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The first impulse of states that acquire nuclear weapons is “simple” deterrence, and the simplest form of deterrence is massive retaliation to existential threats. (India and Pakistan, for example, now embrace declaratory policies of simple deterrence.) The second impulse, made possible by the growth of nuclear capabilities, is to avoid “all or nothing” decisions that could effectively result in the complete destruction of national territory. Thus was born the notion of limited nuclear options.

Here’s how the Nixon administration thought about the problem, as codified in NSDM 242, issued on January 17, 1974:

The United States will rely primarily on U.S. and allied conventional forces to deter conventional aggression by both nuclear and non-nuclear powers. Nevertheless, this does not preclude U. S. use of nuclear weapons in response to conventional aggression.

Should conflict occur, the most critical employment objective is to seek early war termination, on terms acceptable to the United States and its allies, at the lowest level of conflict feasible. This objective requires planning a wide range of limited nuclear employment options which could be used in conjunction with supporting political and military measures (including conventional forces) to control escalation.

Plans should be developed for limited employment options which enable the United States to conduct selected nuclear operations, in concert with conventional forces, which protect vital U. S. interests and limit enemy capabilities to continue aggression. In addition, these options should enable the United States to communicate to the enemy a determination to resist aggression, coupled with a desire to exercise restraint.

Thus, options should be developed in which the level, scope, and duration of violence is limited in a manner which can be clearly and credibly communicated to the enemy. The options should (a) hold some vital enemy targets hostage to subsequent destruction by survivable nuclear forces, and (b) permit control over the timing and pace of attack execution, in order to provide the enemy opportunities to reconsider his actions.

Nuclear deterrence theory works best at the conceptual level. As Hans Morganthau once wrote, “The very purpose of threat and counter-threat is to prevent the test of actual performance from taking place.” But here’s the rub: Deterrence concepts must be credible, which means that they must be translated into operation plans. And when concepts become plans, they strain credulity.

No operational plans are more “incredible” than those for limited nuclear war. In Robert Osgood’s best known book, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (1957), he argues that credibility “requires that the means of deterrence be proportionate to the objectives at stake.” Osgood’s view was challenged at the time by those who believed that credible nuclear deterrence required more punch than the enemy could take. As General Curtis LeMay testified before the Senate’s Airpower Hearings in 1956,

A deterrent force is one that is large enough and efficient enough that no matter what the enemy force does, either offensively or defensively, he still will receive a quantity of bombs or explosive force that is more than he is willing to accept.

The dilemma of proportionality vs. leverage has bedeviled nuclear deterrence theory ever since. Reverse mirror imaging hasn’t helped matters: What is perceived as a deterrent by Country X looks a lot like a nuclear war-fighting force in Country Y. The scales of this debate in the United States tipped in the 1970s as Soviet nuclear capabilities grew. (Aspiring Wonks who want a sense of the debate over “prompt hard-target kill capabilities” might check out Paul Nitze’s Deterring our Deterrent in the Winter 1976-77 issue of Foreign Policy.)

The best and the brightest nuclear deterrence theorists – Nitze, Herman Khan, Henry Kissinger, and Albert Wohlstetter, to name a few – failed to crack this nut. Their arguments were unpersuasive because the entire concept of limited nuclear options rested on heroic and questionable assumptions. As Bernard Brodie wrote in his classic book, Strategy and the Missile Age (1959), “It takes only one to start a total war, but it takes two to keep a war limited.” If the stakes in a confrontation between nuclear-armed states were so great as to warrant a crossing of the nuclear threshold, how would they not warrant upping the ante? How would leaders evaluate threat and damage assessments in the chaos of a nuclear battlefield? Would command and control over nuclear forces remain intact in these circumstances? Would national leaders in such discord as to find themselves in a nuclear war somehow manage to find the same page to keep it limited? And how does the quest for securing advantage accord with the very notion of a limited nuclear war?

Given the stakes involved in potential nuclear confrontations, it would be irresponsible for national leaders to refuse to authorize planning for limited nuclear options. But because so many core questions about crossing the nuclear threshold have no good answers, it would also be irresponsible for national leaders to authorize the employment of limited nuclear options.

