The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited North Korea in October 2000. She was preparing the way for a visit by Clinton in December, and the D.P.R.K. was near an agreement to eliminate its missiles and end its missile exports, but the visit was cancelled when Clinton decided he had to remain in the United States during the dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush about who won the 2000 presidential election. When George W. Bush was determined to have won, his administration backed away from the Clinton administration’s grand bargain with North Korea. Thereafter, relations between the two countries progressively worsened. Bush administration observers quipped with gallows humor that the rule in the new Bush White House was to study what Clinton had been doing and then do the opposite.

  * The religious group to which Carter referred, the Branch Davidians, was a schism or “branch” of the Davidian sect of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, organized by a charismatic but sociopathic leader named David Koresh. Koresh and seventy-five of his followers had been killed the previous year when the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms attempted to serve a search warrant on the sect’s compound near Waco, Texas—the Davidians violently resisted and a fifty-one-day siege of the compound culminated in a devastating fire from which only a few of Koresh’s followers escaped.

  * Originally the Korean Energy Development Organization. Gallucci liked the acronym and kept it after the change in name because he and his son were studying aikido, the Japanese martial art.

  TWELVE THE CORNERSTONE OF PEACE AND STABILITY

  IN AUGUST 1994, while Bob Gallucci was negotiating with Kang Sok Ju over light-water reactors, Tom Graham, the ambassador and U.S. arms negotiator, had occasion to visit, with a State Department colleague, the workshop where South Africa had assembled its uranium gun bombs. The bombs were gone and their highly enriched uranium components melted down and stored, but the building where Armscor had crafted them remained, as did the ten bank vaults lined up behind false doors where their separated barrels and breeches had been secured. “Look around you,”1 Graham’s hosts told him as he entered the workshop. “Nothing has changed.”

  “There was nothing there2 that you would not find in a high-school machine shop,” Graham recalled. “They showed us the cases they used to move the weapons around, so we had an idea of their size; one would have easily fit in the back of a panel truck. ‘We built six weapons,’ they said, ‘and were working on a seventh when we shut the program down. Nobody knew about it. We never had more than one hundred fifty people involved, including the janitor. We spent twenty-five million dollars. We used gun-barrel technology so we didn’t need to test—we knew the weapons would work.’ They were showing us their operation, they said, because they wanted us to understand that if a country, or even a subnational group, can acquire the nuclear material, the rest is really easy. You don’t need an infrastructure. You just need a few skilled scientists and engineers and the HEU.”

  Graham had visited South Africa to solicit its vote on the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. After his work in the early 1990s encouraging the new states of the former Soviet Union to consolidate their nuclear arsenals in Russia and join the NPT, the accomplished Kentuckian had been appointed acting director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. When a new permanent director was confirmed in November 1993, Graham asked to be appointed special representative of the president for arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament, with responsibility for the NPT. Graham considered the treaty to be “the centerpiece of international3 efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons.” As the 1995 stand-or-fall vote on its indefinite extension approached, the NPT was under siege from signatories who felt that the nuclear powers had failed to sustain their part of the nonproliferation bargain; Graham wanted to represent the United States in the fight to save it. “Although few agreed,”4 he wrote, “I believed that [indefinite extension] was achievable if we remained optimistic, were creative and never wavered.”

  It had been customary in previous NPT negotiations to meet with diplomats at the perpetual Conference on Disarmament in Geneva or at the United Nations in New York, catch-as-catch-can. Graham decided instead to make the case for NPT extension in person to national foreign-policy leaders in capitals around the world. Between 1993 and 1995 he visited more than forty capitals in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. “I traveled all over5 the world looking for votes,” he said later. “It was a little bit like a political convention.” He went to South Africa because it was a key vote, a swing vote. “They had the possibility of bringing in a lot of nonaligned countries who were opposed to us, to support our view that the NPT should be permanent.”

  His basic argument in all his presentations, Graham told me, was that there would be only one chance—the 1995 review and extension conference—to make the NPT permanent: The twenty-fifth anniversary vote had been preapproved when the original treaty was ratified, but any further votes would require new parliamentary ratification by a majority of NPT member states, which Graham called “an impossibility6 in today’s world.” The NPT, he declared, was “the cornerstone of international7 peace and stability and the base on which all other arms control and nonproliferation agreements are built.” If the nonnuclear states wanted the nuclear powers to disarm, the nuclear powers would need the protections of the NPT to do so. If they wanted the commercial benefits of what he called “peaceful nuclear cooperation,” meaning support for the development of nuclear power and other nuclear technologies, the NPT was the “best basis.” For example, he argued, “a nuclear power reactor requires ten years to build and thirty years to operate, and the spent fuel has to be safeguarded forever”—to ensure that it isn’t reprocessed for its plutonium. “For the appropriate economic decisions to be made, there must be assurance that the IAEA safeguards which flow from the NPT will not expire.”

