Forensics Policy Debate Edges Toward Spotlight

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — A year and a half ago, the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s John Harvey stood in a hotel conference room six blocks from the White House and roughly outlined a weighty problem (see GSN, Oct. 20, 2006).

“The problem is we want to avoid nuclear detonation on U.S. soil with no clear origin,” he said.

It was a question about deterrence in a post-Cold War era where Mutually Assured Destruction can become obsolete in the face of stateless terrorism.

“Once a terrorist gets his hands on a nuclear explosive, we don’t necessarily believe we can deter him from using it … for obvious reasons,” he said, addressing a national security conference.

What Harvey, director of the administration’s policy planning staff, was suggesting was that the terrorism may not be deterrable, but the nuclear element could be.

Harvey’s goal is to “dissuade rogue states from transferring nuke warheads to terrorist groups.”

The question of just how to deter that transfer, or the transfer of fissile material that could fuel a bomb, has been gaining increased attention since Harvey’s speech and seems poised to move further into the spotlight in the coming year.

Keeping fissile materials or warheads out of the hands of terrorists could hinge on what experts call nuclear forensics and attribution — the idea that technicians and scientists could sift through the debris of a nuclear attack and determine where the bomb’s material came from.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is in the very early stages of a study on nuclear forensics, and the Homeland Security Department has plans for a White House exercise exploring forensic capabilities after a domestic nuclear explosion.

With robust forensics and attribution capabilities — paired with a declared retaliatory policy — the United States could, in effect, hold nuclear states around the world accountable for a nuclear transfer.

For such a dissuasive policy to work, Harvey noted that the United States would have to provide some “selected insights” into the capability of the U.S. forensics program.  However, Washington would also need to be careful to avoid releasing sensitive information that could help producers of fissionable material disguise their product.

That concern is apparent in the infrequent and cryptic nature of the public comments from government officials on anything related to the U.S. ability to conduct nuclear forensics.

Despite the sensitive nature of the issue, however, the topic has been migrating closer to the spotlight.  An upcoming report from the Preventive Defense Project, a joint research initiative between Stanford and Harvard led by former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Assistant Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, is expected to touch on post-explosion forensics and attribution.

“The whole issue of nuclear terrorism and how to prevent it, deter it, deal with it if it happens is getting more attention,” Michael May, a professor of engineering at Stanford and expert on nuclear issues, said recently in an e-mail.  “It has moved forward to the extent of raising it higher in the consciousness of those people who have to do something about it.”

How well or how quickly the United States could pinpoint the source of fissile material following an attack of nuclear terrorism, however, still remains difficult to determine based on official comments.

While there have been optimistic statements made to the press, some experts have cautioned that attribution capabilities are still lacking.  In February 2006 a defense document obtained by the New York Times described an “initial integrated operational attribution capability for accurate and rapid attribution.”

Contradicting that view, experts and some in the scientific community have suggested there are certain cases where pinpointing the source of nuclear material would simply be impossible and there remains work to be done in the area (see GSN, July 28, 2006).

The science of nuclear forensics was deployed during the Cold War but earnest research into the attribution of a domestic nuclear event began in 1999, spearheaded by the Defense Department and its Defense Threat Reduction Agency.  Then following the North Korean nuclear test in October 2006 the subject received a more thorough airing in the media than it ever had before (see GSN Oct. 17, 2006).

That month, Stanford’s May, Jay Davis, founding head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and Raymond Jeanloz, a professor of planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley and nuclear expert, jointly published an article in Nature.

They wrote that an isotopic signature would be available within hours after a terrorist nuclear detonation, but determining where that material came from hinges on already having a database of existing nuclear signatures.  It is that database that some experts suggest remains incomplete.

Scientific analysis can indicate how long it has been since plutonium has been reprocessed, where uranium was mined based on its composition and even the process that was used to enrich it.  Such information might not conclusively identify a source but could eliminate possibilities, they note.

In their article May, Davis and Jeanloz propose creating an international data bank that would “greatly reduce the time between this most terrible of events and the ability to respond to it.”  Pulling together such a database of nuclear information would require extensive international cooperation.

The United States has developed its own database based on its nuclear weapons test programs and monitoring of atmospheric nuclear tests conducted during the Cold War.  U.S. officials continue to add information to the database, but comments from the head of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, Vayl Oxford, carefully avoid any specificity about the completeness of that catalogue.

Oxford’s office, a division within the Homeland Security Department, launched its National Nuclear Forensics Center in October 2006, just before the North Korea nuclear test.  Staffed with Defense Department, Energy Department and FBI officials in addition to the DHS staff, the center is working on an “integrated plan” to respond to a nuclear event, Oxford said during a May 24 address (see GSN, May 25).

