The director of the Missile Defense Agency, Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, said during an otherwise pretty dull hearing before the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee that the threat to the United States has “increased substantially” with the recent launch by Iran of a small satellite and the launch last week of a mid-range ballistic missile.
That caught the ears of the professional congressional staffers at the Thursday hearing, who wondered what the implications might be, since they were not explored at the hearing.
Some possible answers came from the venerable RAND Corporation. It came out with a report about Iran and its relations with the US over the next decade. One of the key recommendations of the May 19 report, “Dangerous But Not Omnipotent: Exploring the Reach and Limitations of Iranian Power in the Middle East,” is that the US should back off — de-escalate in the report’s language — on a bilateral basis and combine that with “muscular multilateral efforts targeted at Iranian behaviors” that are not acceptable to the international community, such as terrorism and its development of nuclear weapons. Key to this multilateral approach would be support from Russia and China, which the report concedes is “questionable.”
One of the most interesting policy recommendations concerns how the US should communicate its policy goals. We must “issue unambiguous statements about US interests and intentions in the region, particularly regarding Iraq,” the authors say, The messages must be “simple and easily understood, and the United States must stick to them long enough for them to be taken seriously.” Among those statements should be a pledge that the US will say it has “no long term interest in occupying Iraq or establishing a permanent military presence” in Iraq.
The 230-page report, was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force in order to “accurately gauge the strategic challenges from Iran” over the next decade. If the threat from Iran really has “increased substantially,” as the MDA director told the subcommittee, quickly finding answers and implementing alternatives to the policies that have failed to deter Iran from developing ICBMs and pursuing nuclear weapons for much of the last decade is imperative.
I read Kipling because I love the poetry of empire and war. So if the fusion of art and war worked through the medium of rhythm and rhyme, why not extend it to say -- hauntingly beautiful photos of the US strategic arsenal? Enter Martin Miller's Weapons of Mass Destruction, a Visual Perspective --
Although the term, WMD, has become a part of our daily lexicon, it remains very much an abstraction for most of us. This series of images offers a retrospective look at some of these weapons. Most of my subjects are drawn from the Cold War period during which there was a very real threat to the survival of civilization itself. The last sixty years has seen a frenzied tango between strategy and technology that has left us with the chilling array of doomsday machines seen here.
The shot above is of the now-canceled "Midgetman" ICBM, one of the Reagan procurements that never survived the fall of the USSR. Check out the rest of Mr. Miller's gorgeous (and chilling) collection here.
--John Noonan
Russia's Waving its Missiles Around Again...
From the headlines at Military.com:
Russia will deploy missiles near NATO member Poland in response to U.S. missile defense plans, President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday in his first state of the nation speech.
Medvedev also singled out the United States for criticism, casting Russia's war with Georgia in August and the global financial turmoil as consequences of aggressive, selfish U.S. policies.
He said he hoped the next U.S. administration would act to improve relations. In a separate telegram, he congratulated Barack Obama on his election victory and said he was hoping for "constructive dialogue" with the incoming U.S. president.
Medvedev also proposed increasing the Russian presidential term to six years from the current four, a major constitutional change that would further increase the power of the head of state and could deepen Western concern over democracy in Russia.
The president said the Iskander missiles will be deployed to Russia's Kaliningrad region, which lies between Poland and the ex-Soviet republic of Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, but did not say how many would be used. Equipment to electronically hamper the operation of prospective U.S. missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic will be deployed, he said.
He did not say whether the short-range Iskander missiles would be fitted with nuclear warheads and it was not clear exactly when the missiles would be deployed.
"Mechanisms must be created to block mistaken, egoistical and sometimes simply dangerous decisions of certain members of the international community," he said shortly after starting the 85-minute speech, making it clear he was referring to the United States.
The president said Georgia sparked the August war on its territory with what he called "barbaric aggression" against Russian-backed South Ossetia. The conflict "was, among other things, the result of the arrogant course of the American administration, which did not tolerate criticism and preferred unilateral decisions."
Medvedev also painted Russia as a country threatened by growing Western military might.
The Task Force on Nuclear Weapons Management recommended the Air Force put all its nuclear missions under Air Force Space Command and call the whole thing Air Force Strategic Command.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates organized the task force — which was headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger — after axing the Air Force’s top two leaders last June due to its nuclear problems.
The recommendations Schlesinger announced Friday at the Pentagon also would mean that Air Combat Command would lose its nuclear bomber mission.
The task force recommended assigning a group of bombers to a numbered Air Force that would fall under AFSTRAT and have a sole nuclear mission.
Solid. And just in time to meet the challenges of a newly aggressive Russia!
The big changes, as I see them, call for (1) Air Force Space Command to morph into Air Force Strategic Command (2) New billets and career opportunities for the long-neglected nuclear officer (3) Shifting the entire bomber force into Strategic Command.
That's the largest organizational shake up since the much-lamented days of Merrill McPeak. The times, they are a-changing. Or -depending on how far Putin plans to take Russia's nuclear revitalization- could be returning to the old status quo.
Extensive Camouflage Dupes Experts
I thought this was an interesting story in today's Washington Post. It speaks to the extreme skepticism early on with reports that the Syrians were building an illicit nuke plant that the Israelis blew up a few months ago.
I remember attending a roundtable lunch a few days after the attack where nuclear "experts" cast serious doubt on the contention that the Syrian facility that was bombed actually was used for nuke fuel processing or anything else weapons related.
But the Washington Post story today speaks to the camouflaging capabilities governments are now employing to conceal their intentions. It's an interesting look at the lengths to which governments will and can conceal their secret efforts from overhead surveillance and also it shows some of the laborious techniques they'll employ to send out red herrings.
Experience With Syria Exemplifies Challenge That Detection Presents
Syria went to extraordinary lengths to conceal its undeclared construction of a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor from spies in the sky and on the ground in recent years, according to a draft report by independent nuclear experts briefed by Bush administration officials.
The effectiveness of the camouflage effort raises new doubts about the prospects for certain detection of future clandestine nuclear weapons-related activities, the Institute for Science and International Security concluded in its report on the Syrian facility. "This case serves as a sobering reminder of the difficulty of identifying secret nuclear activities," the report said.
According to the ISIS report to be released this week, the fake roof was just the start. Syrian engineers went to "astonishing lengths" to hide cooling and ventilation systems, power lines and other features that normally are telltale signs of a nuclear reactor, authors David Albright and Paul Brannan wrote.
For example, the main building appears small and shallow from the air, but it was evidently built over large underground chambers -- tens of meters in depth -- that were large enough to house the nuclear reactor, as well as a reserve water-storage tank and pools for spent fuel rods, the report said.
An extensive network of electrical lines appears to have been buried in trenches. Traditional water-cooling towers were replaced with an elaborate underground system that discharged into the Euphrates River. And, instead of using smokestack-like ventilation towers prominent at many reactor sites, the ventilation system appears to have been built along the walls of the building, with louver openings not visible from the air, the authors contended.
The ISIS report noted that early skepticism that Syria was building a reactor there was based partly on the observable absence of revealing features. "The current domestic and international capabilities to detect nuclear facilities and activities are not adequate to prevent more surprises in the future," the report warned.
And here's the ISIS report to pick over for yourself...
-- Christian
Russian SLBM Gives Trident a Run for its Money
From an alert DT reader...
Russian Sub Test Fires Ballistic Missile: Navy Spokesman
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, MOSCOW Dec 17, 2007
A Russian submarine on December 17 successfully test-fired a new ballistic missile from the Barents Sea to the far east of the country, a navy spokesman said.
The Sineva missile was launched from the submerged submarine "towards the Kura test ground in Kamchatka," navy spokesman Igor Dygalo told AFP.
"The head section of the missile reached the test ground on time," he said.
Russian television showed the missile thrusting out of the sea at the start of its trajectory.
The Sineva, which has the NATO classification Skiff SS-N-23 and a range of 8,900 kilometers (5,500 miles), was brought into service by Russia’s navy this July.
It is designed to carry four individually targeted warheads, according to the Interfax news agency.
Our reader comments:
I was ready to issue kudos when it occurred to me that SS-N-23 (R-29RM) is not a new missile.
The people at GlobalSecurity.org state that: The R-29RM is a three-stage liquid-propellant missile carrying four or ten MIRV. Compared to the R-29R the missile has a larger launch weight (40.3 to 35.5 Tons) providing a heavier payload (2800 kg to 1650 kg) to a greater maximum range (8300 to 8000 km). The R-29M incorporates a number of significant design changes relative to the predecessor R-29R. Flight tested in 1983...deployed in 1986.
To some, it is considered the best in the world in terms of energy-mass ratio and provides better modernization potential compared to the "really, really new" Bulava SLBM. Because it is not new, does not make it unsuccessful, just not a new success.
"Power to the People" is what I say...Thanks to reader BD for the gouge.
The U.S. Air Force's next-generation bomber will be used to launch nuclear payloads - a requirement that will affect the design and cost of the program, says the service's top civilian leader.
The extra cost of adding nuclear weapons delivery to the aircraft's missions could also complicate efforts to gain financial support by Pentagon leadership and Congress as they deal with a budget dominated by current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. One defense analyst suggests the nuclear requirement can add as much as 50% to a program's price because nuclear delivery systems require a high level of redundancy in communications, command and control, and hardening against various electromagnetic pulses.
The next-generation bomber is expected to be fielded in 2018. To meet that deadline, the Air Force plans to begin a competition for a final design in Fiscal 2009. Although the B-2 remains a highly stealthy aircraft, war planners worry that the proliferation of advanced, integrated air defense systems will limit its ability to penetrate into potentially troublesome regions, such as China or Iran. The new system will incorporate stealth technologies refined after designing the F-22 and F-35, making it the stealthiest aircraft ever fielded, says Maj. Gen. David Clary, vice chief of Air Combat Command.
Candidate technologies must be mature to be considered for use on the aircraft, and - although requirements are far from refined -- senior Air Force leaders say they are placing a high priority on the system's low-observable attributes.
Going nuclear also indicates that a pilot will be on board for at least the first variant of the future system, USAF Secretary Michael Wynne acknowledges. Though the Air Force has had success adding a strike capability to its Predator unmanned aerial systems, policy makers appear hesitant to trust delivery of weapons of mass destruction to a pilotless aircraft. Wynne made his comments during a Nov. 28 speech at a conference here hosted by Credit Suisse and Aviation Week.
This squelches the hopes of unmanned vehicle advocates, who had expected the bomber to be remotely piloted at the outset. But this doesn't rule out an unmanned variant of the bomber, according to Wynne.
He says the entire bomber fleet will likely include the hardening necessary for the nuclear mission. A later variant that would be remotely piloted could handle a separate mission. This option is attractive to Air Force planners because it offers the ability to cycle through multiple pilots at remote bases, extending mission endurance two- or threefold.
One of the missions envisioned for the future bomber is to loiter without detection behind enemy lines and pick off targets or collect intelligence as needed. This, however, would require endurance and a high degree of stealth at all angles.
A helpful Defense Tech reader sent this item along to me. Now, I’m a bit of a dim bulb, as many of you know, and on this, I think the light was entirely out.
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought much about intercontinental ballistic missiles – especially nuclear-tipped ones. But a knowledgeable reader – and helpful tipster - tells me this item is significant.
[From Lockheed Martin]
D5 Fleet Ballistic Missile Launched in Navy Test in the Pacific
SILVERDALE, Wash., November 29th, 2007 -- The U.S. Navy conducted a successful test launch today of a Trident II D5 Fleet Ballistic Missile (FBM) built by Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT). The Navy launched the unarmed missile from the submerged submarine USS HENRY M JACKSON (SSBN 730) in the Pacific Ocean.
The Trident II D5 missile now has achieved 120 consecutive successful test launches since 1989 – a record unmatched by any other large ballistic missile or space launch vehicle.
The missile launch was part of the Demonstration and Shakedown Operation (DASO) to certify USS HENRY M JACKSON for deployment, following a shipyard overhaul period and conversion from Trident I C4 to Trident II D5 configuration.
First deployed in 1990, the D5 missile is currently aboard 12 Trident II Ohio-class submarines and four British Trident II Vanguard-class submarines. The three-stage, solid-propellant, inertial-guided ballistic missile can travel a nominal range of 4,000 nautical miles and carries multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles.
If you’re like me, I was sort of wondering why our intrepid source sent me this story. O.K., so another successful test firing of an SLBM. Big deal, right?
I’ll respect my source’s privacy, but his points make a lot of sense. Here’s what he told me:
The significance of the 120th successful launch of the D5 screams volumes as:
1. Successful Defense Program - that is unmatched by other industrialized competitors (for example the Russian Buluva SLBM has failed 7 of its last 10 tests). This is not a Russian hit piece. It’s that this success is unmatched even among US systems.
2. Reliable strategic deterrence – most countries have a mix of solid and liquid fueled ballistic inventory. So if the US has 18 Ohio’s, 8 on station all the time. Possibly one within range of your country with 24 tubes with 8 independent targeting warheads that are delivered from a system that is extremely reliable. Even in the mind game world - which is the only one that matters - this is quite a deterrent.
3. If you also think about the fact that the original Trident Missile design, implementation and deployment to the fleet was somewhere close to 2 years, I’d say this is an example of a successful defense technology application.
So when this really makes a difference is when you combine it with a better than hokey BMD.
I am inclined to agree. I’ve always believed that as the Cold War ended, we could relegate the ground-based missile leg of the strategic triad to the salvage yard of history. Missile silos were used for measurement during the cold war, they could be assessed by satellites to compile strategic accountability, as could bombers to some degree. The Soviets had them, so we had to have them.
But what good do they really do us in this strategic environment? It seems to me at least that you need to keep strategic nuclear bombers because, they’re recallable. But they’re still vulnerable – but not as vulnerable as missile silos which can’t move.
Sub-based missiles, however, are nearly invulnerable. Few navies in the world have the sophistication or deployment ratio to track U.S. boomers so risk of their discovery and destruction is minimal. I understand that communicating with the subs can be tough, so giving them urgent launch orders may not be as responsive as a ground-based deterrent.
But it’s tough to think of a scenario where America would need to launch a an all-out strategic strike in response to a nuclear attack on the U.S. – particularly in conjunction with a missile defense system.
A B-52 bomber was mistakenly loaded with five nuclear warheads during a flight from North Dakota to Louisiana, a military newspaper reported Wednesday.
The bomber carried advanced cruise missiles as part of a Defense Department program to retire 400 of the missiles, the paper said, quoting three officers who spoke on condition they remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.
The officers said the nuclear warheads should have been removed before the missiles were mounted onto pylons under the bomber's wings for the Aug. 30 flight from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
A Minot Air Force Base spokeswoman, Sgt. Marelise Wood, referred questions by The Associated Press to the Air Force secretary's office in Washington. A spokesman there was out of the office Wednesday morning and not immediately available for comment.
An Air Force spokesman, Lt. Col. Ed Thomas, said that the weapons were in Air Force control at all times and the missiles were safely transferred.
Air Force policy does not permit officials to say whether nuclear warheads were involved, Thomas said.
However, he said all nuclear weapons at Minot were accounted for.
"Air Force standards are very exacting when it comes to munitions handling," Thomas said. "The weapons were always in our custody and there was never a danger to the American public."
He said an investigation was launched and the crews involved in loading the missiles were decertified pending corrective action or training.
I wish we could make this stuff up. And did Col. Thomas keep a straight face when he made those statements?
I'm sorry, but at times like these, only one video excerpt will do:
Just a historical reminder: The atomic bomb named "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 bomber, at 8:15 in the morning of August 6, 1945 - 62 years ago yesterday.
If you’re feeling down, depressed, tired, bored or just all together dreary today, buck up…things could be worse.
A lot worse.
Just consider if you were all those things and next to, nearby, within eyesight, hearing range or even watching one of these on television.
I know it’s a little on the macabre side of things, but Amazing Filtered Things blog has put together a collage of detonated nuke pictures that are just wild. It almost gives you a headache looking at them – that is, of course, unless one of them is of your boss’s office or [?INSERT ANOTHER DESERVING TARGET HERE?].
Pakistan test fired a nuclear-capable cruise missile today reportedly with stealth capabilities. The Hatf VII, or “Babur” as it is known in Pakistan military circles, “is a terrain-hugging, radar-avoiding cruise missile, whose range has now been enhanced to 700 kilometres. It is a highly maneuverable missile with pinpoint accuracy,” a Pakistani military statement said.
The test comes as protests over the firing of Pakistan’s supreme court chief justice by the country’s leader, Pervez Musharraf, continue to grow. The general’s hold on power has always been tenuous – with al Qaeda-linked tribal groups in the west agitating for a Taliban-style government. So this latest missile test could be an attempt to demonstrate his military prowess with angry crowds teeming in the streets.
This is the third test of the Hatf VII missile since 2005, and with its relatively short range, it’s only a threat to neighboring India. Given the raging opposition to Musharraf’s rule, however, a nuclear-tipped Babur in the hands of a fundamentalist government could pose a major threat to U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
The AGM-129A Advanced Cruise Missile (ACM) is being retired by the US Air Force, according to a March 7 post on the Strategic Security Blog by the Federation of American Scientists.
Add the AGM-129A to the growing list of weapons the Air Force is divesting or seeking to divest, which also include the F-117 and the U-2.
The decision also brings an ignominious end to the brittle AGM-129A, the first nuclear-tipped cruise missile designed with stealth as an overriding factor. It was conceived in 1983 in the same generation as the B-2 stealth bomber and RAH-66 Comanche stealth helicopter in an age when stealth -- perhaps like information and networking today -- was still viewed and hyped as its own revolution in military affairs.
The original plan was to deliver 1,500 AGM-129A missiles at a rate of 40 missiles per year after full-rate production in 1993. The weapon would still be coming off the assembly line today!
But the original manufacturer, General Dynamics, was beset by flawed software, shoddy manufacturing and testing mishaps. Congress stepped in to zero-out funds for the program in 1989 and the air force invited McDonnell Douglas to qualify as an alternative source. McDonnell Douglas accepted the invitation, only to regret it later when the Bush I regime decided to stop production of the missile after building about 460.
The remaining inventory is now being retired after less than 20 years of service. Other non-stealthy cruise missiles with conventional warheads -- such as the AGM-86B Air Launched Cruise Missile and the UGM-109 Tactical Tomahawk -- are known to have been fired in combat.
The concept of a nuclear cruise missile now appears to be out of fashion. US Strategic Command is demanding a capability for prompt global strike -- like the kind delivered by a hyper-mach ballistic missile, not a subsonic cruise missile. Conventional (read: non-nuclear) warheads are seen as the proper kill mechanism of a cruise missile, stealthy or otherwise.
To wit: production of the nuclear AGM-129A was curtailed just as the military started pouring cash into the development of stealthy, non-nuclear cruise missiles.
The initial investment in the Tri-Service Standoff Attack Missile fell apart, but the replacement -- the Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile -- is in the inventory today. The JASSM and the AGM-129A are not equivalent even as conventional weapons -- the AGM-129A has an enormous range advantage.
The AGM-129A never really found its niche in the arsenal despite its reportedly $6.4 billion price tag. If there is any return for the taxpayer's investment, it may be as an object lesson for the dangers of taking the fads of military technology to their unjustified extreme.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration selected a design for a new generation of atomic warheads, taking a major step toward building the first new nuclear weapon since the end of the Cold War two decades ago.
The military and the Energy Department selected a design developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California over a competing design by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, according to government sources who spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of a formal announcement.
The decision to move ahead with the warhead, which eventually would replace the existing arsenal of weapons, has been criticized as sending the wrong signal to the world at a time when the United States is assailing attempts at nuclear weapons development in North Korea and Iran and striving to contain it.
But military and Energy Department officials have argued that the new U.S. warhead will not add to the nuclear arsenal. They maintain the new design will make the weapons stockpile more secure and reliable without the need for actual underground testing.
The warhead has been the focus of an intense competition between Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, the government's two premier nuclear weapons labs.
The conventional Trident may be dead, but nuclear Tridents have sparked a heated debate over the future of the UK's nuclear weapons.
Submarine-launched Trident missiles have been Britain's only nuclear option for almost a decade – the UK never had independent ground-launch capabilities, and all the British air-delivered nuclear weapons were dismantled by 1998. The missiles are built, maintained, and serviced in the U.S., but Britain insists that it maintains operational independence.
Today, the British Tridents are based on four Vanguard-class submarines, which are aging and due to be decommissioned in the 2020s. Since the government believes that new subs will take 17 years to design and build, a decision needs to be made. If Britain does not build new subs, it will lose its independent nuclear deterrent force.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's government could have made the decision on its own, but opted instead to open the issue for debate and let Parliament decide – a vote is scheduled for March 2007.
Supporters of renewing the Trident say that 1) no other nuclear states are considering eliminating their arsenals, 2) the number of nuclear states is increasing, 3) the world is a risky place, 4) it is impossible to predict whether the Tridents will be needed, so it is better to retain them. These arguments together seem to say, essentially, that in an uncertain, dangerous world, it is better to have nukes than not (shhh – don't tell Iran!).
