Riding off into the twilight…

In “The Twilight of the Bombs”, the last volume of his breathtaking account of nuclear history, Richard Rhodes describes the post Cold War problems and hopes associated with nuclear weapons. The book bears many of Rhodes’s trademarks- it is extremely well-researched and contains sharp portraits of the major players as well as fast-paced accounts of key events that make you feel as if you were there. Rhodes’s abilities as a storyteller are still remarkable. This book is relatively slim and does not command the high-octane prose of Rhodes’s masterpiece “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” but as usual, Rhodes’s authoritative knowledge of nuclear matters provides many revelations and he has a novelist’s eye for detail which keeps the reader hooked.

The book can roughly be divided into four parts. The first part concerns the first Gulf War and the dismantling of Iraq’s nuclear infrastructure, the second part describes the race to secure nuclear material in the former Soviet republics after the fall of the Soviet Union, the third part briefly talks about South Africa’s nuclear ambitions and and then in more detail about attempts to contain nuclear efforts by North Korea and the last part concerns the run-up to the second Gulf War and some final thoughts on the future of nuclear weapons. One striking omission in the book is Iran, and I think readers would have appreciated Rhodes’s insightful thoughts on the Iranian nuclear problem.

The first part examines the troubling evidence in the 1980s that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a nuclear capability. Rogue Pakistani scientist A Q Khan had even tried to unsuccessfully sell Iraq a bomb design based on a Chinese weapon. At the same time that the US was providing aid and goodwill to Iraq to support it against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, it was also unearthing evidence in the form of dual-use equipment shipments and intelligence analysis that Iraq was pursuing enriched uranium. Interestingly, the technology that Iraq was using turned out to be electromagnetic separation, a primitive technology that the US did not initially believe would be used; for nations pursuing nuclear capability, separating uranium isotopes by using centrifuges is much more efficient. Yet electromagnetic separation is exactly the kind of technology that a relatively primitive and cash-strapped economy would pursue. This is a good example of how biases can lead to false conclusions in spite of supporting evidence. Later, Rhodes has pulse-racing accounts of searches for enrichment technology in Iraq conducted by the weapons inspectors of the IAEA and the UN. Even after the inspectors discovered evidence of enrichment in the form of equipment used for electromagnetic separation, this was not yet conclusive evidence of weapons building. Probably the most exciting moment was when, deep down in a small room in a basement, the inspectors discovered a report that did provide such evidence in the form of clear and detailed descriptions of materials and design for an implosion bomb.

The second part of the book deals with the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and the spirited and at times desperate race to acquire nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. There are many heroes in this story which stands as a model of bipartisan cooperation against a serious threat. Among these are David Kay, Hans Blix and Bob Gallucci who were nuclear inspectors and disarmament specialists. Probably the most prominent ones are the Democratic and Republican senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar who worked day and night to acquire funds from Congress to secure nuclear material and weapons from the three countries and have them transferred back to Russia. Concomitantly, Secretary of State James Baker hopped from one capital to another, urging the presidents of the new nations to sign the NPT and START using a combination of carrots (in the form of monetary rewards) and sticks (in the form of possible sanctions and threats from Russia). All three nations agreed that they were better off without nuclear weapons, and the result was a transfer of thousands of strategic and tactical weapons back to Russia. A third important and massive effort involved blending down the enriched uranium from Soviet weapons to reactor grade and shipping it back to the US for use in US nuclear reactors; Americans may be amused to know that about 10 percent of their current electricity derived from nuclear energy comes from nuclear weapons that their former foe had targeted against their cities. Curiously, the biggest reformer in this drama was President George H W Bush who orchestrated the largest arms reductions in history (he abolished entire classes of weapons, including missiles with multiple warheads and all ground-based weapons), and he needs to get much more credit for doing this than what has been given to him.

In the third part Rhodes first briefly talks about the dismantling of South Africa’s nuclear program, which is a fine lesson for nations wanting to eschew nuclear weapons. In case of South Africa, the same reasons- internal strife, border conflicts and international alienation because of the government’s apartheid policies- that provoked the country to acquire weapons also encouraged them to give them up. An uglier reason was their fear in the 80s that the weapons might fall into the hands of the black government.

Rhodes then describes in detail the difficult relationship between the US and North Korea in the context of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Along the way, Rhodes also provides perspective by noting that the US had mercilessly bombed the North during the Korean War; since then the North Koreans have constantly been in a kind of perpetual state of war, surrounded by giant powers like Russia and China. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the US had stationed hundreds of nuclear weapons in South Korea as a deterrent until about 1990. Although these actions by the US do not justify the North’s nuclear efforts, they do explain the paranoia and deep sense of insecurity that has fueled North Korea’s animosity towards the US. Again, there are heroes in this story, but one singled out by Rhodes is former President Jimmy Carter who went to North Korea of his own volition in 1994 and successfully mediated the Koreans’ proposal to stop reprocessing in return for light water reactors; the consequence of this diplomacy was the so-called “Agreed Framework” to regulate North Korea’s commercial nuclear program, which unfortunately broke down in 2003 in the face of North Korean non-compliance and disagreements. Since then, North Korea has always had to be kept on a tight leash and there have been several moments of tension between the two countries, but Rhodes’s accounts make it clear how diplomacy has averted another Korean War. Rhodes also has succinct discussions of efforts to develop and implement a framework for the CTBT, which was signed by Clinton but unfortunately not ratified by the Senate.

