North Korea today followed through on its pledge to destroy the cooling tower at its Yongbyon nuclear complex, one day after issuing a declaration covering more than two decades of atomic activities, the Washington Post reported (see GSN, June 26).
Pyongyang agreed last year to give up its nuclear operations in exchange for a host of benefits from five nations — China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. To date it has halted operations at Yongbyon and moved to disable three key nuclear plants, including the reactor that produced plutonium for its weapons. After a six-month dormant period during which Pyongyang and Washington debated the contents of the declaration, the denuclearization process picked up steam again this week. Film crews were on hand as the tower came down at roughly 4 p.m. local time (Harden/Wright, Washington Post, June 27). “As you all saw, the cooling tower is no longer there,” Sung Kim, the State Department’s top Korea expert, said after watching the demolition. “It’s a very significant disablement step.” The demolition is seen as a largely symbolic display of North Korea’s good intentions. “By demolishing the tower,” used to disperse heat from the reactor, “North Korea appears to demonstrate that it would not produce any more plutonium,” Seoul-based North Korea expert Kim Yeon-chul told the New York Times (Choe Sang-hun, New York Times, June 28). “This was an active reactor,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said today in Japan during a meeting of the foreign ministers from the Group of Eight nations. “This was a reactor that was making plutonium, that made plutonium for several devices. … So it is important to put North Korea out of the plutonium business.” The Bush administration, which once included Pyongyang in the “axis of evil,” announced after the declaration was released yesterday that it would begin the 45-day process of removing North Korea from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. It also freed the Stalinist state from some restrictions under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Chinese officials in Beijing received the document, which addresses three plutonium-production programs in the 1990s and this decade, one high-level State Department official told the Post. It is expected to detail Pyongyang’s plutonium stockpile — some of which was used in an October 2006 nuclear test blast — but not its weapons holdings. Also omitted are suspected uranium enrichment and nuclear proliferation activities, specifically regarding Syria. The Bush administration had previously demanded that those matters be addressed in the declaration. In April, with the denuclearization agreement faltering under the dispute, Washington reportedly accepted a compromise under which Pyongyang acknowledged U.S. concerns on those issues in a separate document. “There is some important progress represented by the agreement, but it’s a worrisome omission with regard to Syria and highly enriched uranium. So there’s a lot missing in this deal, and a lot wrong with this deal,” said Korea expert and former Bush administration official Michael Green. Pyongyang, he said, “may conclude there is no serious consequence for testing weapons or transferring technology” (Harden/Wright, Post). Washington has pledged to conduct an intense verification program on North Korea’s claims, which would include rooting out any “discrepancies” in the declaration, Agence France-Presse reported. “A comprehensive verification regime would include, among other things, short-notice access to declared or suspect sites related to the North Korean nuclear program (and) access to nuclear materials,” according to a State Department statement. Also expected are “environmental and bulk sampling of materials and equipment, interviews with personnel in North Korea, as well as access to additional documentation and records for all nuclear-related facilities and operations,” the department said (Agence France-Presse I/Spacewar.com, June 26). The next anticipated step in the six-party process would be another round of full negotiations aimed at moving North Korea toward full dismantlement of its nuclear complex and, ultimately, its weapons. “How this process will work out in the end and whether they’ll give up their nuclear weapons, frankly, I think nobody knows the answer right now,” said Defense Secretary Robert Gates (Anne Gearan, Associated Press/Washington Post, June 27). “We know North Korea has a record of not living up to its obligations. So we are going to monitor very carefully,” Rice said. “We also have serious questions about highly enriched uranium programs in North Korea as well as proliferation activities. So there is a long road ahead.” The G-8 foreign ministers in a joint statement today urged “abandonment of all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs by North Korea,” AFP reported (Agence France-Presse II/Spacewar.com, June 27). Meanwhile, Japan said today it would continue developing defenses against North Korea’s present nuclear threat, AFP reported. “Nuclear weapons development by North Korea is extremely worrying for our country,” said Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba. “It’s important to keep proceeding with the missile defense (system) that Japan and the United States have been jointly working on” (see GSN, Jan. 29; Agence France-Presse III/Interactive Investor, June 27).