Opponents argue that the weapons are 1) unnecessary (Britain's role in the world no longer requires nukes), 2) ineffective (deterrence is an "unproven theory" that is "essentially flawed," especially when it comes to terror), 3) expensive (roughly £20 billion that could be better spent elsewhere), 4) illegal (in violation of Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty, which obligates each signatory to work towards nuclear disarmament), and 5) immoral.
The Scots have been particularly virulent in their criticisms – this is partially tied up in British regional politics but also stems from the fact that the Trident submarines' only base is located in Scotland. Scottish officials have drafted two provocative but doomed-to-fail bills: one would criminalize "supporting the threat of the UK’s nuclear deterrent;" the other would charge the British government £1 billion (almost $2 billion) for each nuclear warhead transported through Scottish territory.
Churches and NGOs across the country have voiced their opposition, as well, and polls consistently show a majority of the British public opposed to Trident renewal. Blair has only offered minor concessions – he "wants to" reduce the number of subs and warheads slightly but says the issue needs more study.
If the Trident debate remains binary – renewal vs. no renewal – Blair has more than enough votes to push his proposal through Parliament. There may be a third option, though: delay the decision. U.S. nuclear experts Dick Garwin, Philip E. Coyle (disclosure: my boss), Theodore A. Postol, and Frank von Hippel recently argued that the Vanguard subs can last up to 15 years longer than the government said, with refurbishments and light use. They argue that putting the decision off would be the best way to maintain "a variety of options." It is unclear whether the government is interested in this option, but over 100 MPs (out of 646) have called for the decision to be delayed.
This will be a debate to watch – if the disarmament advocates succeed, Britain may become the first of the big five nuclear powers to give up its weapons. It looks unlikely in the near future, though.
Great news. According to the Times, "The United States and four other nations reached a tentative agreement to provide North Korea with roughly $400 million in fuel oil and aid, in return for the North’s starting to disable its nuclear facilities and allowing nuclear inspectors back into the country."
But here's the weird thing. "We almost certainly could have gotten this deal before the North Koreans tested a missile and a nuke," the Arms Control Association's Paul Kerr notes. In a way, I agree with this statement from John Bolton:"
This is the same thing that the State Department was prepared to do six years ago. If we going to cut this deal now, it’s amazing we didn’t cut it back then.
Not that the deal is entirely set. As Slate observes, "any agreement with North Korea should be met with some skepticism because the country has changed its mind in the past, and leader Kim Jong-il still has to give his blessing."
Nuke Stoppers: "Hidden" Detectors?
One of the biggest homeland security nightmares is a nuke, smuggled aboard a shipping container. Today, port authorities "scan containers for illicit radioactive materials ashore," New Scientist notes. But "to avoid delaying shipments... detectors generally have no longer than 1 minute to do their work, which is not always long enough."
One possible solution, from MIT's Richard Lanza: hide radiation detectors "inside ordinary shipping containers and sent [them] around the world with other cargo. These covert detectors would spot high-energy gamma rays given off by plutonium or HEU, which cannot easily be shielded."
Lanza proposes using detectors consisting of inorganic crystal scintillators that emit photons when hit by gamma rays. Each emitted photon has a different energy level depending on the isotope the gamma rays come from, allowing the isotope to be identified.
Lanza has made a detector with an array of scintillators behind a mask pierced with holes. Gamma rays passing through a hole would excite one of the scintillators, causing it to emit a photon. He has shown that this can be used to generate an image of a radiation source, allowing the source to be located.
"The technology certainly has merit," one radiation detection specialist, working for the government, tells Defense Tech. And "the Coast Guard, [along] with Customs and Border Patrol, has been considering the use of 'sticky pagers': small boxes that would clamp on a container out of, say, Antwerp, and would take a continuous 1-week reading of the contents of the container as it's shipped across the ocean."
Obviously, you'd be able to get a very good reading of the half of the container nearest the detector, but the minimum detectable activity might be pretty bad near the far side.
I don't know of any specific "sticky pager" development programs going on within DHS [Department of Homeland Security] (including the Coast Guard) right now, but just because I don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't happening. There is interest, though -- there were a few presentations on this type of thing (mostly out of LANL [Los Alamos]) at the winter meeting of the American Nuclear Society.
Our expert does have a small, geeky quibble with the New Scientist story, however. The article keeps talking about "U-232" and how its radiation would "penetrate 22 metres of cargo on average." First of all, U-232 isn't really used in nuclear weapons -- that'd be another isotope, U-235. And U-232's penetration? More like 22 centimeters. Plus, New Scientist: note the spelling of "meters," ok? That's an American-built Internet you're publishing to. We expect things to be spelled our way.
Second Nork Nuke Test Coming?
I was skeptical when I heard the news last week, that "senior defense officials" now think North Korea has "put everything in place to conduct a [second nuclear] test without any notice or warning." After all, wasn't the first Nork test a total dud?
In early December 2006, intelligence sources indicated activities were underway at the Mount Mant’ap nuclear test site near the village of Punggye-ri in North Hamgyŏng Province. The activities were first disclosed by South Korean National Assemblyman Chŏng Hyŏng-gŭn of the Grand National Party (GNP or “Hannaradang”) on December 21. Chŏng’s disclosure followed South Korean Defense Minister Kim Chang-su’s December 15th admonition to 30 senior military commanders “to be thoroughly prepared to counter the possibility of a second or third nuclear test by North Korea.” According to National Assemblyman Chong, North Korea had prepared two tunnels under Mount Mant’ap, and the October 9, 2006 test was conducted in a tunnel on the eastern side of the mountain while recent activities have been at the western tunnel. According to a South Korean government source, the movement of people and vehicles has been detected at the site, and the activities are similar to those that preceded the first test.
National Assemblyman Chong revealed that in December 2006 an unidentified object was moved to the western tunnel entrance and up to 15 people were observed moving about the area. Chong said that the North Koreans were seen constructing a temporary building 10 meters from the tunnel entrance and it is very likely the North Koreans were preparing the tunnel for a nuclear test. Chong also claimed that after the October 9th test in the eastern tunnel, the North Koreans removed the three temporary support buildings near that tunnel entrance and excavated and subsequently filled in a 95-meter long ditch between the buildings and the tunnel, which indicates they could be preparing the eastern tunnel for a future test as well.
Nuke Grenade: Indestructable
If you're standing near Sharon Weinberger, be careful. Her head may explode, after reading this post.
Despite her best efforts -- including a whole freakin' book -- to explain to folks that a nuclear hand grenade violates science's most basic principles, the idea just won't die. The latest example: OK, OK... it's from Maxim, not the New Republic or Foreign Policy. But still, the fact that the nuke grenade (also known as the "hafnium bomb") survives a basic fact-check -- from any magazine -- says something about the imaginary weapon's durability.
Get ready for an adrenaline-pumping international game of dodgeball. For years - and to the tune of $10 million so far - the Department of Energy has been pursuing the idea of nuclear grenades, handheld weapons that could yield kilotons of destructive power thanks to one central ingredient: superexcited elements called isomers. A golf ball holding the energy of just one halfnium 178 isomer- the element being considered for use in the weapon - would contain the equivalent of 10 tons of explosives. The moment researchers discover the best way to trigger the release of that energy...we're all screwed!
Step off, Al Gore. I, with a little help from an eager group of atmospheric scientists, have found a quick fix to global warming. All we need is a handful of nuclear weapons! They can even be small ones!
You’re probably thinking that the heat is messing with my mind. A slewofstudies released in the past few months, though, has confirmed that using nuclear weapons could significantly -- perhaps even catastrophically –- cool the planet.
This phenomenon was first studied towards the end of the Cold War, in the early 1980s. The idea was that the smoke and carbon particles released by fires (in turn caused by nuclear attacks on cities, where much of the world's fuel is stored) could have similar cooling effects to those known to be caused by the ash released in major volcanic eruptions –- only worse (due to physical and chemical differences between ash and smoke). A seminal study in 1983, often called TTAPS (after its authors), confirmed this hypothesis and coined the term "nuclear winter."
Even using extremely crude modeling, TTAPS projected that a massive nuclear exchange between Russia and the U.S. could cause catastrophic cooling in the continental interiors –- a change of as much as -35 degrees C (-63 degrees F). For comparison, the last global ice age, at its peak, saw average global cooling of only -5 degrees C (-9 degrees F) –- though the cooling at continental interiors would have been more drastic. Later studies concluded that these changes would persist for around 3 years.
Nuclear winter studies continued until 1990 and then ceased abruptly (presumably the end of the Cold War sucked the urgency out of the issue). This fall, however, Alan Robock of Rutgers University and some of his colleagues have published several new studies on nuclear winter –- the first such studies in almost 20 years.
Climate models today –- and the computers to run them –- are considerably more sophisticated than those of the early 1980s. Using these improved models, Robock et al. confirmed that the nuclear winter theory holds, in general. The temperature effects for a massive nuclear exchange should actually be slightly less extreme than originally predicted, but according to the new model they would last for over a decade, rather than just for a few years.
Taking a completely new approach, one study also examined a scenario no one bothered to consider during the Cold War: a regional nuclear conflict. They found that massive, superpower-style nuclear exchanges are not required to force major climate change. Even a relatively small nuclear exchange between, say, India and Pakistan, could cause average global surface cooling of over 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) and peak cooling at continental interiors of around 4 degrees C (7 degrees F).
Interestingly, the studies found that the persistence of the climate changes did not depend on the size of the nuclear exchange. In other words, the climate effects from a regional nuclear war would last just as long as those from a global nuclear war, though they would be less extreme.
Recent modeling has also confirmed that nuclear exchanges will drastically reduce global precipitation, by as much as -45% for a massive superpower exchange and -10% for a regional exchange. In the former case, for instance, Northern Hemisphere monsoon seasons would disappear entirely.
These studies have weaknesses –- for instance, they assume nuclear weapons will only target cities, where most smoke-generating fuel is gathered, rather than isolated military installations –- but collectively they are a reasonable step towards updating the science of nuclear winter. After such a long hiatus, with nuclear proliferation looming in Asia and the Middle East, and even though nuclear winter itself is rather terrifying, I find it reassuring that long-neglected effects of nuclear weapons are being studied anew.
UPDATE 7:10 PM: Russell Seitz says the whole nuclear winter thing has been oversold.
UPDATE 01/05/06 4:25 PM: Eric rebuts the rebuttal, here.
So Where Are All The Dirty Bombs?
I've never been one to fully understand the great fear that many state and federal emergency response managers seem to have over dirty bombs, given the many training exercises that seem to include the threat as the main hazard. This USA Today article talks about the issue of loose and stolen radioactive material.
Annual incidents of trafficking and mishandling of nuclear and other radioactive material reported to U.S. intelligence officials have more than doubled since the early 1990s, says the director of domestic nuclear detection at the Department of Homeland Security.
Also up: scams in which fake or non-existent nuclear or radioactive material is offered for sale, often online, says Vayl Oxford, nuclear detection director at the department.
"We sense that people have recognized the value of nuclear material as a useful way of making money," Oxford said. "Nuclear material is becoming a marketable commodity."
The incidents tracked by the department, based on its reporting and information from foreign diplomatic and intelligence sources, average about twice the number made public each year by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Oxford said reports of nuclear and radioactive materials trafficking have ranged from 200 to 250 a year since 2000, up from about 100 a year in the 1990s.
But here's the thing ,Vayl. When you look at the amount of materials stolen or lost (some data are shown in the article's sidebar), we're talking about ounces and a few pounds at best of gamma emitters. No one's tracking the alpha/beta radioactive material out there (polonium anyone?). Still, not exactly enough for an improvised nuclear weapon, maybe enough to scare unknowledgable people.
You might have seen the last season's "Sleeper Cell" that only reinforced some of these fears. I enjoyed watching the terrorist cell use americium 241 to "test" their lead-lined cooler container for radiation leaks (except that americium isn't a strong gamma emitter), talk about how exploding an aircraft holding one nuclear fuel rod over Los Angeles would "cover the city in nuclear fallout" (ah, not really), and how the authorities "got a hit from the radioactive sniffers" on the lead-lined cooler on its way to the last target. Yeah, it's only a drama, but I'll bet people believe this stuff. Maybe it was just disinformation for the real terrorists... yeah, that's the ticket.
UPDATE 12/29/06 11:36 AM: David Hambling writes in to say: "Also, the UK police are ordering some 12,000 CBR [chemical-biological-radiological] suits -- looks like they're expecting those famous/mythical dirty bombs too."
UPDATE 12/29/06 12:05 PM: J here. Great conversation in the comments, especially the cool-headed plugger noting that "dirty bombs" are hazards, not life-threatening events. Many of the comments seem to go to the question of "what's your point?" Without getting too academic (hey, I'm not the ArmsControlWonk, after all), my point is simply this. While there's lots of radioactive hazards out there, the really bad ones aren't being moved in great quantities to cause a mass casualty incident. Given that "dirty bombs" of whatever flavor - alpha, beta, gamma - are largely more of a clean-up job, and while costly to clean up, government goes on. The anthrax letters didn't shut down the USPS, but it did slow things down on the east coast. The polonium poisoning didn't shut down Heathrow Airport for a minute.
They're hazards, they are low-probability events, they're not mass casualty events. Given that basis, what's the appropriate federal response? I suggest that it is not to put rad detectors in every port and every border crossing into the United States and within every major metropolitan area, as DHS's DNDO has suggested (which would cost billions of dollars to implement plus annual sustainment and training costs). The appropriate response is to lock down the bad rads (cesium, uranium, and plutonium), get the terrorists before they attack, and be prepared (like our UK brethern) to clean it up if it happens. Simple. Smart. Efficient. But not the course of action being implemented by the government.
Pentagon Plan: Hit Anywhere on Earth, in an Hour
I've had sources ask to meet me in some pretty odd places. But there was one meeting last year that had to be just about the strangest request yet. It wasn't just that this very-recently retired Defense Department strategist wanted to meet at the Pentagon City Mall -- that's a pretty common place to grab an off-the-record cup o' joe. It was where in the mall he had in mind: at the Nordstrom's coffee shop, tucked all the way in the far reaches of the store, just past the little kid's clothes section.
So I walk past the rows of toddlers' jumpers, past the blue-haired ladies ordering around their grandkids. I sit down with my source. And he begins to tell me about a Pentagon plan that's even odder that the place where we're meeting.
Sounds... ummm, ambitious, right? So how do you pull off that kind of mission, now known as "Prompt Global Strike?" Well, that's the subject of my cover story in this month's Popular Mechanics.
Now, of course, the American military has weapons that can destroy just about anything on the planet in a matter of minutes: nuclear missiles. Which might have been the right answer for containing our Soviet adversaries. But as the Cold War receded into memory, U.S. strategists began to worry that our nuclear threat was no longer credible. That we were too muscle-bound for our own good. Were we really prepared to wipe out Tehran in retribution for a single terrorist attack? Kill millions of Chinese for invading Taiwan? Of course not. The weaker our enemies grew, the less ominous our arsenal became. Military theorists called it "self-deterrence." "In today's environment, we've got zeros and ones. You can decide to engage with nuclear weapons, or not," Navy Capt. Terry Benedict told me. "The nation's leadership needs an intermediate step – to take the action required, without crossing to the one."
Benedict's option -- one of two I explore in the article -- is Trident ballistic missiles, armed with conventional warheads instead of nukes. For lots of good reasons (like the better-than-average chance the missiles could start World War III) Congress has negged the idea. But, in the military establishment, there's still a great deal of interest in using ballistic missiles for the hour-or-less mission. How exactly the nuclear holocaust issue is supposed to be resolved is, at this point, unclear.
Which brings us to option #2. It's a long-term play. And a long-shot, too. The military's research divisions are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into exotic, high-speed weapons like the X-51 hypersonic cruise missile, illustrated on the cover. If it works out as planned, the X-51 will go Mach 5 (roughly 3600 mph) -- much, much faster than any equivalent in the U.S. arsenal. Some Pentagon planners see the X-51 as part of a suite of futuristic weapons that can almost-instantly threaten American adversaries everywhere, without threatening the entire planet in the process. But it's way off in the distance; the X-51's first test flight isn't until 2008. I'm expecting several more trips to Nordstrom's Cafe before then.
UPDATE 11:40 AM: If you want to learn how the Prompt Global Strike concept got started -- and how it's being put into early development, today -- I strongly recommend this chronology, from the Federation of American Scientists' Hans Kristensen.
When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, the agency refused, citing a large workload and a desire to protect its sources and tradecraft.
Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way—by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as “Iran and nuclear,” three officials said, became targets for international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United Nations.
[snip]
In the end, the CIA approved a handful of individuals, though none is believed connected to Project 1-11—Iran’s secret military effort to design a weapons system capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The names of Project 1-11 staff members have never been released by any government and doing so may have raised questions that the CIA was not willing or fully able to answer. But the agency had no qualms about approving names already publicly available on the Internet.
This actually makes sense: You have what you think is the real list, but you only nail people for whom you can make a public case. But woe unto the poor schmoe who has to push a bunch of google search terms on skeptical foreign diplomats.
Come to think of it, the Project 111 name comes from the laptop of death (more) —so what’s the big secret?
This raises so many questions: Is unknown electro-folkie Johnny Burroughs, who records under the name Project 111, now on every no-fly list ever?
Update: I asked about the hyphen in Project 111. D-linz e-mailed me to say:
I decided to add it yesterday because that is how U.S. intelligence officials pronounce the project, with the 1 first and then the 11. Like the way you say nine-eleven for Sept. 11, rather than 9-1-1- for emergency help or one hundred and eleven. IC folks say “project one-eleven”
Later Update: Noah points out that I totally avoided the big revelation, that "none of the 12 Iranians that the State Department eventually singled out for potential bans on international travel and business dealings is believed by the CIA to be directly connected to Iran’s most suspicious nuclear activities.”
I guess that would mean the sanctions are kind of pointless, no?
Even later update: Noah here. At Defense Tech HQ, we're all bigfans of open source intelligence -- information that's out there in the public sphere -- to nail potential bad guys. But only if it actually nails legitimately bad dudes, not just the random Joes who are unlucky enough to show up at the top of a Google search.
Nuke Missiles' Coordinates Plotted
The other day, we looked at the Google Earth map showing the nearly 10,000 nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal. This website goes a couple of steps further, giving the latitude and longitude of every Minuteman nuclear missile silo in the country.
(Big ups: DD)
Google Earth Tracks Nukes
The lovely Elizabeth and I spent the better part of the last week driving across country, to set up the winter Defense Tech HQ in Los Angeles. We didn't realize how many nuclear weapons we passed along the way: the old warheads at the Pantex facility, just outside Amarillo; the 1,914 doomsday devices at Kirtland Air Force Base, in Albuquerque.
The satellite map - drawn from this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistsstudy -- "offers a fresh accounting of the extensive U.S. nuclear inventory, and its dynamic graphics let site users 'fly' onscreen across a sprawling network of military facilities in 12 states and in Europe," a press release reads.
The researchers emphasize that none of the locations is secret. All have been known for years to house nuclear weapons and are highly secure military facilities that do not pose a direct security risk to surrounding communities...
The U.S. nuclear arsenal currently is housed at 18 military facilities in 12 states and six European countries. The highest concentration is at the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific in Bangor, Washington, which is home to more than 2,300 warheads – probably the most nuclear weapons at any one site in the world. At any given moment, nearly half of these warheads are aboard ballistic-missile submarines in the Pacific...
Over the past decade, the United States has removed nuclear weapons from three states – California, Virginia and South Dakota – and one foreign country, Greece. And during that time, the estimated number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile dropped from approximately 12,500 to just below 10,000. At its height, in the mid-1960s, the U.S. stockpile boasted some 32,000 warheads...
[Today], more than two-thirds of the warheads are stored at bases for operational ballistic missiles and bombers. Only about 28 percent of the warheads have been moved to separate storage facilities, such as the massive underground vault at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which stores more than 1,900 warheads – the second largest cache in the arsenal.
Hmmm... maybe we'll take the Northern route home.
Los Alamos Getting Sloppy (Updated)
Why should we bother putting radiological detectors in the ports when it's easier to get the stuff within the United States? The AP has this article on a drug raid at a New Mexico trailer park, which turned up classified documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
Local police found the documents while arresting a man suspected of domestic violence and dealing methamphetamine from his mobile home, said Sgt. Chuck Ney of the Los Alamos, N.M., Municipal Police Department. The documents were discovered during a search of the man's records for evidence of his drug business, Ney said.
Police alerted the FBI to the secret documents, which agents traced back to a woman linked to the drug dealer, officials said. The woman is a contract employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case.
The official would not describe the documents except to say that they appeared to contain classified material and were stored on a computer file.
According to unconfirmed sources, the information was classified as Secret Restricted Data which means it would involve nuclear weapons data and may have concerned detection of underground nuclear weapons testing. Also unconfirmed, the person in possession of the information worked either in Technical Area 55 where all of the Lab’s plutonium is stored or in the X Division which handles nuclear weapons design data for a maintenance subcontractor of the Lab.
POGO also notes six previous security incidents at LANL since 9/11. No wonder that many of the DHS exercises feature dirty bomb scenarios - they must be worried about domestic terrorists getting too much National Lab material...
