Nuclear Weapons, Scientists, And the Post-cold War Challenge: Selected Papers on Arms Control

Nuclear Weapons . Scientists and the

Post–Cold War Challenge Selected Papers on Arms Control

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Nuclear Weapons . Scientists andthe

Post–Cold War Challenge Selected Papers on Arms Control

Sidney D. Drell Stanford University, USA

World Scientific NEih. J E R S E Y * LONDCIR;

SINGAPORE

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HONG K O N G

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TAlPEl * C H E N N A I

Published by

World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224

USA ofice: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601 UK ofice: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE

British Library Cataloguing-in-PublicationData A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The author and publisher would like to thank the following publishers of the various journals and books for their assistance and permission to include selected reprints found in this volume: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Beam Line);National Reconnaissance Office and American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (Beyond Expectations -Building an American National Reconnaissance Capability);American Physical Society (Reviews of Modern Physics); Springer Science and Business Media (In the Shadow of the Bomb: Physics and Arms Control); Bulletin o f the Atomic Scientists (Bulletin ofthe Atomic Scientists); National Academy o f Sciences, Washington, DC (Issues in Science and Technology); Foreign Affairs, NY (Foreign Affairs); Palgrave Macmillan (Adlai Stevenson’s Lasting Legacy); Blackwell Publishing (New Perspective Quarterly); New York Times (New York Times Op-Ed); The Washington Post (The Washington Post Op-Ed); Annual Reviews, CA (Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science); American Institute of Physics (Physics Today);Arms Control Association, Washington, DC (Arms Control Association Report).

NUCLEAR WEAPONS, SCIENTISTS, AND THE POST-COLD WAR CHALLENGE Selected Papers on Arms Control Copyright 0 2007 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, orparts thereoJ may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher.

For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher.

ISBN 98 1-256-896-4 ISBN 981-256-897-2 (pbk)

Printed in Singaporeby Mainland Press

V

Contents

INTRODUCTION

1

CHAPTER I My Involvement as a Scientist Working on Issues of National Security and Views on Scientists’ Responsibilities and Ethical Dilemmas - Reflections - Physics and U.S. National Security - The Moral Obligation of Scientists and a Rekindling of Hope - Response on Behalf of Degree Recipients at the University of Tel Aviv Ceremony Granting Honorary Doctors Degrees - Response at the Ceremony Awarding the William Oliver Baker Award - Beyond Expectations - Building an American National Reconnaissance Capability: Recollections of the Pioneers and Founders of National Reconnaissance - The Impact of a Public Constituency - Science and Society: The Troubled Frontier - To Act or Not To Act

5 7 17 28 34 36 38

45 51 65

CHAPTER I1 Issues Coming to the Fore Immediately Following the Collapse of the Soviet Union and the End of the Cold War - Science and National Security - Testimony on the Future of Arms Control - Abolishing Long-range Nuclear Missiles - Reducing Nuclear Danger

67

68 76 89 91

CHAPTER I11 At the End of the 20th Century: The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Emergence of the New Terror of Biological and Chemical Weapons - Adlai Stevenson and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of Today - On Stockpile Stewardship and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty - Putting the Nuclear Genie Back in the Bottle - Reasons To Ratify, Not To Stall - This Treaty Must Be Ratified - Technical Issues of a Nuclear Test Ban

107 109 113 118 124 125 126

vi

- Merits and Risks of More Underground Tests - Safety in High Consequence Operations - The Route to the CTBT - The Present Threat

169 171 189 197

CHAPTER IV New Challenges in the 21st Century: Escaping the Nuclear Deterrence Trap and Facing Terrorism - The Gravest Danger - Nuclear Weapons and Their Proliferation: The Gravest Danger - Tough Challenges - What Are Nuclear Weapons For - Recommendations for Restructuring U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces? - In the Shadow of the Bomb

205

207 213 231 235 270

CHAPTER V Memorials to Four Colleagues who were Great Scientists and Citizens - Amos deShalit: Statesman of Science - Viki: A Passionate Leader for International Cooperation in Science and in the Pursuit of Peace - Hans Bethe: Shaping Public Policy - Report on the Progress in Reducing Nuclear Danger, Presented at an International Conference in Honor of Andrei Sakharov - Andrei Sakharov and the Nuclear Danger

277

278 286 294 303 317

AFTERWORD What Are Nuclear Weapons For?

323

1

Introduction

This volume includes a representative selection of my recent writings and speeches (circa 1992 to the present) on public policy issues that have substantial scientific components. Most deal with national security, nuclear weapons and arms control, reflecting my personal involvement in such issues, dating back to 1960. These essays are a sequel to the collection in my book ”In the Shadow of the Bomb: Physics and Arms Control” published by the American Institute of Physics in 1993 in its series ”Masters of Modern Physics.” My preface to that book started with the following paragraph: “As a physicist, I have tried to understand nature’s mysteries. As a citizen, I have worked to decrease the dangers posed by the nuclear weapons of mass destruction that are one of the consequences of scientific progress. Since 1960, my life has been divided between pursuing the dream of discovery and working to avoid the nightmare of a nuclear holocaust. The essays, speeches, and Congressional testimony in this collection touch on both endeavors.” The essays in ”The Shadow of the Bomb’’ reflected the fact that in 1993 we were just emerging from the Cold War, during which efforts had been focused primarily on avoiding a nuclear holocaust. The success that the United States and the Soviet Union achieved in that effort was based on their recognition that the enormous destructive potential of nuclear weapons meant, simply, that any nation that initiated nuclear war would, most likely, be committing suicide. This fact reflects the technical reality that there is no effective defense of one’s society against nuclear retaliation. The two superpowers managed their confrontational relationship by establishing a balance of terror in the form of nuclear deterrence based on mutual assured destruction. The 1986 summit at Reykjavik, Iceland, between President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev marked the beginning of a major change in the U.S./Soviet confrontation, starting with the call for sizable reductions in their arsenals of nuclear weapons. The two leaders even went so far as to consider removing all nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that were poised on hair-trigger alert to deliver devastating destruction on an unparalleled scale in less than 30 minutes. Gorbachev and Reagan also presented a vision of escaping from the nuclear deterrence trap based on mutual assured destruction, and flirted with the revolutionary idea of removing all nuclear weapons. In the end, that bold idea was judged to be premature for 1986. However they lit a glimmer of hope that still flickers. Today, 20 years later, and 15 years after the demise of the Soviet Union, the gravest danger presented by nuclear weapons comes in a new form. It is no longer a superpower conflict resulting in a radioactive holocaust. It is the danger that the spread of advanced technology may result in the proliferation of nuclear weapons to a growing number of nations, and hostile governments, including terrorists and suicidal fanatics not constrained

2

by accepted norms of civilized behavior. Our challenge now is to prevent this from happening. At the same time, now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, we should aggressively pursue the opportunity to escape from the nuclear deterrence trap. These themes - sustaining and strengthening a nonproliferation regime against severe challenges, preventing the world's most devastating weapons from falling into the most dangerous hands, and escaping the deterrence trap - are the main focus of the essays in this book. I have divided this book into five chapters. Each starts with a short commentary on the individual articles it includes. Chapter I describes how I originally got involved in technical issues of national security as a complement to my academic career in physics research and teaching. In addition to giving a broad account of my activities on specific problems as a government advisor, these articles also address my views on the responsibilities of scientists and the importance that I attach to the scientific community helping society to benefit from the technical advances resulting from scientific progress. I also discuss ethical dilemmas that we may face in working on technical issues of national security. The next three chapters proceed chronologically in pace with the evolving strategic context for U.S. national security policy and nuclear weapons through the post-Cold War years into the 21st century. Chapter I1 focuses on issues that came to the fore immediately following in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Chapter I11 addresses the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and its strategic importance for maintaining and strengthening a nonproliferation regime that is under increasing pressure as we enter into the 21st century. I discuss technical issues that have to be evaluated and understood for the United States to conclude that a CTBT is consistent with our national security needs. I also include an essay summarizing a study on the what I call the New Terror, that is the growing threat of biological and chemical weapons that we must now face due to the proliferation of the technology to make and use them. Chapter IV addresses the new challenges of the 21st century. Can the nuclear nonproliferation regime be maintained? What strengthening of the restrictions of the NonProliferation Treaty will be required to prevent the spread of nuclear technology and weapons into the most dangerous hands? Can we now, 15 years after the demise of the Soviet Union, escape from the trap of nuclear deterrence based upon mutual assured destruction that guided us through the most dangerous period of the Cold War? And indeed, "What are nuclear weapons for?" in the post-Cold War era with our former adversary, the Soviet Union, now relegated to the dustbin of history, and our new partner, Russia, accepted formally as an ally in the war against terrorism. Chapter V is devoted to memorials to four great human beings who were admired both as scientists and leaders in the endeavor for a better world, with peace and human justice: Amos de Shalit, Viki Weisskopf, Hans Bethe, and Andrei Sakharov. It is inevitable that there is a significant amount of overlap in the essays included in this book since, in one way or another, they are all addressing the challenge we face to

3

reduce the nuclear danger, to walk away from the brink of nuclear holocaust, to extend the nonproliferation regime, and to negotiate a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But one can also see a changing emphasis in the discussion as it tracks the changing strategic context since the historic Reykjavik Summit of 1986. There and then, 20 years ago, President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev flirted with such far out and visionary ideas as getting rid of all nuclear armed ballistic missiles, or "fast fliers," and even contemplated a world ultimately free of nuclear weapons. These ideas are surfacing once again with the question "What Are Nuclear Weapons For?"

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5

Chapter I

My Involvement as a Scientist Working on Issues of National Security and Views on Scientists’ Responsibilities and Ethical Dilemmas The nine essays in Chapter I review how I first came to be involved as a theoretical physicist working on technical matters of national security, nuclear weapons, and arms control. They give a broad overview of the issues of primary concern to me that I encountered at the interface of science and public policy. The first essay, entitled ”Reflections,” is an autobiographical account of my career that I wrote at the time of my retirement as Deputy Director and Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).It was published in the summer of 1998 in Beam Line, at that time the in-house magazine of SLAC. The second article entitled ”Physics and U.S. National Security” appeared as an invited paper for the Centenary Issue of the Reviews ofModern Physics Vol. 71, No. 2, 1999. It describes the contributions of physicists, and my personal ones more extensively as an advisor to the U.S. government, on three of the most important technical national security issues during the Cold War years. These were the development of technical reconnaissance from space as a way of penetrating the Iron Curtain; the debate on whether to limit the development of ballistic missile defenses, taking realistic account of their technical capabilities and limitations; and the developments leading to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996. This article also illustrates the importance of independent scientific advice to government leaders at the highest levels and the ethical dilemma that scientists who get involved in military work often face. The third essay is adapted from a speech in Hiroshima, Japan in 1995 at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. The theme of the conference was the Future of Hope, and it came at a time of renewed hope as the world was moving on a path away from the nuclear brink in the aftermath of the Cold War. On that occasion I presented my views on the moral obligations of scientists to help society shape the applications of our scientific advances for their overall benefits and to minimize their dangers and risks. I also discussed the ethical dilemmas that scientists face when engaged in weapons work, as best illustrated by the trials of Andrei Sakharov. My view of the deeper responsibility of the broad community of university scholars to help mold the character of a society is discussed in the fourth article based on my remarks representing the honorary degree recipients at Tel Aviv University in 2001. The next two articles give more detailed accounts of my involvement, and my views on scientists’ responsibilities, in national security issues. They were prepared for two of the occasions at which I was responding to formal recognition for my technical contributions to US.national security.

