A nuclear Pandora's box

Somehow I left a little something out of my pontifications
introducing the article describing the plight of the oceans -
"Cod is Dead." 
<http://www.gristmagazine.com/books/books072403.asp?source=daily>
More or less on the order of the elephant standing in the living
room, "A nuclear Pandora's box" is about the fast track to oblivion.

-T


a project of the <http://www.nationinstitute.org/>Nation Institute  
<http://www.nationinstitute.org/>

To send this to a friend, or to read more dispatches, go to 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/>tomdispatch.com
<http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/>

A nuclear Pandora's box
Pssst, you want to build a dirty bomb?

Okay, we all know about North Korea -- and it only gets nastier all 
the time. Here's former Secretary of Defense William Perry on the 
subject 
(<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31893-2003Jul22?language=printer>It's 
Either Nukes or Negotiation, the Washington Post,): 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31893-2003Jul22?language=printer>

"If it keeps on its present course, North Korea will probably have 
six to eight nuclear weapons by the end of the year, will possibly 
have conducted a nuclear test and may have begun deployment of some 
of these weapons, targeted against Japan and South Korea. By next 
year, it could be in serial production of nuclear weapons, building 
perhaps five to 10 per year. This is a nightmare scenario, but it is 
a reasonable extrapolation from what we know and from what the North 
Koreans have announced."

As for Iran, the Los Angeles Times' Douglas Frantz reports today on a 
three-month-long investigation into the Iranian bomb 
(<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/216/nation/Iran_is_seen_moving_close_to_producing_nuclear_bombP.shtml>Iran 
is seen moving close to producing nuclear bomb): 
<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/216/nation/Iran_is_seen_moving_close_to_producing_nuclear_bombP.shtml>

"After more than a decade of working behind layers of front companies 
and in hidden laboratories, Iran appears to be in the late stages of 
developing the capacity to build a nuclear bomb... Technology and 
scientists from Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan have 
propelled Iran's nuclear program much closer to producing a bomb than 
Iraq ever was... North Korean military scientists recently were 
monitored entering Iranian nuclear facilities. They are assisting in 
the design of a nuclear warhead, according to people inside Iran and 
foreign intelligence officials. So many North Koreans are working on 
nuclear and missile projects in Iran that a resort on the Caspian 
coast is set aside for their exclusive use."

But never fear our leaders have an infallible plan in response: 
"Foreign intelligence officers told the Times that the CIA, which has 
long contended that Iran is building a bomb, has briefed them on a 
contingency plan for US air and missile attacks against Iranian 
nuclear installations." If, of course, they even know where they are.

And then there's the third (and former) member of the Axis of Evil, 
Iraq, which even without an active program to produce nuclear 
weapons, seems to have shed from its looted al-Tuwaitha nuclear site 
promising materials for someone else's "dirty bomb." As David Pratt 
and Felicia Arbuthnot of the Glasgow Sunday Herald report 
(Potentially lethal radioactive sources missing from Saddam's biggest 
N-plant), <http://www.sundayherald.com/35736> al-Tuwaitha was 
thoroughly looted in the aftermath to war when an administration 
riveted by Iraq's potential to produce weapons of mass destruction 
didn't think it worth the bother to get American soldiers to its 
major known nuclear facility. Pratt and Arbuthnot describe the 
results of this stroke of planning genius thusly:

"Pure uranium oxide which could be used in the making of a 'dirty 
nuclear bomb' capable of killing countless people is being offered 
for sale in a Basra souk for $250,000Š The Sunday Herald source, who 
cannot be named for fear of reprisals, was approached by black 
marketeers in Basra and asked if he would help sell the material. He 
said: 'The cylinders are about a foot long, grey in colour with a red 
band around the top. The skull and crossbones warning logo, and the 
label 'pure uranium oxide' are clearly marked in English.' He added 
that it is thought to have come from the al-Tuwaitha complex, which 
is 15 miles southeast of Baghdad.

"There is no way of sorting this all out because the Americans now 
have closed down access to the site to IAEA officials. 'Ever since, 
atomic agency officials have pressed for access to the site, but 
American officials have resisted. They say that the mandate of the 
agency in Iraq has expired and that allied forces are in charge.'"

