Posts Tagged ‘1960s’

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Meditations

About those nukes in Cuba….

Thursday, October 25th, 2012

The Cuban Missile Crisis turned 50 this week. If you’re interested in nuclear things you no doubt already know this, given that every organization with a plausible connection to it seems to have done something to commemorate it. It’s kind of amazing, but even after all this time, there are new things to learn — and things we still don’t know.

“November 9, 1962: Low-level photograph of 6 Frog (Luna) missile transporters under a tree at a military camp near Remedios [Cuba]. U.S. photo analysts first spotted these tactical nuclear-capable missiles on October 25, but only in 1992 did U.S. policymakers learn that nuclear warheads for the Lunas were already in Cuba in October 1962. Source: Dino A. Brugioni collection, The National Security Archive.”

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be in the audience at a talk by Stan Norris and David Rosenberg at the Wilson Center. Stan is, you will recall, the author of the great biography of General Groves, and a frequent contributor to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ ”Nuclear Notebook” series where he and Hans Kristensen give us the definitive estimates for how many nuclear weapons there are in the world at any given time. David has been a major military historian for at least 30 years or so, and has written a number of important articles with awesome titles: ”The Origins of Overkill,” “A Smoking Radiating Ruin.”

The talk was on the “Nuclear Order of Battle,” a project Stan has been working on to find out what were the actual nuclear forces available to both the United States and the Soviet Union as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding. (Stan and Hans have an article in the Bulletin which summarizes some of the initial findings, though Stan is working on a much longer piece as well.) David, for his part, talked about the nuclear war planning that was going on at the time. What was the context of the crisis, in terms of thinking about nuclear weapons in the United States? What was American nuclear strategy of the time? How did this contrast with the Soviet side of things?

Range of the missiles that the Soviets were installing in Cuba. A number of working MRBMs (Medium Range Ballistic Missiles) had already been installed.

All of this is a pretty sobering thing to contemplate, obviously. I mean, everybody knows that nuclear war in 1962 would have been, to put it mildly, bad. But thinking through how bad in very concrete terms makes it even more disturbing — it takes it from the realm of “generic existential threat” to images of destroyed American cities.

Both were excellent and said far more than I can summarize justly in such a short space, and the audience questions were great. The audience had a good dollop of DC nukerati in it — among those who asked questions were Bill Burr of the National Security Archive; Svetlana Savranskaya, who just wrote a book about the Soviet side of the Crisis; Irving Lerch of the American Physical Society, who had been involved with some of the on-the-ground planning for invading Cuba back in the day; Chris Pocock, an historian of the U-2 spy plane; and Thomas Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council. It was hopping, and both Stan and David were pretty great. The whole thing was taped, and you can watch the video of it online.

The basics were such: At the time of the Crisis, the United States could out-nuke the Soviets by a fairly considerable margin. Depending on how you hash out megatonnage vs. delivery vs. success likelihood and whatnot, the US arguably had an advantage of 17-to-1 over the Soviets, though by my reckoning it was probably more like a 10-to-1 advantage in terms of strategic weapons. In one small but important example of this disparity, in 1962 the Soviet Union had only 42 long-range ICBMs ready to launch. The United States had 182, plus some 500 nukes nestled up along the Soviet border in Italy, Germany, Turkey, and other European sites. The Soviets had maybe 160 bomber-delivered weapons to launch, while the US had around 1,600, plus a technological advantage in bomber technology. Plus the US also had several thousands of other nukes stashed around the globe ready to go, as well.

But the Soviets still could have easily killed tens of millions in the United States and in Europe if it had come to it. 42 ICBMs is still a pretty big number — especially when 6 of them are wearing 3 megaton warheads, and the other 36 are ranging from 3 to 6 megatons. Even if the Soviets were being very conservative about those and launching three per target, that’s still 14 American cities you can scratch off the list, ignoring the fallout. Plus whatever else they threw at us. Which would have been completely devastating. In the face of this fact, our 1o-to-1 “superiority” looks pretty pointless.

As Oppenheimer put it in 1953: “Our twenty-thousandth bomb, useful as it may be in filling the vast munitions pipeline of a great war, will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth.”

A SS-4 Medium Range Ballistic Missile, of the sort the Soviets were installing had actually installed! on Cuba in 1962.

But there’s more. For many years now we’ve known that in a certain sense, Kennedy’s attempt at nuclear “quarantine” failed in Cuba: the Soviets already had moved working nuclear weapons there. This is discussed a bit in Errol Morris’ Fog of War and I’ve always been a little surprised this hasn’t been more talked about. I’d always imagined, though, that the number of Soviet nukes was low. I always imagined four or five. I mean, if they only had 42 ICBMs in the Soviet Union itself, how many nukes could they have put on the island before we noticed? I mean, wasn’t the Cuban Missile Crisis supposed to be that great example of an Incredible Intelligence Coup in which our super-awesome spy planes tipped us off before things got too awful?