6

The seventh essay, reproduced from my 1993 book ”In the Shadow of the Bomb” elaborates my concerns about the importance of educating a public constituency able to understand and weigh in responsibly when important decisions have to be made on issues of national security, and of the obligation of scientists to help build such a constituency. The eighth essay entitled ”Science and Society: The Troubled Frontier,” was delivered at the National Forum and Annual Meeting of Sigma Xi in 1995 upon receiving the John I? McGovern Science and Society Medal. It draws on my efforts to improve working relations between the U.S. government and the scientific community based on improved understanding of the nature and practice of science on one hand, and of the practical realities of the government funding process. In 1945 Vannevar Bush, in his influential report ”Science: The Endless Frontier” designed the nation’s post-World War I1 scientific research program that has become the envy of the world. But by the 1990’s it was fraying at the seams and serious problems were emerging. This was the topic of primary concern that I addressed in my lecture. The ninth essay was written in 1973in response to Professor E. H. Burhop’s questioning my, and my scientific colleagues’, involvement in weapons related work. It was triggered by events in the spring of 1972 at the University of Rome where I spent a sabbatical. After several months in residence at the University’s Physics Department, I was invited to give a seminar on my research work during my time there. When I arrived at the seminar room and attempted to start my talk, I was immediately confronted by a number of the younger pre- and post-doctoral research students who insisted that I talk first on U.S. policy in Viet Nam and Cambodia. Based on what I said, they would then vote as to whether or not I would be permitted to give a physics seminar. This came as quite a shock, as I had talked on numerous occasions with these young scientists during the several months I had been there and they never expressed an interest in my activities as a member of JASON, the group of U.S. academic scientists who did technical studies and gave advice to the U.S. government on issues of national importance. It had come to public attention that some members of JASON were involved with the U.S. military and defense officials on issues directly related to the fighting in Viet Nam. This fact had caused much discussion and some hostility in academic circles. I personally was not involved in those particular activities, due not to any opposition in principle, but to my heavy involvement in other national security issues of a technical nature, including strategic nuclear weapons and ballistic missile defenses. That fact was irrelevant, and I objected strongly, on principle, to being subjected to a political inquisition in order to gain permission to give a scientific talk. This led to further disruption and I was not permitted to give my seminar. I faced a similar confrontation several weeks later at a French summer school in physics at Cargese on the island of Corsica. The result was the same and the school was closed down. Nor was I the only JASON to have been thus confronted. These events led to several articles challenging the participation by individuals such as myself working with governments on weapons and technical issues of national security. This essay states my principles in response to those articles, and in particular to the one addressed to me by Professor E. H. Burhop. It appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1974.

7

COHERENT PRODUCTION AS A MEANS OF DETERMINING THE SPIN AND PARITY OF BOSONS S.M. Berman, S D DreIl(SLAC) SLAC-PUB-0010. 1963 5pp Phys Rev Lett. 1 I 220-224,1963

0sS

MESO BOUNDS ON PROPAGATORS, COUPLING CONSTANTS AND VERTEX FUNCTIONS S D DreII (SLAC), A C Finn. A C Hearn (Stanford U , ITP). SLAC-PUB~0039,Jul 1964. 43pp. Phys 9ev. 136 81439-51.1964 DOUBLE CHARGE EXCHANGE SCATTERING OF PIONS FROM NUCLEI R G Parsons, J S Ti-efil (Stanford U., ITP). S D Drell (SLAC) SLAG-PUB-0063. Nov 1964 16pp Phys.Rev 738.6847-50.7965 ANALYSES OF MUON ELECTRODYNAMIC TEST J A. McClure. S D Drell (SLAC) SLACPUB-0067, Dec 1964 18pp Nuovo Cim.37 1638~1646,1965 PHOTOPRODUCTION OF NEUTRAL K MESONS S D Drell, M Jacob (SLAC) SLACPUB-0065, Dec 1964 24pp. Phys Rev 138.B1313-7,1965

s

ANOMALOUS MAGNETIC MOMENT OF THE ELECTRON, MUON, AND NUCLEON D Drell, H R Pagels (SLAC) SLAC-PUB-0102, Apr 1965 44pp Phys Rev. 140 6 3 9 7 ~ 8407,1965 TEST OF ROLE OF STATISTICAL MODEL AT HIGH~ENERGIES.S D Drell (SLAC), D R Speiser J Weyers (Louvain U.) SLAC-PUB-0138. Jun 1965 8 p p . Preludes in Theorelicai Physics, ed b y A De-Shalit. H Feshbach, I Van Hove N Y . Wiley 1966, pp 294-301 SPECIAL MODELS AND PREDICTIONS FOR PHOTOPRODUCTION ABOVE I-GEV S D Drell (SLAC) SLAC~PUB-0118,Jun 1965 46pp lnvrted talk to the lnt. Symp on Electron and Photon lnteractioiis at High Energies, DESY 1965 Proc of the lnt Symp on Electron and Photon Interactions at High Energies. DESK 7965 Hamburg, Deulsche Physikalische GeseIIschaft. 7965 vol 1. p. 71-90 AXIAL MESON EXCHANGE AND THE RELATION OF HYDROGEN HYPERFINE SPLITTING TO ELECTRON SCATTERING S.D Drell, Jeremiah 0. Sultivai? (SLAG) SLAC-PUB-0745. Oct 7965 9pp PhyS Lett 19516-518.1965 DETERMINATION OFRHOO - NUCLEON TOTAL CROSS-SECTIONS FROM COHERENT PHOTOPRODUCTION S.D Drell (SLAC). James S TrefiI (Stanford U , ITP) SLAC~PUB0170, Feb 1966. 1 l p p Phys.Rev. Lett. 16 552-555.1966 PERIPHERAL PROCESS€S. A C Hearn (Stanford U , ITP). S D. Drell (SLAC). SLAG-PUE~ 0176. Apf 1966 95pp Burhop. E H S . e d High Energy Physics N Y.Academic Press, 1967 vot 2.p 219-64 EXACT SUM RULE FOR NUCLEON MAGNETIC MOMENTS S D Drell (SLAC). A C Hearn (Stanford U.. IJP) SLAC~PUB-0187.Apr 1966 l 0 p p Phys. Rev Lett. 16.908-911.1966 POLARIZABILITY CONTRIBUTION TO THE HYDROGEN HYPERFINE STRUCTURE S D Drell. J.D Sullivan SLAG-PUB-0204, JuI 1966. 84pp Phys Rev 154 1477-1498.1967 ELECTRODYNAMIC INTERACTIONS S.D. DrelI SLAC-PUB-0225, Sep 7966 57pp Report 10 the 13th Int. Conf on High Energy Physics. Berkeley 1966 Proc of the In1 Conf on High Energy Physics, 13th. Berkeley 1966. Berkeiey, Univ of Calif. Press, 1967 p 8599 ELECTROMAGNETIC FORM-FACTORS FOR COMPOSITE PARTICLES AT LARGE MOMENTUM TRANSFER S D. Drell. A C Finn. M H Goldhaber SLAC-PUB-0237, Dec 1966 37pp PhysRevl57 7402-1411 1967 LAMB SHIFT AND VALIDITY OFQUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS 0609 Jan 1967 4pp Comments NucI Part Fhys 1.24-26,1967

SD

DreII SLAC~PUB-

PION PHOTOPRODUCTIONATO-DEGREES S D Drell, J D Sullivan SLAC~PUB-0372, May 1967 13pp Phys Rev. Lett 19 268-271.1967 REGGE POLE HYPOTHESIS IN AMPLITUDES WITH PHOTONS S D. DreIl SLAC~PUB0425. Sep 1967 8pp Comments NucI Part Phys 7 196-200.1967 WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED ABOUT ELEMENTARY PARTICLES FROM PHOTON AND ELECTRON INTERACTIONS? S D. Drell (SLAC) SLAC-PUB-0355. Sep 1967 50pp. Paper presented ar lnt Symposium on Electron and Photon Interactions at High Energies. SLAC, Sep 1967 Proc of the In1 Symp on Electron and Photon Interactions at High Energies, SLAC. 1367 Stanford. Calif. SLAC. 7967 p3-31

S I D N E Y 4

SUMMER1998

M

Y CAREERINRESEARCH

as a theoretical physicist

dates back to fifty years ago shortly after the end of World War 11. And it has been the best of times, Back then, it was a dream time to have been a graduate student! There was no need to worry about a job, unless for Some strange reason you felt that Harvard was the only place to be. Vannevar Bush had laid out a map for the support of science in his perceptive report to President Truman in 1945 enti. tied Science, the Endless Frontier, With clear and brilliant insight he presented the design and foundations of the nation‘s post-World War 11 scientific research program that has become the envy of the world. Here was his far reaching, visionary blueprint: “Science, by itself, provides no panacea for individual, social, and economic ills. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world,” Furthermore, he reminded Wash. ington that research is a difficult and often very slow voyage Over uncharted Seas and therefore, for science to flourish with governmental support, freedom of inquiry must be preserved, and there must be funding stability over a period of years so that long-range programs may be undertaken and pursued effectively. Physics was then a growth industry with an unreal coefficient of inflation that nurtured us all.

D R E L L

8

“%a was the best of times but it could

have been the worst of times."

L o o h g b a c k a t the particle physics of fifty years ago-which now seemi like the Dark Midilie Ages-we had a theory of qi~antumelectrodynamics {QED)with which w e could do lowest order calculations &at were adequate ac.ccunt for what wzs observed in processes involving photons, electrons, an positrons. Bgt heyon0 that, exceedingly laborious calculations generally gave i d i m ~ t ya~result t h t was usudly equated to zero and ignored. The infrared diivergewes alone were wdersrood, thanks to Felix Bloch and .Amold Nerdslecir. Although fragile, limited, and trustrating to work with, QED was the only “s’sccrssfd“ field theosy, and was variously, m d usually unsuccessfully, used as a. model t c try md to anderstand other physical systems. These included nuclei and nuclear forces and what was occurring in situations where mesons were assuxed to be the quanta and perturbation theory w-as invalid. The first W t c i n g &shes of red progress came in 1947 horn Richard Fep-man, julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itira Tomonaga, with a thunderous rw&le fro= Freeman Dyson. They turned QED into a beautiful, qrtantitatiire theory whose divergences would be isolated into renormalization constants, and W ~ Q S Ppredictions could be calculated to very high precision. -reyrman propagators tmned h o n e d ~ u calculations s by the old metho into (well, a l i ~ o s tbaby‘s ] play, 2nd Feynman graphs helped us know what %=ewere doing. It was a very heady time as we found theory sgredcg with the beautiful precision measurements of the Lamb Shih, rhe electron g-2 value, h3yerfine splitting in p o s i t r o ~ u ma, bigher order radiation prccesses. Shcrtly theredter thex was great excitement as we disc o - z e d that there were two m e s o n s t h e C Q S I ~ ~ray C one and the nuclear force one-aad lage new accelerators produced a s7eritsb1ezoo ~f strange particles. Not only was the physics ~ e r exiring y but also we were buoyed up by the strong sup port h r science, and physics in particular, inspired by the demonstrated importance of the contributions that physici.sts had made :c the successfu1conclusion of TVorld War 11 tlzough development oi radar and the atomic bomb. As the cold war intensified there was growing cmcem t h , perhaps, we would be needed again and so we better be courished.and rejuvmated as a strategic asset D-u-isg in its origin4 incarnation, designed to detect the launch of Sovier Figure 2-3. Kidas 1 lifting off from Launch Complex f 4, Cape Intercontinental Ballistic CPnaireraI, 196C. (Photo cou:tesy MRO History Office, lihiy U.S. Air Missiles (ICBM). Force photo.) Rudermm and I assembled everything known in I960 about the reievant chemical reactions, highaltitude atmospheric parmeters, and the like. We calculated energetidly and concluded that it would take a lot of megatons to make an IR cloud that would last long enough and extend far enough to be of strategic value by preventing Midas from detecting, and hence denying us early warning of ICBM l a ~ n c h e s For . ~ g0od reason, the Midas program went ahead and has been of great value to the U.S. As a consequence of chis work, I was invited to join the Strategic Military Pane1 of the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee (PSAC), then chaired by the I k k h x ’ s Science Advisor, ’

The work of Drdl and Kuderman in &is m a was published in the scienrific journal, Infrared P&cs 2, r s . 183, Sent-Dsc, 1962).

