Abstract
The “Cernettes,” a group specializing in physics doo-wop. See “In Brief,” page 9.
Explosive secrets
Costly efforts have been made to stem the possible spread of plutonium and highly enriched uranium–the two materials most often mentioned in fear-of-God stories about the danger that Russia's nukes will get loose, or that Saddam Hussein or some lookalike rogue will beg, borrow, or steal fissile material to construct his own unique and irresponsibly managed nuclear arsenal.
So it is ironic that for more than 50 years the nuclear weapons community has failed to mention to the public that those who care about nonproliferation should also be concerned about the neptunium and americium found in nuclear waste streams, because they, too, can be used to make nuclear weapons.
In November 1998, in response to a request by David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), and others, the U.S. Energy Department declassified the information that weapons could be made from these materials. According to Albright, a frequent contributor to the Bulletin, rumors are that both the United States and France have tested nuclear devices using neptunium 237.
Neptunium and americium–man-made materials produced when nuclear fuel is irradiated–are discussed in detail by Albright and Lauren Barbour, writing in Challenges of Fissile Material Control, a new book published by ISIS (www.isis-online.org).
Albright and Barbour say that neptunium and americium have received little attention because only small quantities have been separated from spent power reactor fuel.
Another reason, of course, is sheer lack of awareness, proving that the nuclear weapons community's long-running policy of silence paid off. Albright said in a telephone interview that he commonly runs into nuclear professionals who simply did not know the significance of these materials.
Although little has been separated, neptunium and americium can be found everywhere in spent nuclear fuel or reprocessing waste. Albright and Bar-bour estimate that at the end of 1997 about 80 metric tons of the stuff had accumulated, enough for 2,000 warheads. Another 10 metric tons are expected to accumulate each year. Separated neptunium is used as a target in producing plutonium 238, and tiny amounts of americium are used in smoke detectors and neutron generators.
“I say baloney. Not on my watch, Mr. President.”
Jesse Helms, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, on the administration's plan to renegotiate the ABM Treaty. Helms, who wants to dump the treaty, spoke on January 23, 1999.
Fifty years is a long time–so maybe the U.S. government was expecting to maintain its silence about neptunium and americium forever. But the government may have agreed to speak out because in the early 1990s a handful of countries–Japan, in particular–began looking at ways to make it easier to dispose of the high-level waste they produce when reprocessing spent fuel. Several countries began researching the possibility that separating out radioactive products like neptunium might be just the ticket. (They thought it would be helpful, for instance, to separate out neptunium 237, which has a two-million-year half-life.)
But if these actinides were removed from the waste, what would happen to the separated neptunium and americium? Because they already have a few, albeit limited, commercial uses, they could possibly be offered for sale on the open market. If they were, might a would-be proliferator try to buy all the neptunium he wanted from a friendly re-processor? (It's very handy stuff; Iraq irradiated a small quantity of the neptunium oxide that it bought from Britain in the 1980s to produce plutonium 238, which it considered using as a possible neutron initiator for nuclear weapons. However, says Albright, key Iraqi nuclear scientists apparently did not realize that neptunium could also be used in place of the basic bomb material. Had they realized that, they could have tried to obtain more neptunium at a time when there were essentially no controls on its transfer.)
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has recognized only “plutonium 239, uranium 233, or uranium enriched in the isotopes of uranium 235 or uranium 233” as materials to be safeguarded. Because of that, a country could theoretically avoid inspections at a reprocessing plant or a waste treatment facility–making it easier to divert or steal the separated neptunium or americium–yet not be in legal violation of its promises to uphold the nonproliferation regime.
The IAEA began debating what to do about monitoring and controlling neptunium and americium late last year, and the agency will take up the discussion again in March.
The IAEA's Board of Governors is reluctant to define neptunium and americium as “special fissionable materials” subject to the agency's full safeguards, but the agency is proposing to establish a monitoring system that would require its non-weapon members to declare their current inventories, report all exports, and allow monitoring at any facility where substantial quantities of neptunium or americium have been or could be produced.
It's reassuring to know that the U.S. government and the IAEA both appear to be taking action before anyone begins to routinely separate long-lived actinides from nuclear waste. Nevertheless, this sort of episode makes one wonder what other little secrets the nuclear weapon community might be saving for the next millennium.