Well, according to Stan, the total number of Soviet nuclear warheads on Cuba was… wait for it… 158. One hundred and fifty eight nukes. On Cuba. During the Cuban Missile Crisis. Manned by scared Soviet troops and a whole lot of Cubans. Yeah. Let that one sink in. Now, to be fair, most of them were tactical nuclear warheads to be used against U.S. forces in case of invasion (which, by American estimates, would have cost 18,500 American casualties, even if nukes didn’t go flying), and “only” 95 to 100 of those were ready to be used. “Only.” But six to eight SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles were also there, and also at “operational” status. Those SS-4s could have reached as far north as Washington, D.C., with explosive yields of a little over a megaton each.

Imagine that: the major cities of the South and the lower Eastern Seaboard subjected to at least 8 megatons of yield, with no possibility of defense, with fallout going wherever it may. And that’s just the “regional” problem — there’s still those other ICBMs that Soviets had. Oh, and here’s a fun thing: those Soviet nukes had no negative physical protection — no PALs. Moscow vigorously asserted its authority in terms of actual nuclear use in the region, but if it had come down to it, there would have been little they could have done to stop a local commander from using one. 

What’s shocking about this is that apparently the Americans had no clue. They knew there might be some tactical nukes in Cuba, but chose to ignore the fact. They didn’t know there were strategic weapons there and ready to go. My question to Stan and David was, why didn’t Khrushchev say, in one of his drunken telegraphs, “guys, you’re too late, you can’t do anything about it?” Their response (augmented as well by Svetlana and Bill Burr) was believable: Khrushchev was too afraid of nuclear war, and the Cuba missile base was really only a fraction of what it was meant to be at that point.

Classic Herblock — “Let’s Get a Lock For This Thing!”

The big point that both Stan and David made was that we really shouldn’t see the danger of the Crisis as being carefully delineated by those famous “13 days.” The period of danger stretched out well into November 1962, and those MRBMs weren’t removed until December 1962. Furthermore, Kennedy and Khrushchev both realized that they only had limited control when it came to preventing all-out nuclear war. The military engines were spinning up, and getting them back to a not-hair-trigger state was a non-trivial thing.

The overall conclusion from both was that the Cuban Missile Crisis was even more dangerous than most people realized at the time, and more dangerous than most people know now. Well, that’s a cheery thought, isn’t it?

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Meditations

Plutonium Lives and Half-lives

Friday, October 12th, 2012

Plutonium is a fascinating element. It’s named after the Roman God of Death (by way of being named after a former planet). Its atomic abbreviation, “Pu,” was chosen to sound like “Peee-yooou,” as in, something smells bad. It doesn’t exist in nature (at least not in more than trace quantities) — all plutonium of significance currently in the world was created by human beings. And of course it is fissile, and so can be used as fuel for nuclear bombs or nuclear reactors.

It’s also pyrophoric, which is a fancy term to say it combusts on contact with air. It’s chemically unusual — it’s right on the juncture point between two different groups of elements, so it has six allotropic phases and four oxidation states. In non-sciency terms, this means that its volume and density changes radically as a factor of its temperature. This made it a tetchy addition to the wartime bomb project, where things like volume and density made a big difference when trying to use it inside of an exploding nuclear bomb. (They found that a plutonium-gallium alloy was a bit more stable.)

And hey, at least one form of it, Plutonium-238, actually glows in the dark! It does so because it’s radioactive enough to be scalding hot, which is why it is useful as a power source for things like the Curiosity rover currently tooling around Mars.1

A glowing pellet of plutonium-238. And you thought The Simpsons wasn’t factually accurate.

If you’re something of a science geek, all of the above is, again, terribly fascinating. And I think it’s been established on here that I am, among other things, something of a science geek. There’s something alluring to folks like me about the idea of a chemically irritable, glowing man-made element named after the god of the dead that catches fire on its own and can be used to blow up entire cities. It sounds like something out of the worst types of science fiction, where authors just make up goofy substances to advance the plot.

Oh — I left out one key thing. It’s also toxic. Exactly how toxic is up for some debate — some informed sources say it is intensely, acutely toxic in very small inhaled amounts, others suggest its toxicity is a lot lower than that, making it more of a long-term threat — but either way, it’s not good for you if it gets into your body. 