Martin Schwartz at the Foreign Policy in Focus website (Nuclear 
Weapons Threats Abroad: Bush's Football in Dirty Game) 
<http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/outside/commentary/2003/0307nuclear.html> 
adds that, while putting forward a series of fantasy "nuclear-threat 
confabulations, the U.S. government has at the same time rendered the 
IAEA clueless as to the disappearance of radioactive material that 
could eventually be used in clandestine bomb-making. In June the IAEA 
inspected the looted Al-Tuwaitha nuclear facility in Iraq and has now 
presented its findings: 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of low-grade uranium 
have been dispersed, but of more importance, the IAEA team was not 
allowed by the U.S. authorities to inspect other locations in 
Al-Tuwaitha, where highly radioactive cesium-137 and cobalt-60 may 
have been looted."

And in the proliferating world out there, that's just the tip of the 
iceberg (if you can use such an image about weapons that threaten to 
turn our world into a sea of fire). In that world, what you don't 
know can hurt you. Nuclear arsenals are a growth industry and, as 
James Sterngold of the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Beyond North 
Korea), 
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/08/03/MN293524.DTL> 
Third World proliferators are now making use of each other:

"The concerns have been made scarier by the fact that North Korea 
itself may be not just a bombmaker, but also a technology supplier. 
So may be Pakistan and Iran, both believed to have traded various 
weapons technologies to North Korea."

A nuclear Pandora's box:

The frightening thing is the next jump in proliferation may be back 
to the more developed world. After all, if Iran is heading for one 
nuclear weapon, Israel may already have hit 200. And we don't know 
what preparations are being made elsewhere in the as yet 
unproliferated world. What of Japan? What of South Korea? What of 
Taiwan? What of, gulp, PakistanŠ or IndiaŠ leaping ever forward (or 
backward) with their already sizable nuclear arsenals? The Bush 
administration only worries about declared enemies -- as if declared 
allies couldn't possibly have their own secret programs aborning in a 
world where nuclear weapons are the hip-hop music of power. It's what 
you dance to if you plan to be anyone at all.

Whatever we don't know about nuclear proliferation there are a couple 
of things we do know, though until recently they haven't been much 
noted. First of all, the cold war never actually ended when it came 
to weapons of mass destruction. It went into a kind of decade-plus 
long abeyance, but now, like one of those irradiated monsters of 
1950s sci fi movies or a morphing terminator, it's back! (And, by the 
way, to judge by our movies, where worlds continue to explode and 
nuclear weapons go off with frightening regularity -- as in 
Terminator 3 which ends as the missiles are leaving their silos -- 
the weaponry never actually left our imaginations either.)

Of course, most of the weapons of mass destruction (or the knowledge 
needed to make them) more or less fell through the cracks of the cold 
war superpower confrontation as each side aided its erstwhile allies 
(never imagining they might one day be putative enemies). As 
Sterngold points out, for instance,

"[T]he spread of [nuclear] reactors around the world by the United 
States and the Soviet Union turned into a new realm of Cold War 
competition. Each side rewarded its friends with research reactors -- 
often easily adapted to bomb-making purposes -- or commercial power 
reactors. In hindsight, states determined to develop weapons programs 
secretly transformed the reactors into bomb factories or training 
grounds.

"Countries as disparate as the Congo, Ghana, Jamaica, Peru, Syria, 
Turkey, Bangladesh, Algeria and Colombia all got reactors. A 
university in Tehran received a research reactor from the United 
States. South Vietnam got an American reactor during the Vietnam War. 
A special military team was sent at the end of the war to spirit out 
the highly enriched uranium fuel, but the team grabbed the wrong 
containers."

And far more important, the Bush administration has decided to 
unsheathe our nuclear arsenal, after a decade or so more or less in 
its silos, and enter "the second nuclear age" with a vengeance as a 
piece by William Broad in Sunday's New York Times indicates (see 
below). At the simplest level, the Bush men are determined to go in 
search of "mini-nukes" and "small" bunker busters (though the 
definition of "small," as Broad makes clear, includes weapons up to 
three times the size of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima). At the same 
time, as Julian Borger of the Guardian reported the other day (US 
scraps nuclear weapons watchdog),
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4723467,00.html>

"A US department of energy panel of experts which provided 
independent oversight of the development of the US nuclear arsenal 
has been quietly disbanded by the Bush administration, it emerged 
yesterday.