The last part of the book concerns the run-up to the second Gulf War. This story has been told before but Rhodes tells it succinctly and well. Meticulous weapons inspections in Iraq between 1992 and 1998 had unearthed no evidence of a WMD capability, although Iraq had also not furnished clear documentation of the dismantling of its WMD capability. As Rhodes tells it, regime change had already been on the table, especially pushed by neoconservatives like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz but even contemplated by former Vice President Al Gore. But even after 9/11, it does not seem like Bush was thinking of attacking Iraq. However, as the record indicates, something changed in his thinking in the next two months, and invading Iraq became a concrete strategy in his mind. Rhodes thinks that a major reason for this shift in his thinking may have been the anthrax attacks which followed 9/11. It seems that these attacks really rammed the threat of terrorism home; at one point alarms even went off in the White House and Dick Cheney suspected that he himself may have been contaminated. Nonetheless, as is well-known now, Bush and his associates decided to invade Iraq fueled by the tried and tested strategy of threat-inflation and on evidence that was dubious at best. Rhodes clearly establishes the prevarications of the administration’s claims about WMDs in Iraq, based on discredited reports about uranium shipments from Niger to Saddam (reports discredited even by the CIA) as well as Chinese imports of supposed aluminum tubes for centrifuges, which turned out to be parts for short-range rockets. At best Iraq was years behind the difficult goal of building a nuclear weapon, a goal which would have needed extensive operations of enrichment and processing which would most likely have been detected. No matter how you cut it, there was no concrete justification for invading Iraq except one based on ideology and belief. Bush also seriously damaged arms reduction efforts by withdrawing from the ABM treaty, by his belligerent rhetoric against North Korea (which withdrew from the NPT and tested a nuclear weapon in 2006) and Iran, by lifting sanctions on Pakistan (a particularly recalcitrant and prolific proliferator) and by agreeing to supply India (which had not signed the NPT) with nuclear-related equipment. And yet in the midst of this tragedy it is easy to miss Bush’s one success in arms control in which he signed major arms reductions with Russia; these reductions brought down the number of warheads on US delivery vehicles from about 10,000 at the end of the Cold War to about 2600.

This brings us to the final, eloquent part of Rhodes’s book where he talks about the possible abolishment of nuclear weapons. He describes the very serious problem of nuclear terrorism; in his view, while it may be very difficult for terrorists to use a sophisticated nuclear weapon, it may be much easier for them to acquire enough material for a crude explosive. Even state-owned nuclear weapons are susceptible to accident, miscalculation and misunderstanding. The bottom line is that as long as nuclear weapons are around, there is always a possibility that they may be used. The only, truly final solution for reducing the threat of nuclear weapons is to get rid of them. How do we achieve this? I would have appreciated more detail from Rhodes in this regard, but he describes promising developments. For one thing, simple laws of physics dictate that without nuclear material one cannot make nuclear weapons. So securing nuclear material is key and the Nunn-Lugar initiative has set a worthy bipartisan example for achieving this goal. Many recent initiatives to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons have also been refreshingly bipartisan. Efforts to ban nuclear testing have already been fine-honed for decades, and getting all nations on board the CTBT would mean a lot; in this context Rhodes singles out Australian diplomat Richard Butler and his Canberra Commission for special praise. The fact is that, in spite of nuclear proliferation, there have been hundreds of nations which have found it prudent not to develop nuclear weapons for various reasons (not the least of which is their expense; according to Rhodes it costs the US 50 billion dollars just to maintain its current stockpile of weapons), so there is hope.

In the end though, only political will, strong leadership and international cooperation can rid the world of these terrible weapons. At some point, owning a nuclear weapon needs to become a crime. It is absolutely necessary to stop regarding these weapons as partisan, parochial concerns which can be leveraged to score political points in elections. To underscore this point, Rhodes recounts a fascinating idea put forth by the Scottish writer Gil Elliot in his book “Twentieth Century Book of the Dead”. Elliot talks about the international efforts to prevent and cure infectious disease and believes that war should similarly be treated as an international anathema that is to be abolished. Efforts to eradicate disease through public health campaigns crossed boundaries and saw even countries who were otherwise very hostile towards each other mutually cooperating. This was because disease was not seen as some other country’s problem but as a common threat. Because of their sheer destructive power, nuclear weapons similarly pose a common threat to all of humanity. Rhodes says that only when nuclear weapons are similarly and completely depoliticized to the extent that infectious diseases are, only when the world sees them not as instruments of aggression and patriotism owned by specific nations but as a common scourge that threatens all of humanity irrespective of our political leanings and differences, only then will we all work together to abolish them.

Shattering the nuclear sword

OBAMA’S THREAT REDUCTION PRIORITIES

Others should embrace them in their own self-interests

I sincerely believe that because of its utterly devastating and game-changing implications, nuclear terrorism is one of the greatest threats the world faces. Even a crude nuclear weapon detonated in Mumbai, London, Tokyo or Los Angeles will cause the kind of destruction and havoc that would be every citizen’s worst nightmare. Such an event will significantly change the political and social landscape of a country for a long time to come, and probably for the worse. That’s all everybody would talk about. In case of nuclear terrorism, the adage about us having to succeed every single time while them having to succeed just once rings resoundingly true.

A recent Nature article emphasizes the steps that President-elect (for only 5 more days) Obama should take to keep nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists. Political leaders all over the world especially in sensitive countries should join him in this endeavor, because their cities might be the first casualties of nuclear terrorism. According to the article, something like only 0.2% of US defence spending is devoted to practical non-proliferation, an amount that has remained virtually unchanged for a decade. The new President’s chief science advisor John Holdren has worked on these issues, having already alerted the non-proliferation community to them back in 2002.

What needs to be paid very close attention to is highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and not plutonium. Building a plutonium implosion weapon involves many intricate steps and would likely be beyond the reach of a terrorist outfit. Plutonium is a hideous element that is extremely difficult to work with. The explosives arrangement around it needs to be machined to the finest dimensions in order to work as expected. By contrast, simple firing mechanisms can be used to detonate a uranium bomb (although I don’t share the article’s predilection for calling it “child’s play”). One of the topics of discussion between Pakistani scientists and Osama Bin Laden in August 2001 apparently involved such firing mechanisms. As the article correctly notes, even a uranium weapon fizzle that delivers 1-5 kT in a place like Manhattan would be devastating.