Because of its connections to nuclear weapons, the United States produced some 100 metric tons of plutonium over the course of the Cold War. And it was produced and operated on in big factories, under lots of secrecy, surrounded by lots of regular people. And there’s the rub: part of me wants to geek out on how awesome plutonium is, and part of me keeps saying, hey, idiot, don’t forget how it affects individual human beings — men, women, children, families. People who have been inadvertently exposed to it, for example. People who went out of their way to live next to a plutonium fabrication facility, for example, because it promised them good jobs and work that helped their country. 

Map adapted from P.W. Krey and E.P. Hardy, “Plutonium in Soil around the Rocky Flats Plant,” HASL-235 (1970). This adaptation is taken from here.

I find nuclear history fascinating, from an intellectual point of view, and all of its little detailed ins and outs continually draw me in. But I endeavor to not be too fascinated by it — so attracted to the “technically sweet” bits that I lose sight of the big picture, and lose any empathy I might have with those who lived it. It’s all too common that in our rush for objectivity, especially about Big Male Military Subjects, that we take solace in the cold, hard facts, and disregard accounts that come from other perspectives.

I was reminded of this last week, when I went to see a talk at the National Museum of American History. The speaker was Kristen Iversen, talking about her new book, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (which recently got a very favorable review from the New York Times). Iversen directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Memphis, and gave a good, heartfelt presentation to a packed room. Interestingly, the room was packed with mostly women, which is highly unusual for nuclear-themed talks, in my experience.

The book is part memoir, part investigative account. Iversen’s family moved to Arvada, Colorado, in the late-1950s. Arvada, a small town north of Denver, was next to Rocky Flats, a plutonium fabrication facility owned by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and operated initially by Dow Chemical.

Hanford would breed the plutonium in their mammoth nuclear reactors, and the metal would be shipped to Rocky Flats, where workers would shape it into forms useful inside nuclear weapons — the “pits.” The pits would then be shipped to the Pantex Plant in Texas for final assembly into bombs.

In theory, all of this would be well-contained within glove boxes and filters and sensibly designed waste systems. In practice, plutonium is a messy substance, and for a variety of reasons, a lot of corners were cut. The result is that map up above — a fairly large plume of plutonium was deposited in the soil around the plant and the surrounding communities.

An employee at Rocky Flats holds a plutonium “button” inside of a glove box, 1973.

From Iversen’s presentation, it sounded like a pretty interesting read. It’s historical, it’s journalistic, and yet it’s read through the lens of the personal. This sort of thing is necessary — we need to keep in mind, when talking about grand strategy and big motivations, that there are all sorts of regular people caught up in this as well. That most of the world is not comprised of heads of state, or even heads of agencies.

The residents of the towns around Rocky Flats were ill served by nuclear secrecy. They weren’t told, for example, that a fire in 1957 spread a wide plume of radioactivity across the area. Or when it happened again in 1969. They weren’t given information on the sorts of diseases that are associated with coming into contact with heavy actinides. They were assured, again and again, that everything was under control.

And from Iversen’s account, most of them believed it. Why wouldn’t they? They had skin in that game — the livelihood of their town depended on it, and, as we’ve all seen again and again, human beings, for all of their famed skittishness, are quick to rationalize the big, unwieldly long-term risks that they live next door to. This is something that people in the field of risk communication have known for a long time: we learn to ignore risks that we live next to, especially when we have a personal incentive to do so. (In fact, many of those cut corners mentioned above were done by the employees themselves, because the profit incentive was on speed, not safety. This is unfortunately an all-too-common story with toxic industries.)

An “Infinity Room” at Rocky Flats — a room so contaminated by radiation that it was never to be occupied by unshielded humans again. From the DOE Digital Archive.

To give you an idea of how not under control things were, though, Iversen tells a gripping account of when the FBI raided Rocky Flats in 1989. Alerted by whistleblowers for egregious safety violations inside the plant, the FBI eventually concluded that the only way to find out what was being done inside Rocky Flats was to bust on inside. But you can’t just walk into a plutonium fabrication facility, even if you’re the FBI. So they came up with what was really an ingenious plan. The FBI told the Department of Energy officials at Rocky Flats that they had to brief all of them on a potential eco-terrorist threat — they said that Earth First was planning to attack the plant. Once the FBI had all of the senior management rounded up in a room for the briefing, they served them with search warrants, and along with the EPA, they invaded the facility and occupied it.

The DOE and the contractor (by then Rockwell) got off the hook pretty much scott free, despite plenty of evidence that they had in fact been complicit in plenty of environmental crimes — which are, as well, crimes against the community at large. Such is how things go, sometimes, when you’re talking about plants that do secret things for the nuclear weapons industry.