"The decision to close down the national nuclear security 
administration advisory committee - required by law to hold public 
hearings and issue public reports on nuclear weapons issues - has 
come just days before a closed-door meeting at a US air force base in 
Nebraska to discuss the development of a new generation of tactical 
'mini nukes' and 'bunker buster' bombs, as well as an eventual 
resumption of nuclear testingŠ.

"'The Bush administration is considering policy changes that will 
alter the role of nuclear weapons in national defence,' [Democratic 
congressman and co-chairman of a congressional taskforce on 
non-proliferation] Markey said. 'Given the importance and sheer 
complexity of the issues raised ... why was the only independent 
contemplative body studying nuclear weapons disbanded - and disbanded 
in such a surreptitious fashion?'"

In fact, the Bush nuclear policy has consisted of taking the lid off 
nuclear weapons domestically and abroad, while promising to take out 
by force, possibly someday with those very bunker-busting nukes, any 
proliferator we don't care for. This is a Pandora's box nuclear 
policy based on a great illusion (or perhaps it would be more 
accurate to say, a grand self-delusion) -- that the United States is 
so militarily powerful it can control the spread of nuclear weapons, 
and do so by force. It's based on the bizarre thought that, with all 
domestic and nuclear oversight groups defanged or brought to heel, we 
are in control. As at the al-Tuwaitha site, it will invariably turn 
out that we are not.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we had, as the title of a much 
ignored but prescient book by Jonathan Schell put it, "the gift of 
time." But no one bothered to use it. Our nuclear forces sat there -- 
part of a vast, globe-spanning, secret landscape of silos, test 
sites, waste dumps, weapons labs and bases -- with no assigned 
mission whatever. In these years, the weapons in a sense gained their 
full value in the world -- the value they had always had. They were 
utterly useless. And yet, unemployed weapons though they may have 
been, they were there and there they remained.

Now, we are entering the second nuclear age without, as a fine piece 
by Paul Webster in the latest Bulletin of Atomic Scientists indicates 
(see below), ever quite leaving the first -- or rather various 
threatening, unilateral policies of the Bush administration have 
given new life not just to Third World proliferators, or to our own 
proliferation policies, but to the near defunct nuclear cold warriors 
of the Soviet Union. They, too, now have their second wind (or second 
wmd) and are pushing ahead in "modernizing" their own nuclear arsenal.

One of the great illusions of the second nuclear age is that the 
small-scale proliferators out there in the Third World are 
unconnected to us, except in the dangers they threaten us with; that 
they are operating on their own. But the world is actually a single, 
bizarrely interlocked nuclear system. If the Koreans go nuclear, then 
the Japanese go nuclear, then the Chinese upgrade their arsenal, then 
the Indians respond, which leads the threatened Pakistanis to do more 
of the same, and then the knowledge -- and possibly weaponry or 
crucial material -- floating out there descends on some other 
would-be-nuclear power. We thought in the previous "age" that we were 
in a MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) world. Little did we know. If 
you start from Russian rearmament, you can create a similar set of 
linkages via perhaps China, and so on. It's that old 
knee-bone-connected-to-the syndrome. This interconnectedness of 
proliferators is the deepest truth of the second nuclear age, and 
there is no way the Bush administration can blast it into 
nonexistence, no matter the power of its weapons.

The Nth country:

What a temptation it is for an administration aiming at global rule, 
the conquest of space, military dominance everywhere, preventive war 
as peace, and force as the language of diplomacy to turn to quite 
literally the most forceful weapons on earth. And what a shame for us 
all that the only language our mullahs speak -- this might literally 
be true of our president, who otherwise speaks in tongues -- is the 
language of force.

