Sleepwalking With the Bomb

by John C. Wohlstetter

  Weapons designers Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman (The Nuclear Express) believe that Israel also wanted from South Africa a clandestine site to test a neutron bomb, presumably for use against Egyptian and Syrian tank assault in event of a repeat of their 1973 surprise attack. They note that it took China, a sophisticated nuclear-club member, five tests to get a working neutron bomb. They conclude that Israel tested a neutron bomb 1,500 miles southeast of Cape Town on September 22, 1979, to make it appear to outside observers as a South African test. The signals matched French weapons, but Israel, as noted earlier, obtained weapons expertise from France.52

  The Soviets were energetically backing Communist “liberation” movements in Africa, all of which South Africa adamantly opposed. Evidence of a South African nuclear test would have strengthened South Africa’s hand in supporting regional allies against Russia’s Marxist proxies. In 1976 the Soviets persuaded the U.S. to cooperate in pressuring South Africa not to conduct a nuclear test at its Valindaba site. (Reed and Stillman drily note that in Zulu the word means, “We do not talk about this at all.”) By 1978 Valindaba was producing enough highly enriched uranium to make one bomb per year, and when P. W. Botha succeeded John Vorster that year as prime minister, he pressed for more. In the 1980s South Africa produced six uranium gun-trigger devices. Needing no testing, these enabled South Africa to go nuclear without alerting the world and risking nonproliferation blowback.

  By the mid-1980s the Cuban-backed Marxist rebels were making progress in the ex-Portuguese colony Angola—just north of the guerrillas fighting South African control of South West Africa (now Namibia). South Africa reportedly had contingency plans to use a uranium bomb on Luanda, the Angolan capital, in event of war.

  In 1989 F. W. De Klerk became South African head of state, and oversaw the end of apartheid. In November 1989 he ordered Valindaba to be closed and his country’s half-dozen uranium bombs dismantled. By September 1991 the task was done. His apparent motivations were to end international isolation and to prevent nuclear weapons from falling under control of a black African leader. This despite the evident fact that the new South African leader, Nelson Mandela, was as unlikely as anyone on the planet to use nuclear weapons.

  South Africa’s decision had two real-world impacts: it reduced weapons-grade nuclear material suitable for theft, and it was a political symbol of voluntary nuclear disarmament as the Cold War ended. But several thousand South African nuclear scientists were now seeking new employment, joining thousands of jobless Russian scientists. They were ripe for picking by nuclear aspirants.

  Former Russian Republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan

  THE MOST significant voluntary disarmament moves were made in three republics formerly part of the Soviet Union: Ukraine, Belarus, and Muslim-majority Kazakhstan. The prime incentive these nascent countries had for surrendering their arsenals was that it would facilitate separation from post-Soviet Russia. They had no great incentive to keep them—using them against the West or against Russia would surely have resulted in their own destruction.

  Securing their nuclear material against diversion by hostile states or sophisticated terrorist groups proved a grand challenge. Once again, The Nuclear Express provides unmatched narrative detail, in this case, on the technology and logistics of securing nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. The scale of the problem was breathtaking.

  Between entering the atomic age in 1949 and its year-end breakup in 1991, the USSR produced 1,200 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and 140 to 162 metric tons of plutonium reprocessed from nuclear reactor waste. If a tenth of a percent of the material went missing, there would be 1.3 tons of weapons-grade uranium and 310–360 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium loose in the world, enough for dozens of nuclear bombs.

  Further, as the Soviet Union dissolved there were still some 27,000 Soviet nuclear weapons—including 11,000 thermonuclear ones—to be dismantled, much of this arsenal located in the three former Soviet republics. Having been part of the former Soviet Union, and thus parties to the 1991 START I Treaty, they agreed to transfer their entire arsenals to Russia. Of the three, Belarus had the fewest weapons—81 warheads on mobile ICBMs (an arsenal nearly as large as that of India or Pakistan). Ukraine’s immense arsenal of 5,000 nuclear warheads—several times larger than the arsenals of Great Britain and France combined—made it the world’s third-largest nuclear power. And Kazakhstan had nearly 2,000 warheads—including an estimated 1,000 multi-megaton warheads sitting on the monster SS-18, the largest ICBM ever built.

