The cracks start to become visible

When Pervez Musharraf put nuclear pirate A Q Khan under house arrest, Khan asked an associate, “Why is this boy doing this to me?”. Now it looks like that “boy” had indeed been naughty too. Khan has made allegations that Musharraf was fully aware about nuclear exports to N. Korea. Khan is contending what has been openly suspected since the beginning; no one could have pulled off operations of such magnitude for such a long time without at least the top brass’s knowledge, if not explicit permission. It could be fun to watch now how Musharraf plays the game of plausible deniability.

To me it clearly seems like Khan is playing his political cards well; with Musharraf likely to be weaned away from his power teat and possibly a new government in Islamabad, Khan now feels confident about exposing him without facing censure or threats to his life. There’s perhaps an entire truckload of worms buried somewhere.

The cracks were pretty obvious from the beginning. Now the plaster covering them seems to be getting scraped off.

McCain on the right path

I have always liked John McCain, even before he was running for President. Maybe it was just the feeling that he is among the few old-school Barry Goldwater Republicans still around. Unfortunately I still wouldn’t vote for him if I could, mainly because I think it’s high time that this country stepped out from the shadows of the current neoconservative republicanism, which McCain can do little to swiftly quell. The problem is that even if McCain is fairly moderate, he may be forced to pander to a very conservative voter base and thus end up enforcing right-wing policies. As just one example, I have no doubt that he will appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v Wade in a heartbeat, or at least hand over decisions over abortion to states, which will still be pretty much the same thing. Any such policy threatens to divide an already-bitter populace.

However, my respect cannot help but increase for the man when it comes to energy policy. McCain has often spoken of reducing energy dependence, and now he seems to seriously plan on doing something about it. I was extremely gratified when he spoke of constructing 45 new nuclear reactors till 2030 to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and reduce foreign oil dependence. He said,

“Across Europe there are 197 reactors in operation, and nations including France and Belgium derive more than half their electricity from nuclear power. And if all of these nations can find a way to carry out great goals in energy policy, then I assure you that the United States is more than equal to the challenge”

At last, a Republican who praises France for a change. It should be noted that no new nuclear reactor has been constructed in the country since the 1970s, and the greatest cost in commissioning new reactors still resides in their extremely long licensing times. Nuclear power, by the way, is not heavily subsidized, no matter what the environmentalists say.

Almost no Democrat I know, including Al Gore and unfortunately also Obama, has volubly spoken in favor of nuclear power or has demonstrated strong leanings towards alternative energy (except renewables, and we all know the problems with those). Now McCain has also announced a 300 million $ prize for a battery of the future that would be environment-friendly and highly efficient. He said

“In the quest for alternatives to oil, our government has thrown around enough money subsidizing special interests and excusing failure. From now on, we will encourage heroic efforts in engineering, and we will reward the greatest success,” McCain said in a speech at Fresno State University.”

It is heartening to know that McCain is thinking in the right direction. On the other hand, his policies and rhetoric about Iran are highly misguided. He should understand that if enough attention is paid to energy and nuclear power, Iranian oil would not be a necessity. Leave Iran alone. Focus on energy policy at home. It’s good to see that he is at least partly doing that. Meanwhile I am still waiting for Obama to endorse nuclear power.

The Atomic Pirate- A Cautionary Tale For Our Times

The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor
By William Langewiesche
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Interest in the Pakistani nuclear marketeer A Q Khan has reemerged recently with news of his rather inane denial of his activities and about the relaxing of restrictions on his movements. Yesterday there was an alarming piece of news suggesting that Khan might have sold blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon to an international smuggling ring. Incidentally I just finished William Langewiesche’s rather disturbing book The Atomic Bazaar, the majority of which is devoted to Khan’s life, times and deeds.

The book is disturbing because its premise is simple; that nations who choose to get nuclear weapons will get them under any circumstances. This is not only because nuclear weapons provide unparalleled leverage in foreign policy and the greatest bang for your buck, but also because it’s not at all easy for other nations to stop nuclear proliferation. This is because of a complex web of reasons that encompass political problems, economic necessities and personal grudges and perceptions. Note that we are not talking here about whether countries have incentives to acquire nukes in the first place. They may or may not and some have and others haven’t, as has been documented lucidly in Joseph Cirincione’s Bomb Scare. What Langewiesche is saying is that assuming that a country does have such incentives, it’s very difficult to stop it from building such weapons. While the fact that this is technologically not too difficult has been demonstrated before, Langewiesche also sheds valuable insight on other reasons why this may be easy.

Langewische describes Khan and concomitantly Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programs as a typical case of such proliferation. Many facts conspired to make both Khan’s and Pakistan’s success possible. What is galling in case of Pakistan is that countries such as the US turned a blind eye to the weapons program because of other geopolitical interests that were deemed more important, as sometimes they unfortunately well may be.

Langewiesche traces Khan’s development as a nuclear proliferator from his early days working for the European nuclear consortium URENCO in Holland. Khan started out as a metallurgical engineer having no connection to nuclear issues. His speciality was machine parts of the kind that are used in centrifuges. He largely joined URENCO because that was the best job he could find at the time, and also because he had married a Dutch woman. It was an unfortunate coincidence of fate that he ended up working for a company that manufactured centrifuges for uranium enrichment. By all accounts Khan was not a brilliant or exceptional scientist, but a sincere and hard-working individual. He was affable and liked by his co-workers.

Khan’s interest in nuclear energy developed simultaneously and ominously with political developments in Southeast Asia. Ever since India had launched its nuclear energy program, Pakistan had wanted to build a nuclear weapon. India and Pakistan had gone to war in 1965 and India had won that conflict. Right after this event prominent Pakistani politicians started making noises about wanting nukes. Foremost among these was Zia-ul-Haq, later Pakistan’s prime minister. Famously and rather inanely, he said that the Pakistanis would develop nuclear weapons even if they had to eat grass. India’s 1971 war with Pakistan in which Pakistan suffered a crushing defeat further and greatly reinforced Pakistan’s convictions about acquiring them.

