By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — U.S. efforts to develop a low-yield deep earth-penetrating nuclear weapon could produce pressure within the government to end its moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, a scientific expert said yesterday.
Princeton University physicist Robert Nelson told Global Security Newswire the testing would be sought to certify the nuclear warhead would produce a precisely sized explosion after undergoing the significant force needed to send it deep underground.
Precision of yield is necessary to accurately anticipate potential radioactive fallout and civilian casualties, he said.
To reliably produce a low-yield blast equivalent to 100 tons of TNT — or less than 1 percent of the bomb used on Hiroshima during World War II — “the critical mass that’s being produced in the explosion has to be finely tuned to be just a tiny bit over critical,” Nelson said.
“And in your design, just the shape of the material, how the neutrons propagate through it during the explosion, if you’re off just a little bit, you could end up generating a five-ton explosion or a 500-ton explosion,” he said.
U.S. military doctrine requires that commanders weigh potential collateral damage, which involves taking into account the known capability of a nuclear weapon, before recommending use of such a weapon to the president.
Current Restrictions
Although former President Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, the U.S. Senate later rejected the treaty. President George W. Bush has indicated he will not ratify the treaty, but has also said he has no plans for breaking the 10-year moratorium initiated by his father on U.S. nuclear weapons testing.
Bush will not rule testing out, however, and his fiscal 2003 budget requests Energy Department funding to shorten the preparation time to conduct a test and for continuing study on various options for earth-penetrating warheads (see GSN, March 22).
Furthermore, if the United States did wish to develop a low-yield weapon, it would need Congress to overturn a 1994 law prohibiting research and development on them that said, “low-yield nuclear weapons blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.”
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham told a March 14 hearing that no testing is required “at this time.”
“We have not examined nor is it even in the current discussion stages as to the issue of any kind of need for testing,” he said.
Surviving Impact
A key challenge for U.S. earth penetrator designers is in developing a casing for the warhead that can withstand the force necessary to plow it deep enough to better contain a small nuclear explosion — without significantly damaging the warhead, Nelson said.
“If you impact the ground too fast, the missile will just crumble,” said Nelson.
Another possibly more urgent challenge, he said, is to protect the weapon’s electronics from the rapid deceleration of the warhead as it burrows down.
Current earth-penetrating technology can burrow a warhead as deep as 50 feet into the earth, he said. The depth needed to contain a one-kiloton explosion is 300 feet, he said.
Testing Without the Blast?
Two U.S. national laboratories are studying two designs, the B61 and the B83, for modification to provide an enhanced earth-penetrating capability that could be used for striking enemy bunkers or cave hideouts deep underground. The studies are expected to run through the next three years (see GSN, March 19).
An earth penetrator, the B61-11, was developed in the mid-1990s, incorporating the B61 into a hard, protective casing for penetration.
Nuclear blast testing was not done on the modified weapon. Rather, the weapon, minus the nuclear material, was tested, according to Jay Coghlan, director of the arms control organization Nuclear Watch of New Mexico.
There is a lot of testing that can be done on the system without actually conducting a nuclear test, Nelson said.
“My belief is that there will be a lot of pressure to test it because they won’t be able to guarantee a particular sized yield, because it is very sensitive at these low values,” he said.
Low-Yield Under Consideration?
Cornell University physicist Kurt Gottfried raised questions about Nelsons comments about the precision of low-yield penetrator warheads.
“It’s my understanding that [destroying a deeply buried, hardened bunker] can’t be done with a low-yield weapon, period,” he said, citing a recent Los Angeles Times opinion piece by a former high-level Sandia scientist and a 2000 paper by Stephen Younger, associate Los Alamos director in charge of nuclear weapons research.
The Times article said for a warhead penetrated at 50 feet, yields greater than 1 kiloton would be required to damage hardened targets deeper than about 200 feet.
“Much larger yields — in the range of 100 kilotons or more — are needed to create enough ground shock to destroy a hardened structure at a 1,000-foot depth,” it said.
Just how low a yield is being considered by the laboratories is not public.
Neither the B61 nor B83 is a low-yield weapon, Abraham told the committee. Both have yields substantially higher than five kilotons he said.
According to information published by the Federation of American Scientists, though, the B61-11 has a yield range of 300 tons to 340 kilotons.