I’m looking forward to reading Iversen’s full book. Because I work primarily with records of the state, I always risk seeing like a state — or at least seeing history like one. Stories of the personal effects, ironically, can help one keep some distance from that standpoint. This isn’t to say that the personal, individual perspective is everything — the “big picture” still undoubtedly matters — but I think a serious historian excludes it at their peril.

One little announcement: In today’s issue of Science, I have a review published of Michael Gordin’s The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovksy and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012). I’ve reviewed a number of Michael’s books over the years, but I think this one is his best-written one yet, and I really enjoyed it a lot. It’s not very nuclear, but it does have an important Cold War theme. Check it out.

Notes
  1. A correspondent also notes that this heating is from alpha emission, which also tends to break the Pu-238 into small particles — meaning they can contaminate a volume rather quickly. Charming. [↩]

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Visions

King of the Wild Frontier

Friday, July 20th, 2012

Of all of the many silly names for nuclear weapons system that have been given, Davy Crockett has got to be one of the odder ones, in my view.1

The “Davy Crockett” was a nuclear weapons system using the smallest nuclear warhead (by weight and yield, but not diameter) that the United States ever produced. The sucker was little — in photos it looks like it is just about a yard long, barely over a foot high.

I’ve eaten meals larger than that nuke.

By nuclear standards, it was, as one colleague has put it, “a mere firecracker.” Only .01–.02 kilotons — just a baby! From a physics perspective, you’re talking about a warhead that weighed 51 lbs yet put out the explosive equivalent of 10 to 20 tons of TNT — in other words, a weapon which has the explosive output of roughly 780X what it would it would be if it were made of conventional explosives. The largest conventional (non-nuclear) bomb in the US arsenal is the MOAB, which has a blast yield of some 11 tons of TNT, according to Wikipedia. So this is a nuke that sits right at the threshold of the conventional/nuclear range, in terms of energy output. Except for, you know, the radiation, which is a big part of its selling point.

The last atmospheric (above ground) nuclear test series that the United States ever had — just before the Limited Test Ban Treaty took effect — was to test the Davy Crockett system. The aptly named ”Little Feller” tests were held on July 7 and 17, 1962; Attorney General Robert Kennedy, among others, was present to observer the test. (Last Tuesday was the 50th anniversary of the second one.)

Man-portable nuclear weapons: as sensible as using alligators as water skis.

As for the name “Davy Crockett” itself, it’s not at all clear who named this thing, or exactly why. It’s almost surely done in the spirit of the 1955 Disney movie — the “king of the wild frontier,” who “killed him a b’ar when he only three” — as prior to that he was a much more obscure figure in popular culture. The name apparently goes back to the earliest days of the project, in 1958.2

Personally, I think naming a nuclear weapon after a guy who (probably) died defending the Alamo in an utterly avoidable last-stand battle is a little grim, but nobody asks me my opinion on this sort of thing. Did the French name any of their nukes after Dien Bien Phu?

The Davy Crockett nuclear projectile. The “dimple motors” apparently would tell you if the nuke’s internal power supply was still working. Bet you didn’t know nukes needed batteries, did you?

All right, enough jibber-jabber, let’s look at some images.

I have — after a few weeks of effort, I might add — managed to get the Library of Congress system to cough up Army Field Manual FM23-20, “Davy Crockett Weapons System in Infantry and Armor Units,” which has some great Davy Crockett photographs that I’d never seen before, as well as notes on how you’d go about trying to use this thing.

You might wonder why this took me so long to get, but that would only prove you don’t use the Library of Congress very much. It’s a great place to work but they have a ridiculously large number of “items not found on shelf.” Fortunately they also have some very helpful research librarians.

The LOC has somewhat slow scanners, and somewhat expensive photocopiers, so I’m not going to reproduce the report in full (at least at this time). But it’s a cool thing, and here are my favorite parts.

First, the Davy Crockett was really two different systems — a “light” gun (the M28) and a “heavy” gun (the M29). They used the same ammunition; the only difference was how far they could shoot the projectile and how large the cannon was. Both could be mounted onto jeeps.

The light system had a range of up to 2 kilometers, whereas the heavy system could go up to 4 kilometers. So that’s pretty close, but again, it’s a small detonation. In theory you could do this totally “safely,” but heaven help you if you’re talking about complicated engagements. I wouldn’t want to be out there on the tactical atomic battlefield on any side, frankly.

The advantage of having these on a jeep is that you could wheel it around pretty quickly, and you could store half a dozen of the warheads in the back. I mean, who hasn’t thought about doing this once or twice?