Does the Obama Administration’s National Security Strategy signal a policy shift that in effect drops the condition that Iran suspend its enrichment related activities as a precondition for negotiations? Stephanie Cooke, Uranium Intelligence Weekly’s editor, thinks so:

Speaking of Iran, few seem to have clocked the possible significance of an Iranian offer to suspend their 20% enrichment program if the proposed Turkey-Brazil fuel swap goes through. Or – perhaps even more importantly – a little noticed shift in the May 2010 U.S. National Security Strategy document that allows negotiators far more flexibility over Iranian enrichment than its predecessor document in 2006. For one thing, unlike the Bush 2006 NSS, the current NSS no longer sets up as a specific objective “to keep states from acquiring the capability to produce fissile material suitable for making nuclear weapons.” It only says the Administration will “work to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.” That leaves open the possibility that the US and its partners in the P5+1 group could at some point begin thinking the unthinkable – namely allowing some enrichment in Iran to continue. These are indications of movement on both sides that could ultimately lead to a defusion of the crisis. For anyone interested in reading more on this, we have made available an article in our current issue of Uranium Intelligence Weekly.

I am not sure about this particular reading of the tea leaves — or whether the condition was ever really meaningful even at the end of the Bush Administration, partisan wrangling to the contrary — but I’d be interested in what others have to say.

Even in the sweltering July heat, there are still events in the DC area. A few that caught my eye this week.

☞Wednesday, July 14, at noon at CATO.
What to Do about North Korea?
Featuring Stephen Linton, Karin J. Lee, Doug Bandow, and moderated by Ted Galen.
The Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001

☞Thursday, July 15, at 9:30am and 2:30pm are the latest hearings on the NewSTART Treaty. The topic is on Maintaining a Safe, Secure and Effective Arsenal. Dr. Michael R. Anastasio, Dr. George H. Miller, and Dr. Paul J. Hommert, heads of of the three national labs, will testify to the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

☞Thursday, July 15, from 6:30pm-8:00pm the World Affairs Council-DC is showing the NTI film A Nuclear Tipping Point.
UCDC Washington Center
1608 Rhode Island Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20036

☞Finally, starting Thursday, July 15, at 8:30pm, the American Ensemble Theater is putting on Lee Blessing’s comic drama A Walk in the Woods. The story follows two Cold War nuclear arms negotiators, one American, one Russian, as they struggle to reach an arms reduction agreement. Full dates and times on the website.
Goethe Institut – Gallery
812 7th Street NW
Washington, DC 20001

As always send any event requests to armscontrolevents@gmail.com

Some readers noted errors in my previously posted calculations (Enriching Salehi’s Statement, 25 June 2010). My assumptions were quite wrong. I’ve now, finally, found some time to sit down and revisit my numbers. And as it happens, on the same day as Mr. Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the AEOI, have announced that his outfit has now produced about 20 kilograms of ‘higher enriched uranium’.

Again, according to the latest IAEA report on Iran:

• One cascade is presently enriching uranium to ‘higher grade’. This cascade comprises 164 IR-1 machines.

• Between 9 February 2010 and 21 May 2010 (that is, for 101 days), a total of approximately 172 kg of low enriched UF6 was fed into the first cascade. This gives as approximate feed rate of 1.703 kg/day.

• On 7 April 2010 (after 57 days), Iran withdrew 5.7 kilograms hexafluoride gas enriched to 19.7 per cent U-235 (the Agency assay indicates an enrichment level of 19.3 per cent). This gives us an approximate product rate of 100 grams per day.

• The tails are set to 2.0 wt% U-235 (and not 0.2 wt% as assumed in the previous post). Iran intends, by connecting the second cascade, to bring the tails down to 0.7 wt% (that is natural uranium).

Under these parameters, a feed of 172 kilograms of 3.5 per cent enriched hexafluoride gas should equal about 14.54 kilograms of 19.7 per cent enriched material. As noted above, Iran withdrew much less than half of this on 7 April 2010. In order to make approximate sense of that numbers, the tails setting must be close to 2.5 wt% (this assuming that material were fed at a constant rate from 9 February to 7 April). Also, under that assumption, the machines operated at about 0.63 SWU/machine and year, not by any means an impressive figure.