It is to be noted here that this set of decisions puts to rest a commonly held myth about the driving force for Pakistan’s nuclear program. It emphatically was not developed only in response to India’s program, although the Indian program certainly expedited its urgent manifestation. Pakistan almost certainly would have developed nuclear weapons even if India had no nukes right up to the present. This was because it was quite clear to Pakistan that it could never win against India’s vastly larger conventional forces, a point driven home after Pakistan’s defeat in 1971. This is emblematic of one of the fundamental reasons why nuclear weapons are so alluring; they can substitute many times for the lack of advantage in conventional forces that a country has and quite cheaply at that, and since most developing and underdeveloped countries lack large conventional forces, this reason alone could be instrumental in their nuclear weapons development, as was the case with Pakistan.

India’s nuclear weapons test in 1974 sealed Pakistan’s decision to proceed with the program. Long before prime minster General Zia had heard of A Q Khan, he had convened a meeting of Pakistani scientists to embark on a nuclear program. The preliminary thrust was in the development of a plutonium-based weapon and reactors were constructed with American and Chinese help whose secret purpose was to transform Pakistan’s generous reserves of uranium into plutonium.

In Holland, Khan was quietly observing these developments and seething with rage at Pakistan’s humiliating 1971 defeat. What I find upsetting was his religious fundamentalist resentment for the “Hindu bomb” and an overweaning ambition to answer with an “Islamic bomb”. In fact Pakistan, as the first Islamic nuclear actor, has been a role model for countries like Iran, a perception that’s hard to erode from the minds of many fundamentalist Muslim citizens around the world.

Since Khan was in the centrifuge business, he quickly saw that he could contribute to the Pakistani program. Boldly he scheduled a meeting with General Zia himself who he quickly convinced. The General decided to play it safe for the moment and instituted a parallel uranium enrichment program essentially in competition with the plutonium program which was under the auspices of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.

What happened next is disconcerting and points to the kinks in systems for keeping nuclear proliferation at bay. For one thing, security at URENCO was rather lax, with employees free to appropriate spare centrifuge parts. Khan casually took blueprints and parts home and noted information about them in Urdu, aided by his wife. Even when an alert co-worker who was a friend became suspicious, Khan quite brazenly continued his activities. It was only when the co-worker talked to the Dutch authorities that URENCO began to investigate Khan. Even then they could come up with no substantial evidence against him. And by 1975 Khan left for Pakistan for good, armed with enough information to jump-start a uranium enrichment unit in his home country.

The next disturbing part of the story is how Khan slowly built up his nuclear empire in the next few years. One problem with stopping nuclear proliferation is that, apart from nuclear material itself, most other equipment used for building either nuclear reactors or weapons is dual-purpose. Most of the parts needed for building centrifuges can be bought from companies making machine tools or parts. You can put a ball bearing in a juice blender or you can install it in a uranium enrichment centrifuge; it’s a fundamental aspect of technology. Khan banked on this fuzzy nature of the nuclear market and placed orders for parts from European companies that had no explicit nuclear connections. Over the years, he formed a network of trusted suppliers that could ship him large and readymade orders of equipment. He himself set up companies in Dubai and Malaysia that were false fronts for backdoor equipment transfer. Most of the companies he dealt with could be vaguely suspected of taking part in nuclear proliferation but their dual-use capacity made them part of a gray market, hard to explicitly label as black, and hard to garner strong evidence against. Many businessmen and officials in Europe were complicit in these transactions; their true numbers and identity may never be known. Khan deftly exploited this fundamental gap in manufacturing and legislation and finally set up a vast network of uranium centrifuges. Pakistan started churning out its first batches of weapons-grade U-235 in the early 80s.

Perhaps the most galling part of the whole story is how the United States did not and in fact could not stop Khan and Pakistan even when they knew about their activities. Through the 1970s there were some American agents and journalists who knew about Khan’s shenanigans. They managed to convince the US government to keep a tighter watch on US companies who might correspond with Khan. Strict laws did stop US companies from doing this. But in Europe it was much more difficult. For one thing European laws and policies were not as strict as those in the US. But more importantly, and I find this point crucial, European governments were cynical of US efforts to curb proliferation when the US itself possessed upward of 20,000 nuclear weapons. It was again about credibility, the same factor that’s keeping countries such as Iran today from taking the US seriously about stopping nuclear proliferation. Khan himself despised the five nuclear powers from preaching non-proliferation when they themselves were continuing to build vast arsenals.

In the 1980s, Khan started essentially running his nuclear material pipeline in a reverse direction, looking around for customers who wanted the same kind of technology. There were eminently many who jumped at the opportunity to buy a readymade nuclear plant or even better, a small nuclear bomb shipped directly to their doorstep. As we know now, North Korea, Iran and Libya were all eager customers of Khan. In turn they paid Pakistan not only in cash, but in complementary technology, like the North Korean missile technology that’s now installed in Pakistan’s missiles. Khan personally gained an enormous amount too; he now was one of the most respected men in the country, he spent lavish sums on palatial mansions, fleets of the latest cars, and on charity. He took pleasure, as many politicians in corrupt countries do, in building luxurious houses in places where construction was formally banned by law. He dined with the prime minister and held parties for Pakistan’s most affluent at his houses.

A lot of this was known to the US, but by this time, they needed Pakistan’s help in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Reagan, Bush and Clinton all turned a blind eye towards Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal because they wanted Pakistan as an ally in fighting their enemies, a mantle they inherited from their predecessors, a favored policy pursued for almost 50 years in the interests of geopolitical strategy. Some agents were asked to keep quiet, others were transferred to other cases. The consequences are there now for everybody to see- a monster that was nurtured in the form of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and a black market of nuclear proliferation that has been unprecedented in its scope. Today the US essentially continues its financial and political policy towards Pakistan while the country continues to provide a safe haven for fundamentalists and terrorist training camps.

The trends continue and the whole story seems to have a strange and ominous air of inevitability to it. Iran seems to signify the same convictions in acquiring nukes as Pakistan did, and it seems difficult to make the Iranians change their course. After all, the nuclear strategy worked well with North Korea and the Bush saber-rattling has been much more moderate towards that country. Iran has a good lesson to learn there.

