[Peace-discuss] Nuclear weapons…

[Morton K. Brussel]

Notes on proliferation. --mkb


December 9, 2008, NYT

Hidden Travels of the Atomic Bomb

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
In 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities, J.  
Robert Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear  
arms.

“They are not too hard to make,” he told his colleagues on the  
Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M. “They will be universal if  
people wish to make them universal.”

That sensibility, born where the atomic bomb itself was born, grew  
into a theory of technological inevitability. Because the laws of  
physics are universal, the theory went, it was just a matter of time  
before other bright minds and determined states joined the club. A  
corollary was that trying to stop proliferation was quite difficult  
if not futile.

But nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. In the six  
decades since Oppenheimer’s warning, the nuclear club has grown to  
only nine members. What accounts for the slow spread? Can anything be  
done to reduce it further? Is there a chance for an atomic future  
that is brighter than the one Oppenheimer foresaw?

Two new books by three atomic insiders hold out hope. The authors  
shatter myths, throw light on the hidden dynamics of nuclear  
proliferation and suggest new ways to reduce the threat.

Neither book endorses Oppenheimer’s view that bombs are relatively  
easy to make. Both document national paths to acquiring nuclear  
weapons that have been rocky and dependent on the willingness of  
spies and politicians to divulge state secrets.

Thomas C. Reed, a veteran of the Livermore weapons laboratory in  
California and a former secretary of the Air Force, and Danny B.  
Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, have teamed  
up in “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its  
Proliferation” to show the importance of moles, scientists with  
divided loyalties and — most important — the subtle and not so  
subtle interests of nuclear states.

“Since the birth of the nuclear age,” they write, “no nation has  
developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise.”

Among other things, the book details how secretive aid from France  
and China helped spawn five more nuclear states.

It also names many conflicted scientists, including luminaries like  
Isidor I. Rabi. The Nobel laureate worked on the Manhattan Project in  
World War II and later sat on the board of governors of the Weizmann  
Institute of Science, a birthplace of Israel’s nuclear arms.

Secret cooperation extended to the secluded sites where nations  
tested their handiwork in thundering blasts. The book says, for  
instance, that China opened its sprawling desert test site to  
Pakistan, letting its client test a first bomb there on May 26, 1990.

That alone rewrites atomic history. It casts new light on the reign  
of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister of Pakistan and helps explain how  
the country was able to respond so quickly in May 1998 when India  
conducted five nuclear tests.

“It took only two weeks and three days for the Pakistanis to field  
and fire a nuclear device of their own,” the book notes.

In another disclosure, the book says China “secretly extended the  
hospitality of the Lop Nur nuclear test site to the French.”

The authors build their narrative on deep knowledge of the arms and  
intelligence worlds, including those abroad. Mr. Stillman has toured  
heavily guarded nuclear sites in China and Russia, and both men have  
developed close ties with foreign peers.

In their acknowledgments, they thank American cold warriors like  
Edward Teller as well as two former C.I.A. directors, saying the  
intelligence experts “guided our searches.”

Robert S. Norris, an atomic historian and author of “Racing for the  
Bomb,” an account of the Manhattan Project, praised the book for  
“remarkable disclosures of how nuclear knowledge was shared overtly  
and covertly with friends and foes.”

The book is technical in places, as when detailing the exotica of  
nuclear arms. But it reads like a labor of love built on two  
lifetimes of scientific adventure. It is due out in January from  
Zenith Press.

Its wide perspective reveals how states quietly shared complex  
machinery and secrets with one another.

All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One  
began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan  
Project. Stalin was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Mr. Reed  
and Mr. Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica  
of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.

Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with Mao Zedong, China’s  
leader. The book says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan  
Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail,  
did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave  
the mastermind of Mao’s weapons program a detailed tutorial on the  
Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with  
its first blast.

The book, in a main disclosure, discusses how China in 1982 made a  
policy decision to flood the developing world with atomic know-how.  
Its identified clients include Algeria, Pakistan and North Korea.

Alarmingly, the authors say one of China’s bombs was created as an  
“export design” that nearly “anybody could build.” The  
blueprint for the simple plan has traveled from Pakistan to Libya  
and, the authors say, Iran. That path is widely assumed among  
intelligence officials, but Tehran has repeatedly denied the charge.

The book sees a quiet repercussion of China’s proliferation policy  
in the Algerian desert. Built in secrecy, the reactor there now makes  
enough plutonium each year to fuel one atom bomb and is ringed by  
antiaircraft missiles, the book says.

China’s deck also held a wild card: its aid to Pakistan helped A.Q.  
Khan, a rogue Pakistani metallurgist who sold nuclear gear on the  
global black market. The authors compare Dr. Khan to “a used-car  
dealer” happy to sell his complex machinery to suckers who had no  
idea how hard it was to make fuel for a bomb.