However, the numbers make more sense in the aggregate. I ran the known average feed and product per day through statistical software, and came up with some interesting numbers, but only after making two assumptions. First, in order to produce 20 kilograms of enriched gas, the total feed for the period would need to be 236.7 kilograms. Second, I had to assume that the additional material has been fed into the cascades after 20 May 2010. This actually leads to a drop in the feed rate (down to 1.2207 kilograms per day). I’ve put it all in a graph.

Running all 156 data points leads to some interesting conclusions. The mean feed flow rate, under all these assumptions, becomes about 1.536 kilograms per day (with a sigma of about 230 grams and a deviation of 218 grams). The mean product flow rate becomes about 129 grams, with a sigma of about 22 grams and a deviation of about 21 grams).

Extrapolating the mean value over a year gives a feed of 560.64 kg yield a product of about 47.09 kg. All things being equal, this would require a tails setting of 2 wt%, which is precisely what Iran has declared. The total separative investment would be 154.4 SWU/year. This would mean that the machines are running at 0.94 SWU/machine/year.

The cascade solution would look something like this:

So, to sum up, I can draw three conclusions:

First, I was definitely wrong in accusing Mr. Salehi of misleading us;

Second, in fact, his figures may well be right; and

Third, playing around with these figures are inherently dangerous, since there are many assumptions that have to be made, especially regarding tails enrichment.

Something interesting apparently happened last Wednesday (7/7/2010) in the skies over Hangzhou, China. As regular Wonk-readers will quickly agree, trying to extract reliable information from regular media reports is difficult at best. Unfortunately, almost all the news reports of this incident that I have seen of it have something like “…UFO over Hangzhou…” in the title. That makes it even harder to believe the reports. It doesn’t help that some of the pictures seem inconsistent with each other. (Editors seem to believe that UFOs in the title means you can photoshop the photos as you like.)

Some of the most interesting photos remind me of the images of the reentry of the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft. Here, the break-up of the object appears behind buildings reportedly in Hangzhou has a tremendously large apparent angle, making it very, very close to the city of Hangzhou. Too close, in my view, to be credible. ( See here for a discussion of “apparent angle.”) I believe these are photoshopped and I am ignoring them. (I freely admit it could be a mistake to dismiss these images but they just don’t seem credible even if they are extremely well done if photoshopped.)

Instead, let us consider some of the most obvious causes of what appears to have been seen. First, NASA does not list any satellite decays—a satellite reentering the Earth’s atmosphere after being in an established orbit—for that day, nor were there any predictions for satellites even near that date. So it is highly unlikely that the “UFO” was a reentering satellite. Furthermore, there were no satellites put into orbit that day so we can eliminate a lower stage reentering.

A DF-21?

The most credible image shows an arc streaking across the sky soon after (near?) local sunset. Assuming this is actually the “UFO” and that it really was taken at Hangzhou, then we can say some interesting things about its trajectory. First, it appears in the Northwest and the end of the trajectory (in this image) is roughly due North. Let’s make that a little more quantitative. At sunset (which happened at Hangzhou that day at 11:00 GMT), the Sun had an azimuth of approximately 300 degrees and remained in that approximate azimuth for a considerable time after setting; though, of course, its elevation continued to go negative. Therefore, the image—assuming it was not zoomed and that it was a typical cell phone camera—shows the end of the trajectory having an azimuth of at least 350 degrees. (That’s 10 degrees West of North.) The peak of the trajectory appears at an azimuth of about 335 degrees. I would say there is about a +/- 5 degree error in my heading estimates, depending mainly on where the Sun really is in the image. Of course, that does not have to be the actual point where the trajectory had its highest altitude. It could simply be the highest point on the apparent trajectory: the curve of the Earth’s surface and the angle the trajectory makes relative to the observer could make a different point appear to have the highest elevation in the image.

click on the image for a larger version

The red line represents the reconstructed line of sight for the “end” of the trajectory while the yellow line represents the reconstructed line of sight for the “peak” of the trajectory. The white line is the ground track for a hypothetical DF-21 trajectory.