Nelson says there are people within the Energy Department pressing for development of low-yield nuclear weapons.
Younger in his article, in fact, argued low-yield nuclear weapons could be used to destroy hardened targets, though not very deeply buried targets, causing fewer civilian casualties than might larger yield.
Minimizing Casualties
Nelson in much-reported analysis in a Federation of American Scientists newsletter last year, wrote that even a buried low-yield explosion would create a large radioactive crater and spread deadly radioactive fallout widely.
Significant civilian casualties are almost inevitable using even a low-yield weapon, particularly in an urban area, because of limitations on the technology for delivering it deep enough to be contained, he said in the interview.
“What I can say with confidence is no matter what you do, you’re never going to be able to penetrate deeply enough into the ground to contain the explosion and to contain the fallout to protect anybody on the surface,” said Nelson.
By Greg Seigle
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — National Nuclear Security Administration reorganization plans look good on paper but more needs to be done for the Energy Department agency to streamline operations and improve performance, according to a three-year study to be released soon.
Management plans recently announced by NNSA Administrator John Gordon, a retired Air Force general, could bolster morale and productivity of the 3-year-old agency, but more must be done to meet today’s needs, including the hiring of its own chief financial officer, according to John Foster, head of a congressionally mandated panel on the U.S. nuclear weapons.
“The panel’s view is that Gen. Gordon has kind of a mess on his hands,” Foster told the House Armed Service’s special oversight panel to assess the reliability, safety and security of the U.S. nuclear stockpile last week (see GSN, March 22).
The Problems
“The opinion that you find expressed at the laboratories, and to some extent at the plants, is that the functional processes that are imposed on them is worse now than it was when NNSA was established,” Foster said. “It’s very disturbing … the panel has difficulty trying to understand why with all the money and the tasks that need to be done, we can’t get on with it.”
The agency is slated to receive about $8 billion as part of the $21.9 billion Energy is requesting for fiscal 2003, funds that must be put to good use to secure and improve “a weapons complex that has atrophied to a point not fully appreciated by many,” Foster said (see GSN, Feb. 19).
“We have tied up the management of the company — of the laboratories and the plants, performing endless studies and reviews in order to see whether or not we can do this or do that. Things we used to do in the matter of a week now can take months,” Foster told lawmakers.
“It is just incredibly process-oriented. And these processes do not add to safety or security. In fact, in some cases they actually hurt the situation,” Foster added. “The weapons program has, in the view of the panel, reached a watershed. Confidence in the nuclear test pedigree is deteriorating.”
The agency should hire a chief financial officer who can address all of the agency’s bureaucratic requirements, reporting not only to Congress and the Defense Department but also Energy, he said. In addition, the agency must create a resource plan that explains just how it will address the challenges faced by the stockpile stewardship program, which oversees the safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, Foster said.
If NNSA is unable to makes these changes, Congress should take further action to strengthen its mandate and provide the support it would need, Foster said, stopping short of saying NNSA should become a completely separate entity from Energy.
A chief NNSA financial officer, Foster said, will free Gordon from the “struggle” to report to the chief financial officer for the department — and from reporting to Congress, Defense and the National Weapons Council.
NNSA Responds
Gordon has created a reorganization plan that will take time to show results, according to a March 15 letter to Foster from Everett Beckner, NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs, obtained by Global Security Newswire.
“The report indicates dissatisfaction with the progress of the NNSA and its degree of autonomy, and recommends that if the rate of progress is inadequate that Congress should examine alternatives for managing the weapons program,” Beckner wrote.
“Apparently, the panel feels that the Office of the Secretary of Energy has been deficient in support National Nuclear Security Administration, or otherwise hard to deal with,” Beckner continued. “In fact the secretary has been very supportive of all issues brought before him by Gen. Gordon.”
Last month Gordon told the special oversight panel that the agency plans to take several steps to streamline and improve operations, including consolidation of headquarters resources and reshuffling decision-making processes with the creation of a new management council (see GSN, Feb. 28).
Foster said the reorganization plan put forth by Gordon could improve the performance of the agency, but only if it is followed very closely.
Recommendations for NNSA
Foster’s panel recommends that “every option” be considered to meet the “unprecedented challenge” facing U.S. nuclear laboratories and production facilities, whose inefficiency wastes up to $1 billion a year, Foster said.