Why did Beijing spread its atomic knowledge so freely? The authors  
speculate that it either wanted to strengthen the enemies of China’s  
enemies (for instance, Pakistan as a counterweight to India) or, more  
chillingly, to encourage nuclear wars or terror in foreign lands from  
which Beijing would emerge as the “last man standing.”

A lesser pathway involves France. The book says it drew on Manhattan  
Project veterans and shared intimate details of its bomb program with  
Israel, with whom it had substantial commercial ties. By 1959, the  
book says, dozens of Israeli scientists “were observing and  
participating in” the French program of weapons design.

The book adds that in early 1960, when France detonated its first  
bomb, doing so in the Algerian desert, “two nations went nuclear.”  
And it describes how the United States turned a blind eye to  
Israel’s own atomic developments. It adds that, in the autumn of  
1966, Israel conducted a special, non-nuclear test “2,600 feet under  
the Negev desert.” The next year it built its first bomb.

Israel, in turn, shared its atomic secrets with South Africa. The  
book discloses that the two states exchanged some key ingredients for  
the making of atom bombs: tritium to South Africa, uranium to Israel.  
And the authors agree with military experts who hold that Israel and  
South Africa in 1979 jointly detonated a nuclear device in the South  
Atlantic near Prince Edward Island, more than one thousand miles  
south of Cape Town. Israel needed the test, it says, to develop a  
neutron bomb.

The authors charge that South Africa at one point targeted Luanda,  
the capital of neighboring Angola, “for a nuclear strike if peace  
talks failed.”

South Africa dismantled six nuclear arms in 1990 but retains much  
expertise. Today, the authors write, “South African technical  
mercenaries may be more dangerous than the underemployed scientists  
of the former Soviet Union” because they have no real home in Africa.

“The Bomb: A New History,” due out in January from Ecco Books, an  
imprint of HarperCollins, plows similar ground less deeply, but looks  
more widely at proliferation curbs and diplomacy. It is by Stephen M.  
Younger, the former head of nuclear arms at Los Alamos and former  
director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon.

Dr. Younger disparages what he calls myths suggesting that “all the  
secrets of nuclear weapons design are available on the Internet.” He  
writes that France, despite secretive aid, struggled initially to  
make crude bombs — a point he saw with his own eyes during a tour of  
a secretive French atomic museum that is closed to the public. That  
trouble, he says, “suggests we should doubt assertions that the  
information required to make a nuclear weapon is freely available.”

The two books draw on atomic history to suggest a mix of old and new  
ways to defuse the proliferation threat. Both see past restraints as  
fraying and the task as increasingly urgent.

Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman see politics — not spies or military  
ambitions — as the primary force in the development and spread of  
nuclear arms. States repeatedly stole and leaked secrets because they  
saw such action as in their geopolitical interest.

Beijing continues to be a major threat, they argue. While urging  
global responses like better intelligence, better inspections and  
better safeguarding of nuclear materials, they also see generational  
change in China as a great hope in plugging the atomic leaks.

“We must continue to support human rights within Chinese society,  
not just as an American export, but because it is the dream of the  
Tiananmen Square generation,” they write. “In time those  
youngsters could well prevail, and the world will be a less  
contentious place.”

Dr. Younger notes how political restraints and global treaties worked  
for decades to curb atomic proliferation, as did American assurances  
to its allies. “It is a tribute to American diplomacy,” he  
writes, “that so many countries that might otherwise have gone  
nuclear were convinced to remain under the nuclear umbrella of the  
United States.”

And he, too, emphasizes the importance of political sticks and  
carrots to halting and perhaps reversing the spread of nuclear arms.  
Iran, he says, is not fated to go nuclear.

“Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina and Brazil all flirted with nuclear  
programs, and all decided to abandon them,” he notes. “Nuclear  
proliferation is not unidirectional — given the right conditions and  
incentives, it is possible for a nation to give up its nuclear  
aspirations.”

The take-home message of both books is quite the reverse of  
Oppenheimer’s grim forecast. But both caution that the situation has  
reached a delicate stage — with a second age of nuclear  
proliferation close at hand — and that missteps now could hurt  
terribly in the future.

Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman take their title, “The Nuclear Express,”  
from a 1940 radio dispatch by Edward R. Murrow , who spoke from  
London as the clouds of war gathered over Europe. He told of people  
feeling like the express train of civilization was going out of control.

The authors warn of a similar danger today and suggest that only  
close attention to the atomic past, as well as determined global  
action, can avoid “the greatest train wreck” in history.


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