But here's the strangest thing about these weapons, no matter how our 
weapons labs "modernize" and streamline and "miniaturize" them, they 
will still be quite useless as policy-makers (which doesn't mean they 
won't be used). What they are good for is vengeance and nothing more. 
When you try, for instance, to imagine either Iran or Israel using 
such weapons as policy, or for that matter India and Pakistan, not to 
speak of the U.S. and Russia, you descend into madness. What policy 
is there, after all, post-obliteration. What could Pakistan's foreign 
policy be, after Karachi was gone? You tell me.

But this doesn't mean that the mad, the driven, the vengence-seeking 
won't use them. And, given proliferation policies, the chances that 
they could are bound to rise. And to make matters more worse, every 
decade the materials for such weapons get cheaper and the knowledge 
of how to use them becomes more widespread. For this to end, we would 
have to take steps to end it. There's a logic to this. It began with 
us and only actual deproliferation policies, ones that would not just 
pressure the world to deproliferate but commit us to do the same, 
hold any hope -- and of course at the moment (though not perhaps 
forever) anyone who took such a tack would be considered quite nutty 
In the corridors of power.

With this in mind I leave you with a fascinating piece by Oliver 
Burkeman from a June issue of the Guardian on two young men, hired by 
the US government in 1964 (we're talking four decades ago) to see if 
they could design an atomic bomb that would work from only what was 
publicly known at the time. And guess what, they succeeded. This "Nth 
country project" was designed to test the limits of proliferation. 
It's turned out, though they only had a hint of this then, that there 
are none. Instead of de-proliferating, of course, we simply 
classified this experiment top secret and conveniently put it out of 
our minds. We are, in a sense, the first and Nth country of all 
nuclear ages. Tom



Facing a Second Nuclear Age
By William J. Broad
The New York Times
August 3, 2003



This week, ten minutes by car south of Omaha, Neb., the United States 
Strategic Command is holding a little-advertised meeting at which the 
Bush administration is to solidify its plans for acquiring a new 
generation of nuclear arms. Topping the wish list are weapons meant 
to penetrate deep into the earth to destroy enemy bunkers. The 
Pentagon believes that more than 70 nations, big and small, now have 
some 1,400 underground command posts and sites for ballistic missiles 
and weapons of mass destruction.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the Defense Department wants bomb 
makers to develop a class of relatively small nuclear arms - ranging 
from a fraction the size of the Hiroshima bomb to several times as 
large - that could pierce rock and reinforced concrete and turn 
strongholds into radioactive dust.


To read more Broad click here
Go to the website <http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/> and scroll.



Just like old times
By Paul Webster
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
August, 2003



Moscow, May 24, 2002: It was the kind of event news editors love: The 
presidents of the two greatest nuclear powers-mortal enemies for 
decades, but now sworn to peace-were meeting to lay down their 
weapons. Amidst the gilt-splashed splendor of the Kremlin Palace, 
peace was breaking out, all on a fine spring day. Then, as the ink 
dried on the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty (also known as 
"SORT," but usually referred to as the Moscow Treaty), President 
George W. Bush gave reporters the headline: "This treaty liquidates 
the Cold War legacy of nuclear hostility between our countries," 
delivering on a promise he had made two weeks earlier to "put behind 
us the Cold War once and for all." Moments later, Bush's statement 
was being typed into teleprompters and printers around the world.

Paul Webster, a journalist who has reported on nuclear issues in 
Canada, France, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States, is currently 
based in Moscow.



To read more Webster click here
Go to the website <http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/>



How two students built an A-bomb
 By Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian
June 24, 2003



Dave Dobson's past is not a secret. Not technically, anyway - not 
since the relevant US government intelligence documents were 
declassified and placed in the vaults of the National Security 
Archive, in Washington DC. But Dobson, now 65, is a modest man, and 
once he had discovered his vocation - teaching physics at Beloit 
College, in Wisconsin - he felt no need to drop dark hints about his 
earlier life. You could have taken any number of classes at Beloit 
with Professor Dobson, until his recent retirement, without having 
any reason to know that in his mid-20s, working entirely as an 
amateur and equipped with little more than a notebook and a library 
card, he designed a nuclear bomb.


To read more Burkeman click here
Go to the website <http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/>

--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>