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 should be much more like George H W Bush

Yes, the comparison would probably make him cringe, but Freeman Dyson makes an interesting and accurate observation in an interview. He notes that the two presidents most responsible for dramatic arms reductions were both Republican; Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush.

HW especially reduced nuclear weapons stockpiles by a greater percentage than any other president. He was responsible for negotiating the START treaty with the Soviet Union which remains the largest and most complex arms control treaty in history; its final implementation in late 2001 resulted in the removal of about 80 percent of all strategic nuclear weapons then in existence.

As Dyson notes, for all the enthusiasm on the left, Obama is actually doing much less than both Reagan and Bush and needs to do much more to reduce nukes. Maybe, as Dyson wryly says, one needs to be a right wing Republican to get rid of nuclear weapons.

“Dyson: Well he should be doing much more. I mean this is… I like Obama and I like what he is doing, but this is not at all impressive. George Bush, Sr., did far more. I mean George Bush, Sr., got rid of more than half of our nuclear weapons just like that. He was the one who really got rid of nuclear weapons on a big scale, but George Bush, Sr., was careful because he was a Republican. He did it very quietly. He didn’t want to have his name associated with that, but he got it done. Of course with Obama it’s sort of the opposite that he would like to get the credit for it, but he is not really doing it, and so it’s, I think he should be doing far more and I hope he will, but he is in a much more difficult position. It helps to be a right-wing Republican if you want to disarm…”

A promising book falls apart

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were such horrific and singular historical events that any new retelling of them deserves to be read seriously. It was with such thoughts that I picked up Charles Pellegrino’s “The Last Train From Hiroshima”. The first few pages were enough to glue me to my chair. In an almost poetically clinical manner Mr. Pellegrino describes the effects of the bomb on human beings in the first few seconds after the detonation. His accounts of people evaporating and the “iron in their blood separating” while their friends who were protected in “shock bubbles” that were mere feet away were absolutely riveting.

Yet in spite of this promising start I could not shake off the gnawing feeling that something was wrong. For instance I have read my fair share of atomic history and so I was astonished to not find absolutely any mention of William “Deke” Parsons in the book. Parsons was a physicist and naval captain who played a part in designing the ‘gun type’ Little Boy and was instrumental in arming the Hiroshima bomb on flight. Earlier his hands had almost bled from practicing the arming, which had to occur at a precise given time twenty five thousand feet up in the air on the ‘Enola Gay’. There is a superb account of him in Stephen Walker’s “Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima”. In response to a comment I made on Amazon, Mr. Pellegrino replied that he did not mention Parsons simply because he has already been part of so many accounts, which to me does not seem a good enough reason for the exclusion. Apart from this omission I also noted Mr. Pellegrino’s statement that Stanley Miller and his advisor Harold Urey won a Nobel Prize for their classic experiment pioneering origin of life research. Urey won a Nobel, but for his discovery of deuterium. Miller was nominated for the prize a few times, and in my opinion should have won it.

Alas, the riveting start of the book and the author’s accounts have now virtually fallen apart. In two New York Times articles it has been reported that the most egregious error in the book consists of the story of one Joseph Fuoco who was supposed to be on one of the planes. Mr. Fuoco makes several appearances in the book, and I had found myself scratching my head when I read his accounts, having never heard of him before. The New York Times and other resources discovered that Mr. Fuoco never took part in the bombing missions. Instead the relevant man is one Charles Corliss who has not been mentioned in the book. Astonishingly, Mr. Fuoco seems to have completely duped the author as Mr. Pellegrino himself admitted; he submitted several photographs and letters to Mr. Pellegrino as proof of his role in the mission, including a letter of commendation from President Truman. Clearly Mr. Fuoco proved to be a remarkably facile con man.

But sadly, this and many other errors have cast serious doubt on the validity of the book. This is a pity since Mr. Pellegrino is an interesting writer who has written books on diverse topics ranging from Jesus’s tomb to Atlantis . As of now the publisher (Henry Holt) has a blurb on the Amazon page saying that further printing and shipping of the book has been halted (which makes me cherish my first printing copy). Even Mr. Pellegrino’s PhD. from Victoria University in New Zealand is being questioned. As usual, an otherwise fine author seems to have sullied his name by sloppy writing on an important topic.

