Shattering the nuclear sword

"Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”- John F. Kennedy, speech to the UN, September 1961.

"Countdown to Zero" is one of the best accounts of the dangers of nuclear weapons for the layman that I have recently seen. The film which opened last week takes a comprehensive yet succinct look at the risks posed by nuclear weapons, and is set against the backdrop of John F. Kennedy's speech to the United Nations in which he quoted the words cited above. JFK talked about a "Sword of Damocles" hanging on our head that is secured by a flimsy thread. As the film emphasizes, the most important operative words in Kennedy's speech are "accident, miscalculation or madness" which can all cut the thread holding the sword. To illustrate how this could happen, the film showcases interviews with leading arms control experts and policy personnel, including former CIA agent Valerie Plame, Harvard professor Matthew Bunn, nuclear terrorism expert Graham Allison, WMD expert Joseph Cirincione and world leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev and Tony Blair.

The fact is that no matter how responsible the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons may be and how well-protected the weapons may seem, the extremely complex nature of the system always increases the chances of miscalculation, accident or madness. The film gives concerning examples. For instance, a few years ago, nuclear weapons instead of regular ones were loaded on a plane in North Dakota and flown almost halfway around the country without anyone noticing it. The Cuban Missile Crisis is of course well-known, lesser known are the Palomares incident and half a dozen others when nuclear weapons were accidentally dropped from mid air. Fortunately none detonated. But the danger is pervasive and the film also recounts some chilling events. The most heart-stopping is an incident in 1995 recounted by Cirincione, when the Russians mistook the flight of an experimental rocket from Norway for a nuclear launch. The codes were ready, everyone in the Russian hierarchy was convinced, and all that remained to launch a nuclear strike against the US was President Yeltsin's approval. Thankfully for the world, Yeltsin was "not drunk" and he did not trust the officials' judgment enough, leading to a narrow brush with catastrophe. The problem is that the complex protocols embedded in the use of nuclear weapons allow much opportunity for misunderstandings and accidents and very little time for response and corrective action. Even a President would have typically no more than a few minutes to make a decision, thus increasing the possibility of triggering armageddon. The simplest and most ludicrous of causes can set off false alarms; in one case, the setting off of a nuclear alert was the result of a malfunction in a single computer chip costing less than a dollar.

One of the most jaw-dropping instances I remember was from Richard Rhodes's book. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, was woken up in the middle of the night and told that there were 1500 Soviet nuclear missiles headed for the US. As Brzezinski was contemplating what to do next, the caller called back and said that the number of missiles had been upgraded to 15000. Hearing this, Brzezinski just sat on his bed; there would be no point in alerting anyone. Of course, it turned out to be "computer malfunction".

Apart from such misunderstandings, the other reason why nuclear weapons pose such a great danger is of course because they may fall into the hands of terrorists, and deterrence does not apply to such stateless actors. Al Qaeda has been trying to get their hands on nukes for years. What makes the situation worse is the relatively easy accessibility of enriched uranium in the former Soviet Union. After the Cold War ended, many nuclear facilities in the former Soviet republics found themselves orphaned, severed from central control, with their workers out of a job. While many of the facilities were later secured with US cooperation, many others were ludicrously insecure, with barely a padlock preventing access to nuclear material; in the words of a former Soviet official, "potatoes were guarded better". Selling a few grams of uranium to potential buyers would allow impecunious laid-off workers from these facilities to make a lucrative buck. The film documents that there have been literally dozens of instances when former nuclear workers have been caught trying to smuggle a few grams of nuclear material across borders in Russia and Central Asia. In addition, countries like Iran, North Korea and Pakistan are happy to trade nuclear-related technology to wannabe buyers.