(vd

41

Jerome ’iViesner. Call it entrapment, commitment, or whatever, but I have remained actively involved in technicai narional secwirJjwork for the United States.

The World of Satelhe Reconnaissance The extent iif my government involvement increased by a qumturn leap in the fdl of 1963 when I was intrrrdlrced to the ce&,siCaS possibilities of doing photoreconnaissance from spacebased satellite systems. Phomremnnaissance satellites, together with signals intelligence (STGINT) and electronic intel&gence (ELlNn satellites that constituted the so-called “national technical means,” mdd pierce the Iron Curtain that had been erected by an obsessively secretive Soviet government. These systems represented a big step toward achieving the Open Skies &ar President Eisenhowex had firsr d e d for in 1355. h o n g their other values, these sarellites opened the dmr to mns control nego6ations based on eEectiveIy verifiable treaties. The firs: generarim of phctoreconnaissmce satellites, known as Corona, was declassified in 1’%5.4 I was introduced t~ this amazing achievement by Bud Wheelon in h e fall of 1963. He was &en &e Central Indigence Agency (Cut) Deputy Director for Science and T‘chnobgy (DDS&T>and he telephoned me at Stanford University and asked me eo come 10 Wibingcon.5 He said he wanted to show me something that was important, and he needed my help. I dutifully obeyed and found my way to the CIA Headquarters ~ u ~ ~ ~ ~ n g , then identified by the words Bureaia a€Public Roads, or something similar, on a sign kpn the George LVbshington Pararkway. For a discussion o f h e decision to declassifv h e Corona program, see “The Declasifiarion Decision,” In G r m a Bersen &e S m and rhe Earrh-The Firsr NRO Reconn2sznceE,ve in Space (R.A. McDonald, Uitcir), Berhesda, MD: American Socieg far Photogrammetry and Rernotc Sensing, 1997. Corona B e w e m die Sw, md &he Za-&dso inciudes a comprehensive aliecrion of Other Corona-related articles, x a c y of which were wrirten by participants En rhe progrsnr. h associzred Corona reference is “Corona: Success for Space Reconnaissance, h Look 1n.o the Cold War, and ,4 Revolution for Intelligence,”in Pbtogranaertjc E~~j~eeri~~andRemo:eSensinLg. (-PE&RS) (vd. 61,110.6,June 1335). ’ Aibert D. iBudj X.X%rt$on sm7ed as CLYs DDS&T from 5 Aug~ar1363 to 26 September 1966. He is a Pioneer of National Recoxuissance (inducted into the NRO Hall of Pioneers, 27 Scpcernber 2000). See Chqxer 42 fo: his recdlecrions. AIso see Wheeloni arricie in P h p k &day (vok 50, page 24, 1997) f’r his o v e n k t of rbe Corona project.

*

~

42

I learned, to m y amazement, that we could photograph the earth with fairly good resolution from satellites. I also learned that these Project Corona satellites were producing a corona-like electrical discharge that was streaking the film, thereby diminishing the quality of the images and reducing the intelligence value of the photography. Concerned that this problem was not getting the priority attention it needed, Bud had assembled a team of industrial scientists from each of the corporations that had contributed major components of the Corona system, including Itek, Eastman Kodak, and Lockheed. He asked me, as an independent academic, to lead the team in a detailed technical investigation into what was causing this problem and how to fix it. Thus began a most extraordinary experience. The industrial team that Bud assembled was a group of scientists and engineers, a group that was as outstanding as any I ever have known. I added to my panel two superb physicists, whom I knew as personal friends and respected highly-Luis Alvarez and Malvin Ruderman. The investigation was to be in a scientific realm that was then new to me, and I wanted my two colleagues to add to my confidence that I would stay on track and not go off on useless tangents. Our effort was intense, and lasted about four months, during which time I essentially lived in Washington, except for weekends at home and a weekly Friday physics lecture at Stanford. Our work was successful in resolving the Corona project’s corona problem. In order to avoid the buildup of electrostatic charges, we recognized that extreme care was required to maintain a clean vacuum and balanced electrical and thermal conditions. Particular attention had to be given to the condition and type of material of the rollers across which the film was spooled. All these factors were important to avoid the electrical discharges on the ultra-thin film speeding rapidly across the rollers. We also gained further understanding of the limits in optical resolution that could be achieved with a system based on Corona technology, before moving ahead with more advanced ones. At the conclusion of our study, I briefed our findings to the Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone (frequently referred to in code those days as Earthquake McGoon), and members of the Overhead Reconnaissance Panel chaired by Edwin Land of Polaroid.

The Land Panel I was then made a member of the so-called Land Panel that advised the White House on overhead photoreconnaissance. We reviewed and stimulated the development of new technologies and systems to provide timely, high-quality photoreconnaissance from space. This proved to be a fascinating activity throughout the panel’s existence for a decade. Someday, the subsequent advances beyond Corona will have their day in the sun, and people will be astounded to learn of the enormous achievements and incredible value of scientists and engineers in the Intelligence Community.6 A critical activity of the Land Panel during the Nixon Administration had to do with the possibility of gaining real-time intelligence from space instead of waiting to recover and develop exposed film, and the choice of a technology to achieve this goal. On one occasion, Dick Garwin and I, with extensive information on this subject as members of both PSAC and the Land Panel, successfully intervened with National Security Advisor Henry Kssinger to argue the case for selecting electro-optical technology and reversing what we believed to be a flawed decision that favored an alternative technical choice.’ The result proved to be of great value in the years since it was implemented. Subsequently, Drell also was appointed as a member of the PSAC and served under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon from 1766-1971. Richard L. Gamin is a Founder of National Reconnaissance (See chapter 3 for his recollections).

’

A?

More of the People Throughout my experience on the Land Panel and the PSAC, I had the privilege of working with Don Steininger, a retired Lieutenant Colonel and physics Ph.D. who was a staff man to the President’s Science Advisor and a person of extraordinary wisdom and effectiveness. He knew when and Somedaj thesubsequent advances how to push the “system”without closing clown coopbeyond Corona will have their day eration. He worked with great dedication, and he was respected for his integrity and objectivity. He was one of in the sun, and people will be asmy cherished friends, and a colleague in these endeavors tounded to learn of the enormous for more than a decade. He died tragically at an early age because of cancer, but only after being awarded a National achievements and incredible value Intelligence Medal for his invaluable service. In addition ofscientists and engineers in the to Bud Wheelon and Don Steininger, I also want to Intelligence Communiq mention one of Bud’s successors as DDS&T, Les Dirks, who was a brilliant government servant in intelligence. I recall, from my early years of involvement, the very strained and occasionally harmful rivalry between the CIA and NRO (then very young and still very secret) for control and turf in the photoreconnaissance program. At times, it was hard to tell who was the enemy. I am glad that this rivalry is a memory of the distant past.

Challenges for Today and The Future Improving intelligence through the better application of science and technology has been a major theme of my government work. In 1988, I had the good fortune to accompany a bipartisan delegation of five Senate leaders, including then-Senator Bill Cohen, to Moscow to meet then-President Gorbachev, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, and Marshal Akhromeyev. I was one of several advisors to the delegation, and as an expert on technical national security issues, my role was to keep discussions on defense, nuclear policy, arms control, and the like on the straight track with facts. During that week in Moscow, I had a number of opportunities to talk with Cohen about my concerns at the loss of aggressive leadership in our government driving the reconnaissance and intelligence programs to the frontiers of what was technically possible. The Land Panel no longer existed, and the science advisory apparatus in the White House, diminished in importance, had almost no involvement in national security issues. Upon our return, Bill Cohen, then the ranlung minority member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), called me to Washington to meet with him and Senator Dave Boren-then its chairman-to discuss my proposal for the SSCI to create a Technology Review Panel to fill this vacuum. In my view, it was needed and could be of great value both in photoreconnaissance as a successor to the Land Panel, and in signals intelligence as a successor to the panel that had been chaired by Bill Baker of Bell Telephone Labs.’ Senators Boren and Cohen agreed with my concerns and asked me to form such a technology review panel and serve as its first chairman. I did that for four years during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and we made some genuine contributions. That panel still exists. In early 1993, I received a telephone call from Admiral Bill Crowe, whom President Clinton had asked to chair the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). Bill called to ask me if I would be willing to serve with him on the PFIAB as his nuclear expert. I felt greatly honored and said yes. Bill and I had gotten to know each other very well during the 1990-93 period during our collaboration with McGeorge Bundy in writing a

’William 0. Baker is a Founder of National Reconnaissance.

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book encirled rPeduchgNuclear Danger: The Road Away From rhe Brink published by the Councii QPI Foreign KeIations. eight years on h e E'FfiB were interesting and rewarding. A major theme of my work on PFNB was emphasizing how Irnporxant the roie of science and technology for US.inte2iigence apablities has been in the past, and most certainly wilB be in the future.

Rgure 2-3.Siddsey hell [second from I&) being recognized as a founder of national r e c ~ ~ ~ a 27 ~ ~ a ~ c e ~ September 2WO.The fowder award plaque was presented by DNRO Kelh Hall (left) and DCI George Tenet (third born the left) {Pkato by Sara J~dy,NRO Visual Design Center) ~

germ advisory roles. He senred as a key scientific consultant to Program B, and served on the Technology Review Panel of the Senate Select Commi:tee on Intelligence where he was

NRG specid projects. Service to hia r i o d ~ e ~ o ~ ~ d 960-2000 ~ i ~ 5 ~ ~ c ~ :

4s

The Impact of a Public Constituency

It has often been said that war is too important to be left to the generals and that peace is too vital to be left to the politicians. So, too, are matters of nuclear weapons and policy too important to be left to the nuclear-strategy “experts.” In reality, there are no experts on nuclear war. We have never had a nuclear war, and any scientist knows that you must have data before you can become an expert. We do not know how a nuclear war would start, be waged, or finally stopped. No one, including nuclear-strategy “experts,” knows what would be left after such a “war.” What this means is that the public must inform and involve itself actively in the formulation of policy on these issues. This requires public outreach, public education, and active dialogue with our public officials. The record we will explore in this article shows that an informed and active public constituency can have a significant effect in shaping sound policy in highly technical areas that determine our very survival. In the United States, there was no public debate at the time of the fateful decision by President Truman in 1950 to develop the second generation of nuclear weapons-that is, the H-bomb or hydrogen bomb. This was early in the cold-war period, and secrecy was applied broadly. As a result, the public played no role in the decision to move ahead to the megaton-scale H-bomb. The debate within government on whether, and then how, to proceed with work on the H-bomb in response to the first Soviet A-bomb Reprinted from In the Shadow of the Bomb: Physics and Arms Control (Masters of Modem Physics, Vol. 6) (AIP Press, 1993), pp. 191-196., with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media.