Particle or nuclear?

This is interesting. A Tehran University physics professor has been killed by a bomb planted outside his home. There is speculation whether this could be the work of outsiders, especially from Israel or the US.

To me the accusation that this was an Israeli operation seems anything but far fetched. After all there has been ample talk of the Israelis bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities the way they did with Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1980. But any such action would likely cause immense international outrage and political problems for Israel, not to mention added Arab animosity. Thus from their perspective the next best option would be to do something like this, assassinate someone who was playing a key role in the nuclear program with the hope that it would at least slow down Iran’s plans and intimidate them.

The trouble is that until now the specialty and role of the assassinated professor is not known. As the NYT reports,

There was some dispute about his field of scientific specialization.

The English-language Press TV said he taught neutron physics at Tehran University, although it was not clear whether he was part of Iran’s contentious nuclear enrichment program.

The broadcaster called the professor a ?staunch supporter of the Islamic Revolution? of 1979 that overthrew the Shah and initiated three decades of theocratic rule.

But two Iranian academics, who spoke in return for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said in telephone interviews that he was not a nuclear physicist and had specialized in particle and theoretical physics. The Web site of Tehran University lists him as a professor of elementary particle physics.

Now that’s silly. A professor who teaches neutron physics would likely know a lot about nuclear reactors and bombs; in 1939, the greatest expert in neutron physics in the world was Enrico Fermi, probably the most important physicist working on nuclear energy. Everyone should know that it does not matter much whether the dead professor’s field of specialty is “nuclear” or “theoretical and particle” physics since it is quite easy for a particle physicist to learn nuclear physics and vice versa (even the movies seem to have understood this; in the George Clooney-Nicole Kidman blockbuster “The Peacemaker”, the scientist working for the bad guys is an astrophysics PhD.)

Thus the unfortunate man’s specialty by itself does not at all preclude him from working on the nuclear program. Only time will tell what his exact role was.

New debate about an old 4 kT bang

When on May 11, 1998 India tested nuclear explosives, there was considerable doubt about whether we had tested a bona fide thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb. Every country’s strategic nuclear deterrent has thermonuclear weapons, and to announce itself as a ‘true’ nuclear weapons power India had to demonstrate that we had the capability to build hydrogen bombs. However most outside sources did not believe we had tested a true thermonuclear.

Curiously we seem to have largely bluffed then about the yield, and now the debate seems to have been ignited again with a statement by P. Santhanam of the DAE who accepts that our purported thermonuclear might have fizzled out. Surprisingly, at the same time there seem to be statements from individuals as august as A P J Abdul Kalam who contends that the tests provided the “designed yield”…

…Read the rest of the entry on Desipundit

ASCENT OF THE FAKIRS: INDIA’S NUCLEAR TESTS

For the last few weeks I have been reading “The Nuclear Express” by Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman. Both Reed and Stillman are veteran nuclear weapons and security experts who worked in the government and at Los Alamos. The book is densely packed with previously unknown information. Perhaps the most important- and most concerning -part of the book is about China’s nuclear weapons program and Chinese nuclear aid to Pakistan, but the book also has excellent discussions on the development of Israel’s nuclear program, including the French-Israeli alliance that blossomed after the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, and the Russian-Chinese alliance that was broken off by the Russians in 1959.

The book gives an impression that in some way all nuclear nations are proliferators. Naturally some are less responsible than others, but even India which is generally considered to be a model non-proliferator has two scientists on the US State Department list who are supposed to have provided enrichment know-how to Iran. However, by that token, hundreds of scientists and officials including those in the US should be on the same list; after all when the Shah was in power, Dick Cheney among others was instrumental in selling reactor technology to the Iranians. It seems that we always proliferate to a nation when we consider it to be our friend.