This nuclear material is notoriously hard to detect. As the film says, smuggling a few kilograms of enriched uranium by shielding it in a lead pipe is child's play. This is mainly because the relatively weak radiation from uranium can be almost completely shielded by lead, but also because this uranium could be hidden in any one of a whopping 100,000 shipping containers entering the US every single day. Finding a few kilos of U-235 in a heavily shielded lead casing in one of these countless containers is an unimaginably difficult problem to solve. Set the detectors on high and one would not detect the low-intensity radiation. Set it on low and one would detect almost everything else (including fruits, papers and wood) which emit comparable ambient levels of radiation.

If terrorists manage to get past the most difficult step of acquiring nuclear material, they can easily build a crude nuclear bomb. Plus, paraphrasing Churchill, terrorists don't have to do their best, they just have to do enough. Exploding a crude bomb in the port itself would not be what they have in mind, but it would still be enough to bring about chaos and panic, possibly collapsing the financial and economic system of a country.

So what can be done to address this life-threatening problem? One of the biggest truisms about nuclear weapons which separates them from other WMDs is that if you don't have uranium or plutonium, you cannot build these weapons, period. Thus in theory, you completely solve the problem if you secure the material. Programs for securing material from the former Soviet republics have been instituted for years, but funding has embarrassingly been a problem. Plus there is no accurate estimate of how much material may have been stolen after the Soviet Union collapses. Securing this material would be the first thing to do. Secondly, countries who want to peacefully pursue atomic energy must be provided nuclear material by an international body under the strictest of safeguards.

But most importantly, there is one almost perfect solution which there is no getting around: reduce the nuclear arsenals of the world to zero. Nada. Zilch. There is no doubt that the US and Russia which still stock the lion's share of nukes should take the lead, a point which has been belabored often to scant effect. This should especially be ludicrously easy for the US which still has thousands of nukes on hair-trigger alert and which has conventional forces that could easily overwhelm any other country's defenses and offenses. If there is one country that does not need any nuclear weapons, it's the US, followed by Russia. The psychological impact of the US renouncing every single nuclear weapon would be hard to overestimate (Nixon did it with chemical and biological weapons in the 70s). It would be tremendous and would offer the US an unprecedented moral authority to ask others to do the same. While it may not be easy for countries like India and Israel which share extensive boundaries with unstable and dangerous regimes, such an act will signify huge potential. This was a dream that President Reagan often talked about. As idealistic as it sounds, it should be feasible at least for the US. Most refreshingly, amid all the partisan bickering that we keep hearing about, such an initiative has gained traction with a wide swathe of influential statesmen from both parties. In a compelling document last year, several former highly influential bipartisan officials like Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn called for the abolishment of nuclear weapons. President Obama has latched on to this dream. It remains to be seen what he actually does about it.

As JFK said in his speech, "the weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us". In 1986, during the very promising Reykjavik meeting when Reagan and Gorbachev came within a hairsbreadth of getting rid of all nuclear weapons, Reagan told Gorbachev about a dream that seems straight out of a movie. He said that once the world has decided to get rid of all nuclear weapons, he and Gorbachev would meet again in Reykjavik, each holding the last nuclear missile in their hands. They would both be so old that they would hardly recognize each other. Gorbachev would squint at Reagan and say "Ron, is that you"?. And Reagan would say, "Mikhail?". And then they would both destroy the last two nuclear bombs on the planet, and the whole world would have a giant party.

We will have the champagne ready.

Trailer:

A NUCLEAR WEAPON IN MUMBAI: THE UNTHINKABLE

As the horrific attacks on Mumbai are still in their last stages, I keep on worrying about only one scenario; a nuclear weapon detonated on Indian soil, perhaps in Mumbai. The thought makes me shudder and lose at least a little sleep at night.

Several top analysts in the US such as Graham Allison and Joseph Cirincione have identified kinks in the US security system, especially in border security, that would make it possible for terrorists to use a nuclear weapon on American soil. Allison thinks that a nuclear attack of some kind and magnitude on US soil may already be overdue. If that's the case with the United States which is still one of the most relatively secure places in the world, one can only imagine that the scenario would be much worse in India.

