28. A technique called laser enrichment may someday enable creation of bomb fuel with far smaller-scale infrastructure.
8.
PAKISTAN AND INDIA: WHO GUARDS THE GUARDIANS?
The second myth is that nuclear weapons are OK in the hands of ‘the good guys’ and not OK in the hands of ‘the bad guys.’ We need to have a system that is not based on subjective considerations.
MUHAMMAD EL-BARADEI, UNITED NATIONS CHIEF NUCLEAR INSPECTOR, 2006
FORTY YEARS AGO THERE WERE FIVE ACKNOWLEDGED NUCLEAR powers, all formally committed to evolving international nonproliferation legal norms: the U.S., the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China. A sixth, Israel, was already an undeclared nuclear club member. The 1970s were to begin extending nuclear weapons proliferation into the Third World, with two countries—India and Pakistan—eager to take President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program and produce Atoms for War (at minimum, to deter each other) as well. This chapter traces the acquisition of nuclear technology by India and Pakistan, and in so doing offers the Sixth Lesson of nuclear-age history: CIVILIAN NUCLEAR POWER INHERENTLY CONFERS MILITARY CAPABILITY.
What is historically significant are two facts. First, India and Pakistan crossed the nuclear weapon threshold by equivalent routes, via proximity of civilian nuclear power generation to military nuclear deployment. India had a program for 10 years for commercial use only, until it perceived that China had come to imperil India’s national security. Pakistan saw in India’s bomb a mortal threat to its security. Both began their nuclear power programs in 1955, the year that the U.S. declassified atomic data under Atoms for Peace. Coincidentally, it was also the year the historic conference of underdeveloped nations was held in Bandung, Indonesia, where India assumed a leading diplomatic role.
But then their paths sharply diverged. India has never aided nuclear proliferation anywhere. In contrast, Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist established a clandestine network aiding nuclear proliferation efforts in several rogue states.
“The Buddha Smiles”
IN 1947, while his nephew Phillip was marrying the future Queen of England, Lord Louis Mountbatten presided over the fateful Partition of India into two states—with the new Sunni Muslim state of Pakistan flanking Hindu India on both sides. Millions died in the subsequent mass murder and mayhem. The Kashmir and Jammu states were divided, with most of Muslim-majority Kashmir taken into India by a Hindu prince. This partition enraged parties on both sides of the border, triggering wars in 1947, 1965, and 1999. Kashmir today remains a white-hot flashpoint.29
The two nations also fought in 1971—a war that politically sundered East Pakistan from West, and left hundreds of thousands dead in the newly created state of Bangladesh. Two and a half years later, on May 18, 1974, Indian nuclear scientists sent India’s leaders a message: “The Buddha smiles.” The occasion was the detonation of what India called a “peaceful nuclear explosion.”
With no bright line dividing commercial nuclear power and weapons-grade bombs, some didn’t find India’s blast so peaceful. Foremost among those concerned with the blast was Pakistan, India’s mortal adversary. Abdul Qadeer Khan was a Pakistani metallurgist working at the Amsterdam facilities of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency at the time of the Smiling Buddha test. In collusion with the Pakistani government he copied thousands of pages of highly confidential material on how to build enrichment facilities to extract nuclear fuel for a bomb, and spirited them back to Pakistan. Following in India’s footsteps, Khan took full advantage of Eisenhower’s ill-starred generosity, pursuant to which the United Nations had created the agency—the International Atomic Energy Agency—for which he worked.
The idea of bringing the bounty of atomic power to the world’s poor reflected the idealism of postwar decolonization. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Arthur Goldberg—a former Supreme Court Justice and a renowned expert on international law—said in 1968 that it would be “unthinkable” and “unacceptable” to decide that nonnuclear countries, “must do without the benefits of this extremely promising energy source, nuclear power—simply because we lack an agreed means to safeguard that power for peace.”30
The astonishing fact that he made this statement during a debate on the Nonproliferation Treaty gives a sense of how deeply rooted was the idealism behind Atoms for Peace. In the idealist view, nuclear countries were morally obligated to place their civilizations at risk so as to provide poor countries with access to a source of electric power that then was thought to be cheaper than likely alternatives.