Recent reports of inadequate security over U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe have spotlighted the danger of nuclear terrorism and the need to improve U.S.-Russian cooperation, a proliferation expert said this week (see GSN, June 19). In February, a U.S. Air Force panel completed a security review of European air bases that house U.S. nuclear weapons and concluded that “most sites require significant additional resources to meet [Defense Department] security requirements.” The review was triggered in part by an August 2007 incident in which Air Force crews lost track of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles (see GSN, June 9). “Nuclear terrorism is the greatest threat we face, and there must be no higher priority than the security of all nuclear weapons and materials,” former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), now head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told Global Security Newswire this week. “The Air Force's reported conclusion that most bases that store U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe do not meet security requirements is another wake-up call about nuclear risks and the dangers of the status quo.” The Air Force study hinted at plans to consolidate the Pentagon’s Europe-based nuclear weapons, currently consisting of up to 240 B-61 gravity bombs kept in five nations, according to an estimate released this week by the Federation of American Scientists. More than 100 B-61s were quietly removed recently from a British air base, according to the FAS assessment (see GSN, June 26). Fearing the prospect of terrorist theft, Washington has pressed Moscow since the end of the Cold War to consolidate Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons into fewer storage sites with better security. The U.S. action to downsize its own nonstrategic arsenal in Europe could strengthen the U.S. argument. “Smaller and more portable weapons are inviting targets for terrorists and are more of a threat than a protection to the United States, our allies and Russia,” Nunn said, urging the two nuclear superpowers to address the threat together. “The recently reported security concerns underscore both the urgency of the problem and the necessity for cooperation,” he said. Nunn’s comments followed a speech he delivered earlier this month in Germany lamenting the continued existence of tactical nuclear weapons. “Welcome to the end of the Cold War — battlefield nukes are still in vogue and for the first time, both Russia and NATO have reserved the right to use nuclear weapons first, even if not attacked with nuclear weapons. Together, are we inadvertently and unthinkingly headed ‘back to the future?’” he said. Nunn urged Washington and Moscow to stop antagonizing each other and to coordinate their efforts to address shared threats. “Whether caused by the absence of vision, a lack of political will, or nostalgia for the Cold War, the failure of both sides to forge a mutually beneficial and durable security relationship marks a collective failure of leadership in Washington, European capitals and Moscow,” he said in the speech at the American Academy in Berlin. He suggested that both U.S. and Russian leaders should reconsider provocative policies, such as U.S. support for expanding NATO into the former Soviet sphere, U.S. adherence to Cold War nuclear doctrines, Russian pressure on neighboring nations, and Moscow’s willingness to leverage its energy resources for political gains. “If we are to be successful in dealing with the hydra-headed threats of emerging new nuclear weapons states, proliferation of enrichment, poorly secured nuclear material and catastrophic terrorism — many nations must cooperate. We must recognize, however, that these tasks are virtually impossible without the cooperation of Russia,” Nunn said. “It is abundantly clear that Russia itself faces these same threats and that its own security is dependent on cooperation with NATO and the United States” (Greg Webb, Global Security Newswire, June 27). [Editor’s Note: Sam Nunn is co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. NTI is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by the National Journal Group.]