The image above shows these reconstructed observation angles from Hangzhou; the red line represents the reconstructed line of sight for the “end” of the trajectory while the yellow line represents the reconstructed line of sight for the “peak” of the trajectory. I have added another line running roughly East to West from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center with a length of 1,800 km, roughly the range of a DF-21. Amazingly (perhaps an amazing coincidence) the halfway point of that trajectory corresponds roughly to the angle on which the apparent trajectory reaches its maximum. This peak appears to be about 25 degrees above the horizon in the image of the trajectory. Is that possible for a hypothetical trajectory so far away (~1,400 km) from the camera?

The apparent elevation of the peak of such a hypothetical DF-21 trajectory as seen from Hangzhou can be calculated from a simple geometric relationship as about 17 degrees. That is really amazingly close to the “observed” 25 degrees considering all the simplifications in the calculation I have introduced to make a quick calculation! So we certainly cannot rule out this possibility on geometric grounds alone.

Problems with a DF-21 Hypothesis

The major problem with a DF-21 hypothesis is that the peak of the trajectory occurs nearly 600 km above the Earth’s surface! So the arc we see in the image cannot be the trail produced by reentry heating. Perhaps we should rule a DF-21 launched from Jiuquan out on those grounds alone. But it is possible that continued discharge after burnout from the DF-21’s solid-propellant second-stage motor could be illuminated by the Sun if there was just the right geometry. Any other missile trajectory has to have the reentry much, much closer to Hangzhou. That creates lots of range safety issues and presumably are ruled out. (An errant missile trajectory would never have been allowed to get so close to such a large population center. All missiles, even SCUD combat missiles, have a self-destruct charge on board to prevent such large discrepancies from the planned flight path.)

So it seems to me that a DF-21 launch somewhere near Jiuquan and aimed at a point somewhere in the eastern Gobi desert is the most likely cause of this “UFO” even given the problem of illuminating the solid-motor discharge above the Earth’s atmosphere. Unfortunately, I doubt that we will learn anything new about the DF-21 from this image, given the uncertainty of where it took off, its heading, and its range.

A General Disclaimer

I have made a tremendous number of approximations and simplifications in this analysis in order to get a feeling for this event. Many of you will object to those and say more care should have been taken. I agree with you in principle but think such accuracy is unwarranted at this time considering the tremendous amount of uncertainty in judging which pictures are accurate and even what basic timing data to believe. Let me emphasize once again that this analysis assumes that the image at the top of this post is what caused the alarm in Hangzhou. I have no idea if that is the case. If some of the images I have discarded are really images of the phenomena, than this analysis’s assumptions are wrong at the start.

It is always hard to use media reports for quantitative analysis but particularly so for anything with UFO in the title. It seems that editors see that as a license for any kind of photoshopping they like. So, until better information is available, I think the most likely explanation is a DF-21.

Editor’s Note: Don’t even think about making a comment suggesting it was a real UFO, those comments will not get approved. This is a serious blog and is not interested in UFO theories. Get your own blog if you want to discuss that sort of thing.

This morning’s Washington Post features an op-ed on Iran policy by former U.S. Senator Charles (Chuck) Robb and retired U.S. Air Force general Charles (Chuck) Wald. It’s a serious, earnest statement, but also seriously flawed.

The gist of what The Two Chucks have to say is this: we cannot “compel Iran to terminate its nuclear program” unless we threaten to bomb it. Only if we do threaten to bomb it — in addition to imposing sanctions and holding the door open to diplomacy — will we have any real hope of success. This shift to a “triple-track strategy” must be made swiftly, because Iran “could achieve nuclear weapons capability before the end of this year.”

Call it the “Say it with JDAMs“ school of nonproliferation diplomacy. Unfortunately, it overlooks a couple of the key puzzle pieces needed to understand the situation.

**

First and most importantly, you can bomb an enrichment facility, but you can’t bomb an enrichment program. (Or not one as well-developed as Iran’s.) It’s not like a reactor, with billions of dollars’ worth of hard-to-replace capital piled up in one spot over the course of several years. Instead, it’s thousands of interchangeable pieces that can be brought together and operated more or less anywhere.