Given this scenario, it is more than disconcerting that some 272 HEU reactors in 56 countries remain unsecured. Feedstock balances for many of these reactors are not meticulously accounted for. Some uranium can even be scraped from the insides of centrifuges or gaseous diffusion tubes and declared as wasted or not produced. Quiet and gradual extraction of tiny amounts could lead to the accumulation of tens of kilograms, a quantity sufficient for a crude explosive device.

Clearly the focus of the new administration should be to try to secure such reactors in hot spots; in Pakistan, Iran and the former Soviet Union among other countries. Leaders all over the world should join in the effort; to provide secure technology, sensors, anti-terrorist safeguards. They should make sure their own reactors are sufficiently guarded. Fortunately, one of the foremost policy actions that Barack Obama was involved in as a Senator was non-proliferation. He worked with Senator Richard Lugar to continue securing nuclear material from the former Soviet Union. Non-proliferation was always one of Senator Obama’s special concerns. Let’s hope it stays that way and gets bolstered by international support.

PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR ARSENAL

And what woe it could breed

The New York Times has a very interesting, lengthy article by David Sanger on problems with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Although Pakistani officials repeatedly suggest that their weapons are safely secured, they would not allow American or other officials to verify this; thus we are basically left with their reassurances, and unfortunately there’s not much in the past that would help us accept their reassurances. On the other hand, it’s not just the safety of the arsenal that’s the only matter of concern.

Among other things, the article profiles Khalid Kidwai, a general who is in charge of the Pakistani arsenal. Kidwai is a man who knows a lot but will not say much. He was essentially put in charge of the security of the complex after the 1998 nuclear tests. Although Pakistan’s nuclear secrets were supposed to be secure after this, it was just one month before 9/11 in August 2001 that one of Pakistan’s most prominent and eccentric nuclear scientists, Sultan Mahmood, had a meeting with Osama Bin Laden. Mahmood was a chilling emblem of the conflation of advanced technology and religious fundamentalism. Even more than A Q Khan he wanted to build an “Islamic bomb” and was more than glad to await the day of reckoning. Nuclear weapons were undoubtedly discussed in his meeting with the Al Qaeda leader, although the details remain vague. The fact that such a meeting even took place calls into question how safe Pakistan’s nuclear secrets are. Plus, nobody is going to allow American authorities to directly inspect the nuclear complex. Mahmood and A Q Khan have long since been kept incommunicado. We have to take the Pakistanis’ word for accounting of nuclear material and personnel checks.

The article has other troubling details. While the warheads and missiles are apparently kept separate by the authorities, specs on Permissive Action Locks (PALs) are not known. PALs essentially disable a warhead if someone tries too hard to tamper with it. The Pakistanis would not allow American personnel to inspect their weapons and installs PALs. Apparently there was some exchange of design information between the two countries, but nobody would say how effective that exchange was and whether its recommendations were put into effect. More exchange has been thwarted by one of those ironically absurd and ridiculous policies where the US cannot divulge details of PALs to Pakistan because then it would be ostensibly selling nuclear technology to a failed state. Muddle-headed bureaucracy does not get any better than this.

The principal problem as always is that it’s just difficult to trust anything that the Pakistanis say for two reasons. Firstly nothing that they say can be actually verified. But more importantly, Pakistan’s past pronouncements have turned out to be false so many times either because of inside complicity or ignorance that it’s hard to believe them when they say they are a responsible nuclear power. Consider the A Q Khan and the Mahmood debacles. Consider the radicalization of the universities from where the nuclear programs draws its talent. There are 2000 Pakistani personnel with advanced nuclear knowledge and even 1 percent of these wiling to offer their expertise to terrorists is a huge liability. The article also talks about Prime Minister Yousef Gilani’s 2008 trip to Washington where he wanted to assure Bush that he had ordered a raid on a radical Madrassa school in tribal areas where Islamic radicalization was part of the daily curriculum. Apparently the NSA had already intercepted messages from insider elements which warned the school about the raid before it took place so that targeted personnel could possibly leave. Bush knew about this, and yet Gilani tried to assure Bush that it was evidence of how the Pakistani government is trying to weed out radical elements.

As long as there is a total lack of control from Islamabad over fundamentalists in the ISI, in the general populace and in the defence forces, no assurances that the Pakistani government gives the US or the world can be taken too seriously. There are just too many non-state players sometimes in collusion with state players who run amok in the country. Neither the president nor the prime minister nor any single authority controls them; even the more authoritarian Musharraf could not keep them in check. Official promises are not going to stop unofficial actions. And as long as these anarchic elements continue to be part of the unofficial and official outfits of Pakistan, the threat of its nuclear arsenal falling into the wrong hands will always have to be taken seriously. Even if directly pilfering a nuclear weapon may be hard, there are many other ways in which the love of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons can be spread around. When it comes to assessing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, it is important to err on the safer side.

But an even more important lesson to be learnt is that US policy towards Pakistan needs to be significantly changed. For 50 years the US has supported the country in hopes of first fighting communists and then of fighting terrorists. Both these objectives have bred severe unwanted repercussions. During this process the government has also turned a blind eye toward Pakistan’s nuclear activities in the hope that their neglect will be compensated for by a greater victory. But there has been scant success in this endeavor. In addition, instead of the US dangling carrots in front of Pakistan, it’s been Pakistan who has inevitably dangled carrots in front of the US. Pakistan’s carrots have been simple and very effective; give us money otherwise we will descend into chaos. Perhaps now the mantra of the US should be- give us the terrorists or we will replace the carrot with a stick. The buck needs to stop here.

THE ATOMIC PIRATE: A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR OUR TIMES

The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor
By William Langewiesche
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Interest in the Pakistani nuclear marketeer A Q Khan has reemerged recently with news of his rather inane denial of his activities and about the relaxing of restrictions on his movements. Yesterday there was a piece of news suggesting that Khan might have sold blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon to an international smuggling ring. Incidentally I just finished William Langewiesche’s rather disturbing book The Atomic Bazaar, the majority of which is devoted to Khan’s life, times and deeds.