We can sum up four principal reasons quoted by Langwiesche that lead to the rise of the “nuclear poor”:
1. The age-old incentive especially for poor countries to acquire relatively cheap nuclear weapons that will provide the biggest bang for their buck and quickly make up for the lack of an advantage in conventional forces.
2. The gray nature of the nuclear market and the dissonance among international trade laws that allows proliferators to cleverly skirt regulation and acquire much needed nuclear material.
3. The personal relations and rivalries that prevent countries from cooperating and fighting the proliferation genie together; the European inertia about not heeding the US’s urgent warnings to heel in their corporations is a good example.
4. As a related and very important point, the geopolitical interests that sometimes inevitably bind a nation’s hands and make it difficult or impossible for it to enforce strict policies to stop proliferation. In this case, the US deemed its relationship with and support for Pakistan so important that it turned a blind eye to Khan’s activities.

So what is the solution to stop the nuclear poor from flourishing? For one thing, as I noted earlier, the nuclear poor will get their hands on a nuclear weapon only if they want to. What we need to to is to convince them that they would genuinely be much better off without nuclear weapons. For that, and this point really cannot be reiterated enough, the nuclear powers of the world and especially the US must have credibility. As of now, the US has the least amount of credibility among all the powers. In the current scenario it’s inevitably going to be extremely difficult to convince Iran or any other country to disarm. If he does get elected, the new President Obama will hopefully bring about drastic reductions in the current arsenal, while I don’t see the new President McCain doing so.
It is a very simple element of foreign policy that a country’s safety can only lie in the safety of its enemies, a principle that the US has largely neglected in the last eight years. Whether it’s Iran or North Korea, it is a simple fact of human nature that they are are not going to feel secure if they continue to see the US saber-rattling and engaged in messianic rhetoric.

Secondly, there can sometimes be very simple incentives for countries to give up the idea of nuclear weapons. The country that led to the fall of Khan, Libya, is a shining example. Khan was almost about to deliver a readymade weapon to Libya’s doorstep when Quadaffi realized that here was his chance to gain significant political leverage as well as financial benefits from announcing the existence of this secret atomic bazaar and to give up his nuclear ambitions. If a country truly realizes that its security and self-interest lies in not possessing nukes, it could give up its nuclear ambitions in a heartbeat.

All hope should not be lost. If nations decide to build nuclear weapons, then it’s disturbingly possible for them to do so. But much can be gained if we can work together to convince everyone that the best kind of nuclear weapon is not just one which is never used, but one that’s never had.

Kaku on nuclear

Michio Kaku is a well-known physicist who is a primary researcher in string theory and the author of some delightfully engaging books detailing the spectacular predictions of modern physics. NIE nuclear notes has some thoughts on an interview that he gave to The Times of India. While the interview and his answers suffer from the problem of lack of time to say something comprehensive that’s typical of such short interviews, here I briefly focus on his answer to the nuclear energy question:

Q: Would you say nuclear energy is the future?

Going for nuclear energy is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Fusion (based on hydrogen) is clean. But fission (based on uranium) generates tremendous waste. Nature uses fusion; for example, allowing the stars to recycle themselves cleanly. But nature does not use uranium, which is filthy. Nature only uses fusion, the power of the stars.

While what he says is strictly true, there are two issues here: firstly, as some have documented, the Oklo Reactor was a fascinating example of at least one time when nature “used” fission. But more importantly, just because nature does not use something does not mean it’s necessarily bad to do so. Also, nature does not have to tackle the same kinds of complex problems that we humans have created for ourselves, not to mention that nature has billions of years at its leisurely disposal to solve them in its own way. It’s probably a self-evident truth that most of what we do in our artificial world, such as the production of synthetic materials for example, goes “against” nature. Nature does not synthesize many drugs for cancer or nylon. Yet we need such things, sometimes for satisfying our creature comforts, and sometimes for empowering us to lead healthier and longer lives. That’s how we have always lived. To this extent we have been going against nature ever since the dawn of humanity; while some of our actions have been unequivocally bad for both nature and us, there’s no reason to stop considering them as a whole simply because nature does not indulge in them. Further on,

Like nature, we should go on without uranium power. I can think of four reasons to avoid nuclear energy: 1. Risk of proliferation: the technology of commercial nuclear energy is identical to what is required to make an atomic bomb — there is no wall separating the two; 2. Vulnerability to accidents and meltdowns; 3. Radioactive waste disposal; and 4. To make any dent in global warming, we would have to increase our commitment to nuclear energy by 10 to 50 times, which is totally impractical. So there is no necessity to go nuclear.

I have talked about point 1 a couple of times here. Every technology is a mixed blessing and we always have to strive to minimize its negative influence and maximize the positive influence. On the other hand, safeguards against proliferation can be implemented; by having multiple layers of security, by internationally controlling and keeping account of fissile material, and by switching to more proliferation-resistant fuel cycles such as those involving thorium. Potential solutions to proliferation exist, and it would be a little defeatist to simply give up because of proliferation fears without thinking about them.

Point 2 also has been addressed several times before. Many scenarios involving accidents are exaggerated; Chernobyl is now pretty well-known to be an anomaly. Meltdowns can be prevented by having inherently safe reactors with many backup safeguards. Even simulations of terrorist attacks against nuclear power plants don’t result in doomsday situations. And finally we cannot say this enough; comparing the risks from nuclear power plants to risks from widespread climate change, carbon emissions, oil crises and the resulting international political and social disruption makes the former seem like a small price to pay.

Point 3 is of course the favourite beating stick of anti-nuclear activists. Kaku is not an anti-nuclear activist, but he should understand and say that the problem of waste disposal is technically nuanced (which isotopes? what’s their physical state? how long would they pose a hazard? would all of them be equally hazardous? what are the risks exactly?) and has more importantly been turned into a political minefield. Without the damage that has been done to it by political scare-mongering, it would be a challenging technical problem, many solutions for which have been advocated. Yucca Mountain is a sound repository. Again, compare these waste issue to immediate problems stemming from oil consumption and the related political turmoil.