It’s hard to tell, but yes, there are six of them in there, on the left.

But the really gobsmacking aspect of the Davy Crockett is that it was man-portable. They had “port-a-packs” (their term!) that a little squad of soldiers could use to trudge these things around in the field.

Easy and convenient!

The big guy, in the middle, has the nuke. The little guy, second from the right, wonders why they couldn’t just use the jeep.

The instructions in the manual explain that you — the guy in charge — needed to “indoctrinate” your squad with a sense of “urgency” when they used the Davy Crockett, so they would always be running around as fast as possible. It also mandates that, “The search for nuclear targets is constant and vigorous.” Vigorous!

OK, so you’ve got your squad. They are feeling urgent. You march them out. Suddenly, you see a nuclear target! What next? First, unload your “port-a-packs,” and assemble your tripod.

Next, get the gun barrel into the tripod.

Next, you put the propellant in. The projectile has no means of launching itself — it’s more like a grenade than a missile. The way the gun works is that you put a huge tube of conventional propellant behind the projectile, and then a long “launching piston.” The piston is attached to the nuke. When the conventional propellant goes off, it sends the piston flying, which in turn transfers that force to the projectile.

Next, you basically assemble the other parts of the gun, get the nuke ready to go (you can choose to have it go off in ways optimized for a “low” or “high” burst height — I don’t know what functional difference there was, or how a simple switch could change it) and carefully fit the nuclear projectile onto the front. (Please don’t drop the nuke. And I think it may be redundant at this point to note that you are instructed not to smoke around the nuke. If you need assistance, please call your IKEA service representative.)

Before you put the nuke on though, you’ve got to set the “timer dial.” This is actually located on the bottom of the nuke itself. This was a tricky thing, of course — you could only set it to a maximum of 50 seconds, and you wanted it to go off above the target in question, at the right height. The warhead was fairly “dumb” — it wouldn’t detect when the right time to go off was, you had to figure that out yourself to a pretty high degree of precision.

The Davy Crockett egg timer. As with all nukes, “safe” is a relative term…

What if you messed up, and the nuke just slugged into the target? It wouldn’t, according the manual, detonate on contact. It would just break — a “functional failure” or “DUD.”

What then? Well, it explains, in such a contingency, the procedure is to wait 30 minutes, then verrrryyyy carreefully (my interpretation) go over to the maybe-dud nuclear warhead you just shot, recover it, and then pass it off to people who knew how to service nuclear weapons. (The nuke is not, it explains, serviceable in the field.) Not sure how that works when you’ve just aimed it at a Soviet tank column, but I’m just following procedure, here.

Back to firing the gun — a step not shown here is the work that goes into aiming it. Not very interesting photos, so let’s skip them. The gun itself shoots out a bunch of propellant from the back when it fires, so you have to unwind a very crude looking little firing line with a button on it.

And then you’re pretty much ready to go! Here’s the assembled Davy Crockett system (this is the large one, not the small one, but they look pretty similar).

The large one is somewhat more amusing than the small one, because loading it is quite inelegant looking by comparison:

There’s just no graceful way to load an atomic bazooka. Now you know.

Lastly, it’s time to address the obvious. Pretty much every photograph of the assembled Davy Crockett looks impressively phallic. But in my mind, the one below wins the award as “most disturbingly phallic.” This one comes from Chuck Hansen’s Swords of Armageddon. It’s kind of hard to imagine it wasn’t purposefully staged.

The less said about that, though, the better.

The Davy Crockett system was actively deployed from 1961 through 1971. The redoubtable Atomic Audit reports that they were found to be highly inaccurate and were not effectively integrated into actual war plans. Nonetheless, according to the same source, some 2,100 warheads for the Davy Crockett system were produced, at a cost of about half a billion (1998) taxpayer dollars.

The same warhead was also used for an “Atomic Demolition Munition” which was deployed until 1989 (!), but more on those another time — they’ve got their own story.

Just a note: the NPR’s very-cool Robert Krulwich has two pretty great posts recently. The first, which would be great even if it didn’t involve yours truly, is on “Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb.” Check it out, if you haven’t already. The second sounds like a Bio-ethics 101 hypothetical but was a real question for a small number of people : “If You Are Hit By Two Atomic Bombs, Should You Have Kids?“

Notes
  1. The  nickname of the AIR-2 Genie  — “Ding-Dong” — would of course have taken the cake, if it were official. [↩]
  2. Roland B. Anderson and Leonard C.  Weston, ”Project Management of the Davy Crockett Weapons System, 1958-1962,” (Army Weapon Command, Rock Island Arsenal, 26 October 1964), available from the Defense Technical Information Center. On the name, see the “discursive footnote” on page 12 of the report (page 24 of the PDF).