In any case, there is a vast amount of information in the book that is worth reading. Stillman and Reed have some interesting facts about India’s 1998 nuclear tests. In spite of many assertions to the contrary, we don’t seem to have successfully tested a thermonuclear device (hydrogen bomb) in our first test called Shakti 1. The official stated Indian estimate for the test was 45 kilotons. However, Stillman and Reed look at three rather authoritative sources and find that the total yield was only 16 kilotons, which would make the claim impossible. According to the authors’ sources, the second test Shakti 2 was a close replica of the 1974 Smiling Buddha device and yielded 12 kilotons. The third test Shakti 3 was for diagnostics purposes and was only 0.2 kilotons. That puts Shakti 1 at only 4 kilotons, far less than the 45 kilotons that the Vajapayee government claimed. The thermonuclear weapon tested was supposed to be a boosted fission design in which a primary fission weapon ignites a secondary fusion weapon by radiation implosion. The primary is “spiked” by the addition of tritium or deuterium which in turn is supposed to ignite the secondary. It seems that the primary’s yield was very low, which meant that the secondary did not ignite at all. Thus the low 4 kiloton yield. This indicates that India is not truly in the “nuclear club” since all strategic weapons with yields of several hundred kilotons are thermonuclear.

Pakistan’s test results were even more dubious according to Reed and Stillman. At first the Pakistanis could not even agree in public about how many tests they conducted. Then, simply to indicate parity with India, they announced that they had conducted five. In Pakistan’s case only one weapon fired as expected.

But given that Pakistan conducted its tests only eighteen days after India conducted its must mean than Pakistan already had a device ready for testing. This is one of the most important and startling sections in Reed and Stillman. The device was ready for testing because eight years earlier, another nuclear device had been tested by China on Pakistan’s behalf in May, 1990 at their Lop Nur test site. Author Stillman was among the first Americans to set foot inside China’s nuclear weapons complex, and there is plenty of evidence that China tested Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and that it provided unprecedented support to Pakistan’s nuclear complex. There are many pieces of evidence cited in the book which make this an almost inescapable conclusion; for instance, a neutron initiator scheme used for initiating the nuclear weapons was found in a book published by none other than A Q Khan. Plus, Stillman saw several Pakistani scientists within the Chinese weapons complex in the 90s. Chinese support for Pakistan’s bomb had clearly been long-standing and extensive. What China expects to gain from this is ominous and will be a topic for another post.

AN EXCELLENT PRIMER

The Bomb: A New History
Stephen Younger
Ecco, 2009

Stephen Younger’s book on the bomb is a very good primer on nuclear weapons, but somewhat limited by its length. Mr. Younger who is a veteran weapons designer and defense official begins with a succinct history of nuclear weapons and then goes on to review the major weapons and delivery systems in the United States and other countries. He talks about the deterrence triad in the United States; bombers, ballistic missiles and especially submarine-based nuclear missiles that can pack the biggest punch most efficiently. Also included are short discussions of developing and already developed arsenals in other countries including Russia, China, Southeast Asia, France and Britain. Younger writes about the modern weaponization of Russia which is in progress and discusses the status of development in other countries. The discussion also includes a general overview of nuclear weapons effects including thermal, blast, radiation and electromagnetic effects and a chapter on ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ targets and their targeting. Younger contends that a weapon of about 10kT yield would be sufficient to destroy or seriously damage most major cities and installations in the world, except extremely hardened underground facilities. Compare this with the W series of warheads in the US arsenal, many of which pack an explosive force equivalent to several hundred kilotons of TNT.

Younger also discusses nuclear proliferation and the problems inherent in terrorists constructing a bomb. His list of measures for combating such terrorism include a discussion of not just technical measures like missile defense and more efficient border security, but an insightful paragraph on the valuable role of intelligence and especially human intelligence in thwarting terrorists’ attempts to secure a weapon or material in the first place. He also narrates the efforts expended by the Cooperative Threat Reduction Initiative in securing nuclear weapons and reactors in the former Soviet Union. These efforts also involve the dismantling of conventional weapons. While people constantly warn that terrorists might end up constructing a crude nuclear device and while there is some merit in this suggestion, it’s not as easy as it sounds. As Younger says, the devil is in the details, and while much of the general information on nuclear weapons is publicly available, it is far from trivial for any terrorist outfit to actually surmount the many intricate scientific and engineering problems encountered in actual weapons construction. The construction of a plutonium implosion weapon is especially daunting given the excessively exacting conditions that the weapon’s core and outer explosives have to satisfy. A more detailed discussion of dirty bombs is missing from this narrative. Also, while Younger’s analysis of anti-nuclear weapons measures is clear, what is missing is a crucial discussion of countermeasures that can be easily developed against missile defense. These countermeasures have been convincingly demonstrated time and time again to be able to thwart even sophisticated missile defenses. In addition, new missiles such as the Russian SS 27 have been apparently designed to manuever and baffle such defenses.