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explosion in late summer of 1949 was carried on almost completely under a thick cloak of secrecy. We have no idea whether, in those strained times, an effort to negotiate with the Soviet Union to head off the development of the H-bomb might have succeeded, but we didn’t even try. It was nine years later before a serious initiative on peaceful uses of nuclear energy was made, in 1958, but, by then, it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle, and there was no way to deny the basic scientific reality of the hydrogen bomb. By the early 1960s, the design and building of hydrogen bombs had advanced to a mature technology. The scientists in the nuclearweapons laboratories had become what Lord Zuckerman calls “the alchemists of our time, working in secret ways that cannot be divulged, casting spells which embrace us all.” Testing of H-bombs in the atmosphere continued at a rapid pace through most of the decade of the 1950s, leading to a substantial, worldwide build-up in the level of radioactivity. By 1960, an active and vigorous public constituency around the world had become concerned about this radioactive fallout and its effects on the health of their families and friends. They joined many scientists who understood the weapons in detail to protest continued testing. Scientists could bring a highly informed judgment to bear on the question of how the cessation of nuclear tests in the atmosphere would affect our national security. This was the first important issue of nuclear weapons in which the public in the United States played a major role. Around the same time, some scientists in the USSR, and, in particular, Andrei Sakharov, were also advocating a ban on testing. In the Western world, concerned citizens by the hundreds of thousands applied strong political leverage, while the technical case in support of an atmospheric test ban treaty was presented by concerned scientists. These forces inside and outside of government enhanced one another. Working together, they helped accomplish what may well have been beyond the power of either alone: the Limited Test Ban Treaty signed in 1963 by President Kennedy and General Secretary Khrushchev. By the end of the 1960s, scientists had developed important new weapons technologies that could potentially alter, in a fundamental way, the nuclear forces of the United States and the USSR. One new development was antiballistic missile (ABM) systems, using advanced computers, very high acceleration interceptor missiles, special nuclear warheads, and phased-array radars. The original proposal to deploy ABM systems near large population centers in the United States stirred a major public debate, primarily

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THE IMPACT OF A PUBLIC CONSTITUENCY

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because many people did not want nuclear-tipped missiles located, figuratively, “in their own backyards.” Triggered by these public concerns, the ABM decision became an opportunity for extensive public debate. The halls of Congress and the media became vital educational forums for careful and informed technical analysis of the effectiveness and arms-control implications of the proposed ABM system. Through this unprecedented public debate on a weapons system, Congress came to understand that the proposed ABM system was not going to do what was promised. By 1970, it was clear, on the basis of technical facts alone, that offensive missiles could respond with relative ease to any practical ABM system. Technical arguments for deployment collapsed, and the ABM debate boiled down to its value solely as political leverage for the arms-control talks-its value as a bargaining chip for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). The outcome of this was the successful negotiation with the Soviet Union at SALT I of the ABM Treaty severely limiting deployment of ABM systems. That treaty is currently in force. I consider it to be our most important arms-control achievement to date. At the same time as the ABM debate, however, the United States moved ahead rapidly with the development and deployment of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). The original American justification for MIRVs was that they would penetrate ballistic-missile defenses by overwhelming their defensive firepower with an intense rain of many warheads. They were offered as an insurance policy against Soviet ABM deployments, which had then begun around Moscow. However, when the SALT I treaty of 1972 prohibited the deployment of nationwide ABM defenses, American MIRV programs proceeded full tilt. The new rationale for MIRVs became our alleged need for counterforce-the need to threaten a wide repertoire of Soviet military targets, including their retaliatory forces. MIRVs did not lead to an increase in the visible presence of nuclear weapons. Therefore, in contrast to ABMs, they did not cause a reaction from citizens who wanted no nuclear weapons nearby. In such circumstances, we deployed MIRVs with very little public attention or concern, the USSR responded with its own major buildup of MIRVed forces, and arms control suffered a setback. It is not that there was no opportunity for serious public debate about the pros and cons of MIRVs and their impact on the arms race and our national security. It was simply that there was no specific issue to bring the MIRV decision home to the man in the street and arouse public reaction. Therefore, no U.S. public constituency was created to nurture the cause of arms

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control in opposition to the MIRV. Moreover, the country was becoming increasingly concerned first with Vietnam and then with Watergate. There was also little expressed public interest in the SALT I1 treaty when it came up for ratification by the United States Senate in 1979. The arms-control advocates and a few politicians pitched in and argued mightily. However, there was no public outcry, as there had been at the time of the ABM debate that set the stage for SALT I. The Senate debate on SALT I1 dragged on with little public pressure for ratification. Debate was eventually terminated as a result of the Soviet armies entering Afghanistan and the reaction of the American public to it, making it politically impossible to obtain ratification in the United States. In a reverse way, Afghanistan mobilized public opinion in the West against arms control, which again demonstrates the essential power of public opinion. The original rationale for the United States developing the MX missile was to respond to the buildup of highly MIRVed Soviet ICBMs and to decrease the vulnerability of our land-based missile force, thereby improving deterrence. We sought to base the new ICBM so that it could not be attacked and destroyed. However, the debate in the United States, which was covered in the media much more thoroughly than the original MIRV decision, revealed deep differences of opinion on counterforce versus deterrence, on the effectiveness of the proposed basing scheme, and on its environmental impact. The MX basing plan, as it was originally perceived, is no longer with us. Claims of the survivability and effectiveness of “Densepack,” “Bigbird,” and “Racetrack”-the three schemes with, at one time or another, administration backing-just did not stand up under close technical scrutiny. Today we are deploying only fifty MX missiles, and they have little to do with our security or with deterrence. They are not a major arms-control issue. I see a pattern in this mixed record of the past. The atmospheric test ban treaty and the ABM debate that culminated in SALT I are two major successes in American nuclear-weapons policy. Further, the MX program has been restructured and sharply cut back from the original plans. It is notable that these results were achieved with vigorous and constructive public participation and support. By contrast, the development of the H-bomb and of MIRVs greatly increased the devastating potential and the threat posed by our nuclear weapons. As such, they may be considered failures of our nuclearweapons policy. Although there may have been no feasible alternative

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THE IMPACT OF A PUBLIC CONSTITUENCY

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to developing the H-bomb, we didn’t try to head it off. I find it significant that these technical escalations were undertaken without public involvement or debate, and also without a serious effort at negotiating them away. Another serious setback, after years of negotiating, was the Senate’s failure to ratify the SALT I1 treaty because of a similar lack of an involved public constituency. On March 23, 1983, President Reagan described to the nation his vision of the future in which we are protected against nuclear weapons by a space-age defense, popularly labelled “Star Wars,” and no longer have to live in a balance of terror. We are, therefore, encountering once again major decisions that will determine the course of our nuclearweapons policy until the end of the century and beyond. These decisions present challenges and opportunities to our citizens, scientists, and government. The good news is that this issue is itself not shrouded in secrecy or ignored in the shadows of apathy-to the contrary. In the press, in the churches, in civic organizations, in universities, and in the political arena, a process of education about deterrence has begun in earnest, and nuclear weapons policy is commanding priority attention at this time. There now exists an active and concerned arms-control constituency ready to participate in a national debate that we all should welcome-scientists, government, and citizens alike. As a result of this public-inspired debate, Star Wars is still undergoing tough, critical scrutiny, including in particular its technical prospects and its impact on arms-control progress. And certainly the president, when he gave his speech in 1983, did not expect to find himself in 1987 with only half the money he wanted to get. The public arms-control constituency created during the past few years must continue to grow and prove that it is enduring, informed, constructive, and energetic and that it has a broad political base. To endure, it must have a clear and understandable goal. This means going beyond a freeze, which was an important goal in building a constituency but was inadequate to sustain it. The public must also be informed. It must have a realistic sense that there are no easy, absolute solutions-not in the short term. We must keep working at the issue to make it become part of the public agenda through public education, public outreach, and meetings with our elected officials. We can make sure that public officials know that this is one of the issues on which they are going to be elected or not elected. It is effective to choose a few issues and to be very well informed about them, so that one does not get caught out or discredited as a

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result of using shallow overgeneralizations, and then to hold to those positions like a bulldog. And one should avoid spending all of one’s time in talking with like-minded friends. It is important to spend time reasoning with those who hold opposing views. The public constituency must also be constructive. The attitude must be one that takes other people’s arguments seriously, recognizes that opponents feel deeply about what they believe, and engages in civilized, constructive debate. The public arms-control constituency must be energetic. Every citizen has his or her talents. Consequently, different people are going to be effective in different ways: in the electoral process, through public outreach, or through active research on the issues. Finally, it is important to seek a broad political base-that is, not simply from the left or the right. Support will be required from a broad spectrum of the public. Public involvement in arms-control issues is not only useful, it is essential. We have had no progress without it. Stimulated by the involvement of the public, we negotiated and ratified SALT I. Without it, we ended up with MIRVs and failed to ratify SALT 11.

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S C I E N C E A N D S O C I E T Y : THE TROUBLED F R O N T I E R S i g m a Xi 1995 N a t i o n a l Forum a n d Annual M e e t i n g Research Triangle Park, N o r t h Carolina S i d n e y D. D r e l l S t a n f o r d Linear Accelerator C e n t e r , Stanford University M a r c h 2, 1995

I am honored to receive the John P. McGovern Science and Society Medal and by the invitation to give this lecture. I have a very special affection for Sigma Xi. It presented me with my first ever significant apwaad: election t o associate membership in 1946 during my senior year at Princeton - I presume for my senior thesis work under Johnny Wheeler. At the award banquet I also received a copy of Fritz Zworykin’s treatise on the Electron Microscope. That I soon traded that volume for an advanced theoretical physics text sounds, perhaps, ungracious but it wasn’t by any means. It was simply evidence of the narrow - and properly so focus of a young theoretical physicist’s interests in esoteric fundamental science.

It would be 15 years later, after a turbulent period during which the United States faced some of the most dangerous confrontations of the Cold War, before I would reach out beyond the academic mold of teaching, training and pure research and commit a significant portion of my time and energy to issues where science and society interact strongly. My initial efforts were almost totally concentrated on technical issues of national security and arms control. The challenge of working to help avoid a nuclear holocaust was, and still is, of special significance to the international community of scientists who created the nuclear weapoiis whose very existence poses so grave a danger to our survival. Fundamental decisions of nstioiial security a,re based predomiimntly on political and military assessments but they should - and must - be informed by solid technical understanding. The physica.1 and technical facts are crucial because they help define the range of choices in formulating a practical policy toward reducing nuclear danger and avoiding conflict. For example, it is important to understand how technology and the laws of nature can be applied to increase transparency for monitoring and, hopefully, limiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We must also understand what we can and should be doing to retain a safe and reliable nuclear deterrent as we continue our negotiations to reduce the number of warheads, as well as to ban all nuclear bomb tests as ail aide to our efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. I note tha,t the final review conference on the NPT extension opens next month at the UN in New Yorlc.