    This report, incidentally, starts off in a highly amusing way:

    Several centuries ago, Edmund Spencer recorded that he was impressed by “…the ever whirling wheel of change.” We can but speculate what his reaction would be today, for we have seen the pace of acceleration increase a thousand times more than it has during the entire previous span of human history. This is especially true in the continuing military technology affecting weapons, equipment, strategy, tactics, and even the fundamental concepts concerning the role of military power.

    Today, we must telescope tremendous technological concepts, whose more simple tactical and strategical counterparts of a few years ago could be worked out at a relatively leisurely pace. The story of the Davy Crockett project is the recounting of such a telescoped project.

    Wow! What an intro — from Spencer to the atomic bazooka, in two paragraphs.

    The report also has a thesis that would not pass muster in any of the classes that I taught: “It is extremely difficult to draw any conclusions about the management of the Davy Crockett weapons systems’ development, except to say, it was successful.” [↩]

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Meditations

More on Centrifuge History

Monday, June 25th, 2012

I wrote about centrifuges a few weeks ago, and have learned some new, interesting things since then. John Krige, a professor at the History, Technology, and Society program at Georgia Tech, has two quite provocative articles  published about interactions between the US and the UK regarding centrifuges in the mid-to-late 1960s. They are worth your attention.

European centrifuges (URENCO)

Krige’s first article is “Hybrid knowledge: the transnational co-production of the gas centrifuge for uranium enrichment in the 1960s,” just published online (and forthcoming in print, I believe) in the British Journal for the History of Science (BJHS).1 As the title may tip you off, this is an article for a primarily history of science/science studies crowd, and speaks in that idiom. Don’t let the jargon scare you off, though: as far as the genre goes, it’s readable and the underlying point is an important one. It concerns the interchanges of centrifuge information between the US and the UK in the early 1960s, which were done under the 1955 US/UK Agreement for Co-operation on the Civil Uses of Atomic Energy, and their consequences when the UK, Netherlands, and Germany decided to go into a cooperative, profitable effort to produce a commercial centrifuge enrichment plant in 1967. (What eventually became URENCO, I believe.)

The US thought this was a somewhat dodgy enterprise — they really didn’t think centrifuges would be as profitable as gaseous diffusion, their chosen enrichment method, but the UK disagreed — but were happy to support it, so long as the UK didn’t give away any “restricted data” that had been produced by the US. And there’s the rub: the UK and US had been exchanging information for a long time, and the UK really thought that it had produced a completely indigenous design (taking off from Gernot Zippe’s unclassified contributions) without any significant US “data” in it. The US disagreed and threatened to cut off all future US-UK exchanges if the latter didn’t let them verify to their satisfaction that there wasn’t any US data in the design. The UK, for its part, thought that it had a really superior centrifuge design compared to the US, and were worried that if the US claimed parts of it were “theirs,” it would completely muddy up their attempts to get clear of the US monopoly on the enrichment of uranium.

In the end, the US decided the UK design was kosher enough, and all was well with them. But it’s a fascinating (and to me, totally unknown) episode in the US-UK “special (nuclear) relationship,” one which really highlights some fundamentally interesting aspects of both US and UK atomic policy, and the fundamentally transnational (as Krige puts it) nature of modern centrifuge development (an Austrian working in the USSR develops technology that he then further works on in the US and the UK which is then turned into a company with the UK, Germany, and Netherlands, etc.). It also gets into some good history of science questions about how one identifies the source of any given piece of design or machinery — and how difficult that can be.

US centrifuges (Piketon)

The second paper by John is “The Proliferation Risks of Gas Centrifuge Enrichment at the Dawn of the NPT: Shedding Light on the Negotiating History,” just published online (and imminently forthcoming in print) in The Nonproliferation Review.2 This essay was a winner of an annual prize by the journal (one of two) and John gave a presentation on it last Thursday at GWU (which you can watch online — John is the first of the two speakers/winners, after the introduction by Stephen Schwartz).

In this paper, John tackles the question of the apparent ambiguity in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) about whether centrifuge-style enrichment activities (like that currently pursued by Iran) were considered a protected form of “peaceful use” to be allowed and encouraged. It has been speculated that at the time of the treaty’s writing, the risks posed by centrifuge enrichment — which is a lot smaller scale than gaseous diffusion plants, and thus easier to hide or protect — weren’t considered by the NPT drafters, and thus represent an unanticipated “loophole” in the treaty terms.