The book is disturbing because its premise is simple; that nations who choose to get nuclear weapons will get them under any circumstances. This is not only because nuclear weapons provide unparalleled leverage in foreign policy and the greatest bang for your buck, but also because it’s not at all easy for other nations to stop nuclear proliferation. This is because of a complex web of reasons that encompass political problems, economic necessities and personal grudges and perceptions. Note that we are not talking here about whether countries have incentives to acquire nukes in the first place. They may or may not and some have and others haven’t, as has been documented lucidly in Joseph Cirincione’s Bomb Scare. What Langewiesche is saying is that assuming that a country does have such incentives, it’s very difficult to stop it from building such weapons. While the fact that this is technologically not too difficult has been demonstrated before, Langewiesche also sheds valuable insight on other reasons why this may be easy.

Langewische describes Khan and concomitantly Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programs as a typical case of such proliferation. Many facts conspired to make both Khan’s and Pakistan’s success possible. What is galling in case of Pakistan is that countries such as the US turned a blind eye to the weapons program because of other geopolitical interests that were deemed more important, as sometimes they unfortunately well may be.

Langewiesche traces Khan’s development as a nuclear proliferator from his early days working for the European nuclear consortium URENCO in Holland. Khan started out as a metallurgical engineer having no connection to nuclear issues. His speciality was machine parts of the kind that are used in centrifuges. He largely joined URENCO because that was the best job he could find at the time, and also because he had married a Dutch woman. It was an unfortunate coincidence of fate that he ended up working for a company that manufactured centrifuges for uranium enrichment. By all accounts Khan was not a brilliant or exceptional scientist, but a sincere and hard-working individual. He was affable and liked by his co-workers.

Khan’s interest in nuclear energy developed simultaneously and ominously with political developments in Southeast Asia. Ever since India had launched its nuclear energy program, Pakistan had wanted to build a nuclear weapon. India and Pakistan had gone to war in 1965 and India had won that conflict. Right after this event prominent Pakistani politicians started making noises about wanting nukes. Foremost among these was Zulfikar Bhutto, later Pakistan’s prime minister. Famously and rather inanely, he said that the Pakistanis would develop nuclear weapons even if they had to eat grass. India’s 1971 war with Pakistan in which Pakistan suffered a crushing defeat further and greatly reinforced Pakistan’s convictions about acquiring them.

It is to be noted here that this set of decisions puts to rest a commonly held myth about the driving force for Pakistan’s nuclear program. It emphatically was not developed only in response to India’s program, although the Indian program certainly expedited its urgent manifestation. Pakistan almost certainly would have developed nuclear weapons even if India had no nukes right up to the present. This was because it was quite clear to Pakistan that it could never win against India’s vastly larger conventional forces, a point driven home after Pakistan’s defeat in 1971. This is emblematic of one of the fundamental reasons why nuclear weapons are so alluring; they can substitute many times for the lack of advantage in conventional forces that a country has and quite cheaply at that, and since most developing and underdeveloped countries lack large conventional forces, this reason alone could be instrumental in their nuclear weapons development, as was the case with Pakistan.

India’s nuclear weapons test in 1974 sealed Pakistan’s decision to proceed with the program. Long before Prime Minister Bhutto had heard of A Q Khan, he had convened a meeting of Pakistani scientists to embark on a nuclear program. The preliminary thrust was in the development of a plutonium-based weapon and reactors were constructed with American and Chinese help whose secret purpose was to transform Pakistan’s generous reserves of uranium into plutonium.

In Holland, Khan was quietly observing these developments and seething with rage at Pakistan’s humiliating 1971 defeat. What I find upsetting was his religious fundamentalist resentment for the “Hindu bomb” and an overweaning ambition to answer with an “Islamic bomb”. In fact Pakistan, as the first Islamic nuclear actor, has been a role model for countries like Iran, a perception that’s hard to erode from the minds of many fundamentalist Muslim citizens around the world.

Since Khan was in the centrifuge business, he quickly saw that he could contribute to the Pakistani program. Boldly he scheduled a meeting with Prime Minister Bhutto himself who he quickly convinced. Bhutto decided to play it safe for the moment and instituted a parallel uranium enrichment program essentially in competition with the plutonium program which was under the auspices of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.

What happened next is disconcerting and points to the kinks in systems for keeping nuclear proliferation at bay. For one thing, security at URENCO was rather lax, with employees free to appropriate spare centrifuge parts. Khan casually took blueprints and parts home and noted information about them in Urdu, aided by his wife. Even when an alert co-worker who was a friend became suspicious, Khan quite brazenly continued his activities. It was only when the co-worker talked to the Dutch authorities that URENCO began to investigate Khan. Even then they could come up with no substantial evidence against him. And by 1975 Khan left for Pakistan for good, armed with enough information to jump-start a uranium enrichment unit in his home country.

The next disturbing part of the story is how Khan slowly built up his nuclear empire in the next few years. One problem with stopping nuclear proliferation is that, apart from nuclear material itself, most other equipment used for building either nuclear reactors or weapons is dual-purpose. Most of the parts needed for building centrifuges can be bought from companies making machine tools or parts. You can put a ball bearing in a juice blender or you can install it in a uranium enrichment centrifuge; it’s a fundamental aspect of technology. Khan banked on this fuzzy nature of the nuclear market and placed orders for parts from European companies that had no explicit nuclear connections. Over the years, he formed a network of trusted suppliers that could ship him large and readymade orders of equipment. He himself set up companies in Dubai and Malaysia that were false fronts for backdoor equipment transfer. Most of the companies he dealt with could be vaguely suspected of taking part in nuclear proliferation but their dual-use capacity made them part of a gray market, hard to explicitly label as black, and hard to garner strong evidence against. Many businessmen and officials in Europe were complicit in these transactions; their true numbers and identity may never be known. Khan deftly exploited this fundamental gap in manufacturing and legislation and finally set up a vast network of uranium centrifuges. Pakistan started churning out its first batches of weapons-grade U-235 in the early 80s.