UPDATED 10:20 AM: It should be noted that this isn't Los Alamos' first drug-related incident. Back in 2004, local authorities evicted a man who had lived for years in a cave on lab property. from a cave on Los Alamos National Laboratory land where they say he apparently lived for years with the comforts of home — a wood-burning stove, solar panels connected to car batteries for electricity and a satellite radio. Ten marijuana plants were found outside the cave, and the fellow inside was charged with possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.
UPDATED 4:15 PM: Whatever you do, be sure to check in regularly at the POGO blog, where they've got all kinds of funrumors floating in. Police docs, too.
UPDATED 10-26: J. here - let me clarify that I believe the combination of classified LANL documents and potential theft of radioactive isotopes from domestic sources (universities, medical labs) is what ought to get people excited about this incident. Obviously we don't know what's in the documents that makes them classified, and I am not suggesting that LANL might be the source of loose plutonium material. But unless LANL tightens up their security procedures and trains/screens its employees and contract support better, its leadership ought to be on notice.
Condi's Rad Detectors: Not So Fab?
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is pushing North Korea's neighbors to use more radiation detectors, to keep Kim & Co. from smuggling nuclear materials into or out of the country.
Of course, that assumes that the sensors can actually handle the job. In many cases, they can't.
Unlike plutonium, which emits... high-energy gamma rays that are almost impossible to shield, HEU emits only low-energy gamma rays... If the uranium is shielded by just a thin layer of lead, or even wood, the detectors miss it.
There are better sensors in the works, Homeland Security Watch's Christian Beckner says. They use "germanium instead of sodium iodide, or [rely on] active detection technologies, where you bombard the container with high-energy particles that create new signatures which are easier to detect." Unfortunately, they cost a ton -- seven times more than the current sensors. And they "haven't been proven yet in the field." Not here. And certainly not in China or South Korea, where they would do the most good to contain the current crisis.
But not all is lost. Two U.S. government programs -- the Container Security Initiative (CSI) and the Megaports Initiative -- are helping foreign inspectors get advanced x-ray machines which are better at seeing through shielding. The machines can pick up fishy-looking shapes, if not radiation signatures.
CSI also puts American customs officers at "foreign ports to liaison with officials there and get them to inspect [potentially risky] containers," Beckner says. It's not a perfect program, relying "too much on the personal relationship between the American officers and the foreign port officials; the former don't have the authority to force foreign ports to comply, and Senate investigators have found that in many cases these foreign ports aren't fully responsive."
But, overall, Beckner thinks "it's been a relatively effective program." And for right now, it's really all we've got.
Nuke Spaceship Docs Revealed
In the late 1950's, the U.S. government began research into an interplanterary spacecraft that relied on nuclear detonations for propulsion. The effort, dubbed "Project Orion," died quietly ater a few years. But many of the documents surrounding the atomic spaceship have remained hidden or classified for more than four decades.
Boing Boing has a bunch of 'em up, now -- as well as an interview with tech historian George Dyson, who's dad worked on Orion. Check it out.
UPDATE 11:15 AM: "Orion is interesting from a military technology point of view, partly because it was literally a 'space battleship' with a large stock of nuclear warheads it could deliver anywhere on the planet," says David Hambling. "In particular, there is a program mentioned in [Dyson's] book called 'Casaba Howitzer' which is a nuke with highly directional blast, suitable for attacking buried installations etc. Casaba Howitzer is still, as far as I know, highly classified with no details anywhere."
Real Korea Worry: Chem-Bio
North Korea's newly-tested nuke is bad news, for sure. But the bigger worry, says Popular Mechanics is the "huge arsenal of mass casualty weapons" that Kim & Co. have been assembling for 45 years: biological and chemical arms.
While it would be foolish not to be gravely concerned about North Korea's purported development of an offensive nuclear capability, the actual threat for the foreseeable future is, arguably, minimal. North Korea's threadbare economy (it has a GDP of $40 billion - compare that to California's gross state product on $1.55 trillion per year) is incapable of maintaining an effective nuclear weapons program. Its nuclear science is at best second rate and, certainly, is second hand.
In contrast, as one North Korea expert explained to me, CBW is mass destruction on the cheap. "Biological and chemical weapons are very inexpensive, many, many times cheaper than nuclear." Another expert gave this grim assessment: "The use of anthrax is a distinct possibility for this nation [North Korea]..."
The consensus among weapons inspectors, intelligence analysts, academics and others I have interviewed—–which is backed up by the available open source material—-is that North Korea has developed anthrax, plague and botulism toxin as weapons and has extensively researched at least six other germs including smallpox and typhoid. It is also believed to have 5,000 tons or more of mustard gas, sarin nerve agent and phosgene (a choking gas). The Center for Nonproliferation Studies says North Korea ranks "amongst the largest possessors of chemical weaponry in the world." South Korea's military estimates half of North's long-range missiles and 30 percent of its artillery are CBW capable...
Yet the West's myopic obsession with North Korea's nuclear efforts has allowed this far more real and equally lethal threat to escape into the shadows: a WMD program, backed by in excess of 13,000 specially trained troops, capable of devastating its southern neighbor, attacking U.S. troops in Asia and disrupting the regional economy in ways that could see the U.S. and other western nations plunged into crisis.
Yes, the new [United Nations] resolution 1718(2006) includes a reference to biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, but only as an afterthought, and the resolution exists only because of the nukes and their perceived threat. Unfortunately, in this case, as with others, the world is overly focused on a potential retina-searing nuclear detonation, without properly appreciating the very clear-and-present CBW killer that exists just a virtual button's push away from Kim Jong Il's perfectly manicured fingernails.
If the whole thing sounds a little hysterical to you, chem-bio guru Jason Sigger says: get real. The story is "100 percent right in regards to N. Korea. And you can extend that argument to China, Iran, Syria, Israel, Pakistan, and India, and potentially in the near future (because of Iran), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others."
Seriously, I see this all the time in the "combating WMD" community. The arms control and counterproliferation people talk "WMD" but the subtext is "nuke." Even the majority of the consequence management tasks are now "dirty bomb" or "improvised nuclear device" scenarios... [the] mentality is [that] nukes are the only thing that can drastically affect US military power in any region of the world.
But there are other threats, too.
Nork Test: No Big Whoop?
"There is no question that the political and security implications of the [recent North Korean nuclear] test are huge and almost entirely negative," writes Ivan Oelrich, over at the Strategic Security Blog. "The technical significance of the test is somewhat less than meets the eye."
[A week ago,] the outside world knew that the North Koreans had plutonium available from fuel rods that had been removed from the reactor at Yongbyon. We knew that at least some of the plutonium had been separated out of the fuel rods and, since separation is a fairly straightforward process, it was a fair assumption that most or all of the plutonium had been separated. So we knew about their plutonium supply (and the test tells us nothing more about that), but another key question remained: Could they fashion the plutonium into a bomb?
...Before the test, we did not know whether the North Koreans could build an implosion bomb or not. Had the test been successful, we would now know that they could, although we would still not know how close they were to a useable weapon; their test device might have weighed tons and been a once off, rigged up, laboratory experiment. But the test was not successful, so we still don’t know whether the North Koreans can build a workable implosion bomb. Presumably the North Koreans learned something from the test so the probability of the next test being successful is somewhat higher than the probability that the first test would have been successful. This is not much of difference, leaving us in pretty much the same position we were in before the test...
Why might the test have failed? An implosion bomb uses conventional high explosives to compress plutonium until it becomes “critical,” that is, it will sustain a run-away chain reaction. The pressure from the conventional explosives has to be carefully controlled, for example, it must be symmetric or else it is like squeezing a ball of putty: pressure on one side doesn’t compress the plutonium, it just squirts it out the other side. The most likely reason for the failure is some problem with the compression and there is any number of reasons why the compression might not be adequate. If the test were carefully instrumented (which is not necessarily the case), the North Koreans should be able to narrow down the cause, which will give them a much improved chance for success with their next test.
UPDATE 10/14/06 11:20 AM: "Initial environmental samples collected by a U.S. military aircraft detected signs of radiation over the Sea of Japan, possibly confirming North Korea's nuclear test," the Washington Post reports.
UPDATE 10/15/06 7:06 PM: "The proposition that the apparently low yield of the test is a failure is not self evident," says Defense Tech pal John Pike, pointing to thisWeekly Standard piece. After all, Pike notes, the yield on the American B61 nuke can range anywhere from a third of a kiloton to more than 350 kt.
UPDATE 10/15/06 7:23 PM: No excerpt will do justice to this epic retelling of North Korea 50-year quest for the Bomb. So just go and read the whole thing.
Nork Fallout: Asia Arms Race?
So here we are, 36 hours later, and everybody is still talking about North Korea's nuclear test. But despite all the nervous chatter, not much has changed, at least in the short term. (Down the road is a much different story.)
Condemnations of the North’s brazen act aside, China is no more willing now than they were last week to risk a collapsed regime on their border - it almost assures a flood of refugees and a US military ally sharing a border with China. The US’s options are similarly limited – even if we know where all their nuclear sites are, it’s unlikely we’d be willing to bet that the unpredictable Kim regime wouldn’t retaliate against Seoul. That leaves us to do what we’ve gotten good at with North Korea: issuing a strong condemnation and then hoping that CNN switches back over to coverage of Jon Benet Ramsey.
The only big potential short term implication is if the international community demonstrates that this test was a fake, or a dud. Then the North will be forced to up the ante to compensate for the embarrassment (just as the nuke test was to compensate for the humiliating failure of the July long range missile test).
The real impact of the Kim's nuclear trial is in the long term. That's when things have the potential to get extremely scary. Not only do you get the possibility of the Norks throwing a nuclear yard sale for terrorists. But for Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, it energizes his push to strengthen Japan’s security capacity like nothing else could have. Abe had already appointed a number of fellow conservatives in Foreign Ministry and Defense positions in the cabinet, he’s declared his intent to modify the constitution’s limitations on Japanese military capacity, and he mooted the possibility for a Japanese pre-emptive strike against North Korea in the aftermath of the July missile tests. The pacifist nature of Japan’s constitution is reasonably well-ingrained in Japanese political culture, and he would have met a lot of resistance in these moves. That resistance will be drastically weakened by the North Korean test. From there, it’s a shortlogical step to the usual scenarios of a Sino-Japanese arms race in East Asia. And there's only one word for how that scenario plays out: Gulp.
In the days ahead, we'll hear all kinds of reasons why the Nork nuke test was so sucktastic. (Suitcase bomb, anyone?) Dicky Destiny -- a.k.a. Dr. George Smith, of GlobalSecurity.org -- has a plausible early candidate: "'fizzle yield'; that is, the smallest nuclear yield [a] particular device could provide."
"... [T]here is a moment when the [bomb's] fissile material becomes critical (projectile still on its way to its destination [in a gun-type weapon], or only a small part of the material compressed [in an implosion-type weapon]) and the time it reaches its intended state. During this interval, the degree of supercriticality is building up toward its final value. If a chain reaction were initiated by neutrons from some other source during this period, the yield realized would be much smaller --possibly a great deal smaller -- than the nominal yield. Such an event is referred to as preinitiation (or sometimes predetonation).
... "If the [bomb's] assembly velocities (of the projectile or material driven by an implosion) are quite low, the earliest possible preinitiation could lead to an energy release (equivalent weight of high explosive) not many times larger than the weight of the device."
Other parts of the discussion on bomb design obstacles, also presented at the seminar, indicated that yields lower by a factor of ten in crude designs can be indicative of fizzles. What information has been published on the North Korean test falls into this range.
Summarized, there are certain number of things that can go wrong when firing your first atomic bomb, particularly when using a crude design. And one might expect to see them from a weird and crazy hermit nation, like North Korea, endeavoring to enter the nuclear club.
U.S. 'Dragnet' Hunts for Nuke Clues
So how does the Pentagon figure out if the Nork nuke test was a dud or not? By directing "a dragnet of aircraft, ships, seismic listening posts, spy satellites, and other intelligence-gathering systems to glean as much as possible about the size [and nature] of the detonation," the Boston Globe says.
While North Korea said yesterday that no radioactive material had leaked out, the Air Force Technical Applications Center, based in Florida, flew special aircraft downwind from the test site near the Chinese border to try to catch any radioactive material that might have been vented into the atmosphere.
According to the Air Force, the WC-135W "Constant Phoenix" planes "collect particulate and gaseous effluents and debris from accessible regions of the atmosphere" to be analyzed by military specialists and the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons laboratories.
These samples would allow the national weapons laboratories such as Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia to determine whether Pyongyang used plutonium or uranium in the blast.
Meanwhile, the United States has activated a special Air Force detachment located at South Korea's seismic listening post in Wonju, close to the border with North Korea, officials said.
The main objective of the collection effort is to use the data to make a more accurate assessment than ever before about the sophistication of North Korea's outlawed weapons program and to find out how close the nation might be to mounting a nuclear warhead on one of its long-range missiles.
NORK Nuclear Test: It's A Dud (Updated)
HA HA HA HA.
I -- Jeffrey Lewis, crossposting from Arms Control Wonk -- love the US Geological Survey.
There is lots of data floating around: The CTBTO called it 4.0; The South Koreans report 3.58-3.7.
You're thinking, 3.6, 4.2, in that neighborhood. Seismic scales, like the Richter, are logarithmic, so that neighborhood can be pretty big.
But even at 4.2, the test was probablya dud.
Estimating the yield is tricky business, because it depends on the geology of the test site. The South Koreans called the yield half a kiloton (550 tons), which is more or less -- a factor of two -- consistent with the relationship for tests in that yield range at the Soviet Shagan test site:
Mb = 4.262 + .973LogW
Where Mb is the magnitude of the body wave, and W is the yield.
3.58-3.7 gives you a couple hundred tons (not kilotons), which is pretty close in this business unless you're really math positive. The same equation, given the US estimate of 4.2, yields (pun intended) around a kiloton.
A plutonium device should produce a yield in the range of the 20 kilotons, like the one we dropped on Nagasaki. No one has ever dudded their first test of a simple fission device. North Korean nuclear scientists are now officially the worst ever.
Of course, I want to see what the US IC says. If/when the test vents, we could have some radionuclide data -- maybe in the next 72 hours or so.
But, from the initial data, I'd say someone with no workable nuclear weapons (Kim Jong Il, I am looking at you) should be crapping his pants right now.
First the missile, then the bomb. Got anything else you wanna try out there, chief?
UPDATE 10/10/06 1:14 AM: Noah here. Looks like the LA and NY Times have both pickedup (sorta) on what the good Wonk was sayin'.
Throughout history, the first detonations of aspiring nuclear powers have tended to pack the destructive power of 10,000 to 60,000 tons — 10 to 60 kilotons — of conventional high explosives.
But the strength of the North Korean test appears to have been a small fraction of that: around a kiloton or less, according to scientists monitoring the global arrays of seismometers that detect faint trembles in the earth from distant blasts...
Philip E. Coyle III, a former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon and former director of nuclear testing for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons design center in California, said the small size of the test signaled the possibility of what might be described as a partial success or a partial failure.
“As first tests go, this is smaller and less successful than those of the other nuclear powers,” he said.
Perhaps the North Koreans wanted to keep it small, he added. “But if it turns out to be a kiloton or less,” Dr. Coyle said, “that would suggest that they hoped for more than that and didn’t get it.”
UPDATE 10/10/06 8:45 AM: Rumor alert! Stratfor is pretty sure that the Nork nuke -- "about one-fortieth of the Nagasaki blast" -- was a dud, too. But, just to be on the safe side, the intel service offers up "three possible explanations for the apparently small yield: the North Koreans deliberately detonated a very small device, they tested a larger device but it failed to execute properly, or the explosion was not caused by an atomic device."
Possibly the North Koreans wanted to show that they had the technology but did not want to appear too threatening, so they minimized the size. Or they could be demonstrating the ability to use lower-yield nuclear mines or artillery shells that would protect North Korea by blocking strategic passes into the country, and would possibly threaten Seoul but would not pose a significant threat elsewhere. Also, the water table is high in the area of the blast; maybe they were being careful not to break into the aquifer.
These are all good reasons, but the counterargument is that if you are going to go nuclear, go nuclear. North Korea does not have a pressing need -- or history -- of being subtle, so a small blast doesn't fit in with its plan...
What if the North Koreans didn't go nuclear, but detonated a large chemical explosive in an underground chamber? It would take a lot of explosive to yield that result, but it is not impossible. A chemical explosion would have a different seismic signature than a nuclear one, and therefore geologists should have already discounted this theory; but the analysis is going to take up to two days, according to the White House. It is certainly not beyond the North Koreans to fake a nuclear explosion, and there have been some big explosions in North Korea that have been mistaken, for a short period of time, for something nuclear. But there is no evidence, beyond our speculation, for this theory.
UPDATE 10/10/06 8:51 AM: Interesting counter-argument from Trent Telenko in the comments. Since North Korea has "had the complete design specifications for a Chinese missile-ready nuclear warhead of the plutonium implosion type for years," thanks to the A.Q. Khan network, this dud may be more dangerous than it seems.
Will They or Won't They?
Or can they or can’t they? We just don't know. The North Koreans, fresh from their smashing success with rocket science over the Fourth of July weekend, could be getting ready to try their hand at nuclear physics. U.S. officials claim North Korea is preparing to test a nuclear device, ABC News reports.
Considering we still don’t know if Fearless Leader really is northeast Asia’s largest importer of luxury Cognac, I’m afraid it’s hard to speculate whether this nuclear test is in the works. But I have another question: will it work?
I keep thinking of Marvin the Martian’s great quote: "Where's the Ka-boom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Ka-boom!"
Welcome to the final post in my series on the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program and the future of U.S. nuclear stockpile stewardship. In this post, I'll review where RRW stands today, and touch briefly on some of the political dimensions of the debate over the program.
There's a lot of material on this program – from the government, from outside experts and from policy advocates of all orientations – that I won't be able to cover, so to those interested in reading more, I recommend checking out CDI's guide to government documents on RRW, as well as articles on the program at the Arms Control Association website and over at Arms Control Wonk.
In May 2005, the two nuclear design labs, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, began an 18-month RRW Feasibility Study, as mandated in the fiscal year 2006 Defense Authorization Act. The study consisted of a design competition between the two labs (both with help from Sandia) to produce plans for the first RRW warhead, a replacement for the W76 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead.
The preliminary designs were completed and submitted in March, and underwent peer review in the labs in May. Currently, the teams are back at the drawing boards, incorporating suggestions from the peer reviews and from the Project Officers Group, the representatives of the nuclear stockpile's Department of Defense "customers." By November, NNSA is expected to pick a winning design.
As reported in Defense Tech last week, however, RRW is well on its way to expanding beyond a single warhead design. It has been clear for some time that one RRW design would not be enough to replace all nine warhead models currently in the stockpile. Still, many RRW observers were disappointed and concerned to hear that the Senate is planning to commission a design competition for the next RRW warhead and to allocate $62 million for RRW in 2007 – more than double the department’s $27 million request, and the program’s $25 million budget for 2006 – before the first feasibility study is even completed.
The arguments in favor of RRW have mostly been described in previous posts: redesigning the stockpile to increase performance margins would, if possible, help put to rest concerns about the effect of modified manufacturing practices on warhead performance, and would provide work for the nuclear weapons complex.
The arguments against RRW, meanwhile, take issue with both the program’s desirability and its feasibility.
The first argument against the program is that, according to the program’s opponents, there is no need to change the current warhead designs. In the example of the pit remanufacturing debate discussed in my last post, this means that the program’s opponents believe that the new pits have been proven conclusively to be as reliable as the old pits, and can be incorporated into existing warheads.
(Dr. Jeanloz, by the way, is on the record as an RRW "skeptic," rather than an outright critic, but several other experts have offered views similar to his as arguments against RRW.)
This assessment contradicts the NNSA’s assessment that the RRW designs will "be certifiable and producible without nuclear testing" even though the plans call for "redesigning" the warheads' nuclear subsystems. Nuclear testing is almost universally regarded as a very bad thing – the Bush Administration is formally committed to continuing the current testing moratorium, in no small part due to concern that a U.S. test would inevitably lead to Chinese and Russian tests.
Critics who cite this concern point out that even if the nuclear weapons complex ever brought itself to certify a warhead design which had never been tested, U.S. Strategic Command, as the stockpile's "customer," would be unlikely to accept such an unproven product.
It is worth noting, by the way, that there are certain modest modifications which can increase warheads' performance margins to a certain extent without adding uncertainty – these changes are not controversial, and are being considered outside of RRW.
Finally, critics point out that the program's supposed contributions to the goal of "stockpile transformation" are not consistent with each other.
On the one hand, RRW is supposed to lead to long-term cost-savings by producing a stockpile which can be maintained without a complex stockpile stewardship effort. On the other hand, RRW is also supposed to "continuously exercise" the nuclear weapons complex and "enable" the transition to a "responsive infrastructure."
The two goals are clearly incompatible – a good-for-a-century warhead design which met Congress' goal of reducing the cost and complexity of stockpile maintenance would not meet NNSA's goal (and Congress' secondary goal) of keeping the production complex "exercised" for a possible future arms race. (Ryan jokes that to some people, RRW seems to stand for "Reliably Recurring Work.")