What John has found is that while centrifuges were not discussed in the official record, they were discussed extensively on the backchannel by the US and the UK. In particular, the UK was extremely worried about the proliferation potential for the gas centrifuge. They, after all, were pursuing the technology themselves, and knew it could be a potent game-changer in breaking the gaseous diffusion monopoly. They wondered if it would not be the angle pursued by a future proliferating state, and conveyed as much to the US.

The US was itself comparatively unworried. It thought that it (and its European allies) could control the spread of centrifuge technology through classification and export controls, and still were dubious that the centrifuge would play a bit role in world affairs anytime soon. I pushed John on this at the talk (you can hear me asking a rambling question about this at the 1:41:24 mark in the video linked above), and he elaborated in a way that I thought was more compelling: the US was weary about getting the treaty signed (they had finally gotten the Soviets on board, and the NPT treaty process was over a decade old at that point), and were worried that any attempt to modify the treaty at that point would bog it down for years to come. Furthermore, the UK was engaging in said partnership with the Dutch and the West Germans, and the US really wanted to make sure the Germans were still on board with the NPT.

(The West Germans were really not too pleased with the NPT and it was a huge hassle to get them to ratify it; like many nations, they appropriately saw it as an infringement on their national sovereignty and their future security options. Of course today the Germans are big supporters of the NPT — it’s interesting how these things switch around, depending on where you are sitting at the time.)

The UK didn’t push the matter, because it didn’t want to rankle the treaty process, either, and because it too wanted to profit off of the centrifuge. So both the US and UK let the matter slide. (I think John’s work highlights something that I’ve been thinking for a short while now: there’s a lot of potential for a “deep” history of the NPT, one that goes beyond the open record.)

Iranian centrifuges (Natanz)

Whether this affects one’s interpretations of the NPT today — John thinks that there is basically no real legal argument against Iran being able to develop centrifuges, and certainly no argument that the early NPT drafters had left an unanticipated “loophole” in place that anyone is taking advantage of — seems to me, someone not at all versed in international law, to be unclear. (Do off-the-record conversations between two parties count towards later interpretations of a treaty’s intent?) But either way, it’s a fascinating story. The apparent US lack of concern about specifically centrifuge proliferation has come back to haunt it, these decades later.

Notes
  1. John Krige, ”Hybrid knowledge: the transnational co-production of the gas centrifuge for uranium enrichment in the 1960s,” BJHS (online May 2012). [↩]
  2. John Krige, “The Proliferation Risks of Gas Centrifuge Enrichment at the Dawn of the NPT: Shedding Light on the Negotiating History,” The Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 2 (July 2012), 219-227. [↩]

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The Centrifuge Conundrum (1964/1968)

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

On Monday I wrote a bit about the history of the Zippe-type gas centrifuge. What’s fascinating about the Zippe centrifuges, for me, is that they were pushed internationally for the purpose of commercialization, and because of their origin outside of the United States (and their post-Atoms for Peace publicity), they were not put under as heavy restrictions as other uranium enrichment technologies — despite the fact that they are really the ideal enrichment method for a potential new proliferator. This created a major problem for the United States. Centrifuge technology was both hard for the US to meaningfully control (since it didn’t originate in secret American labs), and US companies were eager to “stay competitive” with Europe in the vast new frontier of enrichment possibilities they opened up (which seemed like big money in the 1960s, when the future of nuclear power was still rosy). For this week’s document(s), I want to share two different (short) positions on what we might call the “centrifuge problem” of the 1960s.

Glenn Seaborg (left) and Robert McNamara (right) flank President Kennedy as he visits the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1962

The first is a 1964 memo from Robert S. McNamara, then the Secretary of Defense, to Glenn T. Seaborg, then the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. It comes at a time — about six months prior to the first Chinese nuclear test — where the United States started to get really serious about proliferation, or as it was often called then, the “Nth country problem.”1

Click image for the PDF

McNamara’s memo aimed to confront the problem of centrifuge proliferation head-on. Proliferation was a problem in McNamara’s eyes because, “...the acquisition of fissionable material for even one or two weapons by a non-nuclear country could have a destabilizing impact on international relations which would be harmful to US security.” (This is, of course, exactly why helping other countries proliferate might seem like a good idea to some countries, as Matthew Kroenig has argued in his fairly recent book, Exporting the Bomb.)

But McNamara knew he couldn’t end proliferation through simple technical means: “I recognize that the controls which can be placed on technology can only retard, not prevent, its growth and diffusion. Even so the goal of retardation is a worthwhile one.” This is actually a very old argument related to the benefits of secrecy: it doesn’t stop diffusion of information, but it does slow it down. And slowing it down can be strategically valuable.