To illustrate the point, here’s an interior view from Iran’s centrifuge facility at Natanz:

Any one of those centrifuges — the tall, silvery tubes in the picture — and the piping connecting them can be replaced in short order.

What’s more, the entire complex could be buried in wreckage, and the centrifuge workshops would simply start sending their products to a different location.

Bomb the workshops — if you are lucky enough to locate them — and new workshops could be set up before very long.

Following this line of reasoning leads you to a realization that Iran’s capacity for precision engineering would have to be bombed somehow. That’s not a problem with a solution.

**

Second, Robb and Wald are mistaken about when Iran will achieve “nuclear weapons capability.” The Iranians could start producing highly-enriched uranium for bombs before you go to bed tonight. They could have started years ago, in fact. That they have not done so, as far as anyone knows, renders the art and science of timeline-ology, as Robb and Wald are practicing it, more or less moot.

(It helps to recall that the timelines sometimes discussed by representatives of the Intelligence Community reflect features such as how much time it takes to set up a new clandestine facility like the one at Qom, as opposed to anything special happening at the big showpiece facility at Natanz.)

**

Perhaps you’re wondering: So if we can’t bomb their enrichment program, why haven’t the Iranians already started making bomb material? What’s holding them in check?

One possibility is, maybe they’ve decided they don’t want to, or feel they don’t need to.

A second possibility is, they think the price of forging ahead would be too high. The sanctions are bad enough as it is.

A third and related possibility is that they think that the price might involve not just the bombing of an enrichment facility here or an air defense system there, but a much more comprehensive sort of attack, one that would threaten the regime’s grip on power.

Here is where we might start a different sort of conversation about the utility of threats. As Tom Schelling pointed out some decades ago, threats are much more useful for trying to deter action than for trying to compel action. After all, if Iran were to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or kick out inspectors, then they would have crossed a line, not the other side. It is much easier to justify the use of force in response to a grave provocation than in terms of a technological timeline generated with a spreadsheet somewhere, and subject to a variety of assumptions.

In the meantime, certain advantages accrue to the United States and its allies from not dropping JDAMs. One is that the international community can continue to monitor Iran’s nuclear programs, albeit not as well as it should. To start bombing would probably mean losing that access, since the Iranians would probably respond by leaving the NPT and rebuilding their centrifuge facilities in secret somewhere. In short, the real Iran “nuclear timeline” has to do with leadership decision-making more than technical milestones. Bombing might well accelerate that timeline, not slow it.

Readers know that I like arguments. Senator Lugar has been making a very good argument about New START and so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons, which are not covered by any strategic arms reduction treaty.

Opponents, like Governor Romney, have pointed to Russia’s large stockpile of such weapons as a reason to resist ratifying the New START agreement.

I find this a bizarre objection for a very simple reason expressed by Senator Lugar, most recently in his response to Mitt Romney’s oped that I mentioned the other day:

Do you think rejecting New START would make a further US-Russia agreement on “tactical” nuclear weapons more or less likely?

The answer is obvious: if our goal is to secure an agreement with Russia that would cover all classes of nuclear weapons, ratifying the New START agreement is a necessary step. Here is how Senator Lugar makes the argument:

Governor Romney also cites Russia’s stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons as a reason to oppose New START. Russia does have more tactical weapons than we do, but he distorts their value by implying that they constitute a serious missile threat to Europe. In fact, most of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons either have very short ranges, are used for homeland air defense, are devoted to the Chinese border, or are in storage. He also ignores that our NATO allies have endorsed the New START Treaty. A Russian attack on NATO countries is effectively deterred by NATO conventional superiority, our own tactical nuclear forces, French and British nuclear arsenals, and U.S. strategic forces. An agreement with Russia that reduced, accounted for, and improved security around tactical nuclear arsenals is in the interest of both nations. But these weapons do not compromise our strategic deterrent.

Rejecting the Treaty would guarantee that no agreement on tactical nukes would occur.

I have some specific ideas on how to manage Russia’s stockpile of “tactical” nuclear weapons, but for now I think Lugar’s point is sufficient: If we seek new negotiations with Russia, we have to ratify the treaties we’ve already negotiated. First things first.