  Kazakhstan faced even thornier problems than disposing of weapons. Its nuclear test area underwent 456 tests in 41 years, the highest number of tests for one test site, massively contaminating the test site soil. Worse, Kazakhstan had to find a way to rid itself of its weapons-grade uranium used in Russian nuclear submarines. In late 1994 the U.S. sent massive military cargo planes on a secret airlift mission to Kazakhstan to pack up and remove the fuel. In an operation that equaled anything Hollywood could serve up, they succeeded in getting their cargo out just before Iranian buyers could get their hands on the stuff for use in crude uranium “gun-trigger” devices.

  Amazingly, by 1996 all three former Soviet republics were nuclear weapon free. In 2012 Ukraine’s final shipment of weapon-grade uranium was sent to Russia.

  Pseudo-Disarmers: North Korea and Iran

  HOSTILE STATES manipulate the international community to frustrate nonproliferation enforcement. North Korea and Iran have been following the same playbook, with North Korea having already crossed the finish line and Iran rapidly approaching it. They use dummy firms to purchase prohibited items; they launder money to fund their program; they make serial offers of pseudo-concessions to curry goodwill; and they use negotiations to stall.

  When nice does not work they use not-nice: threats of war, or other forms of intimidation—terrorism, hostage taking, etc. They use elaborate schemes to evade inspection regimes—phony accounting, commercial use, and materials unaccounted for.

  North Korea, to put it gently, has played U.S. diplomats—and several presidents—like the proverbial violin. Former president Jimmy Carter’s 1994 visit to Pyongyang is just one of these cases. Traveling there against the wishes of President Clinton, Carter came back with news that the North was ready to make a deal, and would stay within the Nonproliferation Treaty. Indeed—but on its terms, not ours.

  When State Department diplomat Robert Gallucci returned to the U.S. after signing the Agreed Framework that laid out the U.S.-North Korea deal President Carter had worked out, the Americans assumed that the crisis had passed. After all, North Korea had committed to shut down its Yongbyon facility, whose design and operation facilitated production of weapons-grade plutonium. Pyongyang also agreed to use plutonium fuel for commercial reactor production only. In return the U.S. agreed to supply the North with two light-water nuclear reactors designed to be less usable for proliferation (that is, plutonium production). The U.S. also threw in fuel oil to help the North meet its domestic energy need.

  Needless to say, North Korea deceived inspectors over the next eight years, as it clandestinely diverted fuel for a bomb. Its October 4, 2002, statement to U.S. diplomats that it had developed a uranium-enrichment capability for a bomb was not sufficient to convince the Bush administration that the North had in fact joined the nuclear club, but it led to the suspension of nuclear cooperation on November 21.

  Less than a month later, the North announced it would restart its Yongbyon facility, and it formally announced its withdrawal from the Nonproliferation Treaty at the start of 2003. Its underground atomic test in October 2006 proved that the world’s nuclear club had a new member.

  Yet this reality only intensified U.S. diplomatic efforts—at times via the “six-party talks” that added South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia as parties—to tame the North’s nuclear program. Carrot and stick diplomacy followed, with, as ever in such talks with bad guys, more carrot than stick. In 2007 the U.S. unfroze $25 million of as
sets on Pyongyang’s promise that the money would be used for humanitarian purposes. In 2007 North and South Korea agreed to hold talks aimed at a final formal peace treaty to officially end the Korean War.53 On October 11, 2008, the Bush State Department took North Korea off the terrorism list, making it eligible for more aid.