  Graham found significant resistance to making the NPT permanent, especially among the member states of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which includes many countries in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and the Caribbean. One of his reasons for working state by state, visiting the key capitals, was to forestall the NAM from opposing the treaty en bloc. In exchange for their votes, he wrote, “many countries stressed8 the importance of a CTBT”—a comprehensive test-ban treaty that would ban all nuclear testing. (A test ban was the next obvious step forward in limiting nuclear-weapons development and proliferation, because only the simplest and bulkiest weapon designs, unsuited for missile delivery, could be devised indigenously without testing.) “Some also emphasized the need for updated and legally binding negative security assurances—pledges by the nuclear-weapon states not to attack non-nuclear-weapon states with nuclear weapons (most of the NAM wanted this) and positive security assurances—pledges by the nuclear-weapon states to come to the aid of non-nuclear-weapon states threatened or attacked with nuclear weapons (Egypt wanted this). Some countries, primarily in the Middle East, underscored the problem of Israel not being an NPT party.”

  Before he could sell the NPT to other countries, Graham had to line up support at home. The NPT itself was not a problem, since limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons had always been to America’s advantage and therefore a U.S. priority. But he understood early on that the price of making the NPT permanent would be U.S. commitment to a CTBT—and the U.S. weapons labs and the Pentagon were resisting such a ban.

  More was at stake for the labs than their ability to test new weapon designs or assess the safety of old ones. Their future might be at stake and the careers of their scientists and engineers, many of whom had never known any other line of work. Sig Hecker was still director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory at the time of the internal U.S. debate over ending weapons testing. A fundamental issue, Hecker told me, was how to balance the loss of certainty about the performance of the U.S. nuclear arsenal against the increased security that would result from eliminating nuclear testing throughout the world.
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  The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 had brought unprecedented changes to the U.S. nuclear-weapons complex. The Strategic Air Command furled its colors and stood down on 31 May 1992. George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin agreed at a June 1992 summit to cut their nuclear arsenals to between 3,000 and 3,500 deployed strategic warheads by 2003. (Counting their strategic reserves, each side’s remaining numbers would actually be around 10,000.) They would limit submarine-launched ballistic missiles to 1,750 warheads while scrapping all their multiple-warhead ICBMs. Yeltsin had proposed mutual reductions to 2,500 strategic warheads each, but Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney successfully opposed the lower number, Graham writes, “and the Russians9 eventually accepted the [higher] 3,000–3,500 [limit], a level they could not [financially] support for their own services.” Despite Cheney’s sabotage, diplomat James Goodby rightly called the agreement “the greatest disarmament10 program in the history of the world.”

  Cheney resisted reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal because he was then in the process of formulating a new post–Cold War defense policy that he considered more appropriate to the new status of the United States as the world’s only remaining superpower. (Russia, according to the conventional wisdom, had receded to the status of a Third World country with nuclear weapons.) An early version of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), wrote the policy experts Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, “laid out very clearly11 how America should think now that the Cold War was over: ‘Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.’” Cheney, the two policy experts concluded, “wanted the United States to remain12 the preeminent world power by keeping others at bay and bending the world to its wishes.” The names of those on Cheney’s staff who worked on the document would become familiar in the post-2000 administration of George W. Bush: Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Stephen Hadley, Eric Edelman. In the last year of the administration of Bush’s father, the DPG draft was not well received. “That was just nutty,”13 George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft told Chollet and Goldgeier. “I read a draft of it. I thought, ‘Cheney, this is just kooky.’ It didn’t go anywhere further. It was never formally reviewed.” But of course it did go further, after the interregnum of the Clinton years.

  Despite Cheney’s resistance, the U.S. nuclear-weapons-production complex was downsizing, partly in response to unilateral and negotiated arms reductions, partly because public concern had caught up with its environmentally abandoned ways. The FBI had actually raided the Department of Energy’s plutonium-production facility at Rocky Flats, in Colorado, in 1989, looking for evidence (which it found in abundance) that the DOE and Rockwell International, a contractor, had violated environmental-protection laws. In September 1992, Secretary of Energy James Watkins cancelled plans for a new reactor to make tritium for nuclear weapons; with thousands of weapons to be removed from the arsenal from which tritium could be cannibalized, existing stocks of the yield-boosting gas would serve until at least 2012.* “The September decision was14 a climax in the transition of the DOE weapons complex,” wrote the historian W. Henry Lambright, “from an enterprise whose principal mission was weapons-making to one whose primary role would be weapons research and development and environmental cleanup. Almost half of the entire $12 billion budget of DOE [in 1992] now focused on nuclear cleanup.”