And finally point 4 and beyond…

No nation is going to multiply reactors 10-50 times because of inherent dangers. The marketplace will eventually decide, especially since the cost of solar hydrogen will continue to go down.

Why is it so unimaginable to contemplate increasing nuclear capacity by 10 to 50 times? Just because uninformed governments don’t contemplate it, does that mean the problem is with nuclear? One thing is resoundingly true of course. The marketplace will eventually decide. But market forces are fundamentally driven by public demand and therefore public opinion. Blaming nuclear for not making a dent in market share because of ill-informed public opinion is unfair. The fault is not with nuclear, it’s with lack of cogent dissemination of knowledge and consequent action. There is no reason why softer public opinion compounded with shorter licensing times for reactors should not make nuclear competitive. All we need is to give nuclear a good chance. It’s not like it’s not been around at all.

And finally, I don’t know what to make of the statement, “the cost of solar hydrogen will continue to go down”. The day we get abundant, cheap and safe hydrogen for transportation from abundant and cheap solar power will be the day that I will retract everything I ever said about nuclear power.

Memorandum for the next President

The Union of Concerned Scientists has released a statement imploring the United States among other things to basically get rid of most of its battle-ready nuclear weapons, halt missile defense, halt all new weapons development programs and sign treaties banning the development of any nuclear weapons. The statement is signed by as distinguished a roster of scientists that you could hope to find; it includes 23 Nobel laureates, 10 recipients of the National Medal of Science and 91 members of the National Academy of Sciences. The list includes scientists from across the political spectrum, lest the usual cynical folks see it as another “liberal conspiracy”.

Currently the United States is probably the biggest destabilizer of international security in the world, especially because of the global image that it maintains. A ridiculous number of nuclear weapons are still on hair-trigger alert. The US through various maneuvers continues to antagonize and alienate Russia. As I have said before on this blog, global missile defense is eating away at the fabric of world peace. Sadly all this has seriously undermined the national security of the US itself, with virulent antagonism against it having emerged both among nations and terrorist-groups. The US today, even when its statements may be well-intended in an objective sense, has almost zero credibility when it asks other countries to disarm. All this is mainly thanks to the Bush administration, although they are carrying on a grand tradition perfected by the Reagan administration. This is one of the biggest holes they have dug their country in. One only hopes they don’t drag the entire world into it.

Some of the statements are worth copying out at length:

“By maintaining thousands of highly accurate nuclear weapons on alert, the United States perpetuates the only threat that could destroy it as a functioning society: a large-scale attack by Russia launched either without authorization, by accident, or by mistake because of a false warning of an incoming U.S. attack.

By giving nuclear weapons so large and visible a role in U.S. policy, and by planning to maintain and even upgrade its nuclear arsenal indefinitely, the United States has increased the incentive for other nations to acquire nuclear weapons, and reduced the political costs to them of doing so. The United States has further bolstered this incentive by threatening to use nuclear weapons against states that do not possess them.

By contributing to a climate in which possessing nuclear weapons is legitimate, the United States has also undermined the ability of the international community to prevent more states from acquiring them. And while the political barriers to acquiring these weapons are crumbling, technical barriers are also falling. The world could soon face a spate of new nuclear weapons states.

The world will stay on this course as long as the United States and the other nuclear powers —Britain, China, France, and Russia—assume that nuclear weapons are essential to their security. To avoid a new and more dangerous nuclear era, these states must drastically reduce the role that nuclear weapons play in their security policies. The United States can, and should, take the lead in promoting an effort to clear the path to a world free of nuclear weapons.

There is no plausible threat over the next decade or beyond that requires the United States to maintain more than a few hundred survivable nuclear weapons. There is also no military reason to link the size of U.S. nuclear forces to those of other countries. Nor does any plausible threat require the United States to retain the ability to launch nuclear weapons in a matter of minutes, or even hours.

Then, as we are all just holding our breath for Bush to leave, there are sound and straightforward prescriptions (italics mine) for the next President, as well as a reference to the ambitious disarmament plan uncovered by the group headed by Reagan defense secretary George Schultz. The plan is lent credence by the fact that all these gentlemen are seasoned leaders and statesmen, and most importantly they are no doves who would espouse a knee-jerk pacifist stance.

Four of the most seasoned architects of U.S. national security policy—George Shultz, Secretary of State under President Reagan; William Perry, Secretary of Defense under President Clinton; Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford; and Sam Nunn, former Senator from Georgia—have forcefully articulated the need for a new approach. They argue that the United States should embrace the goal of a “world free of nuclear weapons” as a vital contribution to preventing more nations, and eventually terrorists, from acquiring nuclear weapons.[1]

In short, it is time for a change.

The next president should bring U.S. nuclear weapons policy into line with today’s political and strategic realities by taking 10 critical, unilateral steps. These steps are practical and pragmatic: they would increase U.S. security by decreasing the risks of a Russian nuclear attack, nuclear proliferation, and nuclear terrorism. These steps would also lay the groundwork for a world without nuclear weapons, and enable the United States to lead other nations in that direction:

1. Declare that the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter and, if necessary, respond to the use of nuclear weapons by another country.

2. Reject rapid-launch options by changing its deployment practices to allow the launch of nuclear forces in days rather than minutes.

3. Eliminate preset targeting plans, and replace them with the capability to promptly develop a response tailored to the situation if nuclear weapons are used against the United States, its armed forces, or its allies.

4. Promptly and unilaterally reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to no more than 1,000 warheads, including deployed and reserve warheads. The United States would declare all warheads above this level to be in excess of its military needs, move them into storage, begin dismantling them in a manner transparent to the international community, and begin disposing—under international safeguards—of all plutonium and highly enriched uranium beyond that required to maintain these 1,000 warheads. By making the endpoint of this dismantlement process dependent on Russia’s response, the United States would encourage Russia to reciprocate.

5. Halt all programs for developing and deploying new nuclear weapons, including the proposed Reliable Replacement Warhead.