Perhaps the most galling part of the whole story is how the United States did not and in fact could not stop Khan and Pakistan even when they knew about their activities. Through the 1970s there were some American agents and journalists (most notably Mark Hibbs) who knew about Khan’s shenanigans. They managed to convince the US government to keep a tighter watch on US companies who might correspond with Khan. Strict laws did stop US companies from doing this. But in Europe it was much more difficult. For one thing European laws and policies were not as strict as those in the US. But more importantly, and I find this point crucial, European governments were cynical of US efforts to curb proliferation when the US itself possessed upward of 20,000 nuclear weapons. It was again about credibility, the same factor that’s keeping countries such as Iran today from taking the US seriously about stopping nuclear proliferation. Khan himself despised the five nuclear powers from preaching non-proliferation when they themselves were continuing to build vast arsenals.

In the 1980s, Khan started essentially running his nuclear material pipeline in a reverse direction, looking around for customers who wanted the same kind of technology. There were eminently many who jumped at the opportunity to buy a readymade nuclear plant or even better, a small nuclear bomb shipped directly to their doorstep. As we know now, North Korea, Iran and Libya were all eager customers of Khan. In turn they paid Pakistan not only in cash, but in complementary technology, like the North Korean missile technology that’s now installed in Pakistan’s missiles. Khan personally gained an enormous amount too; he now was one of the most respected men in the country, he spent lavish sums on palatial mansions, fleets of the latest cars, and on charity. He took pleasure, as many politicians in corrupt countries do, in building luxurious houses in places where construction was formally banned by law. He dined with the prime minister and held parties for Pakistan’s most affluent at his houses.

A lot of this was known to the US, but by this time, they needed Pakistan’s help in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Reagan, Bush and Clinton all turned a blind eye towards Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal because they wanted Pakistan as an ally in fighting their enemies, a mantle they inherited from their predecessors, a favored policy pursued for almost 50 years in the interests of geopolitical strategy. Some agents were asked to keep quiet, others were transferred to other cases. The consequences are there now for everybody to see- a monster that was nurtured in the form of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and a black market of nuclear proliferation that has been unprecedented in its scope. Today the US essentially continues its financial and political policy towards Pakistan while the country continues to provide a safe haven for fundamentalists and terrorist training camps.

The trends continue and the whole story seems to have a strange and ominous air of inevitability to it. Iran seems to signify the same convictions in acquiring nukes as Pakistan did, and it seems difficult to make the Iranians change their course. After all, the nuclear strategy worked well with North Korea and the Bush saber-rattling has been much more moderate towards that country. Iran has a good lesson to learn there.

We can sum up four principal reasons quoted by Langwiesche that lead to the rise of the “nuclear poor”:
1. The age-old incentive especially for poor countries to acquire relatively cheap nuclear weapons that will provide the biggest bang for their buck and quickly make up for the lack of an advantage in conventional forces.
2. The gray nature of the nuclear market and the dissonance among international trade laws that allows proliferators to cleverly skirt regulation and acquire much needed nuclear material.
3. The personal relations and rivalries that prevent countries from cooperating and fighting the proliferation genie together; the European inertia about not heeding the US’s urgent warnings to heel in their corporations is a good example.
4. As a related and very important point, the geopolitical interests that sometimes inevitably bind a nation’s hands and make it difficult or impossible for it to enforce strict policies to stop proliferation. In this case, the US deemed its relationship with and support for Pakistan so important that it turned a blind eye to Khan’s activities.

So what is the solution to stop the nuclear poor from flourishing? For one thing, as I noted earlier, the nuclear poor will get their hands on a nuclear weapon only if they want to. What we need to to is to convince them that they would genuinely be much better off without nuclear weapons. For that, and this point really cannot be reiterated enough, the nuclear powers of the world and especially the US must have credibility. As of now, the US has the least amount of credibility among all the powers. In the current scenario it’s inevitably going to be extremely difficult to convince Iran or any other country to disarm. If he does get elected, the new President Obama will hopefully bring about drastic reductions in the current arsenal, while I don’t see the new President McCain doing so.
It is a very simple element of foreign policy that a country’s safety can only lie in the safety of its enemies, a principle that the US has largely neglected in the last eight years. Whether it’s Iran or North Korea, it is a simple fact of human nature that they are are not going to feel secure if they continue to see the US saber-rattling and engaged in messianic rhetoric.

Secondly, there can sometimes be very simple incentives for countries to give up the idea of nuclear weapons. The country that led to the fall of Khan, Libya, is a shining example. Khan was almost about to deliver a readymade weapon to Libya’s doorstep when Quadaffi realized that here was his chance to gain significant political leverage as well as financial benefits from announcing the existence of this secret atomic bazaar and to give up his nuclear ambitions. If a country truly realizes that its security and self-interest lies in not possessing nukes, it could give up its nuclear ambitions in a heartbeat.

All hope should not be lost. If nations decide to build nuclear weapons, then it’s disturbingly possible for them to do so. But much can be gained if we can work together to convince everyone that the best kind of nuclear weapon is not just one which is never used, but one that’s never had.

Note: As a commentator pointed out, the most exhaustive treatment of Khan’s doings is detailed in the fascinating Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons. This book especially talks about Richard Barlow, an intelligence analyst who was dismissed from the CIA when he tried to expose the US administration’s appeasement of Pakistan. He was especially galled when the US sealed a contract to sell nuclear-capable aircraft to Pakistan in spite of a Congressional law forbidding the sale of such equipment. Mr. Barlow was almost instantly fired, and the book depressingly finds him living in a trailer, still trying to collect his pension. This is of course not the first time that the US government acted like it was above and beyond Congress and the people. And also not the first time that true patriots have been treated as scum and a danger to the country.
In any case, while I highly recommend this book, the level of detail in the 600 page volume might be a little too much for those who want to get a quick summary of Khan’s life and times.

PRAGATI CIRINCIONE BOOK REVIEW

I had been invited to write a book review for Joseph Cirincione’s “Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons” in National Interest Review’s Pragati magazine and here it is. During the process of writing, I gradually came to terms with the fine art of brevity, something that I was not exactly known for. The January issue of Pragati is here.