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It is no less important to understand that there are practical technical limits that cannot be altered by any effort to achieve strongly desired goals. I am referring here to the periodically renewed quest for nationwide protection against a determined onslaught of long-range nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. Although there are indeed some limited missions for an anti-ballistic missile defense that are realistic and very worth pursuing, there is no contest against a determined offense, given the awesome destructive potential of nuclear warheads, and the variety of means of delivery, including cruise missiles and ships, as well as covert entry. Looking beyond the national security arena, we find that the end of the Cold War has in no way reduced the importance of science as an enabling mechanism for society to be able successfully to address many of its other challenges, be they economic, medical and health, environmental, conservation of limited resources, or over-population. But how unfortunate that today, as these pressing issues emerge from the shadows of the Cold War, we as a nation seem to be growing less interested in science. There is less optimism about its potential, a growing sense of impatience with its prospects, an erosion of public trust in its institutions and integrity, and pressure to cut budgets and programs. I am troubled by emerging government and public attitudes toward science as a luxury, unless it can justify its support by a promise of immediate practical benefits and economic pay-offs. I fear that the likely consequence of such a short term view and gross misunderstanding of the nature and practice of science will be the U.S. forfeiting its mantle of world-wide scientific preeminence. Indeed I view this to be the inevitable consequence unless other societies fall into the same trap with us. Let me give what I find poignant and to me the most compelling evidence that suggests this troubling prospect. I do so not in the sense of whining or looking to find culprits, but rather in search of the remedies to help us meet the challenge ahead of assuring that in the U.S. we make best use of what SStT have to offer our society. My concerns about the future of science in the United States are rooted primarily in the message I am hearing from the young researchers and students who are the critical resource in our nation’s scientific future. It is their voices that sound the alarm; more than the various budget figures, or the noise and heat generated by our internal squabbles that erupt periodically due to shifting balances in scientific priorities between different fields of basic research, or between basic and applied research - or what is now called strategic research. In the wake of the cancellation of the SSC in October 1993, the Secretary of Energy created a panel to help define a, new vision for a. future U.S. High Energy Physics Program. I chaired that panel which worked hard during the first half of 1994 to formulate a challenging, competitive, and fiscally practical iiational prograin in high energy

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physics that would rise as a phoenix out of the ashes of the ruins of a decade of planning for the SSC. The supercollider was a project that the HE community supported with top priority. Many young scientists had bet on it - and committed to it - for their futures. When my panel set to work in January of last year I solicited written input from all members of the particle physics community. In excess of 400 of my colleagues responded to this request - some cynically, some rudely, many thoughtfully - but there was one large segment that touched an especially tender nerve and gave serious root to my concerns. These were the young, newly discouraged and disillusioned cadre of graduate students and post-doctoral research fellows who saw years of their hopes, hard work, and exciting prospects go down the tubes. They questioned their prospects for future careers in science. This discouragement is widespread, and not confined to any one branch of science. It breeds on the decreasing opportunities for scientists - particularly the young - to find the support and the opportunities to spread their wings, and actually do independent research. To the extent that their diminishing prospects, as broadly perceived, deter the best young minds from entering into careers of scientific research we are in trouble, for a strong infusion of the top rank talent is essential to sustaining a strong and productive scientific endeavor as a national resource. Vannevar Bush emphasized the need, and laid out the requisites, for this nation to build and to manage a major league scientific endeavor in his perceptive and pathbreaking report in 1945 to President Truman, entitled (‘Science: the Endless Frontier.” With clear and brilliant insight he presented the design and foundations for the nation’s post-WWII scientific research program, a program that has become the envy of the world.

I reread that superb report in preparing my remarks for tonight. Vannevar Bush’s words ring as true and right on the mark today as they did when he first presented his report 50 years ago this summer. I really have little to add - and I cannot say it any better than he did when he urged this nation, as it built for a post WWII future: “Science, by itself, provides no panacea for individual, social, and economic ills. It can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditioiis be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of acliievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a na.tion in the modern world.” And he went on to caution: Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown. Freedom of inquiry must be preserved under any plan for Government support of science. ..’, ((

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Furthermore Vannevar Bush reminded Washington that research is a difficult and often very slow voyage over unchartered seas - as we here know very well - and therefore, for science to flourish with governmental support, there must be funding stability over a period of years so that long range programs may be undertaken and pursued effectively. The American scientific effort that has developed over the past five decades, following Vannevar Bush’s defining guidance, still remains today the envy of the world. Its achievements and its contributions to the nation and t o people everywhere are a source of great pride and value to this nation. But there is no denying today’s problems. The young - the vital resource for the future - have given us clear warning by their actions and their words. Their concerns present us with a serious challenge, and we who have benefited so much from what grew out of Vannevar Bush’s vision, should respond with 3ur best practical efforts to renew that vision of the endless frontier. To be successful, any such effort must engage the scientific community - i.e. the collective us - jointly with society - i.e. the public and governments on which we rely for support and of which we are a part. We must begin by identifying the root causes of today’s troubles on the frontier of science and society. Here are my four prime candidates for serious concern:

1. The public and our government officials, by and large, do not understand science - how it is done, and what it means to make progress; 2. Science is an engine of change, but it is distressing that society views science with such great suspicion as a source of new hazards and of problems that arise in association with change. This view tends to obscure society’s appreciation of the critical role that science plays as a revolutionary force for improving the human condition.

3. In recent years the idea of a partnership between the scientists and government as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in the management of the nation’s research enterprise has eroded. Increasingly the government has imposed bureaucratic layers of microma.na.geineiit and excessive oversight that have become a detriment to the actual performance of the research.

4. There are serious mismatches between the planning time scale and resource levels used by society and by science in developing future plans. The length of time to train and develop new scientists and to carry through substantive research programs is much longer than the typical duration of government funding plans aad commitments. Here are several examples of how these four prime candidates that I have identified as root causes of today’s problems manifest themselves. There is no

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clearer example of a profound lack of understanding of the scientific process, the nature of scientific hypothesis and evidence, aad the very meaning of scientific progress, than the recurring debate on teaching creationism in the schools. T h e creationist’s argument is couched in such language as “I can’t prove my model and you can’t prove yours.” Absent from such an assertion is any idea of how science amasses evidence, develops and tests hypotheses, generalizes, and makes new predictions t o be confronted by further evidence. Valid models must have an empirical base and offer the possibility of being toppled by new data. There is also a great difference between the image of science in the mind’s eye

of the public at large, and how most science is actually done and makes progress. Aside from the overdrawn figure of a very rare genius like Einstein, the public typically thinks of science in terms of an organized project with an externally set strategic goal of immediate national importance. The standard of success is the building of the atom bomb by the Manhattan Project 50 years ago; or at least of equal importance, if somewhat less sensational, the development of radar at the MIT Rad Lab in World War 11. Those, indeed, were terrific and timely achievements with immensely important consequences. As such they created inflated expectations as well as a false picture of science. The scientific story of the atom bomb has to be understood in terms of the preceding decade’s quiet and profound scientific achievements by the likes of Chadwick, Fermi, Hahn and Strassman, Meitner and Frisch, and Niels Bohr, in their lonely laboratories and studies. Their work was, in Vannevar Bush’s words that I cited earlier: “the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” The legacy of the Manhattan project, and of other similar ventures like the Apollo moon landings, has created inflated expectations and a false picture of what science can do. It has led to today’s call of society to mount an assault on maladies such as cancer and AIDS, with an expectation that the victory will be timely and total. Anything less is viewed to be a failure. There are undesirable consequences of this view of science as a targeted endeavor with externally set agendas t o solve strategic goals. With today’s spending caps the consequences of targeting increased funding in the federal budget on such strategic goals is likely to divert funds from the all important quest of deeper understanding and thereby delay progress. In the examples of cancer and AIDS, the critically important search for a deeper understanding of fundamental cellular processes would most likely be the loser. In addition such targeted assaults on specific illnesses creates false hopes in those who develop unrealistic expectations of being cured. In spite of this we have been hearing a crescendo of goveriiinent voices in

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recent years defining strategic gods and setting the agenda for scientific research. This growing tendency to earmark Congressionally appropriated funds for strategic goals is based on an underlying a,nd totally false assumption that one can program intellectual curiosity and the free play of free iiitellects in exploring the unknown. Baruch Blumberg, Nobel Laureate and discoverer of the hepatitis B virus, which led to a life-saving vaccine now used extensively world-wide, addressed this point in a column that appeared in the Financial Times of London earlier this year. He wrote that he started this research “from a question in basic science without a specific application in mind.” In his opinion, he wrote, this discovery would not have happened as fast, if at all, had he been assigned the task of finding a hepatitis B virus. In a recent commencement address, my distinguished colleague Dr. Lucy Shapiro, Head of the Department of Developmental Biology at the Stanford Medical School spoke to the same point in emphasizing the importance of retaining the focus on basic research: “For exa.mple, drug-resistant pathogenic bacteria, like those which cause tuberculosis, a.re increasing a.t a ra,pid ra.te a.nd the antibiotics that we have used for the past 50 years don’t work any more on these resistant organisms. Our dependence on antibiotics and our coiifidence in rapid cures is jeopardized. This could result in the end of the era of presumptive good health that we have all taken for granted. Today infectious diseases are the leading cause of death in the world. 111 order to combat drug-resistant bacteria, wide-spread viral infections like AIDS, and new virulent strains of viruses and bacteria, we have to have new strategies, and this won’t happen unless we have a profound understanding of ba.sic life proces~es.” The concern I am expressing here is not with the government’s setting long term goals for science and technology, as a.n integral part of its policymaking and budgeting processes. Such long term thinking is important for all of society and should benefit basic research. My concern is strategic goal setting with earmarked funds which will have a stifling effect on the free play of free intellects driven by curiosity. The second prime candidate for serious concern that I identified is the public’s insecurity in the face of scientific progress. The alarm generated amongst the public by the words “nuclear” and “radioactivity” is a good example of the highly exaggerated suspicions and fears of new risks and hazards being generated by scientific progress. The “shiver reaction” to the word nuclear has led the medical profession to label its new and enormously valuable diagnostic tool for taking the most precise pictures of what is going on inside our bodies by noninvasive means as Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI. We all lmow of course that the basic scientific process