  The most radical challenge, however, came in October 1992, when U.S. senators Mark Hatfield, James Exon, and George Mitchell supported and Congress approved a bipartisan amendment to an appropriations bill mandating a ten-month moratorium on U.S. nuclear-weapons tests, after which the U.S. could conduct no more than fifteen tests over a four-year period before a comprehensive test-ban treaty was negotiated, and those tests were only to be for assessing the safety and reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons. The Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell amendment responded to a challenge moratorium instituted by France the previous April. It was designed to position the United States favorably to campaign for a CTBT, and it set a deadline for achieving such a treaty of 30 September 1996. George H. W. Bush signed the appropriations bill, with its subversive amendment, with great reluctance, but the bill included money for a huge particle accelerator, the Superconducting Super Collider, to be built in Texas, a plum that Bush considered important to his reelection. An underground nuclear test fired at Yucca Flat, Nevada, on 23 September 1992, was thus the last of 1,125 weapons tests the U.S. had fired since 1945. A moratorium on U.S. nuclear tests would impose a de facto moratorium on Britain as well, since the British no longer maintained a test site themselves but tested exclusively at the Nevada range.

  George H. W. Bush lost his bid for reelection that November (and the Superconducting Super Collider was subsequently abandoned unbuilt) to Bill Clinton. Sig Hecker was dismayed, as were many of his colleagues. “It was a whole different world,”15 he told me. “Just a bunch of young people in the White House. Many of them had no idea of what the nuclear-weapons business was about. Right from the beginning, Clinton and Gore made it clear that it would be very difficult to convince them that we should do any of these Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell tests. And then we got Ms. Hazel O’Leary as secretary of energy. We went from a four-star admiral, Admiral Watkins, to Hazel O’Leary. And now she had responsibility for nuclear weapons.”

  O’Leary, a lawyer, former prosecutor, and utilities executive, fifty-six years old in 1993, was the first African-American woman to serve as secretary of energy. She was a Virginia native, the daughter of two physicians who had made a point of sending her to summer camp in Massachusetts and high school in New Jersey, where she lived with an aunt, to shield her as much as possible from the spirit-breaking ugliness of the segregated South. Partly as a result, O’Leary grew up to be a smart, attractive, gregarious, hugely self-confident woman with a gift for cutting through the bureaucratic underbrush and getting to the point.

  She got to the point quickly enough in numerous meetings that winter and spring of 1993 with Hecker and other managers of the nuclear-weapons complex, Hecker recalled. “She said, ‘You guys have done a thousand tests. I don’t see what else you’re going to learn with a dozen more.’” Hecker thought her point oversimple, but he understood it wasn’t irrational. “She listened to a number of folks who were pro–arms control—which I consider myself to be—but who were also anti-testing. They felt strongly that testing really was one of the main things that drove the arms race.” Sidney Drell, a vigorous, no-nonsense Stanford theoretical physicist and a founding member of the legendary JASON defense advisory group, was one of O’Leary’s advisers. Sixty-seven in 1993, Drell had been a member of the Clinton transition team on matters related to defense, nuclear in particular. “Sid had just been an enormous advocate of stopping testing,” Hecker told me, “I think since the late 1950s. But he was also a very wise man. He understood the defense world. And without ever saying it directly, he really made me feel the responsibility I had as lab director to give the government the best advice we could possibly give. Without being driven by any of the side issues. And that the reputation of our institution depended on it. I had a strong sense of responsibility anyway, but he made me feel it even more so.”

  Tom Graham came into the debate as well, in May 1993, when the questions of extending the nuclear moratorium and of negotiating a CTBT had worked their way up to the Cabinet-level National Security Council Principals Committee. “Reliability testing is not16 something that had been done very often historically,” Graham wrote later. “There was no demonstrable purpose in doing the testing except simply to have nuclear tests.… This did not seem to me to be sustainable. Further, and
more important, in about two years we were going to seek to extend the NPT, we hoped, indefinitely.” Graham was concerned as well with the difficulty the U.S. was having at that time in convincing Ukraine to turn over its nuclear arsenal to Russia. “How were we going to persuade Ukraine to give up the nuclear weapons on its territory if we were emphasizing the usefulness of nuclear weapons with a test program?” Before the principals meeting, he had tried to confer with O’Leary at DOE. “I had not been able17 to see [her], but I spoke with her deputy, and he said that it was their view that there is a time for an end to everything, and that nothing should just continue on forever with no rationale. I was cheered by these words.”

  Among those attending the principals’ meeting besides Graham were Clinton’s national security adviser, Tony Lake; Lake’s deputy, Sandy Berger; Hazel O’Leary; the CIA director, James Woolsey; the White House science adviser, John Gibbons; Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs; Secretary of State Warren Christopher; and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. Other nuclear issues dominated the first forty-five minutes of the one-hour meeting, after which Lake asked, “Who will speak for the moratorium?”18 Graham was ready:

  I raised my hand and gave the speech that I had used in [a previous] meeting, stressing NPT extension and also Ukraine. I argued that if the United States resumed testing (and having the British tests in Nevada), Russia and China likely would discontinue their moratoria. Indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995 against a backdrop of all five nuclear weapon states testing likely would prove impossible. I further argued that the tests were not necessary and should not jeopardize NPT extension if they were not.