One of the most informative chapters in the book talks about replacing nuclear weapons with conventional weapons. With better targeting and accuracy, the need for megaton weapons is virtually non-existent. Pinpoint targeting can take out the most crucial command and control centers for nuclear weapons without causing high numbers of casualties. Many new conventional weapons can do the tasks previously reserved for nuclear weapons and and thus lower the spectre of the nuclear threat. In fact, some tasks like hitting biological weapons facilities can be safely accomplished only with conventional weapons, since nuclear weapons might well disperse dangerous biological or chemical material into the surroundings. Even hardened bunkers can be destroyed by especially hardened warheads. In addition, replacing nuclear weapons by conventional weapons can go a long way in nuclear disarmament.

Further on, Younger has a valuable analysis of the security of the US nuclear arsenal. This analysis made me realise that the problem is more complicated than it seems at first sight. The issue is simple. The US has declared a moratorium on nuclear testing in 1992. Congress cut funding for new nuclear weapons research. However, many of the weapons in the US arsenal have extended their shelf lives and it’s not certain whether they would work as designed, an ability that is crucial for deterrence. Doubts have especially been raised about the plutonium ‘pits’ at the center of implosion weapons. Computer simulations can aid in such predictions, but the only sure criterion for judging the workability of a design would be a test, an act that would have deep repurcussions for non-proliferation. In addition, many of the production and manufacturing units that built these weapons have been shut down since 1992. Perhaps most importantly, talented personnel who were competent in nuclear weapons design are gradually fading away with very few new recruits to replace them. Sometimes it is easy to forget that even if they are terribly destructive, nuclear weapons provide an immense and exciting scientific and engineering challenge for technical minds. To partly counter this, the US government has poured billions of dollars into the three national laboratories that still work on nuclear weapons- Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia. Massive basic science facilities have been developed at these three laboratories to retain personnel and attract new blood. Nonetheless, nobody really knows whether the nation would be able to gear up for producing new weapons if it becomes necessary, and nobody has been really able to say when and why it would become necessary in the first place. The problem is quite a pressing one and the solution is not clear.

Finally, Younger talks about the future of nuclear weapons. He examines the three positions that have been taken on nuclear weapons. The abolitionist position was recently made popular by a panel of four non-partisan experienced political leaders (Nunn, Perry, Kissinger and Schultz). While this position may be tenable in principle, in practice it would need constant and complete verification which may be difficult. Then there are the minimalist and moderate positions. Younger himself adopts the moderate position which calls for about 1000-2000 relatively low yield non-strategic weapons on missiles and submarines. It is not easy to decide what number is efficient for deterrence, partly because deterrence dictates that analyses of this number should not be publicly disclosed in the first place! But whatever the number, Younger does not see nuclear weapons disappearing from the face of the earth anytime soon. As he concludes in this primer, hopefully the world can enter a state of security in which rogue states don’t have weapons, bombs and material are secured, and deterrence works as planned. While this succinct primer does not provide the answer to whether such a state will actually be achieved, it certainly provides a slim and good introduction to all basic nuclear issues to the layman that should make him or her think and decide for themselves.

THE H-BOMB FUCHS?

And a very brief history of the US hydrogen bomb effort

How the Soviets got the H-bomb by 1955 has always been something of a mystery. Although they had top-notch scientists like Andrei Sakharov working for them, they still got almost exactly the same design as the Americans in just 4 years. Nobody denies Sakharov’s tremendous contributions to the H-bomb effort. And yet the question lingers whether espionage helped H-bomb design just as it had helped Soviet A-bomb design, most famously through Klaus Fuchs’s efforts.