“I’ve challenged them to come up with a forensics and attribution exercise at the Cabinet level by March 2008,” he said.  “We need to know by then how well we stand in the community, and there’s been a lot of dialogue on whether we can do this or not do this.  We need to challenge the community to show where we are in about a year’s time.”

In developing the U.S. forensics and attribution capability, the DNDO national forensics center is coordinating efforts with the national laboratories to make the U.S. nuclear database as complete as possible, Oxford said.

“You need to do a lot of that detailed science characterization of the material upfront,” he said.  “Our job is to make sure that that knowledge base exists so that in a pinch you have something to reference.”

In actually conducting forensics work Lawrence Livermore and Savannah River national laboratories function as “hubs” for the efforts, farming out specialized analysis to other national laboratories.

Across the science complex, a core group of 30 to 50 scientists would collaborate on nuclear forensic cases, according to a February article in Science & Technology Review, a journal published by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The utility of nuclear forensic techniques could, however, be degraded by the proliferation of one type of uranium enrichment technology through the black market network once led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.  With the same centrifuge technology transferred from Pakistan to Iran and North Korea, the signature of highly enriched uranium from a number of locations could be difficult to differentiate, former Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gallucci has suggested (see GSN, June 21, 2006).  The deterrent affect of attribution could be eroded as a result.

Despite increased focus on the need for such a U.S capability the science has not progressed quickly and remains roughly where it was last year or the year before, said Charles Ferguson, a science and technology fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations.

“In general, I think the technological problems are pretty well known,” he said.  “Ideally, you’d like have a library of nuclear materials from every country.  I think in practice we’re never going to get to that level.”

With the hope of increasing that library, Oxford said U.S. officials plan to discuss the issue with the the International Atomic Energy Agency.  In addition, nuclear forensics will be the subject of talks between the Homeland Security Department and its international counterparts during a pair of linked security conferences to be held next month in Miami and Kazakhstan.

The study from the American Association for the Advancement of Science is to be chaired by Michael May but has yet to be rigidly defined, AAAS project director Benn Tannenbaum said.

Tannenbaum said the idea was sparked by the May, Davis and Jeanloz piece from late last year and the hope is the study can provide a survey of the forensics and attribution landscape.

“It’s going to frame what kind of questions you should and could be asking,” he said.  “Can you use forensics as tool for nonproliferation?”

Publicly, very little has been advanced by the White House regarding the the use of attribution to deter nuclear transfers and terrorism.  The most explicit comment came on Oct. 9, following the North Korean detonation of a sub-kiloton nuclear explosion.

President George W. Bush drew a clear line for North Korean leadership.  The rogue regime had already demonstrated at least a limited nuclear capability, and Bush warned that a nuclear transfer to a terrorist group would spur repercussions.

Such a transfer would be “considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequence of such action,” he said.  Determining the North Korean provenance of any nuclear material could come through intelligence gathering or, if material was actually intercepted or used, through nuclear forensics.

A more explicitly spelled out or expansive policy could be problematic, putting the United States in what some call a “commitment bind.”  If a bomb were to go off on U.S. soil and it was determined to be a stolen Russian warhead, attacking Moscow in return would be an unattractive option, Ferguson points out.

Of course, as Harvey noted a year and a half ago, such a declared retaliatory policy could prompt a nation to be more forthcoming about a missing weapon.  Simply put, “you lose a weapon, you better tell us,” he said.

Even given the deterrent possibilities of attribution technology, keeping the material locked up and secure remains the most favorable option to prevent a nuclear terrorism event, both Ferguson and May point out.

“I think we have to come up with a whole suite of responses to encourage countries to secure their material more effectively,” Ferguson said.

Still, May said, it is important to prepare for the possibility of a domestic nuclear attack, and attribution plays into that.

“Prevention is best, and locking up the material is moving forward slowly, I understand,” May wrote in an e-mail.  “But preparing to deal with it can make a huge amount of difference in the consequences of what would be in any case a catastrophe.  Not only can thousands of lives be saved with good preparation, but the country’s democratic institutions would have a much better chance of surviving also.”

Back to top
About Newswire  |  Contact National Journal  |  Re-Use Guidelines © Copyright 2008 by National Journal Group, Inc. The material in this section is produced independently for NTI by National Journal Group, Inc. Any reproduction or retransmission, in whole or in part, is a violation of federal law and is strictly prohibited without the consent of the National Journal Group, Inc. All rights reserved.