As the Congressional Research Service points out, "RRW is a new program with no specific, tangible product yet defined. In deciding how to proceed on RRW, Congress has a number of options available to it." It is possible that a version of the program will emerge which can satisfy the concerns of all sides – of those who worry that the current stockpile stewardship paradigm will lead to a dangerous accumulation of minor changes, and of those who worry that a significant overhaul of warhead designs will destroy, rather than fortify, confidence in the stockpile. Until such a version emerges, though, we can expect to see both confusion and controversy continue to rage.
In my last post, I discussed the origins of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (RRW). In this post, I'll look at one example of a change which is being made in the manufacturing of an essential nuclear component, and at what this change means for the debate over RRW.
The component in question here is the "pit," the sphere of plutonium which sits at the heart of a thermonuclear warhead's primary stage.
During the Cold War, pits were made at the Rocky Flats site in Colorado. After Rocky Flats was shut down in 1989, the United States was left without the ability to make new pits for its stockpile.
In 1996, under the leadership of then-director of Los Alamos Siegfried Hecker, the Department of Energy started working on a new pit manufacturing line at Los Alamos’ Technical Area 55 (TA-55). A decade later, replacement pits are finally starting to roll off the line at TA-55. But a debate has broken out over whether or not those pits are functionally the same as those made at Rocky Flats. As a result, the new pits are still waiting to receive their certification for stockpile use.
At the heart of the debate lies precisely the sort of improved manufacturing technique which I mentioned in the last post. At Rocky Flats, plutonium was shaped into pits by stamping, folding and welding, in what’s known as a wrought process. Unfortunately, the wrought process is very infrastructure-intensive, making it good for an industrial-scale facility like Rocky Flats, but less so for a smaller facility like TA-55. The wrought process also creates lots of dangerous plutonium sawdust and shavings, and leaves behind a product with an uneven microscopic texture.
So under Dr. Hecker’s enthusiastic leadership, TA-55 developed a new technique for making pits. The new pits are made using a cast process – that is, molten plutonium (alloyed with some other metals for stability) is poured into pit-shaped molds. The cast process, if done properly, produces a much more uniform product, with less complex equipment and less hazard.
Fast forward ten years.
New pits have been cast and have undergone a gauntlet of tests and computer modeling, but, of course, not underground nuclear tests. Some scientists at the labs, and in the greater nuclear policy community, are ready to certify the pits as functionally equivalent to the Rocky Flats pits in every way. One of these scientists is Raymond Jeanloz, a professor of planetary science at UC Berkeley who does not work at Los Alamos, but is one of the country’s foremost scientific advisors on nuclear issues, and has served as lead author on severalJASON studies on stockpile stewardship.
But other scientists are hesitant to certify the pits. They feel that however many tests the cast pits have undergone, they are still irreducibly different from the old wrought pits, and that without a nuclear test, no one can say that they would behave the same. These scientists argue that the new pits should be introduced into the stockpile, but only after the labs have had a chance to modify the warheads to increase their performance margins – that is, only as part of RRW.
Ironically, one of these scientists is Dr. Hecker – the grandfather of the TA-55 pits. He stands by his decision to switch manufacturing techniques, and he insists that the new pits are of excellent quality, but he denies that the labs have been able to test the pits as exhaustively as Dr. Jeanloz claims.
To make matters worse, Dr. Hecker and Dr. Jeanloz disagree just as vehemently on the subject of plutonium aging. Dr. Hecker claims that not enough is known about the different processes which take place as plutonium metal ages to predict safely when aging will begin to affect the dynamics of the pit implosion – and therefore the yield of the warhead primary. He therefore claims that the only responsible thing to do is to replace the current pits after a conservative 50-year shelf-life – and to keep replacing the pits every half-century. This schedule would keep the nuclear labs perpetually busy building, certifying and installing new pits.
Dr. Jeanloz doesn’t buy Dr. Hecker’s claim that plutonium aging is poorly understood. He points out that the nuclear labs have learned so much about plutonium aging just in the last six years that they’re planning on wrapping up a major review of pit lifetimes this coming fall (see page 58 of this report).
Dr. Jeanloz is convinced that the review will give estimates of pit lifetimes "substantially" longer than 60 years. If he's right (and he may not be alone), then there's no need to keep up a high rate of pit production – to say nothing of RRW. Of course, whether the results of that review will be published if the NNSA doesn’t like what it sees is anyone's guess....
Taken as a whole, the dispute between Dr. Hecker and Dr. Jeanloz over pit aging and remanufacture offers a useful behind-the-scenes view of the sorts of arguments which are shaping the technical debate over RRW. Of course, plutonium aging is far from being the only concern behind the drive for RRW. Other parts of the nuclear explosives package, such as the high explosives and the secondary, also raise serious technical concerns. And the political and institutional forces driving RRW, which in some cases have little to do with technical issues, are a whole other subject.
But plutonium science has been, historically, a relatively open field, with much of the progress in the field reported regularly in the open literature. The plutonium aging issue therefore allows us a rare glimpse at the type of scientific and technical debates whose outcomes will determine the future of the nation's nuclear weapons infrastructure and stockpile.
In my fourth and final post on RRW, I'll discuss where RRW stands today, and examine briefly some of the political issues raised by the program.
It is still unclear what the reasons for the delay are. The report from KESQ hints, though, that the issue may involve disputes over Western Shoshone tribal claims to NTS lands, as well as concerns that the explosion might stir up contaminated soil and send radioactive material downwind.
The goal of the life extension programs (LEP) is to add anywhere from 20 to 30 years onto the (nominal) design lifetimes of the various warhead models in the stockpile (of course, "there is no such thing as a 'design life'"...). The W87ICBM warhead became the first warhead to complete its LEP in 2004. The B61bomb warhead and the W76SLBMwarhead – the first warhead slated for replacement under RRW – are currently undergoing LEPs, while the W80 cruise-missile warhead’s LEP was recently canceled by the Nuclear Weapons Council in order to free up funds for RRW.
A life extension program is a sort of 50,000-mile tune-up for a nuclear warhead: limited-lifetime components such as batteries and neutron generators are replaced, along with any other parts – "cables, elastomers, valves, pads, foam supports, telemetries, and miscellaneous parts" – which may have degraded. Most of these replacements take place outside the warhead’s nuclear explosives package, however.
While these tasks sound mundane, manufacturing the replacement components is no mean task. Manufacturing lines still exist for some components, but in other cases, lines have been dismantled, suppliers have canceled product lines or gone out of business, and health, safety and environmental regulations have grown stricter.
In these cases, a dilemma arises: should the nuclear production complex go to extreme lengths to recreate the processes needed to remanufacture these components exactly according to the original specifications? Or should they look for ways to make replacement parts that will work just as well, if not better? Since the part has to be replaced anyway, why not make maintenance easier for future generations already?
For components outside the warheads' nuclear explosives package, modifying the manufacturing specs is an attractive option, since each new component can be tested exhaustively without underground nuclear testing.
If too many of these minor changes pile up, though, a sort of "Grandfather’s axe" effect may kick in: if enough components have been modified and replaced, is the warhead design still the same one that was once tested? For this reason, the guiding philosophy has been "change-control discipline": make the fewest number of changes possible, and only after proving exhaustively that the changes will not affect warhead characteristics.
For nuclear components, the problem is more serious. While there are ways to investigate how a nuclear component will behave when detonated – computer simulations which model the component, dynamic and quasi-static experiments which measure its relevant physical properties, sub-critical experiments which assess its behavior under conditions similar to actual detonation – none of these methods has the same doubt-erasing effect as an underground nuclear test.
Any modification to proven designs for nuclear components is therefore bound to cause anxiety as long as underground nuclear testing is forbidden.
Conceptually, this is where the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (RRW) enters the picture.
While some members of the stockpile policy community argue that something like change-control discipline can be applied to nuclear components, too, others believe that if any modification is going to be made to the nuclear explosives package, a broader set of changes has to be made to the warhead design try to offset any possible drop in the performance of those modified components.
In brief, the changes being contemplated by those in the latter camp would increase the performance margins of warhead designs. The performance margin is the difference between the energy which the primary stage is expected to produce and the minimum energy needed to set off the secondary stage – essentially, the warhead's margin of error.
Since increasing the performance margin would require modifications to warhead designs that go well beyond what change-control discipline would allow, it would require an entirely new philosophy of stockpile stewardship. This philosophy is to be put into practice through a program known as Reliable Replacement Warhead.
RRW was introduced into the fiscal year 2005 Department of Energy budget by Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's Energy and Water Subcommittee. Hobson, a noted budget hawk, believed that the Bush Administration’s latest nuclear weapons program, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) – or "nuclear bunker buster" – would be both costly and unnecessary, not to mention harmful to the nation’s non-proliferation posture. His committee therefore cut all funds for RNEP, and allocated the funds instead to a "program to improve the reliability [and] longevity... of existing weapons and their components" – and RRW was born.
Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate that the Department of Defense intended to use RRW as an opportunity to expand the capabilities of the U.S. nuclear arsenal – to work around the cancellation of RNEP. These rumors led Hobson, in March 2006, to complain that "sometimes within the [DOE], people hear only what they want to hear," and remind NNSA head Linton Brooks that "this is not an opportunity to run off and develop a whole bunch of new capabilities and new weapons."
This ongoing back-and-forth about RRW’s purpose inspired the Congressional Research Service’s comment, quoted in my earlier post, that "many find RRW to be confusing."
In the third post, I will discuss the changes which are being made to the warheads' nuclear components, and examine the debate over whether or not those changes require a wider set of modifications to the warhead designs – and therefore RRW.
On July 27, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that it had successfully transferred three kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) to Russia from Libya.
At first glance, this announcement might seem odd. Three kilograms doesn’t sound like much material – and besides, why are we transferring nuclear materials to Russia?
The answer is that this transfer took place as part of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), a collaborative program instituted by the U.S. Department of Energy to repatriate HEU stocks distributed by the nuclear superpowers to their Cold War allies, to keep the HEU out of the hands of terrorists. And while three kilograms is not a huge amount, it is about one fifth of what’s needed to build a simple nuclear bomb.
An unannounced transfer from Libya in 2004 returned 17 kg of HEU to Russia. In late 2005, Libya was estimated to have 23 kg of fresh (unused in reactors) HEU left, so today they probably have 20 kg remaining (the Department of Energy has refused to confirm how much fuel remains in the country). GTRI’s initial goal, stated in 2004, was to repatriate all fresh fuel of Russian origin by the end of 2005; in Libya’s case, at least, the program has fallen woefully behind.
GTRI’s mission is to "identify, secure, remove and/or facilitate the disposition of high-risk, vulnerable nuclear and radiological materials and equipment around the world that pose a threat to the United States and to the international community." This specifically includes conversion of reactors to low enriched uranium fuel and securing high-risk nuclear materials. While U.S. funding has actually exceeded its initial commitment of $450 million, it still doesn’t seem to be enough. The program also disproportionately focuses on Russian-made fuel, even while two-thirds of U.S.- made fuel abroad "is not yet covered" (though, to be fair, the U.S. asserts that these stockpiles are in low-risk countries like France and Germany). Worse, around half of the world’s HEU-fueled reactors have not been targeted for conversion efforts yet and some say the timetable is too long.
GTRI has succeeded in transferring around 189 kg of HEU back to Russia (though I hesitate to say it is entirely secure there) out of 1,781 kg that have been targeted; it has also converted 40 reactors—out of 106 currently targeted—to LEU fuel. Funding for the program is planned to continue through fiscal year 2011.
Russia plans to blend the HEU down to LEU for use as reactor fuel. Let's just hope this happens and that, either way, it doesn't end up floating on a barge in the North Sea.
In order to understand what RRW is, and what it might evolve into, it’s important to take a step back and look at where the U.S. stockpile is today, and how it got there. Over the next few days, I’m going to do my best to summarize the history of stockpile stewardship in the U.S. and the debates which led to the creation of RRW (which I wrote about in greater detail here). Then we can get to the meat of what RRW is all about.
Below the jump – the Cold War ends, and Stockpile Stewardship is (re)born.
During the Cold War, high turnover was the key to maintaining confidence in the reliability of the nuclear stockpile. New weapons were constantly being designed, built, tested and added to the stockpile, allowing older weapons to be retired, or relegated to reserve status; warheads rarely accumulated more than a couple of decades of shelf life, at most.
While stockpiled warheads were not often put through further nuclear tests, they were routinely sampled for disassembly, thorough inspection and all sorts of non-nuclear (or above-ground) testing. This activity, known as stockpile surveillance, was intended to catch production defects and aging-related deterioration to any of the warhead's 3000 components. Most of these components are located outside of the warhead's nuclear subsystem, so their full range of functions could be tested without a nuclear test.
The knowledge base developed over forty years of stockpile surveillance (beginning with the introduction of sealed-pit designs in the late 1950s) laid the foundations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), which was officially born in 1994.
Three events which took place at the end of the Cold War led to the creation of SSP. In 1989, the Rocky Flats site in Colorado, where all the plutonium "pits," or triggers, in the stockpile had been produced, was shut down after years of egregious health and safety violations. In 1992, shortly before its dissolution, the USSR declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. In response, Congress passed a similar testing moratorium, and the President George H. W. Bush announced an indefinite moratorium on the introduction of new weapon designs into the stockpile. The era of high stockpile turnover was over, and the Stockpile Stewardship Program was born.
The Stockpile Stewardship Program was organized by Congress from the Department of Energy's existing stewardship activities in the 1994 Defense Authorization Act. The program was part of a new policy aimed at keeping the nation's bomb-making skills and facilities in suspended animation in case a new nuclear arms race were to break out.
In keeping with this policy, resources which were cut from bomb-making and nuclear testing activities were channeled to the three activities necessary for stockpile stewardship: improving the nuclear complex's understanding of the science of warhead performance and aging (known as "stockpile science"), keeping an eye out for signs of deterioration as warheads age ("stockpile surveillance") and repairing problems which may arise ("warhead life extension").
You can find more details about these three activities in the paper I mentioned earlier (including someworryingreports about the problems SSP has had coordinating the different activities).
In the next post, I’ll be focusing on warhead life extension, and looking at the debates over how to replace old warhead components as an example of the technical controversies behind the scenes of the RRW debate.
Picture floating nuclear reactors sailing the seven seas—generating emergency power at disaster sites, providing fresh water during droughts, and warming the shivering citizens of Siberia.
Now, add indomitable ice floes, highly enriched uranium, hellacious weather, and terrorists slavering over lightly guarded nuclear fuel. Apply a "Made in Russia" stamp and file these titans under Technological Terrors.
On June 14 the Severnoye Mashinostroitelnoe Predpriyatie (more commonly known as Sevmashpredpriyatie, or Sevmash shipyard, one of many Russian sites bursting with nuclear waste, signed a contract to construct a floating nuclear power plant. Sevmash will install pairs of KLT-40S reactors (also sometimes called KLT-40C because of transliteration errors, or just KLT-40) on barges. The Russian icebreaker fleet uses the same KLT-40 reactor type, fueled by high-enriched uranium (roughly 40% enriched). However, according to the Uranium Information Center, the floating reactors have been modified to use low-enriched fuel. Other specific differences between the reactors on the icebreaker fleet and those on the floating plants remain unclear.
(Note: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a short blurb [titled "Russia’s Sea Change"] about these floating plants in its latest issue. However, their piece asserts the reactor design will tentatively be a VBER-300. My sources almost uniformly say that the KLT-40S will definitely be the reactor for this initial, pilot project. The VBER-300 is being discussed for use in a proposed larger floating reactor, but the larger version is, as of now, only hypothetical.)
At full capacity, the two reactors together will provide up to 70 megawatts of power. They are also capable of desalinating water, though it is unclear whether this can be done at the same time as power production. There are 11 other possible sites for these plants in Russia, but very few regional leaders have expressed interest. Rosatom, the Russian civilian nuclear power agency, now hopes to sell them to interested countries in Asia once the design has been successfully demonstrated. China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines have already expressed interest.
On the surface, this may not seem such a bad idea. Proposals for mobile nuclear plants as desalinators havealonghistory — they don’t produce greenhouse gases and they could get to remote locations easily. Such a humanitarian sheen takes the edge off nuclear jitters, too. Fuel will be stored onboard and, to assuage proliferation concerns, the Russians claim that the barges will come back to Russia every 4-12 years for fuel disposal.
All indications, though, point to (dare I say typically Russian?) poor planning, with potential for serious problems.
The most glaring problem: the barges won’t be able to move without help. According to a Russian general cited in Pravda Online, a small squadron of tugboats (likely 8-10) will move the plants around. For most of their lives, these plants will sit, barnacle-like, in shallow waters, and their emergency usefulness will be nil.
Barnacled behavior also makes for a precarious security situation: in a civil war, for example, the plants would be prime, immobile targets for rebels or terrorists. No one knows whether Russia’s overstretched navy or the host country—whatever it may be—will provide security.
It also seems that no plans exist to harden the barges against ice, even though the first dozen or so will be used off the often-icebound northern coast of Russia. Perhaps officials figure a couple more drowned reactor cores will be mere drops in the ocean of radioactive waste already dumped in the region.
And while the fuel, which will formally remain in Russian custody, is supposed to be low-enriched uranium, it could be switched out for highly enriched—even weapons grade—fuel with relatively minor changes to the reactor. The use of a design that originally used HEU makes this possibility even more worrisome. Russia already has massive stocks of HEU, which, if used, would let the reactor run longer without refueling. Though HEU is admittedly easy to blend down, if Russia runs out of money, or gets lazy, using the HEU as is might be an attractive alternative to tugging the barges back to the motherland for more fuel every few years.
China has offered funding in exchange for a role in building the barges, but Russian officials declined because of technology transfer concerns. They were probably concerned that China would learn enough to build its own plants and steal market share from the Russian project.
Interestingly, Rosatom decided not to capitalize strongly on the need for desalination capacity, but rather to focus on the much more emotionally charged nuclear power generation capability of their plants. I’m at a loss for why this might be. Focusing on the humanitarian aspects of these plants would improve their marketability for buyers abroad.
Moscow will fund the first few plants—to be sited in the frigid, poor northern states of Russia, who scarcely need convincing—but the viability of the project depends on finding foreign buyers. Since Russian experts believe the desalination market alone will reach $12 billion by 2015, the focus on power production is baffling. Perhaps there is more to the project, but it is hard to tell for now.
Scanty reliable information on these plants exists, but we know they are being built. Rosatom officials have so far only offered broad, vaguely condescending platitudes as reassurance that these plants will be safe. Some claim that security will not be a problem because Sevmash is located in a high-security zone, but Pravda Online reports the plant will actually be open to the public. Others say the plant will have "five independent safety barriers," and that "[l]eakage won’t occur even if a plane or a helicopter crashes into the floating block." The Russians will perhaps forgive me if I don’t find these reassurances effective, especially in light of their usual utter frankness.
Rosatom acting director Sergey Obozov stated that "the reliability of offshore NPP [nuclear power plants] will be the same with the Kalishnikov gun." Even if reliability is not an issue, the comparison to AK-47s is unfortunate. Do we really want cheap floating nuclear plants proliferating into volatile regions, used indiscriminately by terrorists and despots?
(Eric Hundman is a research assistant at the World Security Institute's Center for Defense Information in Washington, DC. He graduated from Yale University in 2006 with degrees in physics and political science.)
Nukes: Betcha Can't Make Just One!
Remember those commercials for Lay's potato chips where the announcer says that Lay's are so good that you can't eat just one? Well, with a slight modification that slogan now applies equally well to the nuclear bureaucrats at the DOD, the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, weapons designers at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, and their patrons in Congress.
Kudos to Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists for discovering that the ambitious Reliable Replacement Warhead program (see my previous post on that subject here) isn't just about developing one new, more robust, standardized design to eventually replace every weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which was its original purpose when proposed by Congress in late 2004. According to a chart on the web site of the Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Matters, DOD's long-term vision is that in about 14 years there will be as many as four RRWs in the arsenal, along with up to four types of "refurbished, legacy warheads" from the existing stockpile. There are presently nine operational warhead types in the arsenal.
Teams from Los Alamos and Livermore each submitted their proposed designs for a replacement for the 100 kiloton W76 warhead (some 1,600 of which are currently deployed on Trident II D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles) to the NNSA earlier this year. One proposal alone reportedly ran to more than one thousand pages. As early as November, the NNSA will select the winning design, sending the program into its next phase.
Even before today's revelation, however, others were working to expand the scope of the RRW. In a revealing interview with the San Francisco Chronicle last January, NNSA administrator Linton Brooks indicated that new weapons--most likely with new or enhanced capabilities--would be the probable outcome of the RRW program. "I don't want to mislead you," said Brooks. "I will personally be very surprised if we can get the advantages we want without redesigning the physics package [the explosive components of the warhead]."
In late June, Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee with responsibility for nuclear weapons funding, added $35 million to the administration's $27 million request for the RRW to accelerate the program, including $10 million for the specific purpose of initiating a second warhead design competition.
It remains to be see whether this extra funding survives a House-Senate conference on the fiscal 2007 spending bill. But it is noteworthy that longtime critic of the NNSA, supporter of the RRW, and Domenici's House counterpart, Rep. David Hobson (R-OH), bluntly warned administration officials last March against using the RRW to develop new nuclear weapons. Said Hobson, "This is not an opportunity to run off and develop a whole bunch of new capabilities and and new weapons.... We're not going out and expanding a whole new world of nuclear weapons as we get in[to] this Reliable Replacement Warhead situation."