6. Promptly and unilaterally retire all U.S. nonstrategic nuclear weapons, dismantling them in a transparent manner, and take steps to induce Russia to do the same.

7. Announce a U.S. commitment to reducing its number of nuclear weapons further, on a negotiated and verified bilateral or multilateral basis.

8. Commit to not resume nuclear testing, and work with the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

9. Halt further deployment of the Ground-Based Missile Defense, and drop any plans for space-based missile defense. The deployment of a U.S. missile defense system that Russia or China believed could intercept a significant portion of its survivable long-range missile forces would be an obstacle to deep nuclear cuts. A U.S. missile defense system could also trigger reactions by these nations that would result in a net decrease in U.S. security.

10. Reaffirm the U.S. commitment to pursue nuclear disarmament, and present a specific plan for moving toward that goal, in recognition of the fact that a universal and verifiable prohibition on nuclear weapons would enhance both national and international security.

If the next president takes these steps, the United States will have greatly enhanced national and international security, while also setting the stage for negotiations to reduce the nuclear arsenals of other countries. Together with these nations, the United States can then tackle the challenges entailed in negotiating and implementing verifiable, multilateral reductions to levels well below 1,000 nuclear warheads—thereby laying the groundwork for an eventual worldwide prohibition on nuclear weapons.

Even 1000 warheads are quite a lot. China, Britain and France have had no more than 200-400 warheads each. The US with its bigger size might need say 500-600. But 1000 seems to be a good goal for appeasing people from the entire political spectrum. A larger number can also be based on submarines, as is the case with Britain. It’s also interesting that these scientists have unanimously opposed the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. In my opinion, eliminating missile defense or greatly limiting it would be the top priority for now.

Whoever the next President is has a lot to accomplish. I personally believe that radically changing the face of US nuclear weapons strategy is the single-most important international goal for him or her. Combined with other policies, in this action lies the key to national security. I don’t see John McCain doing it to any reasonable extent. Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama (who apparently has signed on to the Schultz vision) would do well to have a copy of the above statement in one of their drawers. We can only hope.

Straws for Mr. Strauss

I know this is probably well-known but I have seen this mentioned enough number of times to feel that I should be explicit about rebuking it. Let’s be clear about this.

Lewis Strauss was no expert on nuclear energy

This is for all those anti-nuclear people out there who are fond of quoting his rather asinine and knee-jerk statement about nuclear energy becoming “too cheap to meter”.

Strauss was a banker who was interested in physics (Leo Szilard corresponded often with him) but did not really have any sound knowledge of physics or nuclear engineering. As far as I know he never consulted with physicists or engineers with a view to assess the true potential of nuclear power.

More importantly Strauss was well-known for being a shrewd, calculating political hawk who could be counted on to toe the party line even for getting personal favors. He was the man who more than anyone else was responsible for shamelessly bringing down Robert Oppenheimer, a man who he enthusiastically supported earlier when it was convenient for him. Clearly anything that Strauss said was almost always politically colored with a view to advance personal goals.

So anti-nuclear lobby, please, if you want to erect straw men and pummel them to death, stop using Lewis Strauss. He is too easily recognizable as a straw man. You will have to be cleverer than that and look for someone else who could fool us more easily.

Made for each other

In spite of being technically infeasible and politically misguided, why have successive US administrations been so besotted by missile defense, with George Bush’s latest generous act being to essentially strong-arm NATO into agreeing to his demands for installing such defense systems in Eastern Europe, clearly an act that is if anything going to instigate even more antagonism against America?

Lawrence Korb writing in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists nails down the phenomenon- Republicans have been having a love affair with missile defense since their patron saint Ronald Reagan embraced the ideal in the pseudo-delusional confines of his idealistic mind. In fact so did Reagan believe in this coveted ideal that he even went to the length of offering to share this technology with the Soviets. In his belief in missile defense Reagan displayed the classic qualities of delusional religious thinking- thinking that something that isn’t actually there is going to save us all. In spite of there being not a shred of serious scientific evidence that any such system could work in practice nor a demonstrated need for it, Reagan made up his mind that it was necessary and would work splendidly. He, Ronald Reagan, would then be known as the great prophet of peace. Through his fantasizing Reagan bequeathed an ignominious legacy to his Republican successors. Now in his rebirth as George Bush, Reagan has returned with a vengeance. He still haunts the deep recesses of space, looking for sites to install x-ray lasers, perhaps telling jokes to the little angels gently guiding CIA spy satellites.

As Korb notes, at least some Republicans may have trouble supporting some of the sacred pillars of the party for fear of losing votes; abortion and gay marriage for example. But no Republican has to fear slighting his voter base by supporting missile defense

It has become a litmus test of loyalty to the Reagan legacy. President Reagan has assumed the same iconic place for Republicans that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had for so many years for Democrats. For example, John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, often refers to himself as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution, as did his former opponents Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani. This revolution was based on three pillars–pro-life as opposed to pro-choice; government as the cause of society’s problems as opposed to the solution; and a robust national missile defense as opposed to arms control negotiations or disarmament. Some Republicans have difficulty completely supporting the first two pillars: The majority of Americans want to place only a few restrictions on a woman’s right to choose and view government as a solution to many of our economic and social problems. But there is no political downside for a Republican to embrace missile defense.

To me that says as much about people’s apathy about this issue as it does about Republicans’ love for it. As Korb says, most Americans either don’t care about missile defense, consider it necessary by default, or assume that they already have it. All three beliefs are fatalistic. The US has already engendered much ill-will even among potential allies such as Russia by planning to install missile defense systems in Europe and now that he knows that he is going to leave soon, Bush seems to be obsessed with putting everything in place before the end of his regime. He and his associates are finely honing their long-acquired skills of causing the maximum damage in the minimum amount of time. Just like RAND theorists in the 1950s pleasured their intellectual apparatus by imagining global thermonuclear war, so do the current denizens of the Pentagon spend their twilight hours fantasizing about hordes of non-existent North-Korean and Iranian ICBMs. And they spend hundreds of billions of dollars on this treasured dream, more than on any single goal. As I have mentioned before, libertarians should be up in arms against this gratuitous diarrhea of taxpayer dollars.

