Thomas Neff, Who Turned Soviet Warheads Into Electricity, Dies at 80
As the Soviet Union disintegrated, Thomas L. Neff came up with an improbable idea. What if Soviet nuclear warheads could light up American cities rather than obliterate them? What if the United States could buy the uranium cores of the deadly arms and turn them into reactor fuel?
Despite vast hurdles and skepticism, Dr. Neff pulled it off, pioneering an East-West deal that gave bankrupt Moscow hard currency, reduced nuclear threats and produced one of the greatest peace dividends of all time. Over two decades, his bright idea turned some 20,000 Russian nuclear arms into electricity, lighting billions of American lightbulbs.
Dr. Neff, a physicist, died on July 11 when, after having breakfast with his wife at their home in Concord, Mass., he collapsed and never regained consciousness. He was 80.
His daughter, Catherine C. Harris, said the cause was a subdural hematoma, or bleeding from the brain.
His feat of nuclear weapon conversion, if now a poorly known chapter of atomic history, was hailed in the early 1990s by federal officials astonished at what Dr. Neff had accomplished.
“Instead of lighting up mushroom clouds, this stuff is going to light up homes,” Philip G. Sewell, a Department of Energy official who took part in negotiations for the uranium transfer, said in 1992 of the recycled Soviet arms. “It’s kind of incredible.”
At the time, many experts worried that Moscow’s arsenal might fall into unfriendly hands. The jitters intensified as Russia announced plans to store thousands of unused weapons from missiles and bombers in what American experts saw as decrepit bunkers policed by impoverished guards of dubious reliability. Many people worried. Few knew what to do.
Dr. Neff succeeded in setting his recycling idea into motion in spite of (or perhaps because of) his lack of name recognition, his inexperience on the world stage and his lack of credentials in arms control. Moreover, he not only came up with the idea; he also shepherded it for decades through thickets of bureaucratic opposition and inertia.
“I was naïve,” Dr. Neff recalled in a 2014 interview. “I thought the idea would take care of itself.”
Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist who advised the Clinton White House and now teaches at Princeton, called Dr. Neff an underappreciated hero who personally engineered the single biggest instance of arms reduction in the nuclear age. At the end of the Cold War, he added, despite great confusion and indecision in Washington, Dr. Neff managed to become a shining example of “what one person can do.”
Thomas Lee Neff was born on Sept. 25, 1943, in Lake Oswego, Ore., the older of two sons of Louise and Lee Neff. His mother was a housewife. His father, skilled at woodworking and fixing things, owned a print shop and taught business classes in Portland at Lewis & Clark College, where Tom received a tuition-free education in English, math and physics. He graduated in 1965 with high honors and received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1973.
Dr. Neff came to his East-West idea as a senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specialized in energy studies, solar energy and nuclear power. He began his decades-long career at M.I.T. in 1977 as manager of the International Energy Studies Program.
His 1984 book, “The International Uranium Market,” shed light on a field rich in secrets and daunting intricacies. His technical background and timing were propitious, as was his outgoing personality.
“He could talk to anybody,” Dr. von Hippel recalled. “That happened in Russia as well. They recognized he was trying to do good. They paid attention to him — in part for the right reasons.”
Dr. Neff’s marathon deal-making began on Oct. 19, 1991, as 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.
During a break, outside the conference room, Dr. Neff approached a leader of the Soviet bomb complex, Viktor N. Mikhailov, a canny apparatchik known for his love of Western cigarettes. Dr. Neff asked if he would consider selling the uranium in Soviet nuclear arms.
“Interesting,” Dr. Mikhailov replied, puffing away. “How much?”
Five hundred metric tons — roughly a million pounds — Dr. Neff replied, giving what he considered a high estimate for the amount of Soviet bomb fuel soon to become surplus because arms control treaties were setting it aside.
Five days later, Dr. Neff made his pitch openly in an opinion piece in The New York Times titled “A Grand Uranium Bargain.” He argued that the highly enriched uranium from scrapped Soviet nuclear arms could be diluted into reactor fuel, turning deadly implements of war to peaceful ends.
“If we do not obtain the material,” he warned, shadowy agents might try to sell it “to the highest bidders.”
Over and over, Dr. Neff nudged the idea along. Two months later, in December 1991, he was among the last Westerners to see the Soviet hammer and sickle flying over the Kremlin before the fall of the U.S.S.R. Later, he estimated that he flew 20 times to Russia and other former Soviet states to work on the deal and to unknot the many tangles.
The first of some 250 shipments of Russian uranium arrived in the United States in 1995, and the last in 2013. To mark the end of what was known as the Megatons to Megawatts program, the Russians held a reception at their embassy in Washington. Dr. Neff was an honored guest.
A Russian brochure reprinted his opinion article, put the overall cost of the transaction at $17 billion and said that reactor fuel had supplied half of all American nuclear power plants.
From beginning to end, Dr. Neff was proud that his improbable idea succeeded in destroying the explosive innards of nuclear arms. In contrast, other arms control agreements diminished the number of deployed arms but allowed the warheads and their nuclear parts to go into storage for possible reuse.
Along with his daughter, Dr. Neff is survived by his wife, Beth Harris; his son from a previous marriage, Chris Neff; his brother, Bill; and two grandchildren.
Dr. Neff was circumspect about what he accomplished. In interviews, he avoided mention of geopolitical gains or the biblical injunction to turn swords into plowshares. The moral of his story, he once remarked, “is that private citizens can actually do something.”
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