“RIGHT NOW, the United States has around 10,000 nuclear weapons. Roughly half of them are on a 15-minute alert. Russia has more than 15,000. Other countries around the world have several hundreds. Together, this destructive force can destroy our planet many thousand times over. Those who lived through the Cold War would find this scenario all too familiar and at the same time surreal. If we pass this age with the preservation of our sanity, future generations will no doubt look back and wonder and ask; what happened? And how will we live with this legacy in the future?

Joseph Cirincione, one of America’s foremost experts on weapons of mass destruction, tries to answer these questions in this succinct and well-informed book. He shines in analysing the reasons why states may or may not acquire nuclear weapons. Interestingly, the same reasons that may propel nations to possess nuclear weapons may convince them to give them up. In case of Britain and France for example, national prestige definitely played a role in weapons development; both proud nations wanted in some part to redeem the historic role they had played in the world over past centuries. Prestige and patriotism fuelled by the BJP was also a reason for India’s nuclear tests in 1998. But the same reasons also encouraged South Africa and South Korea to give up weapons development; both thought they would set a model example in front of the world.

The most common reason touted for possessing nuclear weapons-security-can also be a reason to not have them. While Iran could want them for security, some states like South Korea, Brazil and Argentina think that they appear much less antagonistic when they don’t have these weapons. Countries certainly can also abandon such programs because they fear military aggression and political instability. In fact, promise of military assistance from the US can be important in convincing such countries to give up their own programs, like it did for Germany and South Korea. Security on the other hand clearly played a role in the Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons programs.
Economic factors constitute yet another major reason for weapons building. Countries may decide to abandon nuclear weapons in the face of fear of economic sanctions and as a playing card for getting economic benefits, as Libya did for example. One hopes that North Korea will be such a case. However, the case of India is also interesting in this context. It is now known that nuclear pioneer Homi Bhabha downplayed the cost of building reactors and bombs that encouraged the Indian government to provide funding and facilities for nuclear development.

Cirincione’s key argument is that nations can be induced to give up their nuclear ambitions by using the right combination of sticks and carrots.

It is instructive to examine Cirincione’s prescriptions in the context of the current debate over Iran’s programme. He makes it clear that Iran’s development of nuclear weapons will depend on its perception of US plans to possibly effect regime change. Iran thinks that developing a nuclear capability could deter the US from contemplating regime change. Ciricincione argues that diplomacy and gradual pressure through sanctions are likely to induce Iran to forgo its nuclear ambitions. Iran could also be given an incentive to pursue only some parts of the fuel cycle, such as converting uranium to uranium hexafluoride gas. The gas could then be shipped to other countries like Russia to be enriched and fabricated into fuel rods. But clearly measures like inspections cannot work by themselves because you can inspect and inspect, but it takes only a handful of plutonium to make an effective weapon.
Quite significantly, Cirincione thinks that Iran would also be encouraged to give up nuclear weapons building if it does not face a nuclear threat from what it considers to be its biggest enemy in the Middle East—Israel. The nuclear balance in the Middle East is always going to be contingent on the political atmosphere in that politically and historically volatile continent, and Israel is a key player in these developments. While Israel giving up its nuclear program may sound utopian, Cirincione is optimistic that Israel with its vast and superior conventional forces could be encouraged to incrementally reduce or even eliminate its nuclear capability, perhaps starting by shutting down its production reactor at Dimona.

In the end, economic incentives would be as lucrative as political ones for countries to give up nuclear weapons. This fact has precedents in the past, when nations found it too expensive and unnecessarily so to build nuclear weapons. In today’s era, incentives based on mutually beneficial economic transactions may be the key. Cirincione cites a 2005 recommendation by a group spearheaded by former CIA director John Deutch that proposes an “Assured Nuclear Fuel Services Initiative”. Under such an agreement, countries that currently are trying to pursue fuel generation and enrichment would give up these activities in exchange for assured cradle-to-grave services by countries that already have such capabilities. These services would involve contributing to all parts of the fuel cycle, from the shipping of fuel to the final containment and reprocessing of fuel rods. Countries that provide such services would get revenue. All transactions would be subject to IAEA safeguards. One of the most attractive parts of the proposal lies in the incentives that commercial entities would get for brokering such transactions. Thus, the proposal also aims to breathe new life into the nuclear industry which has been through many bad times in the last few decades.

Finally, Cirincione deals with whether and how we can break through the pall of nuclear destruction. Even if we cannot completely eliminate these weapons, it is not utopian to imagine a world where most countries don’t have them and feel secure, and those who do have a dozen each for deterrence. First and foremost, Cirincione has prescriptions for the US to lend credence to its suggestions to stop nuclear proliferation. Writing in 1993, McGeorge Bundy estimated a maximum of 1500 nuclear weapons that would be necessary for deterrence. Far fewer than this number are actually necessary, because all that is required is for a dozen warheads— even three or four—to get through to cause untold destruction. The US is far behind achieving such goals and its and Russia’s reluctance to cut down on its arsenal is one of the major obstacles in trying to convince other nations to give up their arsenals.

In Cirincione’s view, the US clearly has to improve its image as a safeguarder of peace and also as a nation that truly desires it by working together with other nations. During the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev understood and espoused the very fundamental premise of ‘common security’ which says that you can be secure only if your enemies feel secure. Whether it’s Iran or North Korea, countries like the US cannot achieve security by making them feel insecure.

The most crucial issue of today’s nuclear era is that of nuclear terrorism. Deterrence does not work for terrorist groups who clandestinely acquire nuclear material and then post a deadly package to another nation without a return home address. While this problem is hard to solve, its resolution crucially depends on securing nuclear material in states, an endeavor clearly dependent on international cooperation.

The existence of nuclear weapons was conceived by collective human brilliance, and their future will depend on collective human wisdom. This future is deviously intertwined with the rise and fall of governments and civilisations. To secure such a future, we all have to work together, as Cirincione clearly documents in this slim, readable volume.

