Britain's new nuke debate

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.

-- Eric Hundman

Nork Nuke Deal: Back to the Future?

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?

But the wonks over at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies are warning us: believe the hype.

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!

(Big ups: JH)

New Nukes: Get the Goods

"The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country’s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades," the Times is reporting.

The $100 billion effort is called the Reliable Replacement Warhead. Back in August, our own Haninah Levine took a four-part look at the program. Go read up: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

Mr. Plow eagerly awaits nuclear war

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 slew of studies 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.

-- Eric Hundman

(Special thanks to Haninah for the illustration!)

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.

-- Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist

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.

Here's the goal, as another source -- U.S. Strategic Command's deputy commander, Lt. Gen. C. Robert Kehler -- later told me on-the-record: "strike virtually anywhere on the face of the Earth within 60 minutes."

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.

Google Monkeys Go Nuclear

Linzer has to be f’ing kidding right? RIGHT?

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.

Talk about googlebombing someone.

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?

-- Jeffrey Lewis, crossposted at Arms Control Wonk.com

Even later update: Noah here. At Defense Tech HQ, we're all big fans 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.

When we drive back in the Spring, we'll know. Because the wonks at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Federation of American Scientists have teamed up to make a Google Earth map of the nearly nearly 10,000 nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal.

The satellite map - drawn from this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists study -- "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.

While the FBI won't comment, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has some insights.

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...

-- Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist

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 fun rumors 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.

The problem is, most detectors today rely on solid crystals of sodium iodide, which light up when they're hit with gamma rays. And those sodium sensors "cannot distinguish between a plutonium bomb and the radioactive potassium-40 found in bananas," New Scientist notes. "More importantly, they fail to detect the most dangerous nuclear material of all: highly enriched uranium (HEU)."

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 this Weekly 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 short logical 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.

-- Matthew Tompkins

Korea Nuke: a 'Fizzle?'

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.

They've published lat/long (41.294 N, 129.134 E) and Mb estimates (4.2) for the North Korean test.

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?

-- Jeffrey Lewis, cross-posted at Arms Control Wonk.com

UPDATE 10/10/06 1:14 AM: Noah here. Looks like the LA and NY Times have both picked up (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!"

-- Sharon Weinberger (and cross-posted at my new site)

Dazed and Confused by RRW - Part 4

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.)

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 "entirely new designs for the nuclear subsystem... would be expected to require nuclear-explosion (underground) testing before being accepted for the enduring stockpile."

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.

- Haninah Levine

Dazed and Confused by RRW - Part 3

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 several JASON 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.

- Haninah Levine

Not So Divine After All?

Remember Divine Strake – a.k.a. "strakes on a plain"? Well, forget it. At least for this year.

Palm Springs’ KESQ reports that the planned massive explosion at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) has been put off till 2007, at the earliest.