“If he is very forceful and one will not stand for deviations, then … the panel’s view is that he can make it,” Foster said.
Regardless, more reorganization must occur than what Gordon has planned thus far, Foster said.
In its final report, the Foster panel is expected to recommend that Energy and the NNSA:
* Establish clear lines of authority, responsibility and accountability, definitions that are buttressed by the presence of chief financial officer.
* Work with Defense to define the strategic direction, priorities and deliverables for the weapons program.
* Rebuff detailed “how to” directives from government officials in functional areas such as environmental safety and health, security and program work.
* Identify, scrub and reduce costs of staff activities.
According to Foster the agency should also work with Defense to strengthen the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s programs for understanding weapons’ effects, create systematic annual assessment of Defense’s delivery platforms and integrated nuclear systems that parallel the processes for the weapons stockpile, and reassess the need for certain weapons requirements in view of the latest Nuclear Posture Review, especially those relating to hostile environments.
If Russia decides to construct a nuclear power plant in North Korea, it could threaten recent improvements in U.S.-Russian relations, a senior U.S. official said yesterday, following a statement by Russian Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev Wednesday that Russia is considering such a move (see GSN, Feb. 21).
“For the Russians to do this is a very, very bad sign and would add one more burden to the relationship on nonproliferation and one more important topic we’ve got to get straight with them,” the official told Reuters.
Rumyantsev’s statement came a few days after the United States said it would not certify North Korean compliance with the 1994 Agreed Framework, under which North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for the U.S.-led construction of two nuclear reactors and other forms of aid (see GSN, March 21).
“This is very bad news at a time when we were expressing our doubts about North Korean compliance with the Agreed Framework,” the U.S. official said.
Rumyantsev had also said Russia would continue constructing a nuclear reactor in Iran. Although the United States opposes Russian assistance to Iran, Russian insistence on continuing the project is unlikely to severely disrupt U.S.-Russian relations, the official said (see related GSN story, today).
If Russia expands such assistance to other countries, however, “it would be a big problem,” the official said (Reuters, March 29).
Rumyantsev said Russia is considering a North Korean request to build a nuclear power plant.
“We are holding discussions and trying to figure out whether it would be economically feasible,” Rumyantsev said. “But these are only discussions without any specific foundation” (Vladimir Isachenkov, Associated Press/Washington Times, March 28).
Russia plans to complete construction of a nuclear power reactor in Iran by 2005, despite U.S. protests, Russian Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev said Wednesday (see GSN, Feb. 20).
Russia will take back spent fuel from the site at Bushehr and reprocess it in Russia as part of a law Russia passed last year that strengthens nonproliferation, Rumyantsev said.
“We will ship nuclear fuel to Iran under the contract, which envisages that the spent fuel will be taken back to Russia,” he said (see GSN, Feb. 15).
The United States has repeatedly asked Russia to end its $800 million, 1995 contract with Iran due to U.S. concerns that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons (see GSN, Feb. 7).
Russia has said the reactor is only useful for civilian purposes, and Rumyantsev noted that Iran abides by international nonproliferation agreements, such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
“Iran has signed all required international agreements and undertaken full obligations on transparency and checks … and unfailingly fulfilled them,” he said, adding that the reactor would be under International Atomic Energy Agency oversight.
Russia is not doing anything to help Iran develop a nuclear arsenal, Rumyantsev said. “There has been no other cooperation that could help Iran build nuclear weapons,” he said.
Rumyantsev expressed a desire to find a compromise with the United States that would alleviate some U.S. concerns “while allowing Russia to reap economic benefits.”
The Russian minister also said Russia is considering building a nuclear power plant in North Korea (see related GSN story, today) (Vladimir Isachenkov, Associated Press/Washington Times, March 28).
A U.S. Energy Department commission has arrived in Zheleznogorsk to inspect the production and storage of weapon-grade plutonium there, RFE/RL Newsline reported yesterday (see GSN Jan. 9). The inspection is scheduled to last through April 7.
Two reactors at the Zheleznogorsk nuclear power plant were shut down in the 1990s, but one still remains in operation to provide power to the city, said plant spokesman Pavel Morozov. That third reactor is scheduled to be shut down once the city has a new source of electricity, Morozov said (RFE/RL Newsline, March 28).
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