–Linda Rothstein
40 years ago in the Bulletin
In 1959, nuclear scientists from Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia laboratories were saddled with an internationally agreed nuclear testing moratorium. With time on their hands, they huddled with colleagues from Rand, Aerojet-General Nucleonics, and Princeton University, to plot strategies for selling the idea that nuclear explosions should be permitted again–for peaceful purposes. In the March 1959 issue of the Bulletin, Frederick Reines, a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos, commented on the unclassified version of the group's symposium report.
According to Reines, it was clear that thermonuclear explosives would provide more bang for the buck than fission explosives–“subject of course to restrictions imposed by the large amounts of associated radioactivity” they would create. While the problem of contamination might be overcome when using explosives to create underground chambers, problems would still remain. “Long-range” planning would be required, because “a crater made by a 40-kiloton bomb would be too ‘hot’ to work in” for three-and-a-half to 30 years, depending on how strictly human exposure levels were set.
The most ambitious plan the group discussed was a project to build a second Panama Canal. Sandia's L. J. Vortman concluded that using nuclear devices to create the channel would cost 40 percent less than using conventional explosives.
But there was just one little problem. Vortman calculated that the new canal could be produced by detonating an array of 17 100-kiloton H-bombs at or near the surface. For human safety, however, everyone who lived within a 10,000-square-mile fallout area would have to be evacuated–possibly for a year or longer.
Reines, who had predicted a decade earlier that very few peaceful uses would be found for atomic explosions, remained skeptical about their utility. And he concluded tersely that despite the technology's potential, the desire to conduct “peaceful nuclear explosions” was a weak argument for the resumption of testing.
London calling, the NSA listening
In January 1998, a report commissioned by the European Parliament charged that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)–under a program code-named “Echelon”–had the capacity to intercept and analyze virtually all electronic communications in Europe and beyond. Of particular concern to the Europeans was the focus of Echelon's activities. “Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War,” the report stated, “Echelon is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organizations, and businesses in virtually every country.”
Debate heated up in September, as members of the European Parliament fretted that the NSA could be using Echelon to obtain sensitive commercial and governmental secrets. But just as the story seemed to be gaining momentum, debate in the European Parliament fizzled. While some speculated that U.S. pressure forestalled an open discussion of the issue, others saw less sinister motives at work. Glyn Ford, a British member and head of the agency that had commissioned the Echelon study, told Wired News, “There is not enough information on Echelon, beyond its existence, to debate the matter fully.”
“Oh sure, blame the politicians!”
While Echelon made a brief splash in the European press last year, the system has actually been in existence–in one form or another–for decades. Since 1948, the United States has collaborated with Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, under an agreement known as UKUSA, to collect and share signals intelligence. Echelon is only the latest tool to be employed in a global network of sensitive listening posts.
The NSA refuses to confirm or deny any of the allegations about Echelon–it will not even comment on the system's existence–but news reports agree on a few basic facts: Echelon is a system for sorting and disseminating the millions of messages–phone, fax, email, telex, and cellular–intercepted every day by UKUSA countries. Captured signals are fed into high-speed computers, which match the contents of the messages against “dictionaries” of keywords and phrases. Messages containing keywords (for example–and these are only guesses–“bomb,” “bin Laden,” or “missile”) are tagged and forwarded to the agency that compiled the dictionary. Others are discarded.
Some published reports depict Echelon as an all-seeing eye, capable of intercepting, decoding, and filing every single morsel of electronic traffic, from local phone calls to web site visits. But Steven Aftergood, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, is more circumspect in his appraisal of Echelon: “There is a tendency to assume that whatever might be possible is actually occurring,” he says. “The reality of the intelligence cycle is that only a small fraction of the existing data is collected, and only a small fraction of the collected data is processed and analyzed.”
In recent years, civil liberties groups and consumers have become increasingly concerned about email encryption and internet privacy, but so far revelations about Echelon's ability to rummage through private communications has elicited little reaction from the mainstream U.S. press. The most detailed studies of Echelon to have appeared in the United States are Covert Action Quarterly's excerpt from Nicky Hager's book, Secret Power, which detailed New Zealand's role in collecting raw data for Echelon; and a highly critical report on Echelon's civil liberties implications that was prepared in late 1998 by the conservative Free Congress Foundation, which hopes to provoke congressional hearings on stricter privacy protections.