NOW WILL YOU STOP?

One of the key ideas in stopping nuclear proliferation is to actually help countries enrich their nuclear fuel and monitor the entire process. A country like Iran which threatens to use its own facilities to enrich fuel can be lent assistance by another country. The goal would be to allow such a country to engage in some preliminary steps of fuel processing (eg. converting uranium to uranium hexafluoride gas). The preliminary processed materials can then be shipped to another country for further processing and enrichment and the enriched fuel could then be returned to the other country. Thus, countries which claim that they want to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes should then have no problem in accepting such an arrangement, and it will be much harder for them to then justify indigenous fuel enrichment. Russia seems to be working on such an agreement with Iran, and leading arms expert Pavel Podvig writing in The Bulletin is optimistic about it. Surprisingly, it also seems to have received a semblance of a blessing from His Majesty George Bush the Second:

“It’s possible that by delivering the first 180 fuel assemblies to the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran on December 16, Russia scored a critical victory for the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Early acknowledgement of the event’s importance came from an unlikely source–President George W. Bush. Commenting on the Russian shipment, he publicly urged Iran to now suspend its controversial enrichment program, arguing that with Russian fuel, Iran no longer needed to enrich uranium on its own. Of course, it’s unlikely that Iran will stop its centrifuges–at least not any time soon. But if Washington accepts the shipment of rector fuel to Bushehr as legitimate–despite the continuing controversy surrounding the Iranian nuclear program–it will set an important precedent that should help build a workable system of fuel supply guarantees.”

ONE MORE REASON FOR OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT?

Here’s one more reason to have Barack Obama as president; he could very likely be the president who does the most for non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. In a talk on C-SPAN, Richard Rhodes indicated the formation of an exceptional group of experts including Senator Sam Nunn and Reagan Secretary of State George Schultz. Barack Obama has signed on to this group’s plan for the abolition of nuclear weapons. One of the most significant obstacles facing this goal has been the still-grotesque nuclear arsenal of the US and of course the Bush war-mongering. With its belligerent bombastic about Iran, the Bush administration itself has been the greatest obstacle to achieving nuclear peace. The next president may change that. The fundamental point to be understood is that you cannot be safe unless your enemies feel safe, and the current president is doing everything in his power to make all his enemies, not to mention friends, feel unsafe. The next president could go to the UN and declare that the US is cutting down drastically on nuclear weapons or is getting rid of them entirely. And then he could ask, “Who else is with me on this?”. That could be the way out of the current dilemma. To be sure, it is a little utopian to expect complete elimination of these weapons. But even if the next president could get down the number to a few hundred -currently it is a senseless ten thousand or so- there would be immense progress. As an aside, in a book in 1993, former National Security Advisor to JFK McGeorge Bundy and physicist Sidney Drell had suggested a maximum estimate of 1500 weapons, an estimate that’s still quite high. But Bundy and Drell set reduction to this number as a goal for the year 2000. We don’t need to reiterate how dismally far the country still is from it. Perhaps Obama will change this.

POWER TO SAVE THE WORLD…IN TWO WAYS

As it is with other important issues, the debate about nuclear power has always been mainly political and not technical. Along with the added benefits of nuclear energy and the drastically reduced risks of this energy source compared with conventional sources of energy, the problem of nuclear waste which has been the biggest bee in everyone’s bonnet has also been largely technically solved. The problem has been political; politicians and reactionary anti-nuclear environmentalists comparing nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the same breath and dissuading the nation from adopting the single most important source of power that can solve our energy crisis. Thus the pro-nuclear scientists and citizens who were arguing on technical grounds- a sound and honest strategy- nonetheless failed to see the political arguments that they would have to combat in order to get their message across. This is gradually changing now, and pro-nuclear citizens are also pointing out special interest and political strawmen in the anti-nuclear energy arguments. But there is still a long way to go in educating the general citizenry for whom the word “nuclear” is deeply rooted in fear and untrustworthiness.

I have just received my copy of a new book by Gwyneth Cravens, Power to Save the World: The Truth about Nuclear Energy, which makes a passionate yet reasoned plea for nuclear energy. Cravens is a journalist who was previously part of the anti-nuclear movement. As she researched the topic however, she realised that almost all her fears about nuclear energy were misfounded or exaggerated. Touring various nuclear sites in the country, she reached the conclusion that nuclear energy is the single best solution for combating our global energy crisis. I will review the book as soon as I finish.

But I realised that this issue also relates to the issue of proliferation I was talking about in the last post. The idealist position advocates a little proliferation everywhere. A much safer and more rewarding view would be to advocate giving technology for nuclear power to energy-hungry nations. Not weapons but technology. In fact this was the central point suggested by the report filed by Robert Oppenheimer and others (The Acheson-Lilienthal report) after the end of World War 2. In its new incarnation, it seems it is being rewritten by a group that George Schultz and Senator Sam Nunn have set up. Sam Nunn is one of the world’s foremost experts and a longtime advocate of non-proliferation.

Details of the group’s report and plan have not yet been made public. But in a recent lecture recorded by CSPAN, historian Richard Rhodes said that Nunn has a plan in mind wherein every country in the world would have nuclear technology, but would be at least one year away from making a nuclear weapon. This is a sound and significant plan and sounds very similar in spirit to the Acheson-Lilienthal plan. Let an international body give countries nuclear material and technology, but only that which can be used for generating nuclear power. For example, material provided should be Uranium enriched only to reactor grade (4% U-235) as well as reactor grade Plutonium. Both these materials need to be significantly processed (Uranium to greater than 90% U-235) in order to make them weapons grade. In case of reactor grade Plutonium, the only way it can be used in a bomb is to use relatively large amounts of it. Any such diversion of material for weapons and the technological infrastructure needed to process it can be easily detected by a system of international monitoring, where countries have to keep detailed records of what goes in and comes out.