This may explain why Atoms for Peace ignored a strong caveat concerning civilian nuclear fuel articulated in America’s first, landmark report on atomic energy:
We have concluded unanimously that there is no prospect of security against atomic warfare in a system of international agreements to outlaw such weapons controlled only by a system which relies on inspection and similar police-like methods.31
The proliferation genie released by Atoms for Peace reached the Third World only gradually. India began a plutonium production program in 1956 and succeeded in separating plutonium in a reprocessing plant by 1965—even before it had an operational commercial reactor. The adoption of the Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968—an attempt to restrict nuclear weapons to the U.S., UK, USSR, France, and China—formalized growing Western concern about nuclear proliferation. India and Pakistan have never ratified the treaty (neither has Israel) for the same reason: preserving a nuclear military option.
Only four years after the treaty came into force, India would conduct its surprise nuclear explosion. As Roberta Wohlstetter explains in her landmark 1976 study, The Buddha Smiles:
The Indian case… illustrates… that a government can, without overtly proclaiming that it is going to make bombs (and while it says and possibly even means the opposite), undertake a succession of programs that progressively reduce the amount of time needed to make nuclear explosives, when and if it decides on that course.
A high-altitude 1962 border conflict between India and China, China’s 1964 A-test, its 1966 H-test, and its nuclear-capable ballistic missile test later that year (a 750-mile range missile, indicating sophisticated small-warhead design), along with the wars with Pakistan, drove India’s decision to seek nuclear weapon status. According to Wohlstetter, American officials could have seen India’s program—which generated bomb fuel by means of a reactor built by Canada—as a risk ever since 1966. Instead, the Americans consistently accepted India’s representations of lack of intent to weaponize, and simply discounted contrary evidence, even though India was not then an ally of the U.S. Officially a member of the “nonaligned” bloc at the UN, India in fact sided with the Soviet Union far more often than with America.
Then came the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, during which prominent muckraking columnist Jack Anderson revealed confidential memos showing that the Nixon administration had decided to “tilt” its foreign policy towards Pakistan. Unlike India, Pakistan was a member of two now-defunct U.S.-sponsored alliances: the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and the Central—i.e., Middle East—Treaty Organization). This “tilt” gave India another push in the nuclear direction.
Wohlstetter notes that the Indian case shows how even a purely civilian program can enable a country to come within days of fueling a bomb, and an explosion is hardly the end of the resulting problems:
We oversimplify when we say that “the damage is done” as soon as a country explodes a nuclear device. Much more damage will be done if we do nothing to make the country regret its action. This is especially true if there has been a violation of the sense of an agreement.
She adds that India conveniently interpreted its nuclear technology agreements with the U.S. and Canada as enabling it to detonate a “peaceful” nuclear explosive. India’s leaders knew full well that neither the U.S. nor Canada drew any distinction between military and “peaceful” nuclear bombs. Further, a sovereign country cannot forever renounce a military nuclear capability,
because inherent in the lawful power of a sovereign is the right of a leader to change course. Thus, as with strategic arms agreements, civilian nuclear technology agreements are nearly impossible to enforce against deliberate violators. In 2012 India successfully tested its first nuclear-capable ballistic missile. Its ICBM range enables India to target Beijing and Shanghai.
Compounding the problem in the Indian case is that diplomats argue, as the State Department did even after India’s 1974 explosion, that to crack down would rupture the diplomatic relationship and thus deprive the U.S. of leverage. Yet every time a nation defies international pressure and goes nuclear, the case for stopping nuclear proliferation by treaty suffers. Had prior efforts to stop India, Pakistan, and South Africa proven successful, they would collectively have served as powerful evidence that the treaty is fully effective. (Israel crossed the threshold before the Nonproliferation Treaty became law.)