Now a new book due to be released in January claims that the authors have uncovered a spy who gave details about the H-bomb design to the Soviets. “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation” is co-authored by Thomas Reed, a former weapons designer who worked at Los Alamos for many years. Among other things the book discusses Chinese support of Pakistan’s nuclear program. The authors would not name the spy since he is now purportedly dead. Historians who have weighed in don’t find the idea entirely implausible; after all it is hard to believe that security would have been so tight so as to completely preclude espionage. In addition even after Fuchs was apprehended, the Soviets still had a web of spies and sympathizers spread throughout the US that even as of now is not completely deciphered.

It is worthwhile at this point to recapitulate some of the US H-bomb history:

1942: Edward Teller, the ‘father of the hydrogen bomb’, builds upon a suggestion by Enrico Fermi and proposes the first design for a thermonuclear weapon. This is during a secret conference at Berkeley organized by Robert Oppenheimer that’s supposed to explore the feasibility of a fission weapon, not a fusion device. Teller’s basic idea is to use the extreme temperatures arising from an atomic bomb to ignite a cylinder of deuterium or tritium at one end, with the unproven assumption that the fusion fuel will ignite and continue to burn, thus producing a tremendous explosion equivalent to millions of tons of TNT. The H-bomb distracts the participants enough for them to speculate on its workings, but atomic bomb design (necessary for initiating a fusion reaction anyway) is wisely given priority. The as yet speculative thermonuclear weapon is christened “The Super”. The Manhattan Project is kicked off. Throughout the war Teller goes off on his own H-bomb trajectory, often contributing to flared tempers and inadequate expertise at Los Alamos.

1946: After the war, Teller who is still obsessed with the weapon convenes a short, top secret conference. Klaus Fuchs is one of the participants. The conference concludes, mostly based on Teller’s optimistic assessment, that The Super is feasible. At the end of the conference, Teller submits an overly optimistic report much to the chagrin of Robert Serber, an accomplished physicist who had been Oppenheimer’s principal assistant at Los Alamos. Fuchs transmits the information from this conference to the Soviets.

August 1949: The Soviets detonate their first atomic bomb. Everyone is shocked, perhaps unnecessarily so. A high-level committee headed by Oppenheimer convenes in October on Halloween and debates H-bomb development. The almost unanimous opinion is that the H-bomb is not a tactical weapon of war but a weapon of genocide and therefore its development should not be undertaken. Priority should be given instead to the development of better, tactical fission weapons.

December 1949-January 1950: Edward Teller, spurred on by the Soviet A-bomb, starts recruiting scientists to join him at Los Alamos to work on the Super. Hans Bethe initially agrees, then after a chat with Oppenheimer and Victor Weiskopf, declines. Teller blames his change of mind on Oppenheimer. Later Bethe decides to work at Los Alamos only as a consultant, mainly because he wants to prove that The Super won’t be feasible.

During this time, Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett at Los Alamos embark on a set of tedious calculations to investigate the feasibility of The Super. The result is decidedly pessimistic. The Super would need much more tritium, an extremely rare and expensive isotope, to initiate burning. Even if tritium is added the probability of successful propagation is extremely low. Teller’s dream is dead in the water. Fermi, one of Teller’s role models, confirms the bad news.

January-February 1950: Even as Ulam’s calculations give a fit to Teller, Klaus Fuchs confesses his espionage. The country gradually starts descending into a state of paranoia. Against the advice of many experts, President Harry Truman initiates a crash program to build the H-bomb. Incidentally his announcement comes before that about Fuchs. And it comes absurdly even as Ulam and others have proven that Teller’s Super would not work.

1950: Throughout 1950 the options for the Super keep on looking bleaker. In June the Korean War begins, fueling more feeling of paranoia. Teller’s mood blackens. At one point after Ulam reports his latest set of calculations, Teller is said to be “pale with fury”

December 1950-January 1951: Ulam makes a breakthrough. He realizes that separating the fission weapon and fusion fuel and using the extreme pressures generated by the fission weapon will cause compression of the fusion fuel, thus dramatically increasing the odds of thermonuclear burning. Ulam floats the idea to Teller who enthusiastically espouses it and also crucially realizes that radiation from the fission “primary” would do an efficient job of compressing and sparking off fusion in the fusion “secondary”. The idea is so elegant that Oppenheimer calls it ‘technically sweet’ and now supports the program. Bethe agrees to work on the device because suddenly everyone thinks that the Soviets will now not be long in discovering it. Later, Teller makes significant efforts to discredit Ulam’s role in the invention. But the Teller-Ulam design becomes the basis for almost every hydrogen bomb in the arsenals of the world’s nuclear powers.