On Tuesday morning, a retired Catholic priest and two veterans put on clown suits, busted into a nuclear missile launch facility, and began beating the silo cover with hammers, in an attempt to take the Minuteman III missile off-line. Seriously.
The trio -- members of the Luck, Wisconsin group Nukewatch -- said the break-in was part of "a call for national repentance" for the Hiroshima and Nagaski A-bombings in 1945.
The activists used bolt-cutters to get into the E-9 Minuteman III facility, located just northwest of the White Shield, North Dakota. "Using a sledgehammer and household hammers, they disabled the lock on the personnel entry hatch that provides access to the warhead and they hammered on the silo lid that covers the 300 kiloton nuclear warhead," the group said in a statement. "The activists painted 'It's a sin to build a nuclear weapon' on the face of the 110-ton hardened silo cover and the peace activists poured their blood on the missile lid."
This was all done while wearing face paint, dunce caps, misfitting overalls, and bright yellow wigs.
We dress as clowns to show that humor and laughter are key elements in the struggle to transform the structures of destruction and death. Saint Paul said that we are “fools for God's sake,” and we say that we are “fools for God and humanity.” Clowns as court jesters were sometimes the only ones able to survive after speaking truth to authorities in power.
Guards responded within minutes. And when they arrived, the protesters "ate a lot of gravel," I'm told.
"The individuals were taken from the area and brought to the McLean County Jail," the AP notes. "The three are being charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief, both Class A misdemeanors, and bond was set at $500 each.... The FBI is involved in the case and federal charges are pending."
Nuclear Catfight Goes Surreal
Oh, this is classic. By now, you're all familiar with Carl Collins, the fringe physicist whose superbomb research Sharon Weinberger dismembers in her new book, Imaginary Weapons. Collins (right) is, understandably, a bit pissed off at Weinberger. He has lost most of his government funding, in part because of her exposés, which showed that no credible scientist could replicate Collins' experiments. So he's launched a multi-pronged online campaign against her -- including a spoof Imaginary Weaponswebsite.
Step one in Collins' push-back effort was to unfavorably compare sales of her book -- "a 'dirty' book, demeaning to diversity, internationalization, and educators and scientists in countries with emerging economies," he writes -- to those of Kitten's First Full Moon. (Why exactly he chose this "sometimes slapstick struggle of Kitten, who sees her first full moon and thinks it's a bowl of milk in the sky," as his comparison point remains a mystery.) In any event, Weinberger's recent sales numbers, putting her book in the top few hundred at Amazon, have not been included.
Second, Collins responded to Weinberger on this site, urging readers to "lighten up a bit." He adds, "I think that the root of my problem has been that for 42 years of academic life I have absolutely refused to accept a 'Security Clearance' – from anybody." That's turned the Pentagon and Energy Department's "Best and Brightest" against him, Collins writes.
Last -- an in no way, least -- Collins has set up ImaginaryWeapons.net, a site that looks almost identical to Weinberger's ImaginaryWeapons.com. Well, except for the plea to "savor Sharon Weinberger's unashamed bitter and 'mean-spirited' exposé of the Bush administration's arrogant refusal to accept the censorship of scientific discovery by the 'Best and the Brightest' of her friends."
In her book Imaginary Weapons, Sharon Weinberger reminds us that vast amounts of the taxpayers money (about $50,000 per second) are spent on the technology of war. Improving of the technology requires understanding of the underlying science, a complex and challenging task. In order to "simplify" decisions that direct (or redirect) billions of dollars of contracts there have emerged cadres of "Experts" whose massive certainties about what can (and more often, what cannot) be done become the dominant factors in decisions about "who gets the money." Membership in these elite cadres having been known as "the JASONS," or "the Best and the Brightest," is usually secret, self-perpetuating, and void of diversity. In Imaginary Weapons, Sharon Weinberger attempts to make an "in-depth" examination of the inherent conflict between the need for scientific advice that is "good for the taxpayer" and that which is "good for the preferred contractors." However, in Imaginary Weapons, what she achieves is a portrayal of 2-dimensional actors in a grotesque morality play that is written without concern for the number of casualties that will result from her labeling of real people as being either Good or Evil according to her shallow level of understanding of the issues.
I guess she struck a nerve, hunh?
UPDATE 4:14 PM: It gets better. Collins' wife, Doina, now has a blog up, dedicated to Sharon-bashing. Here's a snip from the first entry:
[T]he boys and girls from the fly-over country that Sharon despises in such heavy-footed paragraphs don't only do great physics, they also write, perish the thought, great books. Like the physicists, they sometimes have trouble getting their work accepted and appreciated. With deep reverence and humble apology to John Kennedy Toole I have to state that to the musings, criticism and such that will follow, no title, dedication, or quotation is more appropriate than his finding in the writings of Jonathan Swift: "WHEN A TRUE GENIUS APPEARS IN THE WORLD, YOU MAY KNOW HIM BY THIS SIGN, THAT THE DUNCES ARE ALL IN CONFEDERACY AGAINST HIM".
Superbomb - or Crapshoot?
I recently got a call from a source with big news: Something called a “hafnium review panel” had convened in last month to assess the not-quite-dead controversy over whether a radioactive material called hafnium could be made into the next superbomb.
Why wasn’t I invited, I wondered?
For two years, I followed the hafnium bomb, the concept of building a nuclear-type weapon based on charged-up nuclei called nuclear isomers. Through the story of the hafnium bomb, I was trying to understand how the Pentagon gets involved in harebrained projects. The end result is my new book, Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld, which chronicles the rise of fringe science in the Pentagon. (The book is officially released this week; and the Monday edition of NPR’s Fresh Air features an interview with me on some of topics covered in the book.)
The tale of the hafnium bomb, as I like to describe it, is a tragicomedy about how a fast-talking scientist from Texas convinced the Pentagon to sink millions of dollars in pursuit of the next superbomb. The whole scheme hinged on an experiment involving a used dental X-ray machine, a music amplifier, and a few specks of highly radioactive dust.
At the height of the controversy, the State Department was demanding briefings, and everyone from the DIA to the CIA was looking into hafnium. The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) also hopped on board, with plans to spend tens of millions of dollars. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, always an optimist, was said to want a hafnium bomb in 18 months. It was, simply put, a bit ludicrous.
Why does it matter? It matters because the world is filled with strange ideas that could be important for national security, if they were real. Red mercury, antimatter bombs, and military psychics are all candidates. Then there are the mysteries of ball lightning and cold fusion, both of which have also attracted interest from military circles.
There’s nothing wrong with government officials considering wild ideas. Science is about curiosity and being open-minded and no idea should be summarily dismissed. (I even admit a soft spot in my ice-cold skeptic’s heart for some of the more serious cold fusion researchers, who are trying very, very hard to solve the energy crisis — but a bit better reproducibility, and maybe a good theory would be helpful.)
But should the Pentagon fund them? And how does the Pentagon know which far-out ideas to fund? Is it okay to fund a teleportation study, which the Air Force did a couple years ago, but not to fund cold fusion? Many of these ideas have been around for quite some time. As one former Pentagon official put it to me: There is a big difference between high risk, high payoff, and foolish risk, no payoff.
And this is why the Pentagon needs peer review—in other words, review of scientific concepts by independent scientists. They may not always be right, but it sure beats a crapshoot approach to funding anything and everything.
Hafnium, at this point, has been reviewed by just about every peer out there. The JASONS, the secretive group of elite scientists, reviewed it in 1999. So did the Institute for Defense Analyses, a highly regarded federally funded think tank. So did a host of other researchers — some even hired by DARPA. They all concluded the experiments done by the Texas group were flawed.
Why does it matter? It matters because funding for science and technology is in decline, and a $1 spent on a bad project is a $1 not spent on a good one. Imagine if the military has passed over physicist Charles Townes and his work that led to the laser, because they decided instead to fund someone like Josef Papp, who claimed to have built a nuclear submarine in his garage (apparently defense company TRW came to Papp’s 1968 public demo with check in hand).
Luckily, Congress stepped in two years ago to cancel DARPA’s isomer bomb, although rumor has it that a small amount of money through the Department of Energy keeps these periodic hafnium reviews alive. The Air Force and Army also fund some isomer research, though nothing related to a bomb and they appear to be staying away from hafnium.
Will isomers someday yield a breakthrough that could make investment in research worthwhile? Possibly. Scientists have imagined everything from a nuclear battery to a new way to power rockets into outer space. But a nuke the size of a hand grenade? Ain’t gonna happen, at least according to the experts. And if you don’t want to listen to the experts, then there are some fantastic perpetual motion machines out there you can buy.
So what happened at last month’s hafnium meeting? Hard to say, but the hafnium believers haven’t given up. The Texas scientist who invented the imaginary hafnium bomb recently posted a new update to his website claiming even greater confidence in isomer triggering. He’s also not very fond of my book.
But last I heard, DARPA’s director told the hafnium believers that if they want more money out of the agency, they should publish their results in a peer-reviewed journal. What a great idea!
UPDATE 06/14/06 12:06 PM: Carl Collins drops by to respond, here.
"Imaginary Weapons," Whole Lotta Fun
In the fall of 2003, defense industry reporter Sharon Weinberger was sitting through yet another Capitol Hill briefing on Pentagon weaponry, when a fellow in the back of the room mentioned something called a "hafnium bomb." Weinberger had never heard of it. So she turned around and asked the guy what the hell a hafnium bomb was.
The question started Weinberger on a two-year "journey through the Pentagon's scientific underground." By the time she was done, Weinberger had run into eavesdropping kittens, wormhole builders, antimatter rocketeers, psychic CIA agents, intelligent designists, and cold fusion true believers. But most importantly, she became deeply intertwined with a far-flung coalition of Defense Department-backed scientists who believed that they could construct nuclear hand grenades out of bits of the radioactive isotope hafnium-178 -- despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. It's all chronicled in Weinberger's fascinating, disturbing, wickedly funny new book, Imaginary Weapons.
Weinberger's story centers around Carl Collins, a Texas scientist turned nuclear Don Quixote, who convinces Pentagon and Energy Department officials to spend millions on his jousts with the laws of physics. The fact his windmill-tilting relies on a second-hand X-ray machine, taken from a dentist's office, doesn't seem to matter. Or that his Romanian wife has a sketchy choke-hold over the hafnium supply. Or that every scientific panel the Pentagon assembles calls Collins' work bunk. Or that no reputable physicist can replicate his hafnium experiments.
Luckily for Collins, "no one remembers the failure," Weinberger quotes Darpa chief Tony Tether as saying. "That allows us to try again and again… Darpa is Groundhog Day. We do things over and over again." For years, it seems, Tether and others in Defense Department woke up every morning convinced that the Russians were about to have a hafnium bomb. It took a near-Herculean effort to finally persuade them that it might not be true.
In the book – and over the next few days, in a series of exclusive posts for Defense Tech – Weinberger shows how dangerous the amnesiac attitude is for the nation's security. But God, is it good for readers. Weinberger is a master observer, capturing the sights and sounds surrounding the inanity and near-insanity of military fringe science, from the puffed-up research claims to the hushed denials, based on questionable secrecy. Scientists wax poetic about the beauty of mushroom clouds. Google searches for hafnium turn up an Alabama physicist, who sees the isomer's intricacy as a sign of intelligent design. Supposedly landmark experiments are commemorated by stryfoam cups marked "Dr. C's memorial target holder." Imaginary Weapons can lay the physics on a little thick for the lay reader, at times. But mostly, accompanying Weinberger on her trip through the Pentagon's pseudo-science netherworld is madcap, farcical fun. Here's an excerpt:
Hafnium went to the Pentagon by way of New Mexico, helped along by a cadre of believers in the Air Force. One of those, of course, was Forrest "Jack" Agee, the Air Force scientist in charge of funding basic physics. He was the man who, in 1999, started funding Collins, while also publishing with him.
In early 2004, I went to visit Agee at his office in Arlington, Virginia.
Standing in front of the nondescript building that housed the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, I stopped for a moment to take in the gray façade that showed little sign of military occupancy. Office workers shuttled in and out of the multistory building, and it wasn't until I arrived at the Air Force's floor that a halfhearted attempt at military security was on display. A sullen woman reading a copy of People shoved a red badge at me, barely glancing at my press credentials.
Agee, once described to me as the eminence grise behind isomers, smiled as I entered his office and extended his hand like a caretaker greeting a mourning relative on their way to buy a casket. It was the last time he smiled. With dark-tinted glasses and a dour demeanor, Agee did not seem like the type of military official to give interviews, and I was surprised, in fact, that he had agreed to speak to me at all. Maybe he was surprised, too, because as soon as we sat down at the small oval table in his office, he immediately looked uncomfortable. Seated at the table, I noticed that Agee had a corner office, but with the windows blocked at every angle by adjacent buildings, casting the room in a permanent gloomy haze.
To Agee's right sat a public affairs official, and to his left, a security officer, who as Agee explained, was there to make sure he didn't say anything classified.
What secrets could accidentally slip out, I wondered?...
When I asked him about the controversial nature of the [hafnium] work, particularly the scientific debate around Collins's hafnium triggering experiment, Agee frowned deeply. "I know that work is going on around the world in this area," he said. "We are familiar with a number of countries that are pursuing this."
Agee paused for a moment to clear his throat and glanced out the window with its plaintive view of the next building—perhaps thinking about the legions of foreign countries that could be eavesdropping on our conversation about dreaded isomer weapons.
He cleared his throat again, and then continued: "It was a surprise that Japanese torpedoes worked in a shallow harbor in 1941. We were technologically surprised by that and with awesome impact. So, the fact that there are countries other than ours that are working on this, well, we better be able to know what this is about whether we ever find an application for it or not, in case others find that." …
I was struck that just about every government scientist I'd met had described their job as preventing "technological surprise," but something like the isomer weapon was only a threat if it worked, or had a reasonable chance of working, I pointed out… An expert panel of scientists had essentially said the hafnium bomb couldn't work, or at least had about as much a chance of being a bomb as a jelly donut. Was there really any legitimate fear of isomer bombs raining down on the United States anytime in the near-to-distant future?
Agee scoffed.
"We rely on more than just a few days' review by some panel—albeit populated by smart people," he said.
UPDATE 06/14/06 12:06 PM: Carl Collins drops by to respond, here.
Red Phones vs. Tridents
It would be China's worst nightmare. Perhaps in the midst of some mutual sabre-rattling over Taiwan, a Chinese satellite detects a missile launch from the Pacific Ocean. A Trident missile is headed China's way. Computers race to determine the target while Chinese ICBMs go on high alert. The clock is ticking ... and millions of lives are in the balance.
This apocalyptic scenario is becoming increasingly plausible as the U.S. military considers arming some of its Trident D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. A conventionally-armed Trident has certain advantages over bombers, cruise missiles, or Special Forces for taking out high-value targets. It's unmanned, extremely accurate for a missile and fast: a Trident can hit any spot on the globe around 30 minutes from launch.
But space sensors can't tell a TNT-tipped Trident from one carrying a 100-kiloton nuclear warhead. So every time the U.S. fired a conventional Trident at a terrorist camp, Russia, China and every other nuclear power would suffer a major freak-out. [Inside Defense has been all over this controversy for a while -- ed.]
In this month's Proceedings (not yet online), Navy Capt. Terry Benedict admits the diplomatic complications of using conventional Tridents. But he believes we can resolve them: "This change in our nation's strategic force will require that no stone be left unturned to improve the measures we have in place to prevent misunderstandings. Areas under investigation and review include existing hotlines and other communications with Russia and China, diplomacy, military dialogue, plus training, tests and exercises."
The only workable solution in Benedict's list is a hotline by which the U.S. would warn other nuclear powers before launching a conventional Trident. But the hotline would be just one link in a long chain of comms connecting national command authorities to strategic forces: this chain would have to function perfectly -- and quickly -- every time to avoid a major incident.
And consider this: to veto a strike, a Chinese leader would only have to refuse to pick up the buzzing red phone.
UPDATE 3:45 PM: Noah here. Benedict's plan, of course, assumes that China isn't on the target list for these new, de-nuked ICBMs. Trust me, it is.
I spoke recently with one of the authors of the new "Global Strike" doctrine, which includes the conventional Tridents. And he talked about Global Strike largely in terms of deterring "potentially dangerous adversaries again" with "big land masses on the other side of globe." That don't sound like Al-Qaeda to me.
Backdoor to New Nukes
The idea, at least at first, was to make the U.S. nuclear arsenal more stable, while reducing maintenance costs. Now, it looks like a new Energy Department initiative is going to be used to build a whole new class of nukes, pumping up the American stockpile.
The Washington Postreports that by November, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration "plans to select the design of a new generation of nuclear warheads that would be more dependable and possibly able to be disarmed in the event they fell into terrorist hands."
Nearly 16 years after the last new nuclear weapon was assembled at the Pantex Plant and 14 years after the last full-scale underground nuclear weapons test at the Nevada Test Site, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories are competing again to design the next generation of warheads "which will be larger and more stable than the existing ones but slightly less powerful."
Intriguingly, these new weapons may incorporate new "use control" technology rendering them totally unusable in the event of theft, according to senior NNSA officials. How this would improve upon the already highly secure electronic locks -- known as Permissive Action Links or PALs -- now safeguarding all deployed warheads, was not explained.
This effort is part of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, which was initially created in late 2004 by Rep. David Hobson (R-OH), chairman of the House Energy and Water Development appropriations subcommittee, as an effort to curtail more controversial and, in his view, unnecessary weapons programs like the now-canceled Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator -- a nuclear bunker-buster. The original legislative justification for the program was simply to "improve the reliability, longevity, and certifiability of existing weapons and their components."
But the RRW has itself now become controversial, as officials discuss using it to create entirely new weapons and capabilities, eventually replacing every weapon in the stockpile. The effort has even become the linchpin of an ambitious and expensive 25-year plan to overhaul the nuclear weapons production complex, and with it the nuclear arsenal.
"We should not fail to take advantage of this opportunity," NNSA director Linton Brooks told the nation's nuclear lab chiefs in 2004. "We are now free to explore a range of technical options that could strengthen our ability to deter or respond to new or emerging threats without any concern that some ideas could inadvertently violate a vague and arbitrary limitation. I expect your design teams to engage fully."
I described the genesis and raised some serious questions about the program in an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last year. And the current issue of Arms Control Today features a piece by Robert Nelson, a physicist and senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which effectively demolishes the three myths underlying the RRW: That stockpile reliability is degrading; that warheads can be re-designed without compromising safety or requiring nuclear testing; and that the RRW will reduce pressure to resume nuclear testing in the future.
Other experts weigh in here on whether plutonium aging poses a serious threat to the long-term viability of the arsenal. Hobson has taken note. At a hearing before his subcommittee in late March, he warned NNSA officials not to overreach. "This is not an opportunity to run off and develop a whole bunch of new capabilities and new weapons," he said. "This is a way to redo the weapon capability that we have and maybe make them more reliable, make them better mission capable." Later this year, we may find out whether the NNSA and the weapons laboratories were listening.
One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz... reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year... The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.
The Pentagon and the Energy Department have been pushing for an update for several years, now -- something that can penetrate deeper, and rely on a lower nuclear yield. That program, the "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator," is officially cancelled. But there's widespread speculation that money for this project is just hidden elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Lockheed is looking into the "Kinetic Energy Cavity Penetrator Weapon" -- a bunker-buster that surrounds the bomb with a gas bubble, so it can plow into the ground ten times further than similar weapons. Testing continues for the Army's "Deep Digger," the bunker-buster that uses cannon to tunnel through solid rock, drilling a channel for the bomb. It's the current record-holder for non-nuclear penetrators, going down twice as deep as the nearest competitor. But still, that's only 30 feet. The Natanz bunker is down another 45. Which is why we're getting ready to see that massive explosion outside of Vegas.
UPDATE 04/09/06 10:56 AM: "The Air Force is proposing to build a new 'prompt global strike'" missile, Inside Defense notes. "Land-based boosters traditionally used for nuclear weapons would be reconfigured and fitted with conventional warheads, according to Air Force Space Command."
How deep down the Natanz facility is less important than what's covering it, the Wonk notes. In Natanz' case, we're talking about a lot of rock and soil. Which means that 5,000-pound conventional bunker-busters, like the GBU-28, ought to do the job of knocking out Natanz rather nicely.
Iran's Reactors: How Vulnerable?
Arms Control Wonk Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is wrapping up his blogtrilogy on the Iranian nuclear threat. And he's doing it with a bang. Or, rather, a series of precision-guided bangs. The last post is on whether the U.S. (or its allies) could take out Tehran's atomic program, if they needed to.
Conventional wisdom states that Iran’s facilities are too dispersed to permit a strike like the one Israel conducted against Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981...
Iran’s facilities are more dispersed, but some key assets are probably quite vulnerable to an airstrike... Overall, I think the prospects for a strike are mixed — a properly timed strike might delay Iran’s program by a few years, although there are good reasons to think that the long-term result of a strike would be to worsen America’s security...
There is certainly no reason to launch a strike now, with Iran’s program several years off and many facilities not yet complete. As the cases of Natanz and Esfahan illustrate, a strike now would be conducted with more uncertainty than I would like.
