Recently in Nuclear weapons Category

Jay Davis, the former director of the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency from 1998 to 2001 has spoken out against an editorial in Nature that called for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (RRW) to be abandoned.

Davis points out that although the plutonium pits that are at the heart of the US nuclear warheads have a predicted lifetime of 40 to 80 years, "the thousands of non-nuclear components in the pit's environment are less stable" and that some parts and materials no longer exist due to environmental and safety regulations.

"The proposed RRW was designed using nuclear systems that were more robust and had higher margins against failure, thus relaxing the stress on new non-nuclear systems intended for replacement and future production."

"It is not a stalking horse for nuclear testing but would increase military and congressional confidence in weapons performance," he says.

Davis also points out that the US is not the only nuclear power planning or working on modernizing its stockpile—the UK, France, Russia, and China all have programs in place to do so.

Gerald E. Marsh, who wrote a piece on non-proliferation for the American Physical Society's Forum on Physics and Society two years ago, argues an opposing view.

"Existing nuclear weapons are already very reliable and their safety features are adequate," he says, and the concern over having an untested weapon in the stockpile will increase the pressure to conduct a nuclear test, he adds.

Paul Guinnessy

Related Physics Today articles
Weapons experts and Congress slow warhead program June 2007

Related Physics Today articles by Davis
Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program July 1992
How close was Iraq to having the bomb? February 1993
Technical and policy issues of counterterrorism—A primer for physicists April 2003

Related Physics Today articles by Marsh
Yields of US and Soviet nuclear tests August 1987
Nuclear test estimates yield criticism June 1988

The Pentagon is signaling to Russia that plans for an extensive European missile defense system (EMDS) could be scaled back.

The original EMDS proposal was to use interceptors similar to those based in Alaska, with a X-band tracking radar located in the Czech Republic and the interceptors based in Poland. The EMDS would protect Europe and the US from missiles launched in the Middle East by destroying them mid-flight.

However Russia objected to the EMDS sites accusing the US of attempting to weaken their security and trying to gain influence in a region that they see as under Russian geo-political influence.

To limit these concerns, and after a new Pentagon analysis suggests the likelihood that the US will face an intercontinental missile threat is a lot weaker than previously believed, the US military is recommending that a land-based SM-3 system be deployed instead says Aviation Week.

The SM-3 can, in theory, destroy mid-range missiles aimed at Europe, but not long-range intercontinental missiles aimed at the US, either from the Middle East or launched from Russia. The SM-3 would still make use of a radar station in the Czech Republic.

"The reality is [long-range intercontinental missiles] did not come as fast as we thought it'd come," said General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaking at a missile-defence conference in Alabama last week.

The Pentagon is currently in the midst of a major review of all its missile defense programs and a number of exotic technologies, such as the Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) are likely to be canceled.

The SM-3 is also seen as cheaper, more reliable system than the original EMDS, and the existing interceptors based in Alaska and at Vandenberg air force base in California should be able to deal with any accidential launches from North Korea.

Paul Guinnessy

As the US nuclear weapons budget has plunged over the past decade, the nation's three weapons laboratories are determined to hold onto a program that they say is now their only source of support dedicated to high-risk research that could have big payoffs. The laboratory-directed research and development program (LDRD) enables the labs to spend 8% of the funding provided by the Department of Energy's weapons and nonproliferation programs for R&D projects of the individual labs' choosing.

"LDRD enables us to conduct high-risk, potentially high-value research in areas that are foundational to national security," said J. Stephen Rottler, vice president for science, technology, and engineering at Sandia National Laboratories, one of the weapons labs. In addition to providing solutions to nuclear weapons and other national security problems, LDRD has helped to prevent technological surprises, Rottler told a Washington, DC, conference on 19 August.

As recently as the early 1990s, DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) included programmatic funding for high-risk basic research in such areas as materials science, Rottler said. But now, the $166 million in LDRD that Sandia will receive in fiscal year 2010 will be the sole source of support NNSA will provide for such basic research.

LDRD projects are competitively selected from proposals submitted by lab staff. Typically, projects involve a few investigators and receive about $450 000 over one to two years. After that, investigators are expected to look to other sponsors for support--whether from NNSA, other DOE programs, or from private industry.