By Elaine M. Grossman
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON—The Bush administration has offered new details about how it would produce new nuclear weapon cores — or recycle existing ones — for its proposed next-generation Reliable Replacement Warhead (see GSN, Oct. 1, 2007). The information is included in a new plan addressing concerns from a panel of experts, voiced last year, about establishing the reliability of a new nuclear weapon absent explosive testing. The White House has proposed building the Reliable Replacement Warhead as a safer, more reliable and affordable nuclear weapon than those currently in the stockpile. Its advocates say the new weapon could be produced and maintained without explosive testing, a feature that many lawmakers demand but one that might be technically daunting to achieve. The National Nuclear Security Administration submitted the 11-page executive summary of its “Advanced Certification” program plan to key congressional committees last month. The document outlines both existing and new efforts dedicated to increasing confidence that the next-generation Reliable Replacement Warhead would function as expected. The document responds point-by-point to the 2007 recommendations issued by the JASON group, a panel of scientists often tapped by the national security and intelligence communities to review technical issues. The nuclear agency, a semiautonomous arm of the Energy Department, in its report accepted all of the panel’s recommendations and detailed several steps it is taking to implement them. One concern the JASON panel raised was that any slight changes in manufacturing the first RRW design — compared to the production of older warheads with proven designs — could mean the difference between the new warhead firing or misfiring, if ever used in combat. “This will require additional experiments and computer simulations beyond those presented in the certification plan,” the group said, referring to the nuclear agency’s initial concepts for verifying the new warhead’s reliability. One area of particular worry for the panel related to manufacturing pits, the core of a nuclear weapon. The scientists questioned how the U.S. national laboratories could reliably predict whether these complex components could actually produce an explosion, in cases where a pit either was recycled from a dismantled weapon or manufactured for the new warhead. The NNSA plan offers some examples of where it plans to explore “alternate methodologies” to build and certify reliable pits: —Sensitivity to chemistry: The current approach to building pits holds plutonium impurities to a bare minimum to boost reliability. However, the production processes to remove impurities “are labor intensive and generate an expensive waste stream,” according to the report. So the agency would attempt to determine if more impurities could be tolerated. “Efforts to better define primary performance sensitivity to the presence of impurities could result in improved ease of certification if higher contaminant levels are allowed,” the NNSA program officials stated. —Inspection requirements: Similarly, current inspection techniques can be expensive and challenging. “Preliminary studies have indicated that inspections requiring fewer data points and using modern techniques could provide adequate confidence,” according to the report. —Surface specification: Presently, specifications for the exterior surface of finished pits are extremely rigorous, requiring that they are “defect- and anomaly-free,” according to John Broehm, an NNSA spokesman. That makes for a high rejection rate, the report states. Yet, “the uncertainty increases due to these conditions [are] not well defined, making part rejection somewhat arbitrary,” according to the document. The agency proposed taking additional efforts to better define the uncertainties related to finished pits. “The NNSA report is nothing earth-shattering,” said one House aide familiar with the issue. However, lawmakers intend to continue to monitor advanced certification plans closely in the event they are needed, the staffer added. The agency plans to spend $20 million in fiscal 2009 on advanced certification activities, increasing to nearly $30 million next year and maintaining a similar level through 2013, according to a chart included in the report. The fiscal 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act required the Bush administration to submit the report. Lawmakers sought the report as a means of forcing the nuclear agency to specify how it would address the JASON concerns, according to one aide close to the issue. An additional motivation, this source said, was to help Congress discern what RRW-related activities continue to take place in the absence of substantial funding for the new warhead. For the coming fiscal year, the House Appropriations Committee this week passed an energy and water bill that zeroes the administration’s RRW request of $10 million for RRW design activities (see GSN, June 26). “The administration promotes the advantages of a new design offering better surety, better reliability and lower yield,” House Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee Chairman Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) said June 17, “but RRW was offered in a vacuum and there was no new strategy behind it.”
A U.S. panel of disaster and medical experts met this week in Washington to discuss preparedness for a possible act of nuclear terrorism, the San Francisco Chronicle reported today (see GSN, March 22, 2007). Convened by the National Academy of Sciences, the experts fretted about the risks of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons. “The risk is there — it's not zero," said committee Chairman Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “We don't know where all the suitcase nukes are. They are out there, and we know the bad guys are trying to get their hands on them. ... If there is a catastrophic event, there are things we can do to prepare for it and to mitigate the effects if it happens.” At the moment, however, city and state authorities would probably find themselves completely overwhelmed following a nuclear detonation, said another participant. “Few of them have coordinated response plans for the aftermath of nuclear terrorism,” said Brooke Buddemeier of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “There is a general lack of understanding of the response needs and uncertainty over federal, state and local roles and responsibilities.” Panel members have begun examining six metropolitan areas that are most likely to be struck by terrorist attack, the Chronicle reported: Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco and Washington. Even a small nuclear blast in any of those areas would create casualties that would quickly exceed hospitals’ capacity. “It will be very difficult to get to those beds,” said Cham Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense. “The roads will be clogged. Access to helicopters will be very limited. The federal response is not likely to be significant in the first 48 hours, as we saw with Hurricane Katrina.” “Physicians are going to have to have moral courage,” added John Mercier of the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Maryland. “They are going to have to decide there are not enough resources for this person or that person” (Zachary Coile, San Francisco Chronicle, June 27).