That might buy some additional time — but for what?
The result will likely be an Iranian nuclear program outside of IAEA safeguards. An Iranian bomb is not, yet, a foregone conclusion. The degree to which Iran’s nuclear program has become an element of the country’s domestic politics suggests that fissures exist within Iranian elites that create space for negotiations... If that’s true, an airstrike now would probably unite Iranians, galvanizing support for a bomb program... Newsweek reports that participants have not been pleased with the outcome of airstrikes in IC sponsored wargames. An Air Force source told Newsweek that “The war games were unsuccessful at preventing the conflict from escalating...”
All and all, at least for now, I think it’s best to keep talking.
Iran's Missiles: How Far Do They Go?
So let's assume Iran does get the Bomb. How big of a threat is that, really? Could the mullahs hook it up to a missile, for instance, and fire that sucker off at Tel Aviv?
The bottom line: Iran might, might, be able to deliver a nuclear weapon against an Israeli city, but that would be at the extreme edge of their capabilities.
Much more worrisome, I would think, would be the weapon delivered by terrorists, perhaps on a ship...
Iran’s missiles aren’t that big, and its warheads aren’t that small. Without more testing of both, I think Iran would be hard pressed to deliver a missile to Israel, let alone Europe or the United States.
That said, Iran—with low confidence—might be able to build a 500-1000 kg warhead could hit targets thoughout the Middle East, including Israel if mated to its Shahab 3 IRBM...
This is, I think, the very edge of Tehran’s capabilities and they would have very low confidence in either system.
Iran's Bomb: How Close?
A cabal of terrorist-funding, virulently anti-Semitic, nuclear-armed mullahs is bad, no question. Really bad. But just how awful is the awful situation in Iran?
Those conflicting, confusing reports in the press are no help. So I begged the Arms Control Wonk, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, to give us some straight answers on three-and-a-half basic questions about Iran:
1. How far is Tehran from getting the Bomb?
2. How easily could that Bomb be attached to missile, and how far can that missile go?
3. How hard would it be for the U.S. or Israel to knock out Iran's nuclear facilities?
Today, the Wonk takes on the first question. The quick answer is that we've probably a little less than a decade until the shit hits the fan, atomically-speaking. Unless the mullahs get really, really lucky. And then it's more like three years until the big showdown.
But don't take my word for it. Go read the whole thing for yourself. Even the math. Even the bit about cascading centrifuges. You'll be a little less unnerved, once you know more about the engineering and the science behind Tehran's nuclear push.
UPDATE 6:22 PM: If the Wonk's analysis made you feel slightly better, this Joe Katzman post should take care of that, quick.
...Those who pooh-pooh preparations to take military action against Iran, or question the likelihood because of targeting difficulties, fail to understand the Bush administration's policies and intent.
Last May, I wrote about U.S. preparations for "global strike," the preemptive attack plan developed by the Bush administration. Global strike, formally known as CONPLAN 8022, refers to a specific set of contingencies to attack weapons of mass destruction should diplomacy fail in a crisis or if there are intelligence warnings of preparations for any type of strike on the United States or one of its allies... [It] constitutes a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack, a capability that has been developed wherein the President could order an attack within hours...
If Iran continues to defy the international community and manufactures nuclear weapons materials, and if U.S. intelligence detects peculiar movements or actions associated with nuclear facilities or, say, Iranian arming and alerting of its ballistic missile or fighter force, CONPLAN 8022 could be implemented to strike at the activity.
Given that the justification for preemption and for the global strike capability is to prevent "another 9/11," this time one with WMD, it wouldn't be relevant whether the United States was confident that it knew where ever last gram of Iran's weapons were. The focus would be against Iran's ability to deliver a WMD. The objective would be to forestall another 9/11. A strike that halted preparations for attack and set back the program so that it was no longer an immediate threat would be a success under the Bush administration's plan.
This is why commentators who warn that the United States does not know where all of Iran's nuclear capabilities are missing the point. Under global strike, the objective wouldn't be to "disarm" Iran: It would be to stop it.
Right now, B-2 and B-52 bombers qould handle the global strike, Arkin says. But late last week, word leaked from the Pentagon that the it'll "begin work this year on a next-generation long-range strike aircraft, accelerating its bomber modernization plans by nearly two decades."
Beaten With A POGO Stick
I was reading Bill Gertz's article on the EMP threat [that'd be the worry that a king-size nuke would trigger an electro-magnetic pulse, frying every electronic for miles around -- ed.], thinking, I wish someone else would point out that the article is a steaming pile of horseapples."
Nick Schwellenbach from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has done just that, drawing on his excellent article for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists entitled EMPty Threat and another called The Next Fake Threat. Gertz is promoting War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World, by Frank Gaffney. Gaffney was a member is tight with many of the members of the EMP Commission, which Schwellenbach points out was … well just read this section from EMPty Threat: [sub. req'd]
[In Congressional testimony, EMP Commission Staff Member Peter] Pry also quoted a passage from an Iranian political-military journal as supporting evidence that Tehran believes the key to defeating the United States is an EMP attack:
"Advanced information technology equipment exists which has a very high degree of efficiency in warfare. Among these we can refer to communication and information gathering satellites, pilotless planes, and the digital system. ... Once you confuse the enemy communication network you can also disrupt the work of the enemy command and decision-making center. Even worse, today when you disable a country’s military high command through disruption of communications you will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of that country. ... If the world’s industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years. ... American soldiers would not be able to find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a single shot.
The EMP Commission, as it turns out, has squeezed much mileage out of this quote. In a PowerPoint presentation delivered in October 2004 at James Madison University, EMP Commission Chairman William Graham also cited the Iranian article to argue that “Potential Adversaries Know About EMP.” Ditto [Rep. Roscoe] Bartlett, who included a variation of the same quote on a chart that he presented before the House of Representatives in June.
Just one small problem—the article never mentions EMP, or for that matter nuclear weapons. Titled “Electronics to Determine Fate of Future Wars,” the author offers a brief overview of contemporary Western thinking on information warfare, focusing on such issues as internet hacking, computer viruses, and disrupting communications. The article does indeed envision American soldiers unable to find food or fire a single shot—but this is not due to an EMP attack, but rather the result of enemy infiltration of information networks. As it turns out, the EMP Commission didn’t need to look all the way to Iran to quote this material. The Iranian author credits the information to the Washington Post.
THERE'S MORE: In this PowerPoint presentation, delivered in October 2004 at James Madison University, EMP Commission Chairman William Graham also cited the Iranian article to argue that "Potential Adversaries Know About EMP."
It lacks special effects (too expensive) and a satisfying ending (too unrealistic), but effectively offers an all-too-plausible scenario of how a Russian scientist desperate for cash could provide highly enriched uranium through middlemen to Arab jihadists. “So, American Hiroshima begins,” says one terrorist.
I couldn’t get my kids to watch it. My daughter said it was “Too much of a downer,” which about describes the attitude of policymakers. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said early this year there was “no huge problem” with the security of nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union. But Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, which studied the issue at length, strongly disagree. They believe nuclear terrorism is a “distinct possibility...”
Of all the varieties of incompetence in this, the Age of Incompetence, the most deadly involves the potential of nuclear terrorism. After years of foot dragging, Presidents Bush and Putin have finally agreed at summit meetings this year that it is the single most serious threat in the world today—far more likely than a nuclear exchange by superpowers. And yet they and their governments are not following through quickly enough to secure loose nukes at their source. At the pace we’re going, it will be 13 years—2018—before all of them are recovered and deactivated, by which time even the most sober analysts believe terrorists will likely have blown up and contaminated some city forever.
The United States, North Korea and four other nations participating in nuclear negotiations in Beijing signed a draft accord in which Pyongyang promised to abandon efforts to produce nuclear weapons and re-admit international inspectors to its nuclear facilities. Foreign powers said they would provide aid, diplomatic assurances and security guarantees and consider North Korea's demands for a light-water nuclear reactor...
The new agreement commits North Korea to scrap all of its existing nuclear weapons and nuclear production facilities, to rejoin the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to re-admit international nuclear inspectors. North Korea withdrew from the treaty and expelled inspectors in 2002.
The United States and North Korea also pledged to respect each other's sovereignty and right to peaceful co-existence and to work toward normalization of relations. The two countries do not have full diplomatic relations and did not sign a peace treaty after the Korean War...
"It is significant that the countries have agreed on a broad set of principles," said Koh Yu Hwan, a North Korea expert at Dong Guk University in Seoul. "But they postponed addressing the hot-potato issues to prevent the talks from collapsing."
Most pointedly, the agreement finesses the North Korean demand that proved the biggest stumbling block in the latest round of talks -- its condition that the outside world provide a light-water nuclear reactor that it says it will use to produce electricity. The issue is left essentially unresolved, potentially leaving both sides to claim that their views prevailed.
The Bush administration wants a far more extensive nuclear dismantlement than occurred after the 1994 treaty. North Korea is expected not only to dismantle its plutonium-based weapons program at Yongbyon, the country's main nuclear facility 60 miles north of Pyongyang, but also a secretive nuclear program based on highly-enriched uranium. It was news of the existence of this program in late 2002 that caused the earlier treaty to collapse.
North Korea had denied having a highly-enriched uranium program, and some other parties to the talks, notably China and Russia, have expressed doubts about the Bush administration's evidence.
In addition, North Korea will be forced to account for and dismantle its already-completed nuclear bombs, possibly as many as 13, which are believed to be hidden underground throughout the country.
Today's agreement skirted many of these difficult issues, which are likely to raise considerable hurdles in the next round of talks scheduled for November.
THERE'S MORE: Meanwhile, "the Pentagon may be having second thoughts about proposed revisions to its nuclear weapons doctrine that would allow commanders to seek presidential approval for using atomic arms against nations or terrorists who intend to use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against the United States."
AND MORE: "The agreement punts on most of the contentious questions; buying time is a respectable diplomatic strategy -- but time favors the North Koreans (who keep stockpiling Plutonium)," says Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis, who studies Asian nuclear arsenals for a living.
I love the agreement, because my Republican buddies will have to shut their pie-holes about how the Clinton Administration blew it with North Korea. After five years of Bush, we still don't have a different plan than what the Clinton Administration did. The joint statement doesn't make any progress on the North Korean uranium enrichment program and the Bush Administration expressed it's "respect" for the DPRK's "right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy."
AND MORE: "It's a significant breakthrough. But it could easily have been accomplished two and a half years ago, had President George W. Bush been willing," argues Slate's Fred Kaplan. "It is also nothing like an actual agreement, just a preliminary step before the real negotiations — where, if history holds, North Korea will frustrate us with tricks and backtracking, and we just have to hang on tight."
Retro-nukes
Dr. Arms Control Wonk here. Noah's running around today, so I've hijacked the blog for moment.
Retro fashions don't usually appeal to nuclear weapons designers, save for the odd Members Only jacket you spot on some poor refugee from the 1980s
So you might be surprised to find that uranium -- which fell out of favor with US nuclear weaponeers in the 1950s -- may be the hip Fall fashion in certain New Mexican locales.
Bob Peurifoy, a retired Sandia executive, favors dumping plutonium weapons in favor of low-tech uranium designs. Actually, Peurifoy prefers the current US arsenal, but Congress says the weapons labs should relax Cold War design requirements to build new warheads that are more reliable and require less toxic industrial processes.
In that case, Peurifoy says, you can't do better than Uranium 235, which isn't nearly as expensive, toxic or fickle as plutonium.
Although a simpe uranium device (above, right) would produce a relatively small yield -- on the order of tens of kilotons -- dropping one on Kim Jong Il's Pleasure Palace would still ruin his day.
(Special Retro Bonus: Click here for a retro shot of former Sandia, and perhaps future Los Alamos, Director C. Paul Robinson).
Fun With Nuclear Targeting
My wing o' the blogosphere is all worked up over an article -- in Pat Buchanan's The American Spectator, of all places -- that claims the OVP wants to nuke Iran in the event of another 9/11 attack ... whether Tehran was involved or not:
The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States.
The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States.
Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing--that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack--but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.
This particular statement may be exaggerated or flat out false. The author, Philip Giraldi, was a source on Sy Hersh's New Yorker article about attacking Iran. Giraldi loathes Cheney almost as much as I do, though from the opposite side of the spectrum.
Wargaming an attack on Iran has been the hot hobby for pundits since Saddam's toppled statue provided a denouement for Operation Iraqi Freedom (the flight-suit-on-aircraft-carrier action was more like the bloopers that run during the credits). Even James Fallows, writing for The Atlantic Monthly, got in on the act (with slides).
So, what's this got to do with DefenseTech?
Most discussions about target sets leave the impression that the decision to use a nuclear weapon here or there is a deeply rational business, with great care taken not just in the selection of each target, but also to ensure each nuclear weapon is really necessary. After all, if we are going to put a nuclear weapon on a tank factory sitting next to a grade school, you'd think that someone made a careful, anguished decision about the lesser of two evils in a morally ambiguous world.
You might think that, but you'd be wrong.
When General Lee Butler become head of STRATCOM in 1991, he did something very strange. He actually asked to look at each and every target, individually -- something no one else had ever done before:
In his first months at SAC, he personally undertook a painstaking review of the million lines of computer code that constitute the SIOP. For the first time, he saw in detail what happens when broad presidential guidance is translated into actual weapons aimed at actual targets, what he calls "climbing down the ladder of abstraction." He was appalled at what he found at the bottom rung.
For example, of the 12,500 targets in the SIOP at that time, one of them was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons. It seems superfluous to say that this is crazy, but it is important to understand how the planning process could result in such a figure. At the level of a presidential directive, a document of a thousand words or so, you will have the reasonable-sounding requirement--if you're thinking about war-fighting at all--to, say, target the political and military leadership. That guidance goes to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which in a 15- or 20-page document called a NUWEP (for "nuclear weapons employment policy") adds some detail: for example, what sorts of leadership facilities should be targeted. The NUWEP then goes to the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which in hundreds of pages of a document called Annex C to the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan lists specific facilities to be struck and damage requirements to be met. Annex C then goes to STRATCOM, where the targetting staff figures out which weapons, and how many, to apply to each target to meet the required level of damage.
[snip]
When I mentioned Butler's 69 weapons to Dr. Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman missileer and acknowledged expert on the operational aspects of nuclear warfighting now at the Brookings Institution, he found in his notes a statement by a high official at SAC in the late 1980s that the highest kill probability for the United States' best weapon against deeply buried, sprawling, hardened command posts was less than 5% (how they calculate this is a whole other matter, but the short answer is, they guess). Blair got out a calculator, assumed a kill probability of 4% for one weapon, and started multiplying. To attain a 50% confidence in destroying the target required 17 weapons. When Blair got up to 69 weapons, the "kill probability" had reached 94%.
The real issue here is that organizations abstract reality to manage it. That abstraction, James Scott pointed out in his book, Seeing Like A State, can produce disasterous consequences such as Soviet collectivization and the Maoist Great Leap Forward.
Most of us intuitively understand the inhumanity of bureaucracies - a perhaps necessary evil in the modern world. This understanding is why General Butler's narrative is so compelling -- a human being acheives a vantage point from which to survey the madness of an inhuman organization. It's Kafka and Joseph Heller in equal measures.
Only an organization would target 69 nuclear weapons on a single facility (later revealed to be the Sofrino missile defense radar) outside of Moscow in a strike designed to minimize "collateral damage". To take another example, STRATCOM calculates only blast damage from nuclear weapons. STRATCOM does not calculate the damage from any fires that would be ignited, even though such fires would be far more damaging than any blast effects. Why? Because fire damage is hard to calculate and, therefore, not real.
Which is where we get to the technology part.
Last fall, Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems & Solutions won a 10-year, $213 million contract "to develop the new architecture and functions" for the Integrated Strategic Planning and Analysis Network (ISPAN) -- STRATCOM's war planning system.
Although the details are classified, the contract website makes clear that the ISPAN doesn't change how STRATCOM does business. ISPAN does not address the fundamental myopia of "kitchen sink" target sets, artificial damage expectencies and rigid delivery schedules that encourage the President to use nuclear weapons before an adversary has time to take protective measures.
That's one reason to be worried about efforts by the OVP to plan to strike Iran -- not because there has been a policy decision to execute the plan (there has not), but because nuclear war planning continues to define the President's options in ways that alienate him from the execution.
The Financial Timesreports a North Korean defector claims "Kim Jong-il's regime has made a one-tonne nuclear bomb and is working on lighter weapons that could be fired more reliably, according to a South Korean magazine."
The unclassified testimony on North Korea and the CTBT suggests Pyongyang has "simple fission-type nuclear weapons ... validated ... without conducting yield-producing nuclear tests.”
"Simple fission-type" is a term of art that means FRICKIN' HEAVY.
Not heavy like Liz Taylor, but heavy like the Nagaski device (left, with a friend), which weighed 9,000 lbs. In practice, "simple fission-type" means too heavy for a long-range ballistic missile, although the emminent John Holdren allowed that a new nuclear state might produce an unreliable warhead that needs testing in the 1,000–2,000 pound range.
Rowan Scarborough (of the Washington Times) reported on a classified DIA report that estimated the NORKs couldn't do better than 650-750 kg (1,400-1,700 lbs).
So, one ton is at the edge of plausible, but my guess is they aren't that good.
I hope Indian PM Manmohan Singh travels light, because he returns to India laden with goodies.
During his state visit to the US, Singh wrung a promise from President Bush to:
... seek agreement from Congress to adjust US laws and policies, and [to] work with friends and allies to adjust international regimes to enable full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India ...
The Bush Administration is prohibited by US law and its international obligations from providing civil nuclear assistance to India, because New Delhi refuses to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In fact, the international obligation in question -- the voluntary Nuclear Suppliers Group -- was created as a response to India's 1974 "peaceful" nuclear explosion.
Tellis argues the "change in approach" arose "from three evolving perceptions within the Bush administration":
First, the administration had come to realize that India would not give up its nuclear weapons so long as various regional adversaries continued to possess comparable capabilities. The fact that the administration initially viewed both of India’s antagonists — Pakistan and China — with considerable suspicion only made senior U.S. officials more sympathetic to New Delhi’s predicament.
Second, the administration was now of the understanding that India’s nuclear weapons did not pose a threat to U.S. security and the United States’ larger geopolitical interests, and could in certain circumstances actually advance American strategic objectives in Asia and beyond. The administration’s own antipathy to nuclear arms control agreements such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (which happened to dovetail with Indian interests on these issues), coupled with its strong expectation of an eventual renewal of great-power competition, allowed both realist and neoconservative factions within the administration to take a more relaxed view of New Delhi’s emerging nuclear capabilities.
Third, the administration now appreciated that the range of technological resources associated with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their delivery systems that were present in India in both the public and private sectors posed a far more serious threat to American safety—were these resources to be leaked, whether deliberately or inadvertently, to hostile regimes or nonstate actors—than New Delhi’s ownership of various nuclear assets. These perceptions, which became dominant in administration thinking in regard to India post-9/11, made tightening the Indian export control regime far more important from the viewpoint of increasing U.S. security than leaning on the Indian state to cap or roll back its strategic programs.
From these three perceptions grew the conviction that the United States ought to focus primarily on safeguarding India’s tangible and intangible WMD capabilities, even as Washington struggled to find ways of accepting New Delhi’s nuclear weaponry within the constraining framework of the existing international nonproliferation order.
Dana Milbank and Dafna Linzer at the Washington Post have a story about the agreement and its implication for the global nonproliferation regime.
A few years ago, on a trip to White Sands Missile Range, I came across a book called "Trinity's Children: Living Along America's Nuclear Highway." Written by two AP reporters, the book was billed as the story of the "extraordinary concentration of high-tech military hardware" along Interstate 25, which runs from New Mexico up to Wyoming. The Los Alamos and Sandia labs, Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain, nuclear test sites and a host of other military facilities are all essentially on the same street, comprising a thousand-mile-long neighborhood of nukes and missiles -- and the controversies that go along with them.
This week, at Slate, two veteran defense reporters are at work on a diary of their travels in some of the same locales -- a weeklong effort they've titled "A Nuclear Family Vacation."
I haven't been doing a good enough job tracking the growing Iran and North Korea nuclear crises, lately. In fact, in recent weeks -- and this is lame of me -- I've barely mentioned them at all.
"German historian Rainer Karlsch says in a new book, Hitler’s Bomb, that the Nazis successfully tested tactical nukes. While I haven’t seen his book and I don’t speak German, I’m frankly very skeptical," says Military.com analyst Joe Buff.
Not only does Dr. Karlsch publicly admit that he lacks definitive proof. But long-known facts, and his newly-revealed facts, in my mind just don’t add up to anything like a working nuclear weapon.
One supposed eye witness to the test describes “two huge explosions” on one night in March, 1945. Others describe the same event in terms of just one “long, slim pillar of light.” This pillar swelled at the top so that it gained the appearance of a crown of branches and leaves atop a tree trunk. To me, in modern terms, this does sound like a mushroom cloud. People living nearby said that afterward they experienced nose-bleeds, nausea, fatigue, and headache symptoms. One man who was involved said that authorities asked his building company to cremate hundreds of corpses that were burned and dismembered, and then afterward destroy their own clothes -- he said the bodies were obviously those of concentration camp or forced-labor inmates.