Supporting this “retardation” goal (a somewhat unfortunate choice of words), McNamara wanted to slow down the diffusion of centrifuge information. His methods:

  1. “…dampen the incentive of countries capable of developing their own gas centrifuge technology.” That is, guarantee nuclear fuel to countries so they are dependent on the US for enrichment and don’t feel they need to develop their own enrichment capabilities. He also thinks that the US should support safeguards on natural uranium — which is interesting since as far as I know, unenriched, natural uranium is not safeguarded today.
  2. “…inhibit assistance to less developed countries.” Specifically he means keeping classification and export controls up in the US program, since that will make nuclear newbies have a harder time.
  3. “…support US gas centrifuge technology at a high level so that the US can stay abreast, or ahead, of developments in other countries.” This is a very good task to send to the Chairman of the AEC: full steam ahead with centrifuge development! But keep it secret. McNamara is no doubt aware that half of the problem here is that the US hadn’t kept abreast, or ahead, of centrifuge developments in other countries (see my previous post on this).

Lastly, Seaborg had asked McNamara if there were any US security objectives that non-proliferation policy might interfere with. (An interesting question.) McNamara says no — the only issue hinted at is the basing of nuclear weapons in NATO countries (“nuclear sharing”), but McNamara seems pretty confident that he doesn’t consider that to be proliferation since it is not a creation of an “independent” nuclear state. (This was a major sticking point for the NPT negotiations in the late 1960s; the USSR was desperately afraid of giving the West German “revanchists” control of nuclear weapons and tried to use the NPT as a way of opposing nuclear sharing policies.)

Now let’s go to the other document, an extract from Seaborg’s office diary from 1968. Seaborg’s office diary entries are generally speaking quite short and not usually very revealing, but this one is interesting. It concerns his day on Monday, November 11, 1968. Here’s the first relevant section:2

At 10 a.m. I presided over [Atomic Energy] Commission Meeting 2352 (action summary attached) [not attached]. At the Commission Meeting we discussed the possibility of modifying our policy of secrecy on our gaseous diffusion and gas centrifuge methods for enriching U-235. The Europeans and Japanese are developing these methods and our policy seems to be outmoded if we want to influence them and stay abreast of them. Despite objections from [Commissioner James T.] Ramey, who prefers the status quo, we asked the staff to make a study, with the aim of coming up with various plans to make it possible to cooperate with the Europeans and Japanese in this area.

So this is an interesting counter to the McNamara concern. The Europeans and Japanese were pushing ahead in both centrifuge and diffusion technology, and there was a question as to whether the AEC should loosen their restrictions in order to “influence them and stay abreast of them.” At least one AEC Commissioner wanted to take a conservative approach, but Seaborg and the others were interested enough in the possibility to order up a staff study, which was often the first step towards a policy change.

There is one more relevant part of that day’s diary entry; that evening, Seaborg went to see the German delegation to a nuclear industry conference. Here’s what he wrote:

Dr. Michael Higatsberger (of Austria) told me the AEC briefings at Oak Ridge last Thursday and Friday on our nuclear fuel policy were very successful and may have convinced many Europeans that they shouldn’t build an enriching facility soon. Charles Robbins (AIF) told me about industry feeling that AEC suppression of industrial work on gas centrifuge is counter to American method of doing business.

Another interesting paring — an Austrian saying that the US had probably convinced the Europeans not to create in their own collective enrichment facility, and an American nuclear industry representative (the AIF was the Atomic Industrial Forum, a nuclear lobby group) saying that AEC control over centrifuge work is “counter to [the] American method of doing business.” (The UK, Netherlands, and Germany did create URENCO in 1971, so not all of them were apparently convinced. URENCO uses gas centrifuges for its enrichment, and is where A.Q. Khan got access to the centrifuge technology that he later took back to Pakistan and exported to quite a few other places.)

What I like about these two documents is they paint a picture of the various political, technical, and economic forces pulling in different directions on the centrifuge problem. Gas centrifuges, like all enrichment technology, have been duel-use since birth, but the fact that they developed outside of US auspices made them especially difficult to control. This difficulty then presented the problem of whether one ought to try and control them, and if so, how. Heavy controls might slow things down, but it also could easily encourage others to press ahead with independent development. Loosening restrictions might increase diffusion, but could also increase dependence on US assistance.

Notes
  1. Citation: Robert S. McNamara to Glenn T. Seaborg (23 May 1964), copy in Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0903211. [↩]
  2. Glenn T. Seaborg, Office Diary entry (11 November 1968), copy in Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0910540. [↩]

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