A major Israeli air force exercise conducted over the Mediterranean Sea this month appears, according to observers, aimed more as a warning to the international community over Iran’s nuclear efforts than as preparation for an imminent attack, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, June 26). U.S. officials suggested last week that the drill was a rehearsal for an air strike aimed at slowing Iran’s nuclear program, which Israel, the United States and other nations suspect is geared toward developing a nuclear weapon (see GSN, June 20). However, Greece, which participated in the drill, discounted the analysis. "The exercise has no connection with Israeli 'preparations' for an attack on Iran, as has been inaccurately reported," Greek government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said, noting that Israeli aircraft in the exercise neither flew at the low altitude necessary for an attack nor simulated evading the air-defenses they would encounter in an actual strike. Israeli officials said the attack was not preparation for a strike although Jerusalem is preparing for possible military action. Retired Israeli Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon told AP that the drill might have been intended to intimidate Iran. "It might be a good idea," he added. "I read the newspapers in the last week and I enjoyed it." Israel has not ruled out military action to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but it has said it would prefer to address the stalemate through diplomatic means. Israeli Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz said this month that Israel would be forced to attack Iran if Tehran does not halt its uranium enrichment program, which could produce a nuclear weapon ingredient. Iran insists the program would only generate nuclear power plant fuel. "From what I've understood, this should primarily be seen as an exercise in psychological warfare, although the possibility that it is also related to genuine preparations for an attack on Iran should not be excluded," said Mouin Rabbani, an independent Middle East analyst (Amy Teibel, Associated Press/International Herald Tribune, June 26). Meanwhile, foreign ministers from the Group of Eight industrialized nations today issued a statement pressing Iran to halt uranium enrichment, Agence France-Presse reported. The powers “strongly urge” Iran to provide full nuclear transparency to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the statement says. "We also urge Iran to act in a more responsible and constructive manner in the region, particularly in the context of the Middle East peace process and the stability of Iraq and Afghanistan," states the document from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States (Agence France-Presse/Google News, June 27).
A group of U.S. lawmakers yesterday called for a renewed effort by Washington to gain access to former Pakistani nuclear proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan to learn more of his former smuggling activities, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, June 20). Khan has confessed, then recanted, to leading a network that supplied uranium enrichment technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, and a recent report suggested that the smuggling ring might have also delivered the design for a compact, advanced nuclear warhead (see GSN, June 18). Pakistani officials have prevented outside investigators from speaking with Khan, maintaining that the United States has received all information provided by Khan to Pakistani interrogators. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, four leading members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee call a nuclear-armed Iran “one of the gravest national security threats facing the United States and our friends and allies. “Now, more than ever, we must be allowed to gain direct access to A.Q. Khan to conduct a full investigation and find out what designs were smuggled and to whom. The United States no longer has the luxury of relying on secondhand information from Pakistani authorities on Khan's activities where our fundamental national security is concerned,” the letter states. The Bush administration has not asked Pakistan’s new civilian government if it could interrogate Khan, recently installed Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani told AP last week. However, Haqqani added that Islamabad could still not grant the United States access to Khan due to the scientist’s thorough knowledge of Pakistan’s nuclear activities. The letter was submitted to Rice by committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.); ranking Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.); Representative Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), head of the committee’s panel on the Middle East and South Asia; and Representative Mike Pence (Ind.), the top Republican on the subcommittee (Associated Press/International Herald Tribune, June 26).
The Y-12 nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee on Wednesday marked the completion of its B-61 gravity bomb refurbishing project, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported (see GSN, March 20, 2007). To extend the life of the B-61, the plant overhauled the “canned subassemblies” holding the weapons’ second stages. A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration said he could not disclose the number of bombs involved in the three-year effort The Y-12 plant built components for a strategic version of the B-61 nuclear weapon and a “bunker-buster” version dubbed Mod 11, according to the NNSA office in Oak Ridge, Tenn. (Frank Munger, Knoxville News Sentinel, June 26).
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