As the labs turn to other federal sponsors to make up for a steady decline in NNSA business, LDRD has become ever more critical in helping the labs attract new scientific talent to their ranks. Unlike NNSA, sponsoring agencies such as the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security pay only for the direct costs of the R&D the labs perform for them; the costs of maintaining the scientific and technical infrastructure fall to NNSA alone. Today, 60% of Sandia's $2.2 billion operating budget comes from non-NNSA sources, Rottler said; not so long ago, 75% came from the DOE nuclear weapons program.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently asked for help from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in making the case for revitalizing the labs. Until 1998-- Chu told PCAST on 6 August--Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos national labs had been "on a 10-year glide path" to halving their NNSA-funded research programs (see "Science key to nuclear labs future says Chu"). While that decline was halted in its eighth year, the NNSA budget hasn't moved upward. At such low levels, Chu said, the labs are "in a bit of a bind" in their efforts to recruit young scientists to work on interesting science.

David Kramer

In the first public meeting of the President’s Council of Advisers in Science and Technology (PCAST), US Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the loss of basic science and technology funding at the nuclear-weapons labs Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore have had an inverse effect in the labs ability to attract "the best and the brightest."

During the 1990s the labs basic research funding was on an “10-year-glide-path” to be cut in half he said, which was only stopped in 1998. "To be blunt," said Chu, "the best and the brightest didn’t want to be weapons designers...they wanted to do good science."

Chu pointed out that this model—of using basic science as the carrot which would eventually lead to an interest in more applied work—has been common at all the major innovation incubators such as the Bell Laboratories or in the weapons labs early history.

How to attract high caliber staff to the weapons labs in the current climate “is an unsolved problem” said Chu, who asked for PCAST to assess ways to attract the best staff to DOE. In the meeting Chu implied that there is currently a review underway of the nuclear weapons management structure.

Chu also expanded on the principles behind his request to Congress to fund centers of excellence in energy research in which DOE would act more like a venture capitalist fund and invest in people, not in individual projects. "In World War II you just picked out outstanding people and gave them a problem and told them to solve it," he said. "They treated problems as triage. You would tackle the hard problem first and move onto the next if it didn't work." A similar attitude needs to exist in energy research he said.

"The key would be the management team and whether they are willing to take on this task," he said. "There are a couple of experiments I want to do in this regard."

Paul Guinnessy

Two former Department of Defense officials from the recent Bush administration—Eric Edelman and Henry Obering—had an opinion piece for the Washington Post last month in which they discussed the Iranian missile threat.

The opinion piece called into question a recent US-Russian joint threat assessment of Iran by the EastWest Institute that included Richard L. Garwin and Theodore A. Postol among their contributors and argued for the rush deployment of a missile defense system in Europe based on the interceptors currently deployed in Alaska.

Although the Washington Post published a letter from Garwin, in which he says missile defense should be held to the same deployment standards of any other weapons system, a longer letter by Garwin and Postol wrote has been circulating on the internet (see below).

Paul Guinnessy

The Wrong Defense and the Wrong Target
by
Richard L. Garwin and Theodore A. Postol
July 8, 2009

Trey Obering and Eric Edelman misrepresent the findings of an East-West Institute study done by a team of Russian and US experts on Iran's Nuclear and Ballistic Missile Programs and then use these misrepresentations to make arguments that are without merit. They claim that a recently tested Iranian solid propellant ballistic missile represents a threat to Europe ("putting much of Europe within range") and imply that the Czech radar and Polish interceptors can counter it when in fact the missile is of too short a range to reach most European capitals and even to be engaged by the European missile defense system they advocate.

They also claim that our report incorrectly identifies and discusses serious limitations of the European Midcourse Radar that Gen. Obering was involved in advocating for the Czech Republic when he was director of the Missile Defense Agency. Our study found that the range of this radar against warheads is so short that it cannot provide even rudimentary discrimination capabilities against warheads and decoys launched from Iran to the eastern two thirds of the continental United States and Northern and Western Europe.

Obering and Edelman state that the radar "has been operated in flight tests in the South Pacific for more than eight years." What they do not say is that the radar was of such short range that it could only be tested against realistic mock warheads at ranges of a few hundred kilometers, where the actual intercept attempts occurred after long-range missiles had already flown thousands of miles to arrive near the radar.

We have recommended to the National Security Adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, that the real capabilities of this radar get high-level technical attention in the president's Missile Defense Review. If this radar does not have the range to discriminate between warheads and decoys, it will mean that the Missile Defense Agency has committed to a radar that would leave two thirds of the eastern part of the continental United States, as well as Northern and Western Europe, with a defense that cannot tell the difference between warheads and countermeasures so simple that it is impossible to believe they would not, and could not, be used.

The other findings of the East-West Institute Study are also relevant to Obering's and Edelman's claims of a dire threat from Iran that requires the immediate adoption of a flawed and untested missile defense system. They are:

Unlike the European missile defense, this defense is not subject to countermeasures. We like it, because we like weapons that work!