The Islamic Bomb
PAKISTAN’S CIVILIAN nuclear program under the aegis of Atoms for Peace began in 1955. It turned military after traumatic losses in two wars with India. Once India severed East from West Pakistan in 1971 and exploded its bomb in 1974, attaining nuclear status was deemed by Pakistani leaders a matter of existential survival. In 1975 Abdul Qadeer Khan stole voluminous technical information from a UN facility in the Netherlands, where he worked in a field office of the International Atomic Energy Agency. His clandestine coup greatly accelerated Pakistan’s drive towards nuclear-club membership. At one point Dutch authorities asked the CIA if they should arrest Khan for suspicious activities. The CIA declined, preferring to continue surveillance, and Khan thus evaded capture.
But American foreign policy also played a role in Pakistan’s nuclear quest. The United States was well aware that Pakistan was pursuing nuclear weapon status. In 1979 the U.S. halted military and economic aid to Pakistan, citing its nuclear program. It ended the embargo in 1982, due to growing reliance on Pakistan to support the Afghan resistance. In late 1984 the CIA learned that Khan had written Pakistan’s president informing him that Pakistan now had enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. The Chinese, meanwhile, provided Pakistan with a 1966 design of an atomic warhead. Anxious about proliferation, in 1985 Congress passed the Pressler Amendment (named after a Republican senator), which called for suspending aid to proliferators unless the president certified it was in the national interest for aid to continue. In Pakistan’s case, the president did so certify, and aid continued in the 1980s. The U.S. sent vital equipment to the Afghan mujaheddin (holy warriors) that proved essential to the defeat of the Soviet invaders and their puppet rulers.32 The strategic imperative of helping the Afghans bleed the Soviets trumped proliferation concerns. Beyond doubt, the nine-year Afghan War’s brutal toll on Soviet troops hastened the end of the Cold War.
The calculation of the Reagan administration and allied conservative Democrats—ignoring proliferation was acceptable if it helped to bring down the USSR—was defensible, provided Pakistan could be induced not to proliferate. But Pakistan’s nuclear ascension itself was by then a practical reality, and it had every intention of proliferating. In 1987 Khan publicly admitted that Pakistan already had developed a nuclear weapon capability.
What was not defensible, by contrast, was what happened after the end of the Afghan War in February 1989. The nuclear horses thus had already left the nonproliferation barn. Pakistan had done everything short of exploding an actual nuclear device. However, in 1990 the George H. W. Bush administration teamed up with liberals in both parties in Congress to try to close the proverbial barn door and punish Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons. President Bush declined to certify that Pakistan was complying with nuclear proliferation safeguards, making the country ineligible to receive military aid from the U.S. And despite harboring several million Afghan War refugees, Pakistan also received no economic aid.
On May 13, 1998, India openly tested a weaponized nuclear war-head. Its Hindu nationalist government made no attempt to call this explosion “peaceful.” Two weeks later, Pakistan showed how close it had been to full nuclear-weapons-club membership, responding with its own tests, one of which employed five separate devices.
The fecklessness of belatedly attempting to stop the unstoppable became abundantly clear after September 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks galvanized America into action against al-Qaeda, and Pakistan’s cooperation was vital in this latest Afghan campaign. But blowback in the form of intense anti-U.S. feeling, most notably in the Pakistani intelligence agency (the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, often just called “ISI”), meant Pakistani cooperation was not forthcoming.
It took Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s famed dire threat (“We will bomb you back into the Stone Age!”) to get Pakistan to even partially side with America again, after the 9/11 attacks. But Pakistan’s support has never been wholehearted, with elements in the ISI playing on the other side, and the government either unable or unwilling to purge them. When Khan revealed his nuclear proliferation distribution network in 2004, his countrymen treated him as a national hero.