To me this reads a lot more like a disaster at a factory handling toxic chemicals, which might or might not have been intended for use as chemical weapons. Here are nine reasons why:
1. Any large explosion creates a mushroom cloud.
2. Any above-ground nuclear detonation, even a small tactical-yield one, begins with a blinding flash across the entire sky. Vision is especially impaired at night, when most peoples’ pupils are dilated due to the dark. The atomic mushroom cloud only results a few seconds after this initial flash. And in war-time 1945, in the remote area where these tests supposedly took place, between blackouts and chronic power shortages and such, at night it would have been really, really dark. One “eye witness” says they were looking out a window and then saw the mushroom cloud. OK, but it weren’t no nuke.
3. Acute radiation sickness severe enough to cause widespread nose-bleeds would cause other subcutaneous hemorrhaging too -- like bruises all over the body -- and both vomit and diarrhea would be bloody as well. Yet these symptoms are not mentioned, and they would’ve seriously stuck in peoples’ memories if they’d occurred, I think.
4. It’s extremely unlikely, especially the way Nazi weapon scientists worked in general, for them to have conducted two nuclear tests at the same place in one night, as one witness claims. A test early in any country’s nuclear weapons program is an incredibly important event. Huge amounts of data are collected and need to be analyzed before it makes any sense to expend additional fissile metal on another test.
5. The Nazis did use slave labor in many of their industrial and weapons plants. Any victim killed in a series of explosions at a chemical factory would likely have been burned and dismembered -- you don’t need a tactical nuke for that. And recovery-worker clothing would indeed get contaminated by whatever chemicals caused the original disaster, so you’d certainly want to dispose of them once you disposed of the corpses.
6. References in some of the media coverage to a Nazi “dirty bomb” seems muddled up with an actual fission device. Hitler is stated to have been relying on these dirty bombs to repulse the Soviet Army’s advance on the Eastern Front. But it’s well known now, and it would have been understood by German physicists in 1945, that dirty bombs are largely psychological weapons -- and they wouldn’t have dented the psyche of Stalin’s revved-up minions marching on Berlin. The toxic effects of true dirty bombs are much more likely to be cancers years down the road, not immediate and total incapacitation and/or death such as occurred to victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To halt a few million Russkie foot-soldiers on a front across hundreds and hundreds of miles, the idea of using radiological bombs is just delusional -- but then, I admit, toward the end Hitler was completely delusional.
7. The actual supposed A-bomb test is described as having a yield much lower than that of the bombs the U.S. used on Japan. The German test, it’s said, was maybe about a kiloton. But in reality it’s actually a much more difficult engineering problem to cause an atomic blast of “just” one KT instead of 20 KTs. Sure, in theory the smaller yield can be obtained with less fissile fuel, which would seem to make it an easier and quicker thing to do, but again there’s a very big “but.” Achieving super-criticality at all with the amount of uranium or plutonium needed to produce a yield of exactly 1 KT is very, very hard, especially with W.W.II-era technology from any nation. Unless, that is, you willing design the weapon to use 20 KT’s worth of bomb fuel and waste it in an intentionally inefficient blast -- which would make no sense at all, even to a crazy Nazi.
8. Ah, you say, but maybe Hitler was going for 20KT and a bad design made the weapon fizzle, so it only yielded 1 KT. Sorry, that still doesn’t answer the other objections above.
9. Dr. Karlsch relies on analysis of modern soil samples to say that the Germans operated a nuclear reactor near Berlin for “perhaps some days or weeks.” It’s been well known since 1945 that the Nazis were working on what was quaintly called in those days an “atomic pile.” The design was dreadfully flawed and its uranium was nowhere near purified enough even to mere reactor grade -- the pile would never have achieved a sustained critical chain reaction. The flawed design, running at its best sub-critical activity level, would indeed leave behind traces to show up in soil samples and get people excited sixty years later, if they enjoy getting excited by this sort of thing.
The book says that the nukes were never used against the Allies because the Nazis didn’t have enough of them. With this part I agree: not enough, as in having exactly zero.
LOS ALAMOS' COSMIC NUKE-SPOTTER
I've been fascinated by cosmic rays, ever since they turned Ben Grimm, Reed Richards, Sue Storm, and her kid brother Johnny into world-saving superheroes. So I was glad to hear that Los Alamos scientists had figured out a way to use the rays to detect smuggled nuclear material. Government Executive explains:
The technique involves the use of muons, which are produced when cosmic radiation decays as it hits the Earth. Los Alamos researchers have developed a system that uses muon radiography to detect uranium, plutonium or other dense materials. A suspect object, such as a cargo container, is passed through two pairs of detectors - one set above the object and one below - that record muons' paths before and after they pass through the object. Analysis of the energy and trajectory of the muons results in a three-dimensional map of the inside of the suspect object...
Muon radiography has several advantages over detectors now deployed at U.S. borders, which use either X-rays or gamma rays, according to the laboratory. For example, gamma-ray detectors are less penetrating than those using muons, produce results that require additional interpretation and require the use of hazardous material such as cobalt.
Los Alamos scientists are now working to develop a set of muon radiography detectors large enough to scan large metal objects within 60 seconds. As the process develops, inspectors using the detectors may be able to clear a vehicle within about 20 seconds of muon exposure, the laboratory release says.
"We believe we've worked through all of the major obstacles to building a prototype system for a range of security issues," Chris Morris of the laboratory's Physics Division.
There's no word, yet, on whether the detector could serve as an early warning system, should the Skrulls invade, or Galactus decides to return to eat the planet.
When only superpowers and their allies held nuclear arsenals, deterrence worked, because all sides understood the horrific consequences of a misstep. Even during the most unnerving confrontations, like the Cuban missile crisis, there were clear "red lines" beyond which no sane leader would intentionally step...
But the lesson of the past few years is that red lines have blurred, to the point where they are now little more than pink smudges. And now, no one seems to know the rules. Not the Bush administration, as it sends conflicting signals about what it and its allies will do if diplomacy fails to disarm Iran and North Korea. Not Kim Jong Il, or the Iranian mullahs, as they test new and undefined limits. And why not test them?
They all know that India, Pakistan and Israel joined the nuclear club without ever accepting the rules laid out in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Even after India and Pakistan set off tests in 1998, the sanctions America imposed were relatively mild and short-lived. As soon as America needed Pakistan's help after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the country was transformed from nuclear outlaw to "major non-NATO ally."
Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wonders about this: "You have to think the Iranians are watching how we handle the North Koreans in the next few months. If you won't do anything with a big cheater, what are the middle and future cheaters to think?"
Go read it all. The standard-issue story on armed robots in the same section -- "Darpa, don't let your robots grow up to be Skynet," essentially -- is eminently skippable, however.
THERE'S MORE: Super, just super. "North Korea on Thursday announced for the first time that it has nuclear weapons and rejected moves to restart disarmament talks any time soon, saying it needs the armaments as protection against an increasingly hostile United States."
NEXT GEN NUKE? NOT!
If you listen to the New York Times, the country's atomic labs are designing "a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives." But Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis says that the Times has the story about the $9 million Reliable Replacement Warhead program all wrong.
Not long ago, the Wonk explains, "Congress shifted $ 9 [million] from 'Advanced Concepts' (which really was designing new nuclear weapons) to the 'Reliable Replacement Warhead' program that would 'improve the reliability, longevity, and certifiability of existing weapons and their components.'"
Rep. David Hobson (R-OH), one of Congress' fiercest opponents to new nukes, recently described the program as 'refurbishing some existing weapons in the stockpile without developing a new weapon that would require underground testing to verify the design.'"
Now, it's not like the Bush administration has given up on new nukes altogether; the Defense Department is expected to ask for millions this year to study bunker-busting atomic weapons. But this program mentioned by the Times today, that isn't how the Bushies are planning on doing it.
NUKES SPREAD, LABS CLAMP DOWN
Both Bush and Kerry said it: the spread of nuclear weapons is the biggest security problem the country faces. And 2004 saw that situation get a whole lot worse, with both Iran and North Korea moving further down the atomic path.
Here at home, the nuclear news was a bit better. Plans for new atomic weapons were scrapped by Congress. And the Energy Department finally got serious about security at its nuclear labs -- after a slew of lost classified disks and laser in the eye shamed the bureacracy into acting.
IRAQI URANIUM NOW IN U.S. LABS
The good news: U.S. troops and scientists have taken a heap of radioactive material out of insecure locations in Iraq. The bad news: they may have brought the stuff to one of the most insecure locations here in America.
NUKE STOCKPILES ON THE RISE
No matter what Iran decides to do about its nuclear program, the chances of radioactive material getting into dangerous hands continue to grow.
NEW NUKE RESEARCH BLOWN UP
It ain't dead, yet. But the Bush administration's push to research and develop new nuclear weapons could be on the verge of flat-lining, after a key Congressional leader moved on Wednesday to eliminate funding for the atomic arms projects.
WHAT'S A "BUNKER BUSTER" NUKE?
In the debate tonight, Sen. Kerry made an aside about cutting the money to develop a new, "bunker-busting" nuclear weapon. What's he talking about?
NOT AGAIN! LOS ALAMOS LOSES SECRET DISK
It's become a recurring nightmare for managers at the nation's most important nuclear weapons lab: a hard drive or disk, filled with classified information, goes missing. And suddenly, Los Alamos officials, trying to remerge from years of scandal, have a whole lot of explaining to do.
SANDIA HAS BUTTER FINGERS, TOO
Los Alamos isn't the only weapons lab that can't seem to keep track of its classified disks. Sandia National Laboratories just announced that they, too, are "searching for a missing floppy disk that was marked classified."
"AT A MINIMUM, ELECTROCUTION"
The heart-warming stories of safety violations from the country's top nuclear weapons lab continue to pile up, like presents under the ol' yuletide tree.
LOS ALAMOS SCIENTISTS SPOOKED
There's something missing from all the hubbub about security breaches and safety violations and political maneuverings over at Los Alamos: a sense of how the lab's 12,000 employees feel about having their workplace shut down. The answer, in a word, is spooked.
NUKE LAB CONTRACT: AMNESIA ATTACK
Imagine, for a moment, that you had held your job for the last sixty years. And then the boss wanted you to re-apply for your job, all over again. But your past performance over the decades – that would barely count, when you filled out the application.
You'd call that kind of a mixed, message, right? But it's exactly what the Energy Department did, when it began to put the Los Alamos National Laboratory's contract up for bid, for the first time ever.
BUNKER-BUSTER WIPED OUT
I couldn't quite believe it, when I first got the news over the weekend. But it's true: "Congress, in a surprising blow to the Bush administration's nuclear weapons ambitions, has eliminated funding for two major bomb research programs, including a so-called bunker buster that the president had said was essential to the country's security," the San Francisco Chronicle (among others) is reporting.
The bunker-buster – or, more formally, the "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator" – is a weapon that burrows about 10 yards beneath the ground before unleashing hell. And it has been a contentious issue in Congress ever since it was proposed by the Administration in 2002. Last year, legislators cut funds for the project in half. Then, in June, a key Republican representative – Ohio's David Hobson, who chairs the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee – moved to wipe out funds for the program entirely. The money was later restored in the Senate.
Now, Hobson seems to have struck again, fulfilling a pledge John Kerry made in the Presidential debates, to ban the bunker-buster.
"The U.S. has about 10,000 warheads in the stockpile already. To him, that number is enough," Hobson's press secretary, Sara Perkins, tells the Chron.
But while Hobson has complained long and loud about America's Cold War-sized atomic stockpile, there's a little more to his bunker-buster opposition than that. Hobson has also been a big-time critic of the Energy Department bureaucrats in charge of the country's nuclear weapons programs. And he's not afraid to use issues like the bunker-buster as a club against them. As I wrote back in June:
[In 2003], he pared back proposed funding for some weapons research programs. For others, he withheld funds until the Bush administration came up with a plan to shrink the country's nuclear weapons stockpile. That road map -- to halve the American arsenal by 2012 -- was submitted last week.
"After several years of frustration, we finally put a fence around some of (Energy Department's) advanced concepts funding and said that it would not be available until the department delivered a revised stockpile plan," Hobson said in a statement. "I admit that we held a DOE program hostage until they produced this revised stockpile plan, and you know what? -- the power of the purse does work!"
IRAN'S NUKE PAUSE - BAD NEWS?
So Iran has apparently stopped enriching uranium for the moment, pressing pause on its nuclear program. Great news, right?
Actually, it could hardly be worse, argues Michael Levi, the Brookings Institution's resident atomic authority. Iran's time-out is the product of a deal between Tehran and three European countries. The mullahs made similar commitments last year -- and didn't keep them. And even if Tehran decides to stick to its agreements this time around, this new bargain has "dealt Iran a stronger hand," Levi contends.
Supporters insist that the new language is more specific and provides fewer loopholes than the last deal. But in exchange for a mere tightening of loopholes, the EU-3 has offered Iran a pretty indulgent deal. Most importantly, the Europeans have again promised to keep Tehran away from the Security Council, a commitment with irreversible consequences -- after all, while the Europeans can change their minds and head to the Security Council whenever they please, they cannot turn back the clock. Every day Iran operates under lessened pressure is a day it might move closer to producing a bomb. (Only an overly optimistic or naïve observer can confidently believe Iran continues no nuclear efforts in secret.) Moreover, the past two years have shown that the further into history Iran's most egregious actions recede, the less willing other countries become to punish Tehran for them. So by delaying a Security Council confrontation, the EU-3 has, for now, dealt Iran a stronger hand.
The Europeans didn't stop there, however. They promised to bring Iran into WTO-entry negotiations; they also promised the possibility of nuclear, technological, and economic cooperation. Finally, they delivered an important intangible to Iran--the deal, which never mentions the country's violations, will provide Tehran with useful ammunition for its propaganda machine domestically, in the Middle East, and around the world. As a guest on Iranian and Arabic television programs, I've experienced first-hand the importance of this factor: Iranian officials seize on any sentiment or phrase from an outside power that can be read as exonerating its nuclear program and use it to drown out reasoned opposition. Now, faced with claims that the outside world, including Europe, believes Iran violated last October's agreement--a plain truth--Iran will repeatedly produce the EU-3 deal as evidence to the contrary. That, in turn, will bolster domestic support for the regime and its actions while creating regional sympathy for Iran's claims of mistreatment at the hands of the West.
It isn't just the EU-3 that is to blame here. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which for the most part has done a solid job in investigating Iran, put itself in an inappropriate political position as part of the EU-3 negotiations. Scheduled to deliver a critical report on Iran's activities last week, the agency delayed its release pending the outcome of the EU-3 negotiations. In doing so, it clearly suggested that Iran could influence the report--which is presumably a factual accounting of Iran's activities--by agreeing to the right deal. Imagine a criminal psychiatrist delaying her assessment of a defendant pending the outcome of plea bargain negotiations, and you've got an idea of how irresponsible this is.
NUKE STOCKPILES ON THE RISE
It ain't over. No matter what Iran decides to do about its nuclear program, the chances of radioactive material getting into dangerous hands are continuing to rise.
And those numbers are growing. Every year, the worldwide amount of plutonium increases by 70-75 metric tons, according to the Bulletin, mostly from "irradiated fuel discharged from nuclear power reactors." It's a number that's "not expected to decrease in the next 15 years."
The report does contain a bit of good news, however, on the uranium front. About 50 metric tons of highly-enriched, or weapons-grade, uranium, were in "civil research and power reactor programs as of the end of 2003." But that number has fallen, as a result of an American government effort, Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactor. The program tries to convince other countries to use uranium in their reactors that's not so suitable for bomb-making purposes. Still, those 50 or so tons are really only a drop in the nuclear bucket. There are over 1,900 metric tons of highly-enriched uranium in military programs across the globe.
Satellite imagery shows that entire buildings in Iraq have been dismantled. They once housed high-precision equipment that could help a government or terror group make nuclear bombs, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report to the U.N. Security Council.
Equipment and materials helpful in making bombs also have been removed from open storage areas in Iraq and disappeared without a trace, according to the satellite pictures, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said.
THERE'S MORE: This guns-for-money program seems like a most excellent turn of events. But with the prices the U.S. military is paying Al-Sadr's gang -- $250 for a mortar, $170 for a grenade launcher and, for a bullet, 25 cents," according to the New York Times, I can't help but wonder: is this a surrender by the Sadrists, or a fundraiser?
AND MORE: "The cash-for-guns initiative is a good idea," Phil Carter says. "If we can at least get rid of some heavy weapons and explosives, it's always worth it, even if they keep the light stuff."
Before the war, Iraq's nuclear program was years away from bearing a usable weapon and, thanks to the sanctions regime, getting further away. Then, thanks to diplomacy and threats of force, IAEA inspectors returned to the country. These inspectors informed the U.S. government that its pre-war assessments of Iraq's nuclear program were off-base and that the threat was nowhere near as imminent as the administration had maintained. Nevertheless, the United States invaded, thus precipitating the evacuation of IAEA inspectors who'd been safeguarding the most advanced elements of the Iraqi nuclear program. After the war, the administration failed to provide enough manpower to secure the sites and, displaying its typical disdain for international institutions, wouldn't let the inspectors come back.
As a result, instead of being under lock-and-key, bits and pieces of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program are now off God knows where.
NYT: CONDI'S IRAQ NUKE FIB
During the lead up to the Iraq invasion, Condi Rice and other senior members of the Bush Administration didn't just pass along bad intelligence about Saddam's nuclear program. They hyped it up, knowing the case was wobbly, at best. The New York Times has the goods:
In a speech to veterans that August, Vice President Dick Cheney said Mr. Hussein could have an atomic bomb "fairly soon." The next month, Mr. Cheney told a group of Wyoming Republicans the United States had "irrefutable evidence" - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.
The tubes quickly became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, asserted on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Before Ms. Rice made those remarks, though, she was aware that the government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all, an examination by The New York Times has found. Months before, her staff had been told that these experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets.
In the debate tonight, Sen. Kerry made an aside about cutting the money to develop a new, "bunker-busting" nuclear weapon. What's he talking about?
Some of the bad guys' most lethal arsenals are assumed to be buried in deep, underground caverns -- places that America's current arsenal has trouble hitting. So the Bush Administration would like to build a nuclear bomb -- a "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator" -- that burrows into the ground before unleashing all kinds of atomic hell. The San Jose Mercury-Newsexplained how it might work in a story last year:
A nuclear penetrator is built in the shape of a thin cylinder with a pointed nose. Dropped from an airplane, its weight and speed allow it to smash through the surface of the ground or puncture rock or concrete. It buries itself 20 to 30 feet deep before exploding, Fred Celec, the deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear matters, said. The power of the explosion "couples'' with the earth to send shock waves down toward buried targets.
Anti-nuclear groups are spooked by the new brand of bomb, of course. "Because of its earth penetrating capability, the RNEP is considered by some in the Administration as a more "usable" nuclear weapon than existing nuclear weapons," says one.
But, according to the Merc-News, there may not be a whole lot of enthusiasm for the new nuke.
"If you can find somebody in a uniform in the Defense Department who can talk about a new need'' for nuclear bunker busters "without laughing, I'll buy him a cup of coffee,'' said Robert Peurifoy, a retired vice president of Sandia National Laboratory.
THERE'S MORE: No. He. Didn't. When asked about the biggest threat facing America, President Bush mentioned -- after nuclear proliferation -- his cockamamie missile defense system. You know, the one that can't pass its tests -- and is being deployed anyway. When will this guy let a bad idea go?
That's the depressing prognosis from today's New York Times, in an article about Tehran's announcement "that it had begun converting tons of uranium into gas, a crucial step in making fuel for a nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb."
NUKE MONITORS: LAME
The Department of Homeland Security is spending a bundle to install new radiation detectors at ports and border crossings. Too bad the things don't work all that well, Newsday reports.
The devices can screen the contents of a truck or shipping container for emissions from radioactive material that terrorists might use in a "dirty" bomb to contaminate an area, specialists said in recent interviews.
But the chances are low, they said, that such detectors, which scan for gamma rays and neutrons, can pick up emissions from a well-shielded cache of highly enriched uranium -- material that could be used in a devastating nuclear bomb.
The portal machines also are prone to nuisance alarms on shipments of many materials with low levels of radioactivity, from kitty litter to bananas, and can be triggered by a person who has recently received radioactive tracers in a medical procedure.
The detectors, which must be calibrated to take into account the natural background radiation from rocks, soil and cosmic rays, can be set to minimize nuisance alarms.
"They adjust the detectors so the alarms are tolerable," said Page Stoutland, head of a program for radiological and nuclear countermeasures at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. "In doing that, have they made the detector such that it will miss legitimate threats? That's the concern..."
Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard co mmander who is now with the nonprofit Council on Foreign Relations, argues that "rather than the super, high-end stuff, the money would be better spent putting radiological devices in the boxes." Small sensors, if made cheaply enough, could be placed in every shipping container to monitor for radiation and relay data in real time as the ship is still at sea, he said.
ATOMIC DOUBLE-TALK FROM GOP
"We really, really, really need new nuclear weapons."
"Ask for new nukes? Who, us?"