The full text of Lugar’s statement is in the comments.

I’ve always counseled our son and daughter to go the extra mile. During the Cold War nuclear competition, the Soviet Union and the United States went a bit further than the extra mile. In one particular instance, the Nixon administration drilled down to 6,150 feet – a distance equivalent to four Sears Towers stacked on top of each other – to test the warhead associated with the Spartan missile defense interceptor.

Since the only way to make missile defense intercepts successful in the 1970s was by means of a nuclear detonation, and since the Spartan was designed to serve as an area defense, its warhead had to be a big bruiser, with a design yield of five megatons. (A detonation of this magnitude would wreak havoc on the radars required to cue and plan intercepts, but never mind.) Among the reasons behind the Nixon administration’s decision to test the Spartan’s warhead at full yield were to demonstrate resolve, reinforce deterrence, and leverage the Kremlin in on-going SALT negotiations.

Conducting the largest U.S. underground test in the environs of Las Vegas was not in the cards. The search for an alternative location somehow fixed on the Aleutian Island chain jutting out into the Bering Sea, off the Soviet coastline. The sacrificial island was named Amchitka. Local Tribes that held the belief that the Aleutians were imbued with Spirit and not a suitable place for nuclear testing were not well represented on K Street.

For details of the test, I recommend Dean Kohlhoff’s book, Amchitka and the Bomb: Nuclear Testing in Alaska (2002), my source for these particulars. Drilling to this depth in the Arctic and placing a warhead weighing approximately 850,000 pounds down the shaft were no easy feats. The horizontal blast chamber, which needed to be drilled by hand, had a radius of twenty-six feet. Cabling must have been an adventure.

The test was carried out on November 6, 1971, registering 7.0 on the Richter scale – the same reading as the earthquake that rocked San Francisco and interrupted the World Series in 1989. The Amchitka test uplifted a fault line in the Bering Sea by forty-two inches.

Update | 8:05 am 7 July 2010 Here is a video of the test.

I was trying to figure out how to mock this terrible, terrible, terrible Mitt Romney op-ed on New START without calling Fred Hiatt a “neocon hack job” (again).

But Peter Crail, on my Facebook wall, said it much better than I can:

Apparently under a Romney administration we can look forward to taking ICBMs out of their silos, converting the silos to interceptor sites, and mounting the ICBMs on bombers. Because that’ll show the Russians who gets out-negotiated.

Sheer genius.

If you are interested in wading through all mistakes in the Romney oped, Paul Podvig has a very patient response.

Late Update | 8:01 am 7 Julyb 2010 John Kerry has a response to Romney in the Washington Post that, among other things, demonstrates the advantages of having access to professional staff who actually know what the hell they are talking about:

Let’s examine the key objections: Romney says that New START impedes our ability to build missile defenses against attack from rogue countries. This is a myth. The treaty will have no impact on our ability to build ballistic missile defenses against Iran, North Korea or other threats from other regions. The Obama administration is free to proceed with missile defense plans it announced last year.

Like others unfamiliar with previous arms control agreements, Romney warns that Russia could use language in the treaty’s preamble as a pretext for withdrawal if the United States builds up its missile defense. In a word, baloney. The preamble is not legally binding. Every arms control treaty since the Kennedy administration has allowed either party to withdraw if it felt its national interests were jeopardized. Surely Romney would not want to give up that right.

Similarly, Romney is flat wrong in claiming that the Bilateral Consultative Commission is broadly empowered to amend the treaty with regard to missile defense. The language is clear that any amendment proposed by the commission would have to be ratified just like a new treaty.

Another red herring is the notion that the treaty allows Russia to escape limits on the number of strategic nuclear warheads. The same limits apply to the United States and Russia, including the ability to count each nuclear-equipped heavy bomber as a single warhead. The new treaty’s approach to counting bomber weapons is consistent with the strategic relations between the United States and Russia and works to our advantage because our fleet has a great nuclear-weapons capacity.