  The North responded to these gracious gestures early in 2009, conducting a series of long-range missile tests of multistage missiles, including one shot fired over Japan, towards Hawaii (though landing short of it). Pyongyang also seized two journalists who had wandered over the 38th parallel dividing the two Koreas, holding them for 140 days. It took a personal visit from former president Clinton to obtain their release, thus saving them from a show trial and many years in prison. And in May 2009 it conducted a second underground nuclear test, one more powerful than its first, though generally believed to be less powerful than the 14-kiloton Hiroshima blast—the North’s designs remain rudimentary. As this book went to press the North was preparing to conduct its third nuclear test. Or it may be a fifth test, given that monitoring equipment has suggested, though analysts have been unable to confirm, that tests have taken place twice since its second test. This uncertainty shows that nuclear forensic detection is far from guaranteed to detect clandestine activity.

  In 2010 things got even worse. On March 26 the North torpedoed a South Korean ship, the Cheonan; the ship sank with all hands. On November 12, the North unveiled its pilot uranium enrichment facility to a group of U.S. officials and scientists. Thus in addition to its ability to divert spent plutonium from spent nuclear fuel (the method used to fuel its two nuclear tests) Pyongyang now has the ability to fuel bombs with enriched uranium.

  In sum, having never once since its 1948 creation honored a commitment in full, the North is, if nothing else, consistent. Its ace of trumps is duplicity, its ability to manipulate Western hopes that bad guys will become good. In the real world, for good things to take place there must be positive regime change, as happened in the former Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.

  The experience with North Korea repeated itself with Iran. After UN inspectors revealed Iran’s clandestine nuclear program in August 2002, a familiar drama unfolded. In 2003 the EU3 (Britain, France, and Germany) began three years of negotiations with Iran, seeking to confine it to commercial nuclear use. This effort went on despite the evident reality that Iran sits on immense oil and natural gas reserves (its energy dependency comes from lack of refining capacity, requiring it to ship some three-fifths of its oil elsewhere to be refined and returned for domestic consumption). In 2006 the U.S., Russia, and China joined the negotiations.

  On November 30, 2007, U.S. officials released a new National Intelligence Estimate—reversing their position of two years earlier—concluding “with high confidence” that Iran had abandoned covert uranium enrichment four years earlier, in 2003, and also abandoned efforts to produce a nuclear weapon. But the estimate treated uranium enrichment, which is by far the main event in terms of going nuclear rogue, as commercial. As Vice President Cheney noted in his memoir, weaponization can be rapidly resumed.

  In September 2009, on the eve of the annual UN General Assembly session in New York, in order to preempt a disclosure of the facility by the U.S., Iran revealed a new, hitherto undisclosed uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom. The facility, which the U.S. had monitored for several years, has a 3,000-centrifuge capacity—far too small to be useful for a commercial program.

  Instead of acknowledging the danger posed by Iran, President Obama’s response was to talk at the UN session about negotiating a new superpower arms treaty with the Russians, thus “setting an example” for other nuclear powers to reduce—and, eventually, eliminate—their own nuclear arsenals. It was left to French president Nicholas Sarkozy to point out that there were two present nuclear dangers—North Korea and Iran—that deserved prompt attention. The president went on in April 2010 to sign New START with Russia, and a month later presided over a two-day international nuclear proliferation summit in Washington, talking anew about moving towards a “nuclear-free” world.

  Iran continues to proceed with open contempt for the U.S. and others, steadily increasing its military capabilities—testing longer-ranger multistage ballistic missiles, and launching a satellite. It continues working on advanced warhead design (necessary to build a compact nuclear warhead to sit atop a missile), including specialized devices with no civilian application, such as a neutron initiator, part of the triggering mechanism for a bomb. It has installed newer, faster centrifuges at its Fordo facility near Qom, aiming to speed up uranium enrichment to produce fuel for a uranium bomb.

  Iran took British hostages (released after the British government groveled publicly) and arrested three American hikers who Iran asserted strayed over the Iraq-Iran border, ostensibly to spy on Iran. One was released by Iran as a “humanitarian” gesture, but the other two were convicted in a carnival show trial on ludicrously trumped-up charges. (They were eventually released.) In January 2012 Iran (falsely) charged an American with being a CIA spy—an action taken immediately after the U.S. Navy rescued Iranians from the Persian Gulf waters and immediately before the Navy rescued a second group of wayward seafarers.