Richard L. Garwin is a long-time contributor to U.S. military technology.

Theodore A. Postol is Professor of Science, Technology, and national Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Policy highlights from Science, Nature, and AIP's FYI

As Research Funding Declines, Chávez, Scientists Trade Charges
Science’s Barbara Casassus investigates the status of science in Venezuela as disaffected scientists say they fear that science funding is becoming more politicized, and declining after broad cuts in funding for research institutes. Recently President Hugo Chávez called on his newly appointed science minister, Jesse Chacón Escamillo—who has scant scientific credentials but has been close to Chávez—to "put the screws" on "feeble scientists" to get better results.

Critics say that research is being mismanaged, and that the government has fired, demoted, or blacklisted dissidents.

The European Parliament and its impact on science-related policy
"You can do more for environment legislation in Brussels [at the European Union parliament] through parliamentary committee work than you can in any national parliament," says Chris Davies, a European MP.

"Although it has no tax-raising powers, it can get things done," writes Nature’s Alison Abbott. "And more than any of the other institutions of the EU, it can allow elected individuals to make a difference: personal enthusiasm counts."

The status of DoD science and technology programs
A hearing by a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee provided an overview of the scientific and technological opportunities and challenges facing the Department of Defense and the science community. Among the most important messages: the need for S&T policies and budgets to adjust to changes in today’s battlefields, and to anticipate future war fighting needs says AIP’s Richard M. Jones.

NNSA frozen as Nuclear Posture Review 2010 beckons
Jones also reports on the House hearing on the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) which runs the US nuclear weapons complex. Funding for nuclear weapons is flat while the Obama administration decides what to do with the NNSA. There has been some proposal to move the group from the Department of Energy to the Defense deparmtent.

Chairman Peter Visclosky (D-IN) opened the May 21 hearing by describing a changing threat environment and the importance of the forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review:

The Chair for the subcommittee that hosted the hearing, Peter Visclosky (D-IN) is quoted as saying “The national security requirements for a 21st century nuclear force, in a threat environment driven by smaller but very serious multiple threats, are very different from the national security requirements of our legacy nuclear force, which was driven by the bipolar environment of the Cold War. We need to transition to a 21st century force as soon as is economically and technically possible. I urge the Administration to focus on this transition with a clean-sheet approach, free of reflexive ties to the policies of the past. We are waiting for the Nuclear Posture Review to set the framework of this transition.”

Paul Guinnessy

Last week North Korea claimed to have conducted its second nuclear test, but how big an explosion was it?

Some indications can be found by looking at the first nuclear test the North Koreans conducted in October 2006.

The North Koreans told the Chinese in advance to expect a 4-kiloton yield but the first public estimates were way off. Russia's defense minister Sergey Ivanov claimed that the test was the equivalent of 5–15 kilotons of TNT.

But geologists of the South Korean and French governments, who used better seismic data, rapidly downsized the explosion yield to 0.5–0.8 kilotons. In other words, the explosive device was believed to be a dud and a relative failure compared with other nuclear tests.

This finding was backed up by the office of US Director of National Intelligence who released a statement on 16 October 2006: "Analysis of air samples collected on October 11, 2006 detected radioactive debris which confirms that North Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion in the vicinity of P'unggye on October 9, 2006. The explosion yield was less than a kiloton."

What type of bomb was the first test?

Siegfried Hecker, the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and who had traveled to North Korea to see its nuclear facilities, stated that he thought the underground test was not of a basic implosion device, which is simple to build if you have the nuclear material, but of a more advanced design based on plutonium suitable for delivery on a missile.

The North Koreans are believed to have reprocessed all 8000 fuel rods they removed from International Atomic Energy Agency seals earlier this decade. The rods are estimated to have 25–30 kg of plutonium metal, enough for 3-4 bombs. Since they kicked out the IAEA inspectors, the North Koreans have been creating more plutonium, producing enough for possibly 6 to 12 devices.

Hecker told a Congressional committee that he thought the North Koreans would learn something useful from this first test, despite being unsuccessful.

Estimating the second test
"Earthquakes and nuclear bombs have quite different seismographs," said David Booth of the British Geological Survey to the Guardian's James Sturcke. "Earthquakes happen along fault lines and you get compression waves, known as P–waves, and shear waves from the movement. With a bomb it is mostly just compression waves meaning the seismograph is a lot less complicated." (see left image for the seismic signature of North Korea's second nuclear test)

Martin Kalinowski says—based on what is now known of the first test, and the 4.7–magnitude underground earthquake that was located in northeastern North Korea, about 40 miles northwest of the city of Kimchaek at North Korean's testing facility—this second test most likely has a yield of 4 kilotons.