And all this when even the basic technical feasibility of missile defense is questioned. The bottom line is simple. Almost every ABM system imagined in the US since the 1960s has focused on midcourse interception, that is trying to intercept and destroy a missile as it makes its way down through the atmosphere. Simply put, this is almost impossible to do since countless decoys dressed up in the missile’s visual and thermal signature will be making their way down at the same speed, making it more than a nightmare for any interceptor to distinguish missile from noise. Using such cheap decoys, the offense will quickly overwhelm the defense. This fact has been demonstrated time and time again, ad nauseam for the last 40 years, most notably by Richard Garwin (see Garwin’s presentation on the proposed European “shield”). So not only is the proposed system politically and internationally misguided, but it won’t even work. Many compliments to the brilliant officials at the Pentagon.

But it is wrong to feel frustrated, and prudent to understand. We should know that minor kinks like “feasibility”, “facts” and “international goodwill” have never thwarted the wishes of the current administration. So it’s probably not surprising that they would follow the path to hell inaugurated by their illustrious predecessor. But as far as foreign policy goes, this issue is as good a reason for Democrats to take power as any other. And it’s high time that Americans take as much cognizance of and express as much outrage on this issue as they do on healthcare or the war in Iraq. This issue will have as deep and perhaps more long-lasting significance for the national security of the US as anything else. Meanwhile, defenses against terrorists smuggling dirty bombs across borders remain weak.

Way to go Europe

Europe seems to be intent on “carbonizing” us back to the stone age along with India, China and the US. I used to think the Germans were pretty green, but:

Enel and many other electricity companies say they have little choice but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly in countries like Italy and Germany that have banned the building of nuclear power plants. Fuel costs have risen 151 percent since 1996, and Italians pay the highest electricity costs in Europe.

So they don’t mind accelerating climate change and shooting themselves in the foot for paying higher prices for electricity. Seriously, is anyone thinking rationally anymore? Also, why is the father of climate change James Hansen repeatedly giving us silence on nuclear? At this rate, he is going to become known as the man who knows all the problems but not one solution.

Magic without Magic: John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008)

Image copyright: NNDB

When I heard from a friend about John Wheeler’s death this morning, I grimaced and almost loudly let out an exclamation of pain and sadness. That’s because not only was Wheeler one of the most distinguished physicists of the century but with his demise, the golden era of physics- that which gave us relativity, quantum theory and the atomic age- finally passes into history. The one consolation is that he lived a long and satisfying life, passing away at the ripe age of 96 and working almost till his last day. It was just a few weeks ago that I asked a cousin of mine who did his PhD. at the University of Texas at Austin whether he ever ran into Wheeler there. My cousin who himself is in his fifties said that Wheeler arrived just as he was finishing- after retirement from Princeton university, where he maintained an office right until 2006.

Wheeler was the last survivor of that heroic age that changed the world and he worked with some true prima donnas. He was an unusually imaginative physicist who made excursions into exotic realms; particles traveling backwards in time, black holes, time travel. A list of his collaborators and friends includes the scientific superstars of the century- Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Richard Feynman to name a few. To the interested lay public, he would be best known as Richard Feynman’s PhD. advisor at Princeton.

Wheeler is famous for many things- mentor to brilliant students, originator of outrageous ideas, coiner of the phrase “black hole”, outstanding teacher and writer. My most enduring memory about him is from John Gribbin’s biography of Feynman. Gribbin recounts how Wheeler in his pinstriped suits used to look like a conservative banker, a look that belied one of the most creative scientific minds of his time. The fond incident is about the playful rogue Feynman being summoned into Wheeler’s office for the first time. In order to underscore the importance of his time, Wheeler laid out an expensive pocket watch in front of Feynman. Feynman who had a congenital aversion to perceived or real pomposity took note of this and during their next meeting, laid out a dirt-cheap watch on the table. After a moment of stunned silence, both professor and student burst into loud laughter, laughter that almost always accentuated their discussions on physics and life thereafter. Feynman and Wheeler together derived a novel approach to quantum mechanics that involved particles radiating backwards in time. Wheeler also initiated the discussion of the notorious sprinkler problem described by Feynman in Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman

John Wheeler was born in Florida to strong-willed and working class parents. After obtaining his PhD. from Johns Hopkins at the age of 21, he joined Princeton in 1938 where he remained all his working life. Princeton in 1938 was a mecca of physics, largely because of the Institute for Advanced Study nearby which housed luminaries like Einstein, John von Neumann and Kurt Godel. Wheeler knew Einstein well and later sometimes used to hold seminars with his students in Einstein’s home. As was customary for many during those times, Wheeler also studied with Niels Bohr at his famous institute in Copenhagen. In 1939 Bohr and Wheeler made a lasting contribution to physics- the liquid drop model of nuclear fission. According to this, the nucleus of especially heavy atoms behaves like a liquid drop, with opposing electrostatic repulsive forces and attractive surface tension and strong forces. Shoot an appropriately energetic neutron into an unstable uranium nucleus and it wobbles sufficiently for the repulsive forces to become dominant, causing it to split. The liquid drop model explained fission discovered earlier. The mathematics was surprisingly simple yet remarkably accurate. Bohr was one of Wheeler’s most important mentors; in his biography he describes how he used to have marathon sessions with Bohr, with the great man often insisting on walking around the department, tossing choice tidbits to Wheeler ambling at his side. Caught up in the recent heated debate about the philosophical implications of quantum theory, Wheeler argued the nature of reality with both Einstein and Bohr.