Romney’s claim that Russia can mount an unlimited number of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) on bombers is a strategic concept that was rejected in the 1960s because submarine-launched missiles were deemed far more effective. If Russia were foolish enough to pursue this path, we could either get the new weapons incorporated in the treaty or withdraw. His argument that the treaty abandons limits on multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles, known as MIRVs, is equally flawed; the Bush administration decided it did not care what missiles Russia retained when it negotiated the 2002 Moscow Treaty. Similarly, concerns about restrictions on converting launchers for ICBMs and those launched from submarines for missile defense purposes are misplaced because those conversions would be more expensive and less effective than alternatives and thus unnecessary.

With Olli Heinonen’s resignation as IAEA Deputy Director General for Safeguards, questions are naturally turning to “Why did he leave?” and “Who will replace him?”

I think the answers are: Because it was time for him to move on, and I have no idea. But there is a little more that can be said, if only to start a discussion in the comments thread.

Why Did He Leave?

There are some rumors about disagreements with Amano, but I’ve talked to a few people and the general consensus seems to be that Olli was ready to move on, and the sinecure at Harvard was some time in planning. (He gave a lecture in September 2009, which is usually a sign someone is looking at moving. That’s a little tip, from a former employee.) His wife is, apparently, a Singapore diplomat. Perhaps she was ready to move someplace other than Vienna.

Heinonen has been at the IAEA since 1983 and served as DDG for Safeguards since 2005. It was time.

Moreover, I would be very surprised if the IAEA was excited about loosing Olli on the world. Indeed, Heinonen at Harvard is a potential nightmare for the VIC. He knows where all the bodies are buried, so to speak. He was point on Safeguards for all the interesting developments on Iran, Syria, Myanmar and one or two other places. Amano and the rest of the IAEA has to be terrified about what he can say now, that he couldn’t a few months ago. Which is to say, having Heinonen in Cambridge is a huge bonus for civil society.

Who’s Next?

Reuters reports that Herman Nackaerts — currently head of Safeguards Operations Division B (SGOB), Heinonen’s old job — is angling for promotion.

Historically, the IAEA has not appointed DDGs for Safeguards from within the VIC — Heinonen was unusual in this regard. A more typical route to the top is to come from outside, usually from industry.

The job of a DDG for Safeguards is very different today. The emphasis today is much less on verifying anticipated compliance and much more on resolving outstanding issues of noncompliance, whether we are talking about hard cases like Iran and North Korea, or more ambiguous situations with Egypt and South Korea.

Another candidate being mentioned is James Casterton, Director of the International Safeguards Division of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and Chair of the IAEA Director-General’s Standing Advisory Group on Safeguards Implementation.

Other candidates may emerge, but I doubt the wrangling will be very public. This is hardly going to be Wrestlemania, though that would be awesome.

Safeguards, Past and Present

I often get annoyed when I hear the IAEA Director-General called the world’s “top nuclear inspector” — after all, the top inspector is really the Deputy for Safeguards. I looked around for a list of those who’ve held the job, but couldn’t find one.

I said to Jill, “Can you believe there is no decent online list of previous DDGs for Safeguards?”

“No,” she deadpanned, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

Well, in any event, Seb was napping, so I took some time this afternoon to read about the history of the job and the go through the UN Yearbooks to create a tentative list of DDGS for Safeguards.

Roger Smith, of Canada, led a safeguards division at the IAEA from 1958-1960, but he wasn’t a Deputy Director-General. (See, Fischer, History of the IAEA.)

Allan McKnight, of Australia, is usually described as the “first Inspector-General” of the IAEA. You can see a late 60s shot of McKnight on a very cordial inspection of a British nuclear power station.

By the way, how rad is the title Inspector-General? Schiff, in International Nuclear Technology Transfer (terrible title, great book) claims that the IAEA eliminated the “Inspector General” title as McKnight’s successor, Rudolf Rometsch, neared retirement. Rometsch, Schiff explains, had become a bit imperious and Sigvard Eklund, then IAEA Director-General, wanted to reduce the status of the job to the level of other division heads. (Schiff uses passive voice, avoiding attributing the motive to anyone in particular.)

Anyway, here is a list, as best I can tell, of the men (and they are all men) who served as the “top nuclear watchdog” for the IAEA. Comments and corrections are welcome.

Source: UN Yearbook