It is very difficult to overestimate the effects of a weapon with even a 1 kiloton yield- a dismal yield by any standards- in a city like Mumbai, irrespective of the time of the day. A more typical scenario usually talks about a 10 kiloton weapon, but as in other such scenarios, it's always best to be as conservative as possible and then extrapolate to worse cases. Now, the 20 kiloton bomb in Hiroshima killed at least 100,000. Mumbai's population is an astounding 20 million compared to Hiroshima's 300-400,000 at the time of the atomic bombing.

Let's imagine a macabre scenario for a second in which a extremely watered down 1 kT bomb was detonated at Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the same location where the terrorists began their killing spree. Extensively depending on the conditions including structures of buildings, wind patterns, road traffic, presence of combustible material and other variables, such a blast could essentially level most of the buildings in the Fort area (within a radius of 1 km or so), including all the famous hotels which the terrorists targeted. There would be almost total and instant loss of human life within this radius, probably numbering in a few thousands right there and then. Those who were not directly struck by the shock wave would be obliterated with shards of flying glass, metal and construction material. Given enough combustible material around, thermal radiation from the blast could also start fires, the effects of which were historically neglected in some such studies. Such fires could seal the fate of people trapped in buildings, many of whom will be seriously injured to begin with. Farther from the blast, prompt and delayed radiation would bathe people and property for miles, essentially shutting down the financial part of the city including the BSE for at least months. The effect on the economy would be devastating.

A dirty bomb detonated in Mumbai with materials like strontium 90, cesium 137 or the infamous polonium 210 would limit the (still significant) blast and thermal effects to the conventional explosive used to package the radioactive material, but the radiation effects would still kill or incapacitate thousands, render large swathes of real estate inhospitable for years, and at the very least severely cripple the financial and commercial sector of the Indian economy, a consequence whose aftereffects themselves would be disastrous in several ways. Similar effects of varying magnitude would be visible in any other of India's biggest or second-biggest cities. Dozens of well-known and loved names spring to mind; Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Calcutta, Chandigarh, Pune, Trivendrum, Jaipur and Varanasi to name a few.

The above scenario discussed a weapon with an embarrassingly low yield. There are 'suitcase' nuclear weapons small enough to fit in a backpack with yields from 1-10 kilotons. Even by the most abysmally conservative estimate, at least 100,000 people could die in Mumbai from the immediate (blast, radiation, thermal) and delayed (radiation) effects of such a 'small' 1 kT explosion. A more typical 10 kT weapon would extend the above effects to at least Churchgate, Grant Road, Marine Lines and Girgaon. The death toll from such an explosion could be 500,000 or so, more than twice the total number of people killed by the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Either the former or certainly this would be a number beyond imagination and a catastrophe beyond comprehension. It will create complete chaos in the country, and the resulting civil strife and riots might kill thousands more.

Sadly, what's really frightening is that smuggling in a small weapon with a 1 kiloton yield could be cakewalk for terrorists. This is not fear-mongering or paranoia. Weapons-grade uranium, especially when concealed beneath common and heavy tamper and shielding materials, can be extremely difficult to detect by most conventional radiation counters (Weapons-grade plutonium which has a higher energy gamma and neutron radiation signature is easier, although still not trivial). It would be relatively easy to detect such uranium if suspected containers could be leisurely inspected over a period of several hours. It is quite a challenge on the other hand to detect such a bomb among the thousands of containers that rapidly flow across India's borders every single day. Considering that Mumbai itself handles 50% of India's maritime traffic, this becomes a weapons detection nightmare. India's long sea and land borders thwart this attempt even more, the same way they thwart it in the US. And it goes without saying that once inside the country, the high population, facile movement of goods across state borders, immense network of road and train networks and the inadequacy of security at all these routes and points would make it virtually impossible to detect such a weapon. Being of similar appearance, language and culture, the terrorists who escort this deadly device would seamlessly blend in among the population, most of which is busy securing its own square meals to be vigilant.

