Archive for the ‘Nukes’ Category

President Obama says he wants a “world without nuclear weapons.” But his Department of Energy may not be so persuaded. It’s prepping for a future where the U.S. keeps double the amount of nuclear weapons a new treaty permits — and at higher cost-per-nuke than it currently spends to maintain its arsenal. We’re talking $175 billion over two decades.

According to an Energy Department plan submitted to Congress in May that the Federation of American Scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists obtained and published, the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration proposes to slash the 5,000-warhead nuclear arsenal down to “approximately 3,000 to 3,500″ warheads. So far, so clear. Nukes going down. President Obama’s plan for a nuke-free world going up.

But then the hedges come in. The Federation points out that the nuclear-arms reduction treaty with Russia making its way through the Senate, known as New START, would create a substantially smaller arsenal, allowing the U.S. to maintain up to 1550 deployed warheads. When not speaking for attribution, administration officials express hope that before the Obama leaves office, they’ll be able to conclude another treaty with Russia that cuts the arsenal even further.

Maybe the Energy Department is just trying to be prudent about having the facilities, technology and personnel in place to maintain a bigger arsenal should national strategy change. (And the Department has long pushed to refresh the stockpile with new, more “reliable” parts and warheads.) But its plan appears out of sync with the strategy as it stands.

Well, sort of. “If you look at what the Obama administration has been saying, it’s committed the nation to making concrete steps for the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons, and also to maintaining a safe, reliable and effective deterrent,” Hans Kristensen, the director of the Federation’s nuclear information project, tells Danger Room. “This is what the NNSA are picking up on. In essence, they’re saying ‘Here’s what we think that means.’ Of course, they are only focused on the second part of what the administration’s said.”

Continue Reading “Fewer Nukes, More Cash: Energy Dep’t Wants $175 Billion for Weapons Complex [Updated]” »

You know that an underground supply-chain network exists to get spare parts suitable for illicit uranium enrichment to aspiring nuclear powers. You don’t know how extensive it is. If you were Lester Freamon from The Wire, you couldn’t map the entire network on a big bulletin board. But you do know some of its nodes. So what do you do? If you’re U.S. intelligence and the target is Iran’s nuclear program, you start introducing some crappy supply into the chain. Welcome to the CIA’s world of nuclear chaos.

It’s also your your Friday must-read piece, courtesy of Danger Room buddy Eli Lake, writing in The New Republic. (Uh, “Subscriber Only?” For a piece this good? WTF?) Eli goes deep inside an extremely murky and decades-old enterprise, one inherited from CIA operations against the KGB. Along with fellow masters of chaos in Israel’s Mossad, operatives and intelligence assets have introduced defective vacuum pumps and decay-inducing chemical sprays to keep Iran’s centrifuges from properly separating uranium isotopes into bomb-ready material. It sends two messages to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the self-proclaimed soldiers of God who increasingly control the nuke program: We know how you’re getting this stuff, and we can touch you when we feel like it.

Whether it can stop the nuclear program is a different issue. Tehran now has two Bombs’ worth of low enriched uranium, despite what appears to be international efforts to foul up the centrifuges. The nuclear facility at Natanz is now cranking out 120 kilograms of LEU a month, up from 70 kilograms in late ‘08.

Sabotage, as Eli describes it, is a tactic, not a diplomatic strategy,  But the history of successful non-proliferation efforts is often a history of kicking the nuclear can down the diplomatic road (e.g., Libya, South Korea), until new leadership comes to the conclusion that it has more to gain by abandoning rogue nuclear activity than by acquiring a bomb. And after all, Iran has sought a nuclear weapon since the Shah was in power, and it just hasn’t been able to clear that threshold. Until new and less reckless leadership comes to Teheran — insh’allah — the CIA and the Mossad are going to keep trying to ensure that some awesome new shipments just so happen to find their way into the stockyards of IRGC dummy corporations.

Continue Reading “How U.S. Spies Straight Wreck Iran’s Nuke Program” »

Both of these men claim to be Iranian nuke scientist Shahram Amiri, who vanished last year while on a pilgrimage to Mecca. One insists he was “abducted in a joint operation by kidnap and terror teams” from the CIA and the Saudi intelligence service. The other says he’s working on his PhD in America, and doesn’t know anything about nuclear weapons.

You’d be inclined to assume that one of these men is Amiri, and the other isn’t. But the truth about his fate could lie somewhere in between these two videos, uploaded to YouTube right before a crucial U.N. Security Council vote on imposing new sanctions on Iran. ABC News says Amiri is, in fact, a nuclear scientist. But he wasn’t kidnapped by anyone. Instead, he “defected to the CIA,” providing an “intelligence coup” about Iran’s weapons programs.

Continue Reading “Which of These Two Is Really Iran’s Missing Nuke Scientist?” »

The Iranian government just announced a deal to send its uranium abroad, in return for fuel for a research reactor. So does that mean the nuclear crisis is solved? Or is Tehran just playing for time while it gets closer to the Bomb?