In 2005 President George W. Bush lifted military aid restrictions on Pakistan (and on India, but those restrictions had been imposed by President Clinton after India’s 1998 nuclear tests), but the damage had been done, and more was to follow. The 2011 plan to kill Osama bin Laden in a U.S. raid deep inside Pakistan had to be kept secret from Pakistani officials for fear that Islamists within the Pakistan government would tip off bin Laden. (An August 1998 U.S. cruise missile strike aimed at bin Laden’s Afghan base camp was compromised when Pakistani officials alerted him; bin Laden fled before the missiles completed their two-hour flight to reach their target.) Al-Qaeda sought to acquire Pakistani nuclear bombs from 1998 to 2001. American pressure after the 9/11 attacks short-circuited bin Laden’s plans. The inevitable price of the 2011 raid—though clearly worth paying to get bin Laden—was a further erosion of U.S.-Pakistani relations.
The prospect that an Islamist regime could overthrow Pakistan’s current government—and thus gain control over Pakistan’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal—has reportedly induced the U.S. to develop contingency plans for taking out or seizing Pakistan’s arsenal. But unless the U.S. knows exactly where all Pakistan’s bombs are, such a mission would have no realistic prospect of complete success. Uncertainty is a huge deterrent to U.S. preemptive action.
Danger in Safety, Safety in Danger
OCTOBER 27, 1970 was not a happy day for authorities in Orlando, Florida. Disney World’s opening was a year away, and they found themselves facing a nuclear bomb threat: pay $1 million and guarantee an escort out of the country, or else a hydrogen bomb would be detonated. Looking at a drawing of the device neither the FBI nor the Atomic Energy Commission would give assurance that it could not work. With the city on the verge of paying up, local police found out that the threat was a hoax perpetrated by a 14-year-old high school student.
Nuclear knowledge is now widely enough distributed so as to answer publicly most of the questions scientists had to answer during the Manhattan Project. According to a top U.S. bomb designer, seven of the eight problems scientists then had to solve are now answered in the public record. The eighth element, the right people, the scientists themselves supplied. Even by the time of India’s first bomb (1974), all the complex scientific questions were answered. A nation that could assemble the right personnel and gain access to the right resources would see the rest follow in due course.
As nuclear bomb knowledge spreads in states that might harbor terrorists, we find two fundamental truths about private parties and nuclear proliferation. First: Private parties cannot now create nuclear fuel, nor will they be able to for some time to come. The process of becoming nuclear capable has taken most states more than a decade. Private parties have vastly inferior resources and thus will not manage the huge set of complex tasks needed to produce nuclear fuel from scratch anytime soon. Neither the uranium nor the plutonium route can be taken without industr
ial-scale processes—thousands of supersonic-speed centrifuges for uranium isotopic separation, or a nuclear reactor and chemical nuclear-waste-separation system for plutonium—to create the fuel.
But there is ongoing research into laser enrichment technology. If its boosters prove correct as to its potential, it may make it possible to enrich uranium without full-size industrial facilities. Proponents claim that facilities one-quarter the size of current plants could be used, making their activities harder to monitor by satellite surveillance. However, even a quarter-size facility is well beyond realistic scale achievable in home garages and backyards.
But any smaller-scale enrichment innovation would be a boon to aspiring nuclear terrorists and their state suppliers. Pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is an application to build a Global Laser Enrichment plant, filed by a consortium of GTE, Japan’s Hitachi, and Cameco, a Canadian uranium mining company. The NRC is expected to rule on the application in 2013.33
The second truth follows from the first: There are only three common ways private parties can obtain nuclear fuel: sale, gift, or theft.34 The first two ways involve a nuclear state as voluntary sponsor; the third way involves a state’s gross negligence. No matter how sophisticated, all terror groups seeking to obtain and use nuclear weapons need state help. An effective counter-proliferation policy must target nuclear states as top priority.
Sleepwalking With the Bomb Page 15