When World War 2 began, Wheeler like many physicists was recruited into the Manhattan Project. Because of his wide-ranging intellect and versatility, he was put in charge as scientific consultant to Du Pont, who was building plutonium producing reactors at Hanford in Washington state. There Wheeler tackled and solved an unexpected and very serious problem. As the reactors were transforming uranium 238 into the precious plutonium, the process suddenly shut down. After some time it started up again. Nobody knew what was happening. Wheeler who was the resident expert worked out the strange phenomenon in an all-night session. What was happening was that some of the fission products produced had a big appetite for neutrons and were therefore “poisoning” the chain reaction. After some time when these products had decayed to sufficiently low levels, they would stop eating up the neutrons and the reactor would start again. This was one of the most valuable pieces of information gained during plutonium production. Ironically, the omission of this information in a second edition of a government history of atomic energy released just after the war alerted the Soviets to its importance. Working on the Manhattan Project was also a poignantly personal experience for Wheeler; the bomb could not save his brother Joe who was killed in action in Italy in 1944. Wheeler later also worked with Edward Teller on the hydrogen bomb, a decision about which he was fairly neutral because he thought it was necessary at the time to stand up to the Soviets.

After the war Wheeler embarked on a lifelong quest in a completely different field and became a pioneer in it- general relativity. He took up where Robert Oppenheimer had left off in 1939. Oppenheimer had made a key contribution to twentieth century physics by first describing what we now know as black holes. Strangely and somewhat characteristically, he lost all interest in the field after the war. But Wheeler took it up and reinitiated a bona fide revolution in the application of general relativity to astrophysics. As his most enduring mark, he coined the word “black hole” in the 1960s. Wheeler became the scientific godfather of a host of other physicists who became pioneers in exploring exotic phenomena- black holes, wormholes, time travel, multiple universes. His most successful student in this regard has been Kip Thorne whose wonderful book expounds on the golden age of relativity. Hugh Everett, the tragic genius who invented multiple universes and the Lagrange multipliers method for optimization problems before plunging into paranoia and depression, left behind choice fodder not just for science but for science fiction; parallel universes have been a staple of our collective imagination ever since then. In retrospect, Wheeler followed his mentor and did for astrophysics what Bohr had done for quantum theory- he served as friend, philosopher and guide for a brilliant new generation of physicists.

Wheeler was also known as an outstanding teacher. His mentoring of Feynman is well-known, and he devoted a lot of time and care to teaching and writing. Along with his students Kip Thorne and Charles Misner, Wheeler produced what is surely the bible of general relativity, Gravitation, a mammoth book running more than a thousand pages whose only discouraging feature may be its length. The book has served as advanced introduction to Einstein and beyond for generations of students. Wheeler also co-authored Spacetime Physics, an introduction to special relativity which even I have timidly managed to savor a little during my college days. His own autobiography, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics is worth reading for its evocation of a unique time of the last century, as well as for fond anecdotes about great physicists.

But many people will remember Wheeler as a magician. Sitting in his office in his pinstriped suits, Wheeler’s mind roamed across the universe straddling everything from the smallest to the largest, exploring far-flung concepts and realms of the unknown. He grappled with the interpretation of quantum mechanics and was an early proponent of the anthropic principle- in John L Casti’s magnificent book Paradigms Lost, Casti quotes Wheeler analogizing observer-created reality with the game in which a group of people asks someone else to guess an object they have in mind by asking questions, except that in the modified version of this game, they let the object be created during the process of questioning. With his mentor Bohr’s enduring principle of complementarity as a guide, Wheeler produced esoteric ideas that nonetheless questioned the bedrock of reality. Wheeler was entirely at home with such bizarre yet profound concepts that still tug at the heartstrings of physicist-philosophers. Only Wheeler could have introduced paradoxical and yet meaningful phrases like “mass without mass”. In celebration of his sixtieth birthday, physicists produced a volume dedicated to him with a title that appropriately captured the essence of his thinking- “magic without magic”.

John Wheeler was indeed a magician. He made great contributions to physics, served as its guide for half a century and motivated and taught new generations to wonder at the universe’s complexities as much as he did. He was the last torch-bearer of a remarkable age when mankind transformed the most esoteric and revolutionary investigations into the universe into forces that changed the world. He will be sorely missed.

Large-scale effects of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan

Back in the days when the Cold War was simmering, one of the rather depressing activities scientists and other officials used to engage in was to conjure up hypothetical scenarios involving nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union and try to gauge its effects. Such theorizing was often done behind closed doors in enclaves like the RAND corporation. In the early 1960s, RAND’s Herman Kahn wrote an influential and morbid book called On Thermonuclear War. Kahn, a portly, overweight, brilliant Strangelovian character was said to be a possible inspiration for the good doctor in Kubrick’s brilliant movie Dr. Strangelove. In fact Kubrick supposedly read Kahn’s 600 page book in detail before working on the movie (A recent biography of Kahn sheds light on this fascinating man)

The book ignited a controversy about nuclear conflict because Kahn’s thesis was that nuclear war fought with thermonuclear weapons was survivable, thus possibly upping the ante for the nuclear powers. Kahn used many rather incomplete arguments to make the not entirely unreasonable point that while such a war would be horrific, it would not mean the end of humanity. The survivors may not necessarily envy the dead. But of course Kahn was speculating based on the then best available scientific data along with his own idiosyncratic biases. One of the biggest effects of a nuclear explosion is to send up debris in the atmosphere, and climate models in the 60s were in a primitive stage to help with predicting any such effects. Also, nuclear effects start wide-ranging fires and, in the rare cases where conditions are right, gruesome firestorms. Fires can account for up to 60% of the damage from a nuclear explosion. While the thermal effects constitute about 35% of the total effects from a typical nuclear air-burst (blast effects constitute about 50%), thermal effects can naturally sort of self-perpetuate through starting fires. According to some analysts, state department officials in the 50s calculating nuclear effects neglected the devastation due to fire, which made their results underestimates. Any realistic simulation of a nuclear explosion has to take into account effects due to fires.

The debate about the effects of a global thermonuclear war was galvanized in the 1980s when Carl Sagan and his colleagues proposed the idea of nuclear winter, in which dimming of sunlight because of the debris from nuclear explosions would lower the average temperature at the surface of the earth. Among other effects, this combined with the resulting darkness would devastate crops, thus bringing about long-term starvation and other catastrophes. Since then, scientists have been arguing back and forth about nuclear winter.