“What's interesting about the issue is that you've got the ends of the political spectrum reaching around and touching each other,” Aftergood says. But so far the middle of the spectrum–just about everyone in the country–seems unconcerned, perhaps because the NSA is legally prohibited from collecting information in the United States without special authorization.
Whatever the actual truth is about Echelon, the story does illustrate the ongoing development of intelligence technology by the United States and its allies, with an eye toward achieving–in the words of the 1996 report on the future of the National Reconnaissance Office–“global information superiority.”
The concern in some European and Asian capitals is that Echelon is feeding sensitive commercial data to U.S. and British companies competing against firms in France, Germany, and Japan. Russia's Izvestia charged in November that 80 percent of the information obtained by Echelon was used for industrial espionage, and that among the keywords in the Echelon dictionaries were the names of 500 French firms and defense contractors.
“Now that there's no Cold War, there's this increasing concern with economic spying,” says Jeffrey Richelson of the National Security Archive. “But the Europeans are hardly innocent there.”
“The U.S. government is not in the business of providing foreign trade secrets to U.S. companies,” After-good says. “Not because it's immoral, but because it's impractical: Which companies do you work with? How much information do you give them? Plus, companies are increasingly multinational.”
“That's one sophisticated missile.”
Members of the European Parliament hope to resurrect the issue sometime this year, but says Richelson, “If I was in Europe, I'd be a lot more concerned about internal surveillance by my own government.” The same European Parliament report that described Echelon also noted that “100,000 telephone lines are illegally tapped each year in France and that state agencies may be behind much of the eavesdropping.” In addition, news reports last fall described European Union plans for a surveillance network that would allow eavesdropping without a court order on internet communications and satellite telephone calls throughout Europe. If such plans move forward, Echelon-induced fears may fade into the background while European privacy advocates fight to keep their own backyard bug-free.
–Brendan Mathews
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In August 1968, the United States may have been so torn by the war in Vietnam that Americans scarcely noticed the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. But the British were watching (New York Times, January 3, 1999). Documents released in early January–under Britain's 30-years-and-out secrecy rule–reveal that after Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, the British Foreign Office retaliated by removing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev from its Christmas card list. Officials argued vigorously, but unsuccessfully, for Prime Minister Harold Wilson to do the same.
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Australia is also revealing its secrets under a similar 30-year rule. Among the secrets: Like Sweden and Switzerland before it, Australia, too, once considered building a nuclear arsenal. Its efforts seem to have consisted primarily of compiling a detailed estimate of the cost of becoming a nuclear weapon state (The Age [Melbourne], January 1, 1999).
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A number of 30-year anniversaries of the Nixon administration began in January, and theoretically, future volumes of the State Department's official history, Foreign Relations of the United States or “FRUS,” should be able to draw on a mountain of previously unavailable–but now-30-year-old–Nixon-era documents. Not likely, predicts Mother Jones (January/February 1999); the intelligence community will hold a good many items back, as is its habit. The magazine quotes Warren F. Kimball, the chair of an independent panel of historians appointed in 1991 by Congress to review the FRUS, who wrote last year that at the rate things were going, the FRUS could become “so incomplete and misleading as to constitute an official lie.”
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This column has previously reported on the “physics chantoosie,” Lynda Williams, who teaches at San Francisco State University when she is not performing at science conventions or the like. But until recently we had never heard of the doo wop-oriented “Cernettes”–yes, named after Europe's high-energy particle laboratory, CERN, near the Swiss-German border (New York Times, December 29, 1998). The group is the brainchild of CERN computer scientist Silvano De Genarro, an Italian, who writes the songs the Cernettes perform in English. English is the “universal language of physics,” he says. (Some of the group's performances can be heard on the web at http://sgvenus.cern.ch/musiclub/cernettes.)
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In November 1998, the Bundesrechnungshof–the German equivalent of the U.S. General Accounting Office–reported that the German armed forces spent $300 million on forklifts, only to discover after they had been delivered that they were too large to fit through the gates and doorways at military depots and facilities.
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A BBC radio program, “Focus on Africa,” is broadcast three times a day from London. The program is popular everywhere on the African continent, but nowhere more than where there is fighting (Economist, January 16, 1999). It was said that during the civil war in Liberia it was safe to be on the streets if the program was on, because all the fighters were inside listening. And earlier this year, the program played a big part in a brief cease-fire in Sierra Leone. When the government of Sierra Leone announced a stand-down on the program, a jubilant Freetown rushed into the streets to celebrate. But minutes later, the rebel commander–also speaking on “Focus”–said there was no cease-fire, and residents rushed back to their homes.