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in this instrument is nuclear magnetic resonance, a process first understood in t h e study of nuclear physics more than 50 years ago and measured shortly after World War I1 b y Felix Bloch and Edwin Purcell. We can bury the word “nuclear” in MRI and that technique is generally trusted and highly appreciated for its far-reaching health benefits. The same holds true for CAT scans. However we cannot avoid t h e use of nuclear in connection with nuclear reactors for civilian power. As a result of exaggerated, and sometimes false, claims of the risks, the industry to build this cleanest and safest source of electrical energy has ground to a halt in this country. This in spite of the fact that nuclear power is the only well-developed and proven alternative to carbon dioxide polluting fossil fuels that sooner or later will enhance a greenhouse effect on earth. The same goes for radioactivity and nuclear radiation more generally, although radiation therapy is a crucial weapon against cancer. Your distinguished McGovern lecturer two years ago, Dr. J. Michael Bishop, noted that concern about radioactivity has created an immensely costly challenge t o the ability of the University of California at San Francisco just t o continue biomedical research in the residential area where it is now located. Turning next to my third prime area of concern about the growing burdens of bureaucracy, there is strong testimony to this problem in the recently released report of the Galvin Task Force, entitled “Alternative Futures for the Department of Energy National Laboratories.” It presents a scathing indictment of how counterproductive the government’s micromanagement and excessive oversight of the DOE’S great national laboratories has become in recent years. The Task Force properly recognized the outstanding quality of R & D being done, but also expressed serious concerns, as in this quote from their overview of laboratory governance: “The Task Force observed multiple symptoms of institutional stress at the national laboratories, including the following: Increasing overhead cost, poor morale and gross inefficiencies as a result of overly prescriptive Congressional management and excessive oversight by the Department ; Inordinate internal focus at every level of these laboratories on compliance issues and questions of management processes, which takes a major toll on research performance;. ..’’ High-energy physics offers an extreme exa.mple of the fourth prime candidate for serious concern that I raised; that is the mismatch between the scientists’ and the government’s resource a.ssuniptions and planning time scales. Between 1990 and 1995, optimism in preparing for research at the superconducting supercollider,

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that is the SSC, being built in Texas, led to an increase of roughly 10% in the number of experimental groups supported by the Department of Energy in highenergy physics. But now, in the aftermath of the cancellation of the SSC in late 1993, there is roughly 8% less total funding for the field than there was in 1990 in terms of dollars with constant buying power. In addition, on top of this squeeze, we lost substantial funds that were supporting physicists employed a t the SSC Laboratory. Understandably this sequence has generated much discouragement and disillusion among the new generation of young physicists about their prospects of being able to build research careers and find opportunities to fulfill their dreams of scientific exploration and achievement in high energy physics. Evidence of a strong government commitment t o reverse this trend and support a stable long term research program with predictable funding levels will be needed to restore the faith of these young people. Here is another example of a serious problem due to a large difference between resource assumptions underlying scientists’ plans and those used by the government in setting support levels. As reported in the series of three excellent articles on American science by Boyce Rensberger in the Washington Post this past December, the ranks of university-based scientists supported by federal grants has been growing a t a steady rate over the last decade a t 5.7% a year. That is 2 - l / 2 times faster than the U.S. work force as a whole. The situation is particularly acute in medical science where the growth has been 10 times faster than the overall work force. Against this pattern of growth the federal funding for science in constant value dollars has to a vei-y good approximation been flat since 1987. This has evidently created a glut of applications for support, an especially serious problem for the younger scientists looking for a first grant to begin their research careers. Such examples show how important it is, both to avoid mismatches in anticipated vs. realistic funding levels, and also to maintain a stable predictability in the support for long-term research programs. Without such predictability, efficient research plans go by the boards. Program starts and stops in response to unplanned funding changes from year to year lead to wasted effort. And when the time from the initial idea to completion of an experimental research program stretches out to a good fraction of the productive lifetime of a young scientist, we can expect nothing less than the defection of some of the younger generation’s best talent to other more promising careers. Now comes the hard part. Having defined our problem - what can and should we do to solve it? In theoretical physics it is frequently said that the key, the most difficult step, to making progress, is being able to ask the right question, or to properly define the right problem. I find - and I always have found - the situation

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to be very different when facing social or political issues. It is just the opposite. For these, the hardest part is finding solutions - which is why Einstein was as usual right when he said “Politics is much harder than physics.” One common theme runs through the first two concerns I have raised. In society’s lack of understanding of science and how it is done, and its concerns about risks and hazards that scientific progress purportedly generates, I see a common theme: science simply has not entered our culture. By and large the society and government we rely on for support is scientifically illiterate. And that is a situation for us to correct - not only in our self interest, but more so in our nation’s and society’s interest. Science and technology are so essential a part of modern day life that scientific literacy is assuming an importance comparable t o the ability to read and write - which are the more familiar domain of literacy. It belongs in the core of the education curriculum no less than reading, writing, and arithmetic - and not just to train scientists, any more than English courses should focus on training professional writers. Our challenge is to prepare a broad student community to function and contribute as informed citizens equipped to cope with the choices and make important decisioiis that will shape the quality of the human condition as we enter the 21st century. And education does not take place only in the classroom. We must also make use of a wide range of effective outreach channels - both printed and electronic - to reach a larger public.

I realize I am not saying anything new, and that many in this very audience have done more and better than I have in addressing this need. Never mind. I salute you, but we must do better and, in particular, give special attention to informing citizens to appreciate what science is and how it is done, so that they will then be able to participate in civic affairs with a basic understanding of the process and concepts of science. That is what one means by scientific literacy! And no one else can do it for us. Just as life has become increasingly difficult in modern society for illiterate people who cannot read or write, American citizens are increasingly being confronted with choices for which a basic understanding of science - its potential, its limits, and its process and ways of thinking - is necessary in order to make informed decisions. In the recently published report “On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research” by our National Academy* it was estimated that nearly one-half the bills before Congress have significant scientific or technical components. -

Evidence of the enormous impact of modern science on society is plain to see from the development of nuclear weapons and energy that grew out of study of

* Committee

011 Science, Engineering, and Public Policy of the National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine: 1995

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nuclear physics to the development of recombinant DNA that grew out of investigations of certain bacterial enzymes. Those facts need no rehearsing or repeating. What I am emphasizing is our self-interest, beyond our responsibility as scientists, to help see to it that the concepts and processes of science enter our culture and become ingrained in it. The better the citizens and the officials on whom we rely for our essential support are educated and trained to understand the nature of process and progress in basic scientific research, the better will be our prospects for restoring a more productive mutual partnership with our society and government. That statement is not mere wishful thinking. It is a basic axiom of enlightenment. One consequence of such education should be a better understanding of the fact that none of us the public, government officials, nor we scientists - are wise enough to know how best to mount a directed attack on a strakegic goal to defeat this or that disease, or t o create this or that new technology as our strategic goal. Our best weapon for making leaps of progress of major significance is the free play of strong intellects exercising their curiosity. This is what I have in mind when I advocate ensuring that science enters into our culture. And in any effort to bring this about we should make use of one of

our most powerful allies, namely industry. Advanced technology-based industry understands our mutual dependence just as well as we do. We rely on the latest technologies to advance our experimental capabilities, and we can speed up the technical applications of scientific progress by working closely together with industry. From their perspective technology-based industry understands the limitations of basic research that is narrowly targeted to achieve specific technological advances, and recognizes its own dependence on scientific progress. Who could have predicted that the development of quantum mechanics to explain the behavior of atoms in the 1920s would have a crucial role to play, decades later, in the development of the transistor, the semiconductor, and the highly miniaturized nanotechnologies of the future? In 1911, when the phenomenon of superconductivity was discovered, who would have anticipated the benefits to basic and applied science and technology, and to medicine, of the innovative technologies it would make possible half a century later? And think of the enormous growth of the biotechnology industry and the new potential for treating diseases that is a direct consequence of the discovery of the genetic basis of life in the DNA and RNA and recent progress mapping the huma.n genome.

I also believe a good dose of scientific literacy - and I have in mind particularly statistical literacy - is a critical antidote to counter the severe allergy to any risk, no matter how small, that may accompany new technical applications spawned by progress in science. Progress here will be particularly difficult. It is not just a

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problem of creating a society of citizens and leaders who are much more literate on scientific and statistical matters. We also have to overcome a legacy of distrust because of previous occasions on which the public has concluded, not entirely without cause, that it has been treated by government officials and scientists working both in and out of government with less than full candor. And there are few things that are more difficult to recover in a democratic society than lost credibility. We entered the nuclear age with assurances that there were no dangers of fallout from nuclear tests in the atmosphere. This claim was made by the same officials whose dual, and often conflicting, responsibilities were to develop our nuclear arsenal, in support of which hundreds of tests were performed that introduced radioactivity into our atmosphere, and, simultaneously, to ensure our safety from harmful fallout. Only after 18 years, and much world-wide popular protest, together with mounting evidence that the assurances of safety were exaggerated, did atmospheric testing cease. The danger t o health and limb may not have been large, given the natural background exposures in everyday life, but memories of the hyperbole in the original claims still linger. And for many located nearby and downwind from the test areas, the damage was very real. During the past year much more information about experiments involving humans exposed to controlled doses of radioactivity has been made public by the Clinton Administration. It may be true that most exposures were voluntary and based on contemporary medical practice. We knew much less then about effects of radiation - I well remember insisting on buying shoes at those stores with x-ray machines which showed me the bones in my feet and toes. But a limited number of experiments admittedly were also involuntary and more conjectural. Such actions have left a residue of distrust that further complicates the task of improving the understanding of what kinds and levels of risks, if any, are involved in scientific activities that touch the public. And this difficulty affects all realms of science today - even to the extent that fear and opposition are encountered to processes that scientifically are well understood to be totally harmless. For instance we still hear concerns and public opposition to keeping tomatoes from rotting in the stores, simply by mutating a specific gene in them. This change prevents the gene from making the enzyme that breaks down the material of tomatoes. We have two important weapons against such science-induced anxieties:

1. Education - to create a scientifically literate population that can bring a reasoned and informed judgment to bear on issues on the frontier between science and society. These issues include resources in support of basic science, and formulating regulations governing its activities so as to permit its maximum benefits to be realized while at the same time giving confidence that the public will not be exposed to unacceptable hazards or unreasonable

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risks.

2. Trust - the sina qua non for building a productive dialogue between scientists and the public and political leaders whose cooperation and support are so essential to our sustained scientific progress. In these dealings, as within science itself, hyperbole and arrogance are no substitutes for credibility based on accuracy and moderation in our promises of progress and claims of success. It is imperative that we bring to the political and public process the same total integrity and high scientific standards that we demand in our laboratories. That is the bedrock for a relationship of trust.