What has changed between 1980 and now though is that climate models including general circulation models have vastly improved and computational power to analyze them has exponentially gone up. Although we still cannot predict long-term climate, we now have a reasonably good handle on quantifying the various forcings and factors that affect climate. Thus for the last few years it has seemed worthwhile to predict the effect of nuclear war on our climate. Now scientists working at the University of Colorado and NOAA have come up with a rather disconcerting study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicating the effects of a regional nuclear war on global climate. A typical scenario is a war with 50 warheads of 15 kilotons each (about the yield of the Hiroshima bomb) between India and Pakistan, a conservative estimate. There have been a few such studies published earlier but this one looks at the effects on the ozone layer, the delicate veneer that protects life from UV radiation.

The researchers’ main argument is that there is a tremendous mass of soot that is kicked up tens of kilometers into the atmosphere during a nuclear explosion. The study seems to be carefully done, taking into account various factors acting to both reinforce and oppose the effects of this soot. The number they cite for the amount is about 5Tg (teragrams, a teragram being 10^12 grams) which is a huge number. They account for local fallout of the soot through rain as being about 20%. What happens to the remaining 4Tg is the main topic of investigation. According to the model, this enormous plume of soot is intensely heated by sunlight. By this time it has entered the upper layer of the troposphere and snakes up into the lower stratosphere where the ozone layer is situated, it is radiating heat that disrupts the delicate balance of chemical reactions that produce and get rid of ozone, reactions that have now been well-studied for decades. These involve the interaction of radical species of oxygen, nitrogen and halogens with ozone that sap the precious molecule away. The bottom line is that this heat from the hot soot vastly increases the rate of reactions that produce these species and eat up the ozone at that altitude, thus depleting the layer. The soot lingers around since removal mechanisms are slow at that height. The heat also encourages the formation of water vapour and its consequent break up and reaction with ozone, thus further contributing to the breakdown. The researchers also include circulation of water vapour and other gases in the global atmosphere, and how this circulation will be affected by the heat and the flow. Nitrogen oxides generated by natural and human processes have already been shown to deplete ozone, and the heated soot will also intensify the rate of these processes.

The frightening thing about the study is the magnitude of the predicted ozone loss due to these accelerated processes; about 20% globally, 40% at mid latitudes and up to 70% at high latitudes. Also, these losses would last for at least five years or so after the war. These are horrifying numbers. The ozone layer has evolved in a synergistic manner over hundreds of millions of years to wrap up life in a protective blanket and keep it safe. What would the loss of 40% of the ozone layer entail? The steep decline would allow low wavelength UV radiation which is currently almost completely blocked out to penetrate the biosphere. This deadly UV radiation would have large-scale devastating effects including rapid increases in cancer and perhaps irreversible changes in ecosystems, especially aquatic ones. The DNA effects documented by the researchers are appalling- up to 213% increases in DNA damage with respect to normal levels, with plant damage up to 132%. In addition, the increased UV light would hasten the normal decomposition of organic material, further contributing to the natural balance of the biosphere. The phenomenon would indeed be a global phenomenon. Decomposition of the soot is thought to be negligible.

Now I am no atmospheric scientist, but even if we assume that some of these estimates end up a little exaggerated, it still seems to me that effects on the ozone layer could be pretty serious. If I had to guess, I would think that there could be uncertainty in estimating how much soot is produced, how much goes up and to what altitude, and how long it stays there. What seems more certain are the effects on the well-studied radical reactions that deplete ozone. Some elementary facts seem to reinforce this in my mind- carbon has a very high sublimation point and can get heated up to high temperatures, the energy radiated by a hot body goes as the fourth power of the temperature, and from college chemistry I do remember the rule of thumb that on an average, the rate of a reaction doubles with a 10 degrees centigrade temperature rise. The estimates of rate increases made by the authors seem reasonable to me.

What is most disconcerting about the study is that it involves a rather “small” nuclear exchange that takes place in a localized part of a continent, and yet whose effects can affect the entire world. “Globalization” acquires a new and portentous meaning in this context. India and Pakistan can both easily field 50 weapons each of 15 kilotons yield, if not now, in the near future. In addition to this global-scale devastation of the ozone layer, it would be unthinkable to imagine the more than 10 million people dying in such a conflict, as well as total devastation of public systems and the food supply. Herman Kahn might have thought that nuclear war is “survivable”. Well, maybe not exactly…

Reference and abstract for those who are interested:
Mills, M.J., Toon, O.B., Turco, R.P., Kinnison, D.E., Garcia, R.R. (2008). Massive global ozone loss predicted following regional nuclear conflict. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(14), 5307-5312. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710058105

“We use a chemistry-climate model and new estimates of smoke produced by fires in contemporary cities to calculate the impact on stratospheric ozone of a regional nuclear war between developing nuclear states involving 100 Hiroshima-size bombs exploded in cities in the northern subtropics. We find column ozone losses in excess of 20% globally, 25–45% at midlatitudes, and 50–70% at northern high latitudes persisting for 5 years, with substantial losses continuing for 5 additional years. Column ozone amounts remain near or <220 Dobson units at all latitudes even after three years, constituting an extratropical “ozone hole.” The resulting increases in UV radiation could impact the biota significantly, including serious consequences for human health. The primary cause for the dramatic and persistent ozone depletion is heating of the stratosphere by smoke, which strongly absorbs solar radiation. The smoke-laden air rises to the upper stratosphere, where removal mechanisms are slow, so that much of the stratosphere is ultimately heated by the localized smoke injections. Higher stratospheric temperatures accelerate catalytic reaction cycles, particularly those of odd-nitrogen, which destroy ozone. In addition, the strong convection created by rising smoke plumes alters the stratospheric circulation, redistributing ozone and the sources of ozone-depleting gases, including N2O and chlorofluorocarbons. The ozone losses predicted here are significantly greater than previous “nuclear winter/UV spring” calculations, which did not adequately represent stratospheric plume rise. Our results point to previously unrecognized mechanisms for stratospheric ozone depletion.