Andreas Persbo at the Verification, Implementation and Compliance blog thinks it's even smaller, possibly as low as 1.6 kilotons. The Russian conclusions, he says, could be based on not accounting for the shallow water table in the region.

More than 16 seismic stations picked up traces of the explosion, and sent data to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization's International Data Centre in Vienna, Austria. The latest refinement of the data, released earlier today, has narrowed down the location of the explosion.

In the right-hand image, the estimation of the origin of the 2009 event (red) is much more precise than in 2006 (green). The other two ellipses show the first automatic estimation of the 2009 event (blue) and the second (yellow).

Political Impact

Following the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's announcement that it conducted a nuclear test, Peter Shannon, chairman of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear–Test–Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), called the nuclear test "a clear challenge to the international community's efforts to advance global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation."

The Wall Street Journal reported the United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting shortly after the test and "voiced their strong opposition to and condemnation of the nuclear test," said the current council president, Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin.

Churkin said in a statement that council members "demand that [North Korea] comply fully with its obligations" not to conduct tests, under a Security Council resolution passed after Pyongyang announced its first test blast in October 2006.

But the biggest political fallout occurred hours earlier today when North Korea apparently helped break a 12-year stalemate on the fissile-material cut-off treaty. "After more than a decade of deadlock the Conference of Disarmament today took the historic decision to restart work," Britain's ambassador to the arms talks, John Duncan, said in a "tweet" on Twitter.

The conference, which will go on until next thursday, is the only multilateral forum on disarmament issues. The following days will see discussions on global nuclear disarmament, reinserting the doctrine of not using nuclear weapons on nonnuclear states, and a revision to the Outer Space Treaty, which bans space-based weapons. North Korea's ambassador Ri Tcheul's influence on these nuclear issues will be closely watched over the coming week.

Paul Guinnessy

Former American Physical Society president and Princeton physicist William Brinkman has been nominated to head the Office of Science at the Department of Energy (DOE). The announcement came out of the White House on Friday.

Daniel Poneman, a lawyer and former National Security Council official, has been nominated as deputy secretary of energy in charge of the nuclear weapons complex. Poneman is the only nonscientist among the Obama administration's four deputy secretaries nominated to lead DOE.

Michael Nacht, has been nominated for assistant secretary of defense (Global Strategic Affairs) at the Department of Defense.

"I am grateful that these fine individuals have made the admirable decision to serve their country," said President Obama in a released statement. "Their expertise and dedication will be a valuable asset both to my administration and our nation as we work to bring about the real change that the American people need today."

Brinkman

William Brinkman, currently a senior research physicist in the physics department at Princeton University, is the third scientist to be appointed to a high-level position at DOE. He is a former vice president of research at Bell Laboratories and a former vice president of Sandia National Laboratories.

After achieving a PhD in physics from the University of Missouri in 1965 and a one-year fellowship to Oxford University, he joined Bell Laboratories.

In 1972, he became head of the Infrared Physics and Electronics Research Department, and in 1974 became the director of the Chemical Physics Research Laboratory. Seven years later he became director of the Physical Research Laboratory until moving to Sandia in 1984.

He returned to Bell Labs in 1987 to become executive director of the Physics Research Division, eventually rising to vice president of research nine years ago.

Brinkman is a member of the American Physical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has chaired the National Academy of Sciences Physics Survey and the NAS Solid-State Sciences Committee. Brinkman was the recipient of the 1994 George E. Pake Prize.

Poneman

Harvard and Oxford graduate Daniel Poneman has years of experience working on nuclear and defense issues. More than $10 billion per year is spent by DOE on nuclear nonproliferation, superfund cleanup sites such as Hanford, and the stockpile stewardship program.

Since 2001, Poneman has been working for the Scowcroft Group, an international business advisory firm based in Washington, DC. From 1993 through 1996, Poneman served as special assistant to the president and senior director for nonproliferation and export controls at the National Security Council. He joined the NSC staff in 1990 as director of Defense Policy and Arms Control, after serving as a White House Fellow in the Department of Energy.

Poneman has served on several federal commissions and advisory panels, and has authored books on nuclear energy policy.

Nacht

Michael Nacht is currently a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has a BS in aeronautics and astronautics from New York University and began his career working on missile aerodynamics for NASA before earning a PhD in political science at Columbia University.

