2025 Monographs

Megatons Into Megawatts: The Deal Eliminating 20,000 Atomic Bombs

Hughes, Jeffrey L.

Megatons Into Megawatts was a deal between the US and Russia from 1993-2013 that removed 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from Russian nuclear warheads which was diluted and sold to the US to fuel civil nuclear reactors, producing 10 percent of US electricity annually while eliminating the potential to make over 20,000 Hiroshima weapons. The multibillion dollar proceeds to Russia from the deal helped keep the collapsed Soviet nuclear complex from leaking “loose nukes” and weapons expertise that could have imperiled global security. The US also diluted over 150 metric tons of HEU in tandem, over 6000 bombs. Experts hailed the “HEU Deal” among the most significant reductions of the nuclear threat ever, eliminating a third of the world’s atomic bomb material. But the achievement, extending over two decades, multiple presidencies, and executed primarily by commercial means, remains little known. This history provides the first comprehensive study of the origins, the negotiations at the highest levels in the US and Russia to get the agreement into place, and the many challenges that imperiled its operation—in the US, Russia, and in commercial markets—which were overcome to fulfill the agreement. The author participated in many phases of the deal.

An Afterword addresses whether, and under what conditions, a future variant of the HEU Deal might be possible, despite Putin’s ongoing war on Ukraine, recalling that the collapse of the Soviet nuclear empire in 1991 spurred the swords to plowshares HEU Deal that would have seemed impossible a decade earlier, and that large stockpiles of nuclear weapon materials remain, are costly to store, and arguably of declining marginal utility.

Moreover, the acceleration of climate change, increasing costs of extreme weather damage, rising world energy demand, including for Artificial Intelligence (AI) which will rival nuclear weapons in military applications, provide additional reasons to understand how Megatons into Megawatts succeeded, overcame past rivalry, used civil nuclear energy and the market to rid of excess HEU stockpiles while producing carbon free baseload electricity, to better face the rapid onrush of current global threats and transformative opportunities.