  Particularly disturbing was the supine reaction of the Obama administration to the rebellion that erupted in Iran on June 9, 2009, after a patently fraudulent election returned Iran’s firebrand Islamist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a second four-year term. Brutal street shootings—plus mass arrests with beating and rape used as intimidation tactics against detainees—quelled the protests after several weeks. President Obama’s response was tepid because he held out quixotic hopes that he could somehow persuade Iran—which had spent 25 years developing its nuclear program and building a massive human and physical infrastructure—to abandon nuclear weapons on the cusp of successfully producing them.

  At the end of 2011 the U.S. and Europe finally imposed strong sanctions, targeting Iran’s central bank and embargoing the import of Iranian oil. Had this been done in June 2009 the Iranian threat already might have been ended via positive regime change. Yet Iran’s nuclear march continues despite sanctions.

  Preventing Nuclear Armament

  WHEN NEGOTIATIONS fail or are used to run out the nuclear clock (as with Iran and North Korea), and when sanctions fail (as frequently they do), the remaining options are aiding the opposition and taking military action. The former was not viable in Saddam’s Iraq—save after the Gulf War, when a countrywide popular uprising was on the verge of dethroning Saddam. But the U.S. stood down, and Saddam crushed the rebellion. As for Syria, it was only the Arab Spring of 2011 that galvanized popular revolt there, its fate uncertain at this writing.

  As for the latter option, twice Israel has destroyed unloaded nuclear reactors, both times with complete mission success. Israel’s demolition of Saddam’s above ground reactor in 1981 was a textbook armament-prevention operation. Eight planes—F-15s for escort and F-16s to bomb—flew over the desert for two hours a few hundred feet off the ground, emerging at sunset to drop unguided gravity bombs on the exposed Osirak reactor. One 2,000-pound bomb landed squarely inside the reactor. Though publicly the U.S. joined a UN condemnation of the raid, privately President Reagan chuckled: “Boys will be boys.”

  The raid was launched because the Israelis knew that the reactor would soon be loaded with nuclear fuel. Once it had gone critical the consequences of scattering highly radioactive material over several countries made a raid untenable. On the advice of most of his top advisors, who wanted to assuage anger in the Arab world, President Reagan allowed the UN Security Council resolution condemning the measure to pass, instead of ordering a U.S. veto.

  There was no serious doubt that Iraq’s program was aimed at obtaining a nuclear weapon. While Iraq’s program started in 1959 as a commercial venture under Atoms for Peace, in the late 1970s Saddam Hussein signed contracts to purchase weapons-grade uranium from France and reprocessing equipm
ent from Italy, the latter to separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel. France offered its newly developed, 7 percent enriched “caramel” fuel, which would have substantially cut Iraq’s operating costs but is not suitable for use as the core of a uranium bomb and does not allow easy separation of plutonium from spent fuel. Saddam turned down France’s offer.

  Saddam preferred 93 percent enriched uranium for the reactor core—vastly higher than needed for commercial or research purposes. In November 1980, two months after invading Iran, Iraq ended international inspections of its reactor. In January it permitted one visit, but the reactor was not yet operational, so inspection was all for show. After Israeli’s June 1981 strike, condemnation was nearly unanimous. As noted earlier, American intelligence still refused to concede that Iraq had been seeking nuclear weapons, and only two of President Reagan’s senior advisers, Secretary of State Alexander Haig and National Security Adviser Richard Allen, backed Israel. Incredibly, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger accused the Israelis of violating international law by committing an act of war. It took retired Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg to answer: as Iraq had attacked Israel in 1948, never recognized what it continued to call “the Zionist entity,” and never signed a peace treaty, the two nations were still legally at war. Israel’s precision strike was thus entirely lawful.

  Saddam likely would have had the bomb well before launching his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait had Israel not moved. After the Gulf War, arms inspectors discovered that Iraq was at most a year or two away from having a bomb.