1951-1952: Work proceeds on a thermonuclear weapon. In November 1952 the world’s first hydrogen bomb, Ivy Mike, explodes with a force equivalent to 650 Hiroshima type bombs. Mankind has finally invented a device that comes closest to being a weapon for complete annihilation of nations.

So that is where matters stood in 1952. That gives the spy a window of two years or so to transmit the information. It’s instructive to note that after Fuchs was outed, Oppenheimer actually hoped that he had told the Soviets about the H-bomb design from the 1946 conference, since that design had been shown to fail and would have led the Soviets on a wild goose chase. However the initial thoughts that Bethe, Oppenheimer and others had about the Soviets discovering the Teller-Ulam mechanism soon don’t look unfounded to me. There were experts who thought that the idea of using compression and radiation to ignite and burn the thermonuclear fuel would occur to anyone who had thought hard and long about these matters. Niels Bohr thought that a bright high-school student would have thought about it, but that’s probably going a little too far. The truth could well be in between, with both original thought and espionage playing a role. In any case the new book promises fresh fodder for atomic aficionados and I have pre-ordered it.

DECONSTRUCTING LITTLE BOY AND FAT MAN

A high-school educated truck driver uncovers the classified details of the first atomic bombs with unlimited verve and imagination

The details and specifications of the first two atomic bombs developed by humanity- Little Boy and Fat Man- are still secret. While a lot of material about nuclear weapons has been declassified, the specs for the first bombs dropped on Hiroshima are still considered out of reach, and probably absurdly so. Even after other countries have built countless nuclear weapons like Little Boy and Fat Man and vastly improved ones, the original bomb design details remain under a shroud of secrecy.

Now, a truck driver with a high school diploma has uncovered these details in excruciating detail. His work has been lauded by prominent historians including Richard Rhodes. His fascinating story is recounted in the December 15 New Yorker. John Coster-Mullen, with the “Coster” in his name curiously being the last name of his wife, has gone to simple but extraordinary lengths to get detailed information on the design of the first two nuclear weapons. He has succeeded to a degree that no professional scientist or historian has before, and which no national laboratory scientist will admit.

Coster-Mullen’s story proves that to make significant headway in a problem you don’t have to be very smart or highly-educated. All you need is the patience to stick with a topic and keep on drilling deep into it. Coster-Mullen has worked with this single purpose for the last fifteen years or so, and has exploited almost every publicly available source to put together the details of Little Boy and Fat Man. These include museum exhibits around the world, scores of books written about nuclear weapons, thousands of documents declassified in the last fifty years, and testimonies and interviews with everyone from top scientists to machinists who worked on the bombs. The most important asset that Coster-Mullen brings to bear on the problem is unremitting determination and pure old common sense.

Consider the instance where he looked at an old and commonly seen photograph of two scientists carting the core explosive ‘physics package’ for the device exploded in the first atomic bomb test- Trinity- into a sedan. Coster-Mullen simply looked at the height of the sedan doors, figured out which model it was (a 1942 Plymouth) went into a car museum to measure the height and width, and then by simple proportionality deduced the size of the box the men were carrying. In another instance, he deduced the length of a crucial plug used for Little Boy from the account of the number of turns needed to screw it in. His general approach is to patch together material from a variety of sources and then connect the dots using simple deductive logic. While there are still unresolved questions about the designs, he has put together an extraordinary amount of detail. This is classic detective work at its best. The culmination of this work is Atom Bombs, a book about the detailed designs of the first atomic weapons that Mullen is selling on Amazon for 50$.

Again, Coster-Mullen has nothing more than a high school diploma and works as a truck driver and part-time photographer. His example eminently indicates that what is needed for success is an iron will to uncover something, and knowing where to look for the data. Read the entire article- it’s fascinating.