Nacht served a three-year term as a member of the US Department of Defense Threat Reduction Advisory Committee, for which he chaired panels on counter terrorism and counter proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, reporting to the deputy secretary of defense.

Nacht also consults for Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on arms control issues. From 1994-1997, Nacht was assistant director for Strategic and Eurasian Affairs at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, leading its work on nuclear arms reduction negotiations with Russia and initiating nuclear arms control talks with China. He participated in five summit meetings with President Clinton - four with Russian president Boris Yeltsin and one with Chinese president Jiang Zemin.

Nacht has testified before Congress on subjects ranging from arms control to the supply and demand for scientists in the workplace.

In the last few days, three candidates—from Malaysia, Spain, and Slovenia—have been submitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency's governing board, to replace Mohamed ElBaradei as the agency's head.

ElBaradei has to retire from the IAEA later this year, and a few weeks ago a meeting to appoint his successor ended in failure over concern that the two original candidates—Japanese ambassador Yukiya Amano and South African diplomat Abdul Samad Minty--did not have broad enough support or experience to run the agency. The deadline for submitting the names of new candidates is 27 April.

The first new candidate arose last week when Malaysia submitted Noramly Muslim, chairman of the Malaysian Atomic Energy Licensing Board and a lecturer on atomic technology at the National University of Malaysia. In the mid to late 1980s Muslim served as the IAEA deputy director general for technical cooperation.

In recent years he has been pushing the Malaysian government to develop at least two nuclear power plants to reduce its dependence on oil.

On Wednesday, Spain's representative submitted Luis Echavarri, the director general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency.

Echavarri, who was born in Spain in 1949 and has a series of master's degrees in engineering and business administration, has been with the OECD for the last 12 years. He has been connected to the nuclear industry since 1975, originally working on the Lemoniz, Sayago, and Almaraz nuclear power plants for Westinghouse Electric before moving to a more regulatory role with the Spanish government in 1985.

Slovenia's government on Thursday submitted former diplomat and international legal expert Ernest Petrič. "The government is convinced that the candidate is able to manage the agency professionally and effectively given his personal qualities, diplomatic and managerial experience, and excellent knowledge of the IAEA, as well as of problems and challenges faced by the organization," the Slovenian press agency STA quoted a government press statement as saying.

Petrič, 72, was Slovenia's ambassador to the US, Mexico, Brazil, and the United Nations. Among international organizations, he has represented Slovenia to the IAEA, the UN security council, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He was chair of the IAEA's governing board for 2006–07. Currently he is a judge on Slovenia's Constitutional Court.

The candidates join Japanese ambassador Yukiya Amano, a nonproliferation legal expert and also a former chair of the IAEA's governing board, who resubmitted his application for the position after not receiving enough votes by the member states to win the first time around.

Amano joined the Japanese Foreign Ministry in 1972, rising to the positions of director of the science division, and director of the nuclear energy division. He was appointed director general for arms control and scientific affairs in August 2002 and director general of the Disarmament, Nonproliferation and Science Department in August 2004. He has been one of Japan's main negotiators on a number of arms control treaties, discussing such issues as the comprehensive test ban treaty, extending the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and the verification protocols regarding the biological and chemical weapons

The governing board will vote on the candidates sometime in May.

Paul Guinnessy

A week after Energy Secretary Steven Chu parceled out $1.2 billion in economic stimulus money to the Department of Energy's civilian national laboratories, newly elected senator Tom Udall (D-NM) urged Chu to find additional sources of support for the nuclear weapons labs, which did not receive any of the stimulus funds.

Udall lamented that while Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, both located in New Mexico, have long been performing considerable amounts of work for other federal agencies, the National Nuclear Security Administration pays for nearly all of the expense of maintaining the labs' workforce and facilities needed to fulfill their core missions.

"This has led to wide concern that the budget and mission constraints of the NNSA could lead to its being unable to provide the very necessary capabilities that are so critical to our nation," Udall warned.

While applauding several "strategic partnership agreements" (SPAs) that other agencies have signed with NNSA to share more of the labs' costs, Udall said much more is needed.

"In order to allow other federal agencies to benefit from the expertise and capabilities developed at the NNSA labs, I believe additional resources and commitment should be devoted to expanding the [labs'] mission in general," Udall said in calling for further SPAs. "It is quite clear that each of these labs has recognized the need to diversify their missions, and I firmly believe that we should encourage that diversification, otherwise we risk losing many of the scientists and much of the research that is so crucial and so critical for our national interests."

David Kramer