Iran is trumpeting the deal as a diplomatic victory: The United States and its allies were expected to push for a tougher round of international sanctions next month, after Lebanon gives up its rotating presidency at the U.N. Security Council. And at first blush, the deal mirrors an arrangement the International Atomic Energy Agency forwarded in October (which is and backed by Western governments) to send out Iran’s uranium for enrichment in France and Russia.

Here are the basic outlines: Iran would ship a 1,200-kilogram batch of low-enriched uranium to Turkey and international monitors would ensure the safekeeping of the stuff. After a year, Iran would get 120 kilograms of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor. (The BBC has the full text of the declaration here.)

In theory, it eases a major concern about Iran’s nuclear program. The proposed shipment of 1,200 kg is enough for a single, crude Hiroshima-style bomb if it is further enriched to a high enough level (90 percent or higher). Problem is, Iran’s low-enriched uranium stockpile is now larger than when the deal was originally proposed.

Continue Reading “Iran’s Nuke Fuel Deal: Breakthrough or Bogus?” »

Stopping nuclear smuggling is already tough. But it’s about to get a lot harder. Helium-3, a crucial ingredient in neutron-particle-detection technology, is in extremely short supply.

Rep. Brad Miller (D-North Carolina), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, chided the Departments of Energy and Homeland Security at a hearing on the issue late last week, suggesting that they created a preventable “disaster.” The Energy Department is the sole American supplier of helium-3, and DHS is supposed to take the lead in spotting and stopping illicit nuclear material.

The helium-3 isotope represents less than 0.0002 percent of all helium. Of that, about 80 percent of helium-3 usage is devoted to security purposes, because the gas is extremely sensitive to neutrons, like those emitted spontaneously by plutonium.

Helium-3 is a decay product of tritium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen used to enhance the yield of nuclear weapons, but whose production stopped in 1988. The half-life decay of tritium is about 12 years, and the U.S. supply for helium-3 is fed by harvesting the gas from dismantled or refurbished nuclear weapons. However, production of helium-3 hasn’t kept pace with the exponential demand sparked by the Sept. 11 attacks.

Projected demand for the nonradioactive gas in 2010 is said to be more than 76,000 liters per year, while U.S. production is a mere 8,000 liters annually, and U.S. total supply rests at less than 48,000 liters. This shortage wasn’t identified until a workshop put on by the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Physics in August 2008.

Between 2004 and 2008, about 25,000 liters of helium-3 annually was entering the U.S. from Russia, according to the testimony of Dr. William F. Brinkman, director of the Office of Science at DOE. Right around the time of the August workshop, Russia decided it was “reserving its supplies for domestic use.”

Continue Reading “Helium-3 Shortage Could Mean Nuke Detection ‘Disaster’” »

NEW YORK CITY — We are all screwed if Iran gets a nuke. And we may be just as screwed if the United States attacks Iran to keep Tehran from getting that nuke.

Okay, I’m paraphrasing a bit. But that’s the core of the message from America’s top military officer, who reiterated today his canyon-deep reservations about any military solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. Sure, U.S. strikes might set back Tehran’s atomic weapons program — for a while. But the “unintended consequences” of a hit on Iran’s nuclear facilities could easily outweigh the benefits of that delay, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told a forum at Columbia University.

“Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome,” Mullen said. “In an area that’s so unstable right now, we just don’t need more of that.”

At Columbia, Mullen also pushed back on a New York Times report that the Obama administration essentially had no strategy for dealing with Iran if Tehran got to the threshold of building a nuke – without quite going over.

“What the mainstream of that article talked about… is that we have no policy and that the implication is that we’re not working on it. I assure you, this is as complex a problem as there is in our country. And we have expended extraordinary amounts of time and effort to figure that out — to get that right,” Mullen said. “This has a focus. The focus of the President of the United States. I am his principal military adviser, and it has from the moment I have spent any time with him — even before he has sworn in,” Mullen said.

But the admiral didn’t detail what strategy all that time and all that focus had generated.

“It has been worked and it continues to be worked,” Mullen added. “If there was an easy answer, we would’ve picked it off the shelf.”

Analysts have speculated that Iran might respond with terror strikes or naval blockades in the Persian Gulf if its nuclear facilities came under attack. Mullen declined to speculate what the results of a strike might be, except to say: they would probably be unexpected, and they would probably be bad.

“From my perspective,” Mullen added, “the last option is to strike.”
Continue Reading “Joint Chiefs Chair: No, No, No. Don’t Attack Iran.” »

In a press briefing yesterday, John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s adviser on Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, made an interesting claim: He said al-Qaida has been “scammed” in its efforts to obtain the material for building a nuclear device.

“There have been numerous reports over the years, over the past eight or nine years, about attempts throughout the world to obtain various types of purported material that is nuclear related,” he said. “We know that al-Qaida has been involved in a number of these efforts to acquire it. Fortunately, I think they’ve been scammed a number of times, but we know that they continued to pursue that.”