M y prescription here is neither tough nor original. It calls for putting more energy into reaching out to society by every possible means to improve scientific literacy. We must, in particular, figure out how to reach students who are not planning to be scientists, or engineers, or doctors. I think that there is an important role for prestigious national scientific organizations, like Sigma Xi, in enhancing scientific literacy and strengthening the bonds of trust between the scientific community and society. With respect to the third concern I raised about excessive government interference, I welcome the way the report of the Galvin Task Force has taken that issue head on. We need to remind ourselves that U.S. government management of scientific research and laboratories as government-owned, contractor-operated, or GOCO, entities worked superbly for many years. It was admirably enlightened, efficient, and flexible. I hope that actions taken in response to the criticisms made in the Galvin report will contribute to restoring that productive partnership. I a m encouraged that Secretary of Energy Hazel 0 ’Leary immediately responded t o the report by agreeing to its indictment that DOE’S management of the laboratories has become excessively costly, bureaucratic, and inefficient , and committing her department to an urgent effort to fix the problem. It is not just the DOE laboratories that need such a fix. For its part the scientific community must demonstrate and maintain a quality of leadership and responsibility in managing our affairs that will satisfy the government that there is no need for it to impose excessive oversight on management regulations. Finally, I turn to the fourth concern that I raised: the mismatch between the scientists and the government’s planning time scales. Multi-year budget cycles in the Congress and the effective setting and holding to long term planning goals would be of enormous importa.nce. I have nothing to add to the extensive and thoughtful discussion of such prospects except my hope that an improved scientific literacy in our culture will make them more realistic and less fanciful than in the past. I am more concerned about wha,t we scientists ourselves should be doing to better match our long term research plans and priorities with realistic funding

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prospects. By doing better on this score, we will be able to manage our programs more successfully and efficiently. We will also be able to provide more realistic, as well as promising, research opportunities for bright young students who plan t o pursue careers in science. The public treasury cannot and will not support all our dearest research dreams, and we must face up to the task of setting priorities throughout all science. Making such choices can be very difficult and hard on collegial relationships, but the examples I cited earlier show there is need for improvement in how we plan. The alternative of leaving priority decisions exclusively to the political process without our strong guidance is certainly worse. For almost thirty years high energy physicists have relied on so-called HEPAP prodess, i .e. the High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel to develop scientific priorities for the U.S. program within funding guidelines from Washington. The process created and sustained a community wide consensus - or at least a working covenant. It had a high batting average of success up until the demise of the SSC. We achieved this by providing a process and a forum that was credible in the eyes of both the scientific community and the program managers and funding agencies in government. With respect to the SSC we ran into some unique difficulties, due in part to its enormous size and cost, and we suffered a major failure. We lost credibility in the eyes of the public for a variety of reasons, some of our own doing, but none due t o technical failures. Costs rose and conflicted with other national needs at a time of economic difficulties. In my own mind, our failure to undertake the SSC as a truly international project at the outset was decisive. But rather than discuss the SSC, I want to emphasize that over this past year, with the help of the HEPAP mechanism, we have succeeded in reestablishing a vision for our future. And it is one that has received strong support in Washington, at least in these very early days of putting together the budget for the coming year in Congress, because of its modest budgetary assumptions. The strong program that has been proposed cuts new ground with its call for a greater involvement in international collaboration. This is quite appropriate. As our scientific instruments have grown so large and expensive, it is essential as well as scientifically advanta,geous to collaborate more broadly in the future in the actual building as well as utilizing of international facilities. National advisory mechanisms like HEPAP are of great value for the task of setting priorities in individual fields of science. They may take different forms in the various scientific disciplines, but I will emphasize one aspect of my experience last year with the panel to put back the pieces of the high energy program and develop a practical post-SSC vision. I insisted that the majority of the panel members be active young tigers on their way up with a strong track record and

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building for their own long term futures. They were terrific - resourceful, energetic, imaginative, and committed. That was a great choice, one that I highly recommend for similar undertakings in the future. Looking ahead, and particularly with the current budget cutting mood in Washington, I believe that we will have to face up to the need to do more in setting priorities, including between broadly different fields of science. That will not be our responsibility alone, but the better our guidance the more likely it is that sensible priorities will be set. This calls for consensus and coalition building with colleagues in diverse fields of science working together with sensitivity to our mutual concerns and needs. Nothing gives Washington a better excuse t o look away from our needs than conflicting views and intensive warfare on priorities. That was one of the lessons to draw from the debate over the SSC. We should recognize our rich and profound interdependence as equal partners with the technical industrial community. There is too high a prestige, or success, factor associated with students being cloned for academia in the image of their mentors. In our training and tutoring we should emphasize a career vista that is more broadly rich. At least in some realms of science this calls for a change in our cultures - or at least a modification in behavior.

I have described major challenges, as I see them, that we are facing on the troubled frontier of science and society. Both scientists and the nation have a lot riding on our success in meeting this challenge. Every American can take justifiable pride in the contribution that science in the United States has made to our country and to humanity. Throughout history we have learned that improved productivity, economic vitality, and strengthened national security have accompanied scientific progress in comprehending the world and nature around us. This message was the fundamental theme of Vannevar Bush in his wonderful report. It is also our legacy as scientists to future generations.

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T O ACT OR NOT T O ACT

fl Have Accepted the Obligation to Try to

He& the Government Functiofl’

Dear Professor Burhop: I a m responding to your letter of April 11 describing views and concerns expressed at the last meeting of the Bureau of the World Federation of Scientific Workers with reference to participation by U.S. scientists in military activities of our government, I n particular y o u ask of those who “have participated in the work of the Jason committee . . . how they felt it is possible to justify their actions t o their consciences.” Your letter poses a serious issue and deserves, I believe, a serious response. I think all men of conscience and intelligence face obligations associated with their knowledge and its potential effects o n fellow citizens throughout the world. Some may choose to act solely through their scientific teachings and writings, others through their involvement with their governments, and still others through international organizations seeking to promote better human conditions. For myself, I have chosen a course which, inter alia, includes substantial efforts to affect i n whatever way I can the policies of the United States through various scientific and technical advisory and working mechanisms. I do this out of the conviction that it is generally an unhealthy situation for a society when its leaders are split into two camps: the intellectual-scientist critics o n the outside and the governmental decision-makers on the inside. Since I live in a country in which I a m privileged to have the opportunity to choose m y government representatives, I have accepted the obligation to try to help the government function. T o be sure I fully recognize that there are many parts o f this (or any other) government that are engaged i n many diverse activities. I n some areas of governmental policy I work publicly through the political processes. I n other problem areas I apply m y technical expertise through various official channels within the government. I n m y personal efforts as a scientist working with m y government I have been, and fully expect that I will continue to be, guided by my conscience and by basic principles as I see them. At the forefront of these I attach overriding importance to working for peace, for reduced human suffering, and for improved conditions of free human expression as well as survival through0 u t the world.

W e all recognize that scientists and all intellectuals in the different countries around the world are faced with problems and issues deriving from their governments’ policies and activities. I n some instances there may be full support for these policies; whereas i n others there may be a basic feeling of their error. I n each case i t is each individual’s choice whether, or how, to involve himself in the functioning of his government when and if the opportunity is made available t o him. As a scientific community we are inevitably divided by such activities because present political realities dictate that not all such work can enjoy the full and open exchange of ideas as well as the public scrutiny that is traditional and cherished in our purely scientific world. I hope your conference will discuss broader aspects of the issues you raise and will not simply focus narrowly on Vietnam and U.S. scientists. Do you wish to oppose all involvement of scientists in their country’s military programs, whether it be atmospheric nuclear testing as now carried out by France and the Chinese People’s Republic, or strategic missile developments leading to more deadly and/or safer weapons, or “national technical means” for making possible arms limitation agreements that can be verified? Do you think scientists are more pure if they adopt a hands off attitude than if they try to guide or influence the direction of military policy? Do you wish to propose an official organizational stamp of approval or disapproval upon a scientist’s activities that is to be given a higher moral value or force than an individual‘s own conscience and values? Do you think you can unambiguously define good and bad activities? I for one feel no need nor desire for any such official political guidance! I also have confidence and faith in most o f m y colleagues in the worldwide scientific and intellectual community and I certainly assume, unless faced with evidence to the contrary, that they are guided by general principles concordant with those I have expressed above. Sincerely yours, Sidney D. Drdl Sidney D. Drell is professor of physics at Stanford University in California and deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. His letter is reprinted here with his permission.

Reprinted with permission from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: The Magazine of Global Security, Science, and Survival, November 1974, p. 6. Copyright (1974) by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Chicago, IL 60637.

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Chapter I1

Issues Coming to the Fore Immediately Following the Collapse of the Soviet Union and the End of the Cold War

With the collapse of the Soviet Union we entered the post-Cold War era. This brought to the fore new diplomatic opportunities for walking away from the brink of catastrophic nuclear war. Most importantly they included the 1991 initiatives by Presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev to remove most of the tactical, or short-range, nuclear forces, and to reduce the size of the strategic nuclear arsenals. Interest was renewed in the proposals at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit to do away with all strategic ballistic missiles, or "fast fliers" as President Reagan called them, so that there would be no need for hair-trigger response in time of crisis. There were also renewed calls for an end to all underground nuclear explosive tests and negotiation of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. These issues are addressed in this chapter in four essays. The first essay, "Science and National Security,'' covers the broad landscape of these possibilities and provides a framework for the essays that follow. It is a major part of my closing address at the 1991 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that was included in my previous book "In the Shadow of the Bomb." The second essay is my testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March 1992 on The Future of Arms Control. I discuss the importance of reductions in strategic forces and the opportunities to accomplish them now that the Cold War was over. I also elaborate on the role of ballistic missile defenses in the new era of arms reductions. The third essay, published in Issues In Science and Technology (National Academy of Sciences; Spring 1992), is an elaboration of the idea presented by President Reagan at Reykjavik to ban all long-range ballistic missiles. The deal came close to being made, but foundered when the negotiations on restricting ABM systems stalled on the word "laboratory." Nevertheless it offers an attractive option for removing the concern of serious mistakes being made under the pressure for a hair-trigger response. President Reagan's proposal is being pursued once again today with renewed vigor. The fourth essay is an article published in Foreign Afaivs (spring 1993) co-authored with McGeorge Bundy and Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr. on the range of steps that would contribute to reducing nuclear danger. This essay is abstracted from a book by the same authors with the title: "Reducing Nuclear Danger: The Path Away from the Brink that was published in 1993 by the Council on Foreign Relations. It covers a broad range of initiatives that expand the political dialogue and reduce the nuclear arsenals and activities.

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Science and National Security Adapted f r o m the concluding address to the 6th Annual American Association f o r the Advancement of Science Colloquium on Science and Security, Washington, D . C . , November 22, 1991

My talk was given a prescient title by the organizers of this program. It has the virtue of allowing me to talk about pretty much anything on my mind. I am grateful for that because any more specific title that might have been proposed several months ago would very likely have been somewhat overtaken by events, particularly following the speech of President Bush on September 27 and the October 5 response by President Gorbachev. We now have a constructive dialogue between the United States and the fragmented Soviet Union. The United Nations proved that it could play a constructive political role following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, now that it is no longer split by Cold War confrontations between the East and the West. The START I treaty has been signed. And, best of all, we have the Bush and Gorbachev initiatives of September 27 and October 5 , respectively. I consider those two speeches a turning point in the U.S.-Soviet nuclear confrontation-the best news on that front since we started living under the nuclear threat following Hiroshima. They accomplished four big things. First, they dramatically reduced the role of the less-than-strategic weapons, giving promise that, in Europe, the reduced ground forces on all sides will be free of nuclear weapons, as will the worldwide naval forces for all but the strategic submarines with their ballistic missiles. The weapons being retired include the ones that have presented the largest difficulties in safety and in command and control. They are among the oldest, technically the most primitive and most accident prone in the arsenal, and they present the greatest dangers of unauthorized dispersion. The Soviets in particular have deployed many thousands of nuclear warheads in this short-range class throughout their republics. Their elimination will greatly relieve worldwide concerns that these weapons, with their deadly nuclear material, may fall into the hands of dissidents or terrorists or may actually be used in civil strife. Second, both leaders reduced the alertness of strategic forces, moving further away from postures that presented the possibility of sudden Reprinted from In the Shadow of the Bomb: Physics and Arms Control (Masters o f Modem Physics, Vol. 6)(AIP Press, 1993),pp. 326-333., with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media.