Nor would it be impossible to obtain such a weapon in the first place, even though this would probably be the most challenging task of all. Analysts have estimated that the price of a 10 kiloton nuclear weapon in the black market may be about 10 million dollars. Based on the quality and yield, this price could possibly drop down to 2-5 million dollars. It is not very difficult for networks like Al Qaeda to secure such a weapon and then, even if they don't use it themselves, auction it off to eager bidders who would carry out both their own objectives as well as that of Al Qaeda's. Evidence suggests that Al Qaeda has already courted Pakistani scientists about nuclear know how as well as material once or twice (Cirincione, 2006). B. Raman in a heartfelt essay worries about the fate of our nuclear materials and weapons and loses sleep over it. I think he should lose even more sleep over it because as far as I know, our own nukes and materials are not the most attractive target for terrorists. The most lucrative weapons raw materials and perhaps weapons themselves have been thought to be loose nukes in the former Soviet Union (Allison, 2004). There were roughly 20,000 nukes in the Soviet Union around the time of its demise. Assuming that only 1% of these nuclear weapons failed to be secured, it still means that an alarming 200 are unaccounted for. Even one weapon among these with its yield degraded would be enough to cause the above catastrophe. A slightly more benign but still volatile scenario exists with Pakistan's nukes.

For now, terrorists have taken the even more easier way out of using conventional weapons and crude tactics. These crude tactics killed 'only' 125 and have shaken a city and nation's soul. The event has left us even more stunned and disturbed because of the sheer viciousness, bravado and efficiency of the terrorists. We better not even try to imagine what it would be like with a crude nuclear weapon or dirty bomb. Mr. Prime Minister, no more words; we already know as much as you do what you want to convey to us. We need action now.

RICHARD RHODES@GOOGLE

As part of the Authors@Google talk series that Google has organised, everyone's favourite nuclear historian Richard Rhodes gave a talk at the company, partly on general nuclear history and policy and partly about his new book (which I reviewed here). In the end, he asked the bright folks at Google for advice about how best one could possibly implement an international system of tracking nuclear material.



There were several interesting points about both history and current policy that he made that I think are worth noting as summaries (for those who may not have the time to watch the entire one hour talk)

1. Paul Nitze was a highly influential official in the State Department who served through six administrations, advising presidents on nuclear policy. After surveying the damage caused by atomic bombs in Japan and comparing it with the damage caused by strategic bombing, he erroneously concluded that atomic weapons are not much different in their effects from conventional incendiary bombing. He set the tone for policy partly grounded in this belief in 1950 when he drafted a key document named NSC 68 which outlined George Kennan's containment doctrine and advocated increasing nuclear weapons building as the best way to counter the Soviets. Although the report was opposed for its exaggerated tone by some, the Korean War that began that year sealed the deal, and the report more or less set the tone for US nuclear policy for the next six decades. Nitze could well be called the "father of threat inflation"

2. Most of the estimates about nuclear weapon targeting made during the Cold War or at least during the early years were underestimates because they neglected the effects of fire. Fire effects and the resulting strong winds cause a firestorm in a nuclear attack, and they can contribute up to 60% of all the effects. Most initial calculations only included blast effects. In a somewhat dramatic illustration, Rhodes showed the possible blast and fire radius of an attack on Google with a 300 kT weapon. The fire radius is much larger than the blast radius, and in addition fires can spread far and wide depending on vegetation.

3. In another telling illustration, Rhodes showed the nuclear winter that would result from a "limited" exchange of about a megaton between India and Pakistan. Within a few months, the simulation shows that the average temperature of the world could drop by 5 degrees, a catastrophic result. One can scarcely comprehend the nuclear winter that would have resulted from an estimated exchange of 10,000 megatons between the two Cold War superpowers. The illustration showed that even a small regional war waged with nuclear weapons could have extremely serious global consequences.

