nuclear facility that came up 44 years ago had been described as a scientific centre. It was reported to have been out of use for more than a decade now because the regime of Slobodan Milosevic could not find the millions of dollars needed to run it.

Scientists at Vinca deny allegations in Western media that Milosevic’s regime had been willing to supply nuclear material to Iraq, Iran or North Korea. Scientists say the technology at Vinca was outdated and that it had found no success in making a nuclear bomb.

Scientists at Vinca also dismissed reports in Western media that Iraq might be willing to employ them. “That is pure construction,” a leading sc ientist insisting on anonymity told IPS. “The whole world is buzzing about the Western attack on Iraq. We know what bombing is. We would be crazy to go there to develop nuclear weapons.”

The first public hint of what Vinca was about came during the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) bombing in 1999. Its scientists warned of environmental disaster if rockets hit the reactor and the nearby nuclear waste storage.

The developments last week revealed that Vinca continues to be a poorly guarded depository of nuclear waste. Tonnes of waste still lie in underground facilities at Vinca. It has come from the nuclear power plant Krsko and from two nuclear centres in Croatia and Slovenia in former Yugoslavia.

“For me that is the bigger problem than the hypothetical problem of terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons,” Serbian Environment Minister Andjelka Mihajlov said at a press conference. “The problem is how to turn Serbia into a safe environment after decades of negligence, topped with NATO bombing.” The NATO bombing had destroyed dozens of oil refineries and power plants that released toxic waste into rivers, the soil and the atmosphere.

“It’s good to see that the old dream of Tito (former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito) of having a nuclear bomb has been dismantled finally,” says analyst Miroslav Lazanski. “It’s also good to see that the country is co-operating with the international community once again, after the decade of isolation. But it is worrying to see that we still live with a waste dump no one cares about.”