That was the crux of the Republicans' double-headed argument yesterday as the Senate debated whether or not to fund the research and development of atomic "bunker busters" and low-yield "mini-nukes." The GOP won out, 55-42, and the plans will go forward.
"We know our adversaries are building hardened bunkers, deeply buried," Allard warned.
America's current nuclear arsenal can't take out these underground chambers. So the country needs to start working on the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator – a bunker-busting atomic bomb.
But when Democrats started arguing against the $500 million in projected funds for the project, Allard shifted gears. Suddenly, the bunker-buster wasn't an urgent need. It was a research project.
"What we're looking at is a study," he said. The $500 million – that was just a placeholder figure, in case Congress might, some day, wish to get serious about the weapon.
Then, just as quickly, Allard pivoted yet again. Democrats, he warned, "shouldn't bury their heads in the sand." Voting against the new nuclear research, that would be like "ignor[ing] that the world is changing."
Voting 55-42, the Senate defeated an amendment pushed by Democrats to slash $36.6 million to study so-called bunker-busting nuclear weapons that would be used to destroy underground facilities as well as smaller nuclear arms with half the yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The administration has said it has no plans to build such weapons, but wants to keep the door open to their development to deal with emerging threats. It successfully pushed Congress last year to repeal a 10-year-old ban on researching low-yield weapons of less than 5 kilotons.
NEW NUKE RESEARCH BLOWN UP?
It ain't dead, yet. But the Bush administration's push to research and develop new nuclear weapons could be on the verge of flat-lining, after a key Congressional leader moved on Wednesday to eliminate funding for the atomic arms projects.
Ohio Republican Rep. David Hobson, who chairs the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, wiped out $96 million in nuclear projects from the government's budget for next year -- including funds for researching nuclear "bunker-buster" bombs and low-yield, "mini-nuke" weapons. Hobson also snapped the purse strings of projects to build thousands more plutonium hearts for nuclear weapons and to fast-track atomic testing.
Just last week, the Department of Energy submitted a plan to pare thousands of weapons from America's existing nuclear arsenal. But, despite the proposal, much of the country's nuclear arms budget is still at "Cold War" levels, Hobson complained in a statement. The Energy Department "needs to take a 'time-out' on new initiatives until it completes a review of its weapons complex in relation to security needs, budget constraints and this new stockpile plan."
Anti-nuclear activists were giddy after Hobson's stand. Two weeks ago, the full House of Representatives narrowly defeated an amendment to take away the money for researching the "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator" -- a weapon designed to burrow deep into the ground before unleashing a nuclear hell-storm in underground bunkers. Taken together, activists said they believe the maneuvers forecast a gloomy future for a new atomic arsenal.
The "secret unlock code" for America's arsenal of Minuteman nuclear missiles during the height of the Cold War: 00000000. And "everyone" at Strategic Air Command knew it.
ATOMIC PLANES IN THE WORKS?
The first line sure is juicy: "After more than six decades of research, the first atom-powered airplane is cleared for takeoff."
And even if the substance doesn't quite back up the tantalizing intro in the current Popular Mechanics -- which it doesn't -- this is still an interesting concept.
The attraction of a nuclear plane is that it doesn't run out of fuel. Convert a drone to atomic power, and it could stay aloft just about forever, the thinking goes.
The nuclear drone wouldn't have a traditional fission reactor, running on uranium or plutonium. Instead, it would be powered by hafnium-178.
"In the late 1990s, researchers at the University of Texas in Dallas made a remarkable and unexpected discovery about [halfnium]," the magazine says. "When they bombarded the metal with 'soft' X-rays like those your dentist uses to examine your teeth, the metal released a burst of gamma rays 60 times more powerful than the X-rays."
This reaction could be safer than conventional ones, the magazine argues.
"The gamma ray output drops precipitously the moment power to the X-ray machine is turned off... Since it produces only gamma radiation, less shielding is required. And should an accident occur, there is less of an environmental concern than with fission. Hafnium-178 has a half-life of only 31 years compared to thousands of years for other reactor fuels. In addition, unlike uranium or plutonium, hafnium-178 cannot support a chain reaction, which means it cannot be used to make rogue nuclear weapons."
But, despite the potentially attractive features, an atomic drone is nowhere near takeoff.
"Project managers for Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory tell Popular Mechanics they have begun discussions that could lead to the conversion of a Global Hawk [drone] to a nuclear-powered aircraft… They have not yet signed a contract to convert a Global Hawk to nuclear power, they are aware of discussions taking place within the Air Force." (emphasis mine)
THERE'S MORE: Some scientists are pouring cold water all over the halfnium idea, reader MS points out. "May not make physical sense," was the opinion of 5 of 12 Pentagon researchers appointed to look into halfnium bombs.
AND MORE: Defense Tech "deserves better than Popular Mechanics doing a fair imitation of the National Inquirer," says Los Alamos consultant and nuclear proliferation expert Russell Seitz.
With so-called "isomers" like halfnium-178, he writes, "energy has both to be put in and gotten out. The mere fact that more and better physicists using fiercer x-ray sources and more sensitive gamma detectors can't get any signal out of the same isotopes -- even upon many experimental iterations and variations -- satisfies me that [this] is just another example of the economics of desire."
AND MORE: The Defense Department was looking at atomic planes back in the 1940's, reader JM notes, with a project called "Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft," or NEPA. And for a year or so, the Pentagon considered irradiating human test subjects, to see how much nuclear exposure pilots could take. After Manhattan Project scientist Dr. Joseph Hamilton pointed out that such experiments would have "a little of the Buchenwald touch," the idea was finally, and thankfully, dropped.
U.S.-PAK DEAL: TROOPS IN, NUKE SALES OK
When A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, "confessed" to mounting a rogue operation to sell the world's bad guys nuclear technology, it seemed awfully fishy.
Now, we know what stinks, thanks to the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh. It’s a "quid pro quo": Bush gets to send troops inside Pakistan to finally hunt for Osama bin Laden; Pakistani president Musharraf is let off the hook for helping countries like North Korea go nuclear.
Pakistan's government is now trying to portray the sale of nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea as the cloak-and-dagger work of a few, isolated rogues.
One of the brochures, a 10-page catalogue from A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories' Directorate of Vacuum Science and Technology, offered virtually all the components needed to establish a uranium-enrichment plant. The specialised centrifuge pumps, gauges, valves and other components each have civilian uses, but together provide the means to enrich the rare uranium-235 isotope to a particularly pure grade so that it can be used to fuel a nuclear weapon.
If there was any doubt as to what was on offer, a second accompanying brochure under the heading of "nuclear-related products" listed "complete ultracentrifuge machines" and other components needed to build a uranium-enrichment plant.
JDW readily obtained the brochures on the spot and inquired whether all of the listed items were available for sale. Several KRL officials provided positive assurances that all had government approval for export...
KRL was not the only Pakistani organisation peddling worrisome technology at the Karachi exhibition. Its rival laboratory - the National Development Complex - was also handing out marketing packages offering a variety of technologies useful in the development of long-range ballistic missiles. While Pakistan is under no legal international obligation to control missile technology sales, it has often pledged to do so.
Moreover, Khan himself has alleged that he received approval for the Iranian transfers from officers in the Pakistani army. One former senior US intelligence officer agrees with this assessment, saying that the former Pakistani Chief of the Army Staff, Gen Mirza Aslam Beg, was "a crucial figure". The official added: "Whatever the network is, it has got to envelop part of the [Pakistani] military establishment."
"The nation's nuclear waste dump proposed for Nevada is poorly designed and could leak highly radioactive waste, a scientist who recently resigned from a federal panel of experts on Yucca Mountain tells the Associated Press."
Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is planned to begin receiving waste in 2010. Some 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at commercial and military sites in 39 states would be stored in metal canisters underground in tunnels.
"‘If we get high-temperature liquids, the metal [in the canisters] would corrode and that would eventually lead to leakage of nuclear waste," Paul Craig, a physicist and engineering professor at the University of California-Davis, says.
"Therefore, it is a bad design. And that is very, very bad news for the Department of Energy because they are committed to that design."
NUCLEAR ROUNDUP
- Iran is still building centrifuges for uranium enrichment -- despite its pledge to stop making weapons-grade nuclear material.
- The U.S. will start sending India civilian nuclear and space technology.
- "North Korean officials told an unofficial delegation of U.S. experts last week that the country has no clandestine program to enrich uranium, even though one member of the delegation had been present when a senior North Korean official admitted it during a meeting in October 2002."
THERE'S MORE: "President Bush's top nuclear security administrator defended yesterday the administration's decision to begin research on a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons," according to the Baltimore Sun.
"We should not fail to take advantage of this opportunity," he told the nation's nuclear lab chiefs. "We are now free to explore a range of technical options that could strengthen our ability to deter or respond to new or emerging threats without any concern that some ideas could inadvertently violate a vague and arbitrary limitation. I expect your design teams to engage fully."
Nevertheless, the Sun notes, Nonetheless, Brooks told reporters that other countries shouldn't pursue such research.
The unclassified semiannual report, covering a period from Jan. 1 to June 30 of this year... (noted) continued Syrian-Russian agreements on nuclear cooperation and Damascus’s expanded access to foreign nuclear-related expertise. Previous agency assessments of Syrian nuclear weapons efforts, however, do not describe U.S. interest in Syrian nuclear activities in such ominous language...
The CIA says that Syria continued during the first half of this year to seek foreign assistance to develop a solid-propellant rocket motor development and production capability. Syria has also relied on other nations, primarily North Korea, for assistance with its liquid-propelled missile program, the report says.
Concerning biological and chemical weapons, the report says that it is “highly probable” that Syria has continued to work to develop an offensive biological weapons capability and that Syria continues to seek foreign assistance and equipment for its chemical weapons program.
In equally grim news, today's Newswire also reports that the "Iran has systematically concealed wide-ranging nuclear activities including the production of small amounts of plutonium and low-enriched uranium," according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. However, "it is not clear whether the country has tried to develop a nuclear weapon."
Now, $7.5 million will go to the project next year, instead of the $15 million requested, Global Security Newswire notes. Congress also trimmed $4 million off of a $6 million request for low-yield nuclear weapons research, and cut $12 million from a $23-million request for building a new nuclear warhead pit production facility.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists takes a shot at this geopolitical Rubik's Cube this month, detailing the 400 or so warheads in Beijing's arsenal.
The good news: few, if any, of the Chinese Bombs can reach the U.S. The bad news: they're working on it.
PENTAGON WANTS LITTLE NUKES
A yet-to-be-released study by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board "recommends developing a range of lower-yield nuclear weapons because the current US arsenal 'is not adequate to [meet] future national security needs," Jane's Defence Weekly reports. "The thinking, a senior military official explained, is that atomic weapons with smaller explosive yields would be seen as more credibly used, thus increasing their deterrence power against potential adversaries."
The envisaged new arsenal is not to be confused with the notion of much smaller "mini-nukes" that have gained notoriety over the past year. Instead, the study’s proposed new weapons will be an evolution of existing nuclear weapons... adapted to produce lower yields as well as "special effects" such as an enhanced electromagnetic pulse...
The study also proposes dramatic increases in non-nuclear capabilities, but several would entail serious treaty repercussions. Most prominently, it calls for MX Peacekeeper ICBMs to be converted, by 2010, to carry conventional explosives at an initial research and deployment cost of US$950 million. Another recommendation calls for development of a new 1500 nautical mile range submarine-launched ballistic missile, also topped with conventional warheads.
REPORTERS SMUGGLE DEPLETED URANIUM INTO U.S.
The country is still shockingly vulnerable to terror attacks, this expose shows.
"For a second year, U.S. government screeners have failed to detect a shipment of depleted uranium in a container sent by ABC News from overseas as part of a test of security at American ports. "
The Feds are "considering criminal charges" against the reporters who pulled this off, according to the Associated Press.
THERE'S MORE: Blogger James Rummel wasn't too happy with the original headline for this post -- REPORTERS SMUGGLE URANIUM INTO U.S.
We are, of course, dealing with the depleted variety. The stuff that's so low in radioactivity that it's actually used as radiation shielding... Wouldn't know it by the headline, though. I suppose it's all part of the "If it bleeds..." school of journalism. If you don't "sex up" the story then I suppose that no one would be interested in reading what you wrote.
While I don't agree with the last statement, his first is spot on, and I've changed the headline.
WEAPONS-GRADE URANIUM AT IRAN NUKE PLANT
"U.N. inspectors have found traces of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium at an Iranian nuclear facility," the Associated Press is reporting. "The find heightened concerns that Tehran may be running a secret nuclear weapons program."
Sure does.
THERE'S MORE: "Now it appears that Iran's rapid progress toward a nuclear weapons capacity came thanks to substantial assistance from Pakistan," says Josh Marshall, citing this report. "Add that to the fact that we now know that North Korea's progress along the uranium-enrichment track (as opposed to plutonium) was similarly the product of key assistance from Pakistan. If we're looking for the unstable Islamist-leaning state which has nuclear weapons and is the chief proliferator of nuclear technology to other unstable rogue regimes, we've found it: Pakistan."
COLD WAR BRITS PLANNED NUKE LANDMINES
New Scientist reports:
To counter the threat of Soviet invasion, the UK planned to bury 10 huge nuclear landmines in Germany, declassified army documents from the 1950s reveal.
The extraordinary weapon was designed to cause mass destruction and radioactive contamination over a wide area to prevent an occupation by Soviet forces. Each mine was expected to produce an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, about half that of the atom bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945.
The mines were to be left buried or submerged by the British Army of the Rhine. They would then have been detonated by wire from up to five kilometres away or by an eight-day clockwork timer. If disturbed or damaged, they were primed to explode within 10 seconds...
In the end, the risk from radioactive fallout would have been unacceptable...and hiding nuclear weapons in an allied country was deemed "politically flawed." As a result, the Ministry of Defence cancelled (the nuclear landmine project) in February 1958.
U.S. TO SKIP NUKE TREATY CONFERENCE
"Reflecting its unwillingness to permanently renounce nuclear weapons test explosions, the Bush administration has decided not to attend an international conference in September to encourage other countries to adopt the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," Global Security Newswire reports.
"The United States is one of 13 holdout countries whose ratification is required before the treaty can take effect."
THERE'S MORE: Defense Tech pal Wyatt Earp points out that the Senate rejected the test ban treaty in 1999.
WHITE HOUSE ADMITS IRAQ NUKE CLAIM IS BOGUS
Five-and-a-half months after President Bush declared that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium in Africa;
four months after documents supporting the assertion were shown to be fakes;
one day after a former ambassador investigating the African uranium claim said that the Bush administration "twisted" intelligence about Iraq's nuclear ambitions;
and a few hours after White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that there was "zero, nada, nothing new" in the ambassador's revelations,
the Bush administration finally admitted that its allegation of an Iraqi nuclear shooping spree in Africa is bogus.
U.S. OFFICIAL: WHITE HOUSE "TWISTED" IRAQ NUKE INTEL
"Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?" Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador to Gabon, asks in a Sunday New York Times op-ed.
"Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
In 2002, Wilson was asked by the CIA to check out claims that uranium from Niger has somehow ended up in Saddam's hands. Wilson did just that, and found that the assertions were bogus; Niger's uranium industry was just too tightly-controlled, he concluded.
But Wilson was ignored, it seems. The Bush adminsitration highlighted the Niger case as a big-time example of Saddam's push to build nuclear weapons. administration officials even brandished documents that "proved" the Niger uranium transfers. Those papers were later shown to obvious forgeries.
NORTH KOREA'S SWISS CHEESE BLOCKADE
When is a blockade not a blockade?
The Bush Administration has finally started taking some rudimentary steps towards keeping North Korea's nuclear weapons from spreading. The U.S. is leading a group of eleven countries in a program to "monitor and perhaps intercept shipments of nuclear materials and rockets" going in an out of North Korea, according to the New York Times.
Sounds good, at first. But take a look at the 11 countries involved in the effort: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Australia, and the U.S. It's notable for who's not on the list. No China, no South Korea. Neither of North Korea's immediate neighbors is included. And how effective can a blockade be without those two?
NUKE INSPECTORS BOLT FROM IRAN
This is bad. Very, very bad:
"Iran denied a team of experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to some of its nuclear facilities, increasing tensions with the U.S., Russia and other nations that have been pressuring the country to prove it doesn't have a nuclear weapons program," the Wall Street Journal reports.
"The inspectors, who arrived Saturday in Iran , left abruptly Wednesday after Iranian officials refused to let them visit the Kalaye Electric Co. nuclear power plant in Tehran, people familiar with the matter said. The move comes amid efforts by the Bush administration to push Iran to provide evidence that it isn't violating its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."
Iran is denying that the inspectors were barred from going anyhwere, of course. An IAEA spokesman declined to comment on the matter.
I read 
Chin up kids -- Strategic Air Command's back!
The conventional Trident may be 
One possible solution, from MIT's 
I was skeptical when I heard the 
If you're standing near 
"The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of 
Step off, 
Climate models today –- and the computers to run them –- are considerably more sophisticated than those of the early 1980s. Using these improved models, Robock et al. 
So I walk past the rows of toddlers' jumpers, past the blue-haired ladies ordering around their grandkids. I sit down with my source. And he begins to tell me about a Pentagon plan that's even odder that the place where we're meeting.
Linzer has to be 
When we drive back in the Spring, we'll know. Because the wonks at the 
Of course, that assumes that the sensors can actually handle the job. In many cases, they can't.
In the late 1950's, the U.S. government began research into an interplanterary spacecraft that relied on nuclear detonations for propulsion. The effort, dubbed "Project Orion," died quietly ater a few years. But many of the documents surrounding the atomic spaceship have remained hidden or classified for more than four decades.
You're thinking, 3.6, 4.2, in that neighborhood. Seismic scales, like the Richter, are logarithmic, so that neighborhood can be pretty big.
In May 2005, the two nuclear design labs, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, began an 18-month 
The second main argument against RRW is that a significantly modified warhead design which has not been tested cannot possibly be as reliable as a tested design. Critics who advance this argument point out that independent assessments predating RRW by government advisory bodies such as the JASONs found that "
As the Congressional Research Service 
In 1996, under the leadership of then-director of Los Alamos 
But other scientists are hesitant to certify the pits. They feel that however many tests the cast pits have undergone, they are still irreducibly different from the old wrought pits, and that without a nuclear test, no one can say that they would behave the same. These scientists argue that the new pits should be introduced into the stockpile, but only after the labs have had a chance to modify the warheads to increase their performance margins – that is, only as part of RRW.
Divine Strake, recall, was supposed to consist of 700 tons – many, many trucks’ worth – of 
The goal of the life extension programs (LEP) is to add anywhere from 20 to 30 years onto the (nominal) design lifetimes of the various warhead models in the stockpile (of course, "
For components outside the warheads' nuclear explosives package, modifying the manufacturing specs is an attractive option, since each new component can be tested exhaustively without underground nuclear testing.
Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate that the Department of Defense intended to use RRW as an opportunity to expand the capabilities of the U.S. nuclear arsenal – to work around the cancellation of RNEP. These rumors led Hobson, in March 2006, to complain that "sometimes within the [DOE], people hear only what they want to hear," and remind NNSA head Linton Brooks that "
The answer is that this transfer took place as part of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), a collaborative program instituted by the U.S. Department of Energy to repatriate HEU stocks distributed by the nuclear superpowers to their Cold War allies, to keep the HEU out of the hands of terrorists. And while three kilograms is not a huge amount, it is about one fifth of what’s needed to build a simple nuclear bomb.
While stockpiled warheads were not often put through further nuclear tests, they were routinely sampled for disassembly, thorough inspection and all sorts of non-nuclear (or above-ground) testing. This activity, known as 
Kudos to Hans Kristensen of the 
The trio -- members of the Luck, Wisconsin group 
Step one in Collins' push-back effort was to unfavorably 
The tale of the hafnium bomb, as I like to describe it, is a tragicomedy about how a fast-talking scientist from Texas convinced the Pentagon to sink millions of dollars in pursuit of the next superbomb. The whole scheme hinged on an experiment involving a used dental X-ray machine, a music amplifier, and a few specks of highly radioactive dust.
The question started Weinberger on a two-year "
This apocalyptic scenario is becoming increasingly plausible as the U.S. military considers 
The Washington Post 
Those conflicting, confusing reports in the press are no help. So I begged the 
Last May, 
A few years ago, on a trip to White Sands Missile Range, I came across a book called 
I haven't been doing a good enough job tracking the growing Iran and North Korea nuclear crises, lately. In fact, in recent weeks -- and this is lame of me -- I've barely mentioned them at all.
Not only does Dr. Karlsch publicly admit that he lacks definitive proof. But long-known facts, and his newly-revealed facts, in my mind just don’t add up to anything like a working nuclear weapon.
The technique involves the use of muons, which are produced when cosmic radiation decays as it hits the Earth. Los Alamos researchers have developed a system that uses muon radiography to detect uranium, plutonium or other dense materials. A suspect object, such as a cargo container, is passed through two pairs of detectors - one set above the object and one below - that record muons' paths before and after they pass through the object. Analysis of the energy and trajectory of the muons results in a three-dimensional map of the inside of the suspect object...
If you listen to the New York Times, the country's atomic labs are designing "a 
So Iran has apparently 
The first line sure is juicy: "After more than six decades of research, the 