But for such a development to take place, countries first have to embrace nuclear energy as a solution to their energy problems. At some point or the other, every country in the world, whether fundamentalist or democratic, whether capitalist or socialist, is going to need a novel source of energy to replace fossil fuels, the deleterious effects from which affect everybody. It is only when they see great promise in nuclear power can they become amenable and even eager to partake of nuclear energy without wanting to build nuclear weapons.

Thus, the idealist position of providing nuclear technology to all nations in my opinion is intimately related to the desire of all nations to want that technology in the first place. Thus, the case for nuclear energy should become a mainstay of the case for non-proliferation of the kind that policy makers are trying to advocate. It is only by including the beneficial effects of nuclear energy in their proposals, that proponents of non-proliferation will make it easier for other countries to want to accept nuclear energy and give up nuclear weapons.

TO PROLIFERATE OR NOT?

One of the central questions debated among nuclear policy thinkers- perhaps the central question- is whether the world will be a safer place by allowing a little nuclear proliferation or by aiming for complete disarmament. This is essentially a debate between realists and idealists the way I see it. The idealist approach is not wrong. But the realist approach may be more feasible.

The realists say that nuclear weapons are here to stay. But they put great faith in the concept of deterrence and contend that if every nation in the world has a few nuclear weapons, all of them will be deterred and the threat of nuclear war will actually reduce. The realists also think that the potential threat from nuclear weapons can also limit the extent of conventional warfare.

The realist way of thinking is not new. After the Second World War, Robert Oppenheimer, AEC Chairman David Lilienthal and Secretary of State Dean Acheson convened meetings to discuss and propose a daring plan called the Acheson-Lilienthal plan. Their report started out by saying that nuclear technology can be obtained and used by anyone, no matter how much the United States would like to think of it as a secret. In such a scenario, it is better to provide the know-how to states and then have an international body keeping an official watch on these states so that such a situation is much safer than states developing such technology clandestinely. The existence of an international nuclear energy watchdog who kept a check on all states was key to the proposal.

The plan looked radical then; it would unfortunately be viewed as radical now. Naturally given the antagonistic political atmosphere of the times, the plan was not accepted without a great deal of modification by the administration and not surprisingly, promptly rejected by the Soviets.

The idealist way of thinking says that no matter if the realistic position works to some extent, it has fundamental flaws. The first flaw is that even if the probability of a nuclear war is extremely low, what if a madman decides to use his weapons? The very existence of nuclear weapons means that we will have to face the consequences of them being used, even if the probability of such a use is low. Secondly, the distribution of nuclear weapons does not exactly solve the problem, but pushes it under the rug. The peace such a situation entails can only be an uncertain, strained peace.

I have always been in two minds when it comes to this debate. I agree to a large extent that nuclear weapons are here to stay, and that it better to have an states possess them and then have an international body keep an official watch on them, rather than to have states clandestinely develop them. Right now, about 30 countries have the material and technology to build a crude nuclear bomb virtually with their bare hands. This knowledge cannot be taken away from them. I also think the realist position is strengthened by the existence of something that the original realists did not have to consider- nuclear terrorism. In the light of this plausible catastrophe, it becomes even more important to stop states from developing nuclear technology clandestinely and passing it to terrorists. We have seen several instances of such proliferation involving Iran, North Korea and especially Pakistan. Pakistani scientists have been known to have briefed Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri on WMDs. A. Q. Khan’s nuclear black market is well-known. From the realist point of view, it is far better to have nuclear material accounted for and officially distributed and tracked to stop it from falling into terrorist hands. The problem with the realist plan is that it depends on an unbiased system of international cooperation where countries don’t browbeat or lobby the international body to advance their interests. As we know from the examples of the UN and the IAEA, this seldom happens and more often than not such a policy results in the existence of certain nations who wield even bigger influence than the international body on key matters. Realism will also, just like the idealistic scenario described below, need the US and Russia to largely dismantle their nuclear fleet to level the playing field.

On the other hand, the idealistic position if it can be realised sounds blissful indeed. A world free of nuclear weapons. The idealists have a point when they say that only a world free of these weapons would have gotten completely rid of the possibility of them being used, no matter how small. Also, the idealistic scenario is not completely idealistic. After all, many countries have renounced their nuclear programs for various reasons. They have felt comfortable with their conventional forces, have decided to send out positive messages to other nations, have prospered in trade with nations that otherwise would not trade with them, and have obtained reassurances that the nuclear powers will help them out in case of an imagined emergency. The idealistic position seems to call the realistic position of assuming that nuclear weapons are going to be inevitable into serious doubt. The idealistic position also seems to minimize the risk of nuclear terrorism.

For the idealist position to succeed, many problems would have to be solved. Treaties, viewed as unrealistic by many and condescendingly rejected by others, will have to be enforced. Countries will have to become much more cooperative. The illusion that only by having more nuclear weapons than your neighbor would make you safe needs to disappear. Most importantly, the two countries which have the largest numbers of weapons, the US and Russia, need to start on an expedited program of dismantling them. This program needs to have the urgency of the arms reductions programs in the late 80s. Such programs should aim to bring down the number of weapons on each side to perhaps a thousand, a goal that seems very far from the tens of thousands of weapons currently in their arsenals.

But the idealist position is on the table precisely because for many it does not sound idealistic. Former Secretary of State George Schulz and Senator Sam Nunn are drafting a radical proposal, perhaps similar to the Acheson-Lilienthal plan, to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The proposal necessarily needs to have a crash program for reducing US and Russian arsenals down in a few years. Then only will it gain enough weightage to dictate what to do in the rest of the world.

In the short term, the realist proposal seems to be feasible. Unfortunately, it will completely defeat the idealistic proposal of having a weapons-free world. I wish we could in fact implement the idealist plan. It might even be feasible to a limited sense. I think events in the next few years will dictate if it seems feasible or not. As of now, I am leaning more towards the realistic plan. In any case, international cooperation will be necessary, and the discussion of conditions for this to happen goes much beyond the limited issue of nuclear proliferation.