Blog by Jeffrey Lewis, ArmsControlWonk.com

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
3:00 pm

Watching a radio program is fascinating experience. You see the speakers shift in the chairs, grimace at tough questions and sense the reaction among the crowd. You can also just sit back and listen. And I mean really listen -- You might be surprised how much more you hear when you don't look. The speakers, too, seem to forget the audience and really listen to one another. This is the situation right now -- Talk of Nation with Neal Conan is broadcasting a live radio program from the Carnegie Nonproliferation Conference as part of the 60th Anniversary celebration organized for The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Neal’s guests are: Ambassador Linton Brooks, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA), co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. The Carnegie Nonproliferation Conference usually emphasizes making both days a multimedia experience. This year has been no exception, from posting presentations on-line to inviting bloggers to cover the conference. But a live studio audience? This is fun.

 

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
12:20 pm
Ever since former IAEA Deputy Director-General Pierre Goldschmidt penned an op-ed for the New York Times calling for the IAEA Board of Governors to report Iran to the Security Council, I've been eager to see what the former top-man for IAEA safeguard inspections would have to say about the future of the nuclear fuel cycle.

The nuclear fuel cycle -- from enriching uranium into fresh fuel for nuclear power plants to storing nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel -- offers a number of points where states could divert uranium or spent fuel to make nuclear weapons.

States like Iran claim they can't trust Western states to reliably provide nuclear fuel, while Washington doesn't trust Tehran not to use enrichment and reprocessing technologies to build bombs.

There are basically two approaches to the problem of national fuel cycles -- (1) ignore the problem, tell the bad guys "too bad", you don't get the fuel cycle, and (2) internationalize the fuel cycle so nobody has separate capabilities. These are platonic forms or conceptual approaches -- actual mileage may vary. Jon Wolfsthal, then with the Carnegie Endowment, captured the three perspectives pretty well:

There are now three basic viewpoints in relation to the fuel cycle issue. The first school believes that the current system essentially works and that adjustments are needed to ensure that no unsafeguarded or illegal transfers of nuclear production technologies take place. A second group maintains that the possession of such capabilities by peaceful, integrated, and nonproliferation-compliant states is perfectly acceptable and that the focus should be only on states with bad track records, obvious incentives to proliferate, and poor justifications for acquiring nuclear production capabilities. A third, more ambitious approach holds that the national possession of enrichment and plutonium-separation capabilities undermines the very basis for nonproliferation and that such activities should be minimized to the extent possible and exercised only under international or multinational control to provide additional assurances that they will only ever be used for peaceful purposes.
Both President Bush and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei have proposed arrangements whereby developed states would guarantee to provide nuclear fuel to countries that forgo indigenous fuel cycles. Bush's proposal emphasizes the second approach, calling for a freeze on new fuel cycle capabilities, while ElBaradei's proposal places more emphasis on a grand bargain. MIT's Thomas Neff has an excellent summary entitled, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle and The Bush Nonproliferation Initiative.

Goldschmidt -- now visiting scholar with the Carnegie Endowment -- just outlined his vision of the bargain for to allow the provision of fresh fuel (and the return of spent fuel) in exchange for the suspension of sensitive fuel cycle activities. Goldschmidt's proposal is somewhere in between, emphasizing a "generic" export license to states that meet basic nonproliferation criteria that allows the states to import fuel from a variety of suppliers. Basically, Goldschmidt suggests such a license arrangement would diversify the risk that states face by remaining dependent on foreign suppliers. That's a little less ad hoc than the Bush Administration, but maintains the essentially national character of fuel cycle facilities.

Can't wait for to read his remarks carefully.


Monday, November 7, 2005
5:00 pm

I attended the afternoon panel, The Taboos, Secrets, and Hidden History of Nuclear Weapons chaired by William Burr (National Security Archive) with Lynn Eden (Stanford University), Robert Norris (Natural Resources Defense Council) and Nina Tannenwald (Brown University).

Lynn Eden showed us the above chart to demonstrate the impact of a 300 KT warhead dropped on the Pentagon.

My first reaction?

My apartment is screwed.

Actually, my apartment would have survived the blast damage, only to be consumed by the massive firestome that would follow the explosion.

That's a big deal to me, though not to US planners who don't actually calcuate fire damage in their warplans. As far as US planners are concerned, my apartment is still standing survive. That assumption is why the US planned to hit Moscow with some 400 nuclear weapons in some operational plans.

If you are interested in more information about Lynn Eden's talk, you can read her article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists entitled, "City on Fire", an interview with PBS or, better yet, buy her excellent book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation.


Monday, November 7, 2005
12:40 pm

Did the Stasi -- East Germany's dreaded Secret Police, save the world?

Conversations with Historians of the Nuclear Age is one of the best panels I've seen in a long, long time at a conference in Washington. Each historian was asked by the moderator, Carla Anne Robbins, to identify his "favorite" moment of the Cold War.

Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, chose the "War Scare" of 1983. I don't know how many folks are aware of the broad outlines of the war scare -- basicall a series of events combined to nearly trigger a nuclear war.

In 1981, an increasingly paranoid Soviet leadership launched an intelligence collection program, known by the acronym RYAN, to look for signs the United States was about to launch a surprise nuclear attack. Almost simultaneously, the Reagan Administration decided to step up psychological operations to exploit Soviet fears -- to "disturb and unsettle the Soviet Union," Rhodes said, with the hope of eliciting more cooperative Soviet behavior.

These operations were, um, aggressive. "Sometimes we would send bombers over the North Pole and their radars would click on," a former Strategic Air Command commander told Peter Schweizer, author of Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union. "Other times fighter-bombers would probe their Asian or European periphery.

Dr. William Schneider, former undersecretary of state for military assistance and technology told Schweitzer "It really got to them. They didn't know what it all meant. A squadron would fly straight at Soviet airspace, and other radars would light up and units would go on alert. Then at the last minute the squadron would peel off and return home."

Schweitzer is a Reagan-fan who thinks the plan was brilliant. He sort of ignores that it nearly ignited a nuclear war.

Against the provocations undertaken by the Reagan Administration and Soviet paranoia, two events propelled the world close to the nuclear brink. Benjamin Fischer captures the gestalt:
In March 1983, President Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the "focus of evil in the world" and as an "evil empire." Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov responded by calling the US President insane and a liar. Then things got nasty.
Really nasty. In September 1983, The Soviet Union shot down KAL 007, a South Korean airliner. Former Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin, in retrospect, noted that both the US and USSR "went slightly crazy" in the wake the incident.

A few weeks later, NATO began what one historian called a "singularly ill-timed exercise" named ABLE ARCHER. The Soviets long assumed any nuclear attack would begin as a "exercise" that simply escalated into the real thing. ABLE ARCHER fit the bill perfectly -- being more extensive than its precedessors by involving high-level officials from the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the President and the Vice President. Had the Politbureau learned of this exercise -- who knows what might have happened.

Enter the Stasi -- the dreaded East German secret police. Either the Stasi -- or the KGB, depending on the account -- had information about ABLE ARCHER but did not pass it along to the Soviet politburo or the upper levels of the Soviet defense ministry. Vojtech Mastny, Senior Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive, argues:
If anybody could claim credit for preventing in November 1983 a tragedy that could have ensued from the “Able Archer” being discussed in the Moscow politburo, it is those unknown Soviet intelligence analysts who, whether out of common sense or because of incompetence, failed to provide policymakers with the potentially explosive information.
So, there you have it. The Stasi may have saved the world. Time for lunch!

Jeffrey