How, exactly, do you run a nuclear scam? Brennan hinted that it was a lucrative line of business for criminal groups in the former Soviet Union. “Sometimes they’re criminal gangs that have information that some material had come out from the, let’s say, the area of the former Soviet Union or some stockpiles and they will try to provide that material to other groups to sell,” he said. “As I said, a lot of it is scam, you know, red mercury, whatever else.”

As Danger Room’s Sharon Weinberger recently reported in Nature, “red mercury” (a fictional substance supposedly used in nuclear weapons) is one of the more common nuclear-smuggling scams. She quotes the former Soviet republic of Georgia’s top nuclear investigator, who cited the 2006 case of a Turkish citizen who tried to smuggle cesium-137 (a radioactive isotope that is used in cancer treatment) inside a red liquid and tried to pass it off as red mercury.

But there are also worries about criminals getting their hands on real stockpiles of fissile material. As part of the ongoing Nuclear Security Summit, the White House is touting a deal with Ukraine to eliminate its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and convert its civilian nuclear reactors to run on low-enriched fuel. This is a so-called first-line-of-defense measure: eliminating or securing fissile materials at their source.

Continue Reading “Al-Qaida ‘Scammed’ in Its Quest for Nukes?” »

It’s been a busy week for arms-control wonks: On Tuesday, the administration released the Nuclear Posture Review, a new statement of purpose for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. And in Prague today, President Barack Obama and his counterpart, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, signed a new arms-reduction treaty, a.k.a. New START.

The full text of the treaty is here; its protocol is here. The latter document is particularly important, as it spells out procedures for conversion or elimination of strategic weapons, as well as the requirements for verification. During the elimination process, intercontinental ballistic missile and other launchers “shall remain visible to national technical means of verification,” i.e., they must be visible to satellites or other monitoring technologies.

In a ceremonial lunch after the signing, Obama said the document “helped to reset in a very concrete and tangible way U.S.-Russian relations.” But New START is just a start. On the U.S. side, the treaty will require Senate ratification. And while the treaty is not about missile defense, per se,  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters Tuesday Russia might withdraw from the treaty if the United States significantly ups its missile-defense capability.

Continue Reading “New Nuke Treaty: Trust, but Verify” »

At noon, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen will hold a press briefing on the new Nuclear Posture Review. The document, however, is now online, and it’s worth highlighting some of the key passages ahead of the briefing.

Much of the conversation about arms control has fixated on counting warheads: As part of the New START treaty, the United States and Russia are committing to new limits on deployed warheads and delivery systems. But the technical details are also important: All U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) will be “de-MIRVed” (i.e., limited to a single warhead each instead of carrying multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles).

The current alert posture of U.S. strategic forces – referred to in Cold War shorthand as “hair-trigger” alert — will be maintained. That means Air Force missile crews will stay on alert, and a significant number of nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines will remain at sea, although nuclear-armed bombers will be off full-time alert. The practice of “open-ocean targeting” for ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles will continue: In the event of an unauthorized or accidental launch, the missiles will be programmed to land in the ocean (or in the case of the ICBMs, drop somewhere in the Arctic Sea).

European allies should also give the document a close read. The United States keeps some forward-deployed “non-strategic” nuclear weapons stationed in NATO countries. The nuclear review says a “small number” of those nuclear weapons will remain. The document also calls for “retain[ing] the capability to forward-deploy U.S. nuclear weapons on tactical fighter-bombers and heavy bombers, and proceed with full scope life extension for the B-61 bomb including enhancing safety, security, and use control.”

Continue Reading “Nuke Review: Deploying, De-MIRVing, and De-Targeting” »

One year after President Barack Obama announced his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, the administration is set to unveil the Nuclear Posture Review today. And that means we’ll finally be able to issue a report card on the president’s arms-control agenda.

For starters, there’s the New START treaty, which is due to be signed this week in Prague. The pact commits Russia and the United States to cuts in the number of deployed warheads. The 2002 Moscow treaty obliged the two countries to reduce their arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads; the new treaty puts the ceiling at 1,550 warheads. It also places limits on delivery vehicles: The treaty imposes a combined limit of 800 deployed and nondeployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear missions, plus a separate limit on the number of deployed systems.

But there’s some wiggle room, depending on how you do the counting: Each warhead on a deployed intercontinental ballistic missile or submarine-launched ballistic missile will count toward the total; but each deployed heavy bomber equipped for nuclear missions, like the B-52 pictured here, will count as one warhead toward this limit.

When fully loaded, a single nuclear-armed bomber can carry a healthy assortment of nukes. As Peter Baker notes at The New York Times, that theoretically gives both sides flexibility to deploy as many or more warheads as permitted by the Moscow treaty.

So are the cuts real, or an accounting trick, as some arms-control wonks argue? Danger Room pal Jeffrey Lewis says it’s time to chillax on the bomber counting. The new limits, he argues, will force the Russians and the Americans to stick to a more stable nuclear-force structure. “Yes, the bomber rules are silly,” he writes. “Bomber rules always are. But as a whole, the limits are serious and meaningful.”

Continue Reading “Bombs Away on Administration’s Nuclear Review” »