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Like their Russian-trained dolphin cousins before them, the last five of Russia's combat-trained Beluga whales were demobilized late last year (Tampa Tribune, November 17, 1998). Strapped for cash, the Russian navy closed the Pacific base at Vityaz Bay where whales had been taught to detect enemy divers and/or attack enemy ships with bombs. The whales were flown to a civilian research center in the Black Sea. The United States has also demobilized many of its dolphin patrols, although some of the animals have had a difficult time adjusting to civilian life.
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It was only a few years ago that military planners began to talk seriously about “information warfare”–and even then the idea did not become truly popular until Defense Department budgets began to earmark funds for exploring how to launch cyberattacks on potential enemies. Now, according to Daniel Verton of Federal Computer Week, the idea of offensive cyberwar seems to have lost some of its charm–and without any actual test, thank goodness. The reason? Defense Department officials have been circulating a study, issued last summer by the Rand Corporation, which argues that if the Pentagon develops offensive strategies, other countries might do the same.
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There are famous watering holes, like Harry's Bar in Venice, says John Weisman, a writer of thrillers and a Virginia resident. But none is a greater hangout than his own local pub–the “Horseshoe Curve,” a basement bar near “Mount Weather.” The latter is an elaborate underground facility a short helicopter ride from Washington, D.C., which was built by the government and designed to insure that the bureaucracy would survive nuclear apocalypse. According to Eddie Dean (Washington City Paper, January 8, 1999), who visited the bar during the Christmas holidays, patrons at the Horseshoe, run by ex-spook Jim Wink, are a close-knit group of locals and tipplers from a variety of tight-lipped government agencies like the FBI, the CIA, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On the night reporter-interloper Dean visited, his fellow barflies told him “they began to run a check on my out-of-state license tags before I even order[ed] a beer.”
Stratcom's Russian connection
On December 24, 1998, a small but intriguing item in the Lincoln, Nebraska Journal Star indicated that the Nebraska Public Power District had reloaded the Cooper Nuclear Power Station (near Brownville, Nebraska) with new fuel rods purchased from the U.S. Enrichment Corporation (USEC). What made the fuel unusual was that it had been produced using uranium obtained from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons.
Interesting. According to the public affairs office at Offutt Air Force Base, where Strategic Command (Stratcom) is located, the base purchases its electricity from Nebraska Public Power (although you can be sure it also has adequate back-up generating power in case of an interruption of service).
So would it be accurate to describe Stratcom–and its neighbors in the Omaha area–as now running on Russian bomb fuel?
Remarkably, yes, in part. But Nebraska Public Power (a state-owned utility) has a variety of plants; Cooper generates only about 20 percent of its power. Nebraska also sells power to the Lincoln Electric System in Lincoln, Nebraska, and to the MidAmerican Energy Company in Iowa, so people who live in those areas could also boast that they were running on Russian bomb fuel. A spokesman for Cooper estimates that the new fuel rods supply about six percent of all the electricity used in Nebraska.
And, of course, the fuel itself might be described as a product of mixed origin. Bomb fuel, or “highly enriched uranium,” is material that has been enriched until it is about 90 percent uranium 235–very different from the “low-enriched uranium” used as fuel in modern light-water reactors. Power reactor fuel contains 3-5 percent uranium 235.
Before the Russian weapon uranium was sold to Nebraska Public Power for the Cooper Station, it was “blended down” with about 20 times as much U.S.-supplied feedstock of natural uranium (which contains 0.71 percent uranium 235) as the Russian weapon uranium.
So far, about 60 metric tons of excess Russian weapon uranium has been transferred to USEC's Paducah, Kentucky plant for blending down. An additional 30 metric tons is expected to be converted to power-reactor fuel each year as the U.S. Enrichment Corporation fulfills a U.S. agreement to purchase 500 metric tons of excess weapon uranium from Russia. The United States has also said it will dispose of some 100 metric tons of its own excess weapon uranium, but it is lagging behind in blending the material down. By mid-1998, USEC had “downblended” only 13 tons.
Nonetheless, it is at least conceivable that some day the folks at Stratcom could be heating their coffee or running their computers with electricity fueled by former weapon material from both Russia and the United States.
–L. R.