4. The real problem with nuclear proliferation is that like any complex machine, the system can go haywire and is subject to "normal accidents". More accounts than would make us comfortable exist of nuclear weapons accidentally armed or delivered somewhere instead of conventional weapons. Rhodes also noted that both the Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals don't have Permissive Action Locks (PALs). This makes the situation uncomfortable. I am interested in knowing his sources for this information.

5. Rhodes again outlined an ambitious plan by many former US experts including Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Sam Nunn for universal disarmament. These gentlemen were early advocates of security through minimal deterrents. But after 9/11, they realised that nuclear terrorism makes only universal disarmament an ideal goal to be pursued for securing peace. Rhodes makes the accurate observation that nuclear proliferation can be stopped only by satisfying nations' security needs. However, I disagree with his projection for Pakistan's nuclear disarmament. Senior Pakistani officials have ostensibly said that they would disarm if India would disarm. But I doubt it because the Pakistani arsenal (about 40 weapons) is as much a deterrent against India's conventional forces superiority as it is against India's nuclear arsenal (about 60 weapons), and India inherently has the conventional advantage because of its size and resources. I don't see how this could stop being seen as a threat by the Pakistanis.

NUCLEAR TERRORISM'S UNHEEDED ASSUMPTIONS?

Nuclear terrorism forms an important part of the armamentarium of one of the Bush administration's favourite pastimes- threat inflation. While it is true that the potential damage that terrorists could cause with even a 1 kT nuclear weapon is tremendous (Times Square NYC, noon on a weekday), there are many very realistic obstacles they need to overcome before they can acquire, process, build, transport and use any kind of a nuclear weapon.

The more realistic fear that governments and the public have is about dirty bombs, explosives packaged together with low-tech dispersive radioactive material that would largely circumvent the need to achieve the myriad steps needed to be in charge of a bonafide atomic device.

Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley challenges two assumptions made by proponents of a nuclear terrorist attack scenario: access to knowledge and the existence of a nuclear black market (exemplified by black market czar Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan). Gormley correctly tackles the myth of easy access to nuclear material and knowledge and identifies the slip between the cup and the lip- from knowledge to working product.

She also questions the ease of facilitation of trade in the nuclear black market and doubts the existence of a dedicated clientele, an essential feature of any black market. The clientele should also have the understanding and sophistication to purchase and process nuclear material (In the early days of Al Qaeda, Bin Laden was had when someone sold him mercuric oxide as yellowcake).

Lastly, she questions the nature of materials that have been implicated in nuclear smuggling until now, most of which included depleted uranium and isotopes like Osmium 167, too ineffectual in a dirty bomb, let alone a weapon.

But I think she is missing out on three other important isotopes which are widespread products of research reactors, large scale reactors as well as medical research reactors- Iodine 131, Cesium 137 and Strontium 90. Out of these, Iodine 131 can be absorbed by the thyroid gland and leads to thyroid cancer, but its effects can be thwarted rather easily by ingesting tablets made of normal non-radioactive iodine, provided such tablets are easily available (the slow dissemination of these tablets was partly responsible for the large number of deaths from Chernobyl). Cs 137 and Sr 90 pose more serious problems, and I would think that more than anything else they would be choice materials for a dirty bomb. Both isotopes seem to strike the golden mean for radioactive lethality, possessing half-lives of 30 years and 28 years respectively; long enough to compare to a human life span, and short enough to be intensely radioactive. Moreoever, both elements chemically resemble two key elements in the human body. Cs 137 behaves somewhat like potassium and distributes throughout body fluids and compartments, whereas Sr 90 resembles calcium and deposits in bones, greatly increasing the risk of bone cancer. Both elements if ingested in reasonable amounts will pose almost irreparable risk and cause permanent damage.

I certainly don't think one should be immediately paranoid about these isotopes, but it is clear that if they wanted to, terrorists could steal them from multiple sources. I would think that any perceived scenario involving terrorists and dirty bombs should include discussion of these three isotopes, which because of their ease of access and purity are in some ways much more lethal than uranium or plutonium.