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attack. Along with this, they also accelerated reductions in the numbers mandated b y the START treaty. Third, by announcing unilateral steps, the leaders set a precedent for a new and more flexible process of arms control to serve as a companion to the increasingly cumbersome negotiations of formal treaties. Nothing remotely like President Bush’s announcement would have been conceivable even three years earlier. The value of that announcement has, of course, been greatly increased by the rapidity and range of President Gorbachev’s response. The differences of emphasis in the two statements are peripheral and much less important than the large degree of their overlap. They indeed reinforce each other. Both countries have now opened the path to arms reductions by reciprocal unilateral actions to join the more developed one of increasingly complex bilateral agreements. These new initiatives mark progress much larger than was expected by any one outside the circle of decision. Above anything else, this shows how much the old rules have changed for the good in the US.-Soviet basic nuclear relationship. And fourth-and perhaps the most important of all as we look ahead-the courageous and broad decisions by both leaders reflect and reinforce in both countries a growing public judgment that our two countries, the Soviet Union and the United States, are and should be much less adversarial as we face our common problems in the twentyfirst century. Much, of course, remains to be done. A speech marks a turning point, not the end of the road. President Bush, for example, proposed an important new negotiating agenda, including a new initiative to enter into detailed technical discussions of cooperative measures to improve command and control of nuclear weapons and to enhance their physical security. Technical information that we share with the Soviets on improving command and control and weapons safety will enhance our safety since we are the most likely targets of an accidental or unauthorized missile launch from the Soviet Union or one of their submarines. The president’s agenda also includes negotiating verifiable means of dismantling nuclear warheads as the United States and Soviet Union begin to actually reduce the number of warheads in our excessively large stockpiles. That, too, will be a most important first. However, I want to focus on a different theme here, and that is, What can science do to contribute to better security during the corning years, in view of the new developments on the political scene? The most threatening new development we face comes from the proliferation of the technology for building and delivering weapons of

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PROSPECTS AFTER THE COLD WAR

mass destruction. In particular, I refer to nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles. The recent discoveries of how extensive and advanced were the Iraqi programs toward building nuclear weapons provided a rude wake-up call on the imminence of the danger of nuclear proliferation. The challenge to counter or slow the pace of proliferation is one with many complex political dimensions, and it calls for devising the right mix of carrots and sticks-both economic and political-to provide incentives to discourage new countries from entering the nuclear club. Some will no doubt go nuclear for whatever regional or ideological reasons, but it will surely remain in the highest interest of the more developed and wealthier nations of the world to preserve the 46-yearold tradition of not using nuclear weapons. If that tradition goes, we will have the most to lose. The very successful application of technology in the Persian Gulf War showed one valuable contribution of science and technology to strengthening this tradition of avoiding the use of nuclear weapons. The development of high-tech, precision-guided munitions, together with timely information and total awareness of events on the battlefield, served two important roles in this regard. First, there was no need for the greater fire power of even the smallest nuclear weapons that some would urge us to develop in order to make them “more usable.” After all, against a localized hard military target, a factor of 10 in the improvement of accuracy is worth about a factor of 1000from ton to kiloton-in bomb yield. But have no doubt about how great are the dangers of further escalation to higher yield, once the nuclear threshold has been crossed. And, second, although the U.S. nuclear arsenal failed to deter Saddam Hussein, the effectiveness of our conventional forces, enhanced so substantially by the high-technology sensors and precision guidance, should greatly raise the stakes for the next would-be agressor. Our forces will continue to need the best that technology has to offer, so long as the world we inhabit remains peopled by nations that still see the image of an enemy in one another. Furthermore, the United States, with its global interest and responsibilities, will continue to require better sensors and communications to maintain an awareness of developments around the world, even as we reduce our reliance on overseas bases. This, by the way, is more than a technical challenge, because the product we seek is understanding-and that also requires good education, knowledge of languages, and familiarity with many cultures. One may hope that, in the future, with better global awareness, we shall be able to pick up earlier and more accurate signals of

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proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Without question, it will require a strong scientific community and a technical R&D base to undergird these activities. Let me turn to another challenge for science. In a world with new nuclear countries that may be less deterred by our nuclear weapons than was our Cold War adversary, we may find that a better case can be made for limited defenses against accidents or primitive missile attacks. To prepare for an informed policy choice, we must rely on the research-and-developmentcommunity to learn the best possible opportunities for, as well as the realistic limitations on, ballistic-missile defense. We can hope that this is what we will now learn from the new R&D program on ballistic-missile defense, which has changed from its initial unrealistic goal of a nationwide “astrodome defense” to a more achievable one of Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS). The United States and the Soviet Union understandably share a desire to improve their security against the threat posed by one or a few ballistic missiles, whether launched accidentally against each other’s homeland or launched by another country with a newly emerging, relatively primitive system. How to do this-or even whether the potential threat warrants deploying an expensive system-has yet to be decided. Any decision must be based on a realistic assessment of the available technologies, as well as on the impact of such deployments on our security, on the stability of the nuclear-deterrent balance, and on prospects of further arms reductions. If these questions are addressed in the same spirit of cooperation and of shared mutual interests that set the tone of President Bush’s speech on September 27, there is good reason to be optimistic about the prospects of making welcome progress on this issue.

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Very much has been written or said about both the requirements for, and the tensions between, deterrence and ballistic-missile defenses. I have nothing to add to that long record, but I would rather step back and take a deep plunge here, looking further ahead with the question whether the United States, the Soviet Union, and the world in toto might not now be ready for what President Reagan proposed at Reyjkavik five years ago, and that is to reduce all ballistic missilesthe “fast fliers”-to zero. Removing the ballistic-missile force would not eliminate the capacity for nuclear offensive actions. Rather, it would put a greater burden on the strategic-bomber force, which has the dual advantages of being recallable in the event of accident or misunderstanding and of being many hours rather than minutes away from delivering its deadly devestation. With bombers, we would no longer be living a mere 20-30 minutes away from nuclear obliteration. Not only do the strategic bombers take many hours to reach their targets, they can be removed from an armed, alert posture-a step recently implemented by both President Bush and President Gorbachev-thereby further lengthening the time interval to catastrophe. Moreover, with modern technology that has already been developed and demonstrated, one can have the necessary confidence in the effectiveness of a long-range bomber with accurate and stealthy stand-off cruise missiles (ALCMs) armed with nuclear warheads. A U.S. proposal to eliminate all offensive ballistic missiles was first presented by President Reagan at the Reyjavik Summit in October 1986. Embraced by President Gorbachev, it eventually foundered on the difference between the U.S. and Soviet positions on SDIparticularly the Soviet misguided insistance to limit all SDI research, development, and testing to the “laboratory.” Speaking at the University of Chicago on November 17, 1986, Secretary of State George Shultz stated the argument for zero ballistic missiles forcefully:

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33 1

In such circumstances, both the United States and the Soviet Union would lose the capability provided by ballistic missiles to deliver large numbers of nuclear weapons on each others’ homelands in less than 30 minutes time. But Western strategy is, in fact, defensive in nature, built upon the pledge that we will only use our weapons, nuclear and conventional, in self-defense. Therefore, the loss of this quick kill capability-so suited to preemptive attack-will ease fears of a disarming first strike. The nuclear forces remaining-aircraft and cruise missileswould be far less useful for first-strike attacks but would be more appropriate for retaliation. They would be more flexible in use than ballistic missiles. The slower flying aircraft can be recalled after launch. They can be re-targeted in flight. They can be reused for several missions. And he concluded that they “would be capable of fulfilling the requirements of the Western alliance’s deterrent strategy.” Any consideration of total elimination of ballistic missiles-or even of their deep reductions-has to start by answering the hard questions, such as, What are our targeting requirements? What if any risks do such reductions present? How do we get there from today’s force structure? Our requirements and risks have been analyzed thoroughly in the context of a U.S.-Soviet Cold War confrontation. The result is the current triad of ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers-and the not altogether comfortable acceptance of living less than 30 minutes from oblivion. New factors emerging in the post-Cold War era may radically change that conclusion. A new analysis is called for that fully incorporates the sweeping worldwide political changes of the past few years. Targeting requirements have diminished considerably with the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Conventional Forces in Europe negotiation of balanced limits on conventional forces at greatly reduced strengths. These developments have muted arguments for extended deterrence against a massive conventional attack, and, in fact, we are now removing the battlefield nuclear weapons and have substantially reduced the number of targets in our Single Integrated Operating Plan. Correspondingly reduced is the need for “time-urgent counterforce,” which requires the capabilities of fast-flying, accurate ballistic missiles in contrast to slow-flying, ALCM-loaded bombers. Another factor is cost. At greatly reduced levels of deployment of

14

332

PROSPECTS AFTER THE COLD WAR

the strategic offensive forces, the cost differential between missile and bomber forces will decrease in importance for two reasons. The first is that the total costs will be less; the second is that, as we continue to lower the degree of fractionation of the missile payload enroute to de-MIRVing the missiles, the difference in cost per deliverable warhead between bomber and missile payloads will also decrease, especially if we insist on mobility in order to retain invulnerability of land-based as well as sea-based missiles. Moreover, it should be practical to maintain confidence in the safety, security, and survivability of a dispersed bomber force. In particular, no direct Soviet threat to such a force would exist with no ballistic missiles or nuclear-armed SLCMs, which Presidents Bush and Gorbachev also proposed to remove in their initiatives. Confidence in the bombers’ survivability would be a most critical requirement before going this route, as would be the most careful technical and operational analysis for assessing risks to their survivability. There would be no concerns about SDI deployments and their threat to stability if there were no offensive ballistic missiles. Any country could choose its own unilateral or cooperative path for deploying defenses against shorter-range ballistic missiles as insurance against hostile neighbors. Peaceful cooperation in space would become a reality. I give great importance to building a world order that, if free of U.S.-Soviet confrontation, is also as free as possible of nations retaining any “quick-kill capability” for nuclear attack at long range. It is generally assumed that, early in the next century, a dozen or more countries will have the capability of delivering weapons of mass destruction over very long distances-up to intercontinental range. It is certainly in our interest to avoid such a threat to the U.S. homeland if at all possible. It is axiomatic that the ability to head off the deployment of such weapons by political means will be considerably enhanced if all nations are willing to forego them. Although recent experience with Iraq illustrates the difficulty in verifying how far a country can move covertly toward a nuclear capability, long-range ballistic missiles are large and their testing and deployment is impossible to hide from “national technical means” of detection. It will undoubtedly be a very difficult challenge to remove all longrange ballistic missiles. Although this proposal seemed all too visionary when President Reagan first proposed it in 1986, it now seems to be more realistic in the aftermath of the Cold War-and also more compelling under the threat of proliferation. Such a proposal as this

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333

faces primarily political obstacles, but meanwhile science and technology should give a serious look at how to get us more than 20 to 30 minutes away from potential obliteration. It would require worldwide assurance of treaty compliance and of attack warning-capabilities we already demonstrate pretty well technically. More openness would also be important-such as open skies, the more-than-35-year-old Eisenhower proposal recently agreed to by the Russians-but, beyond that, more openness and less obsessive secrecy in all matters nuclear. Such secrecy does harm to the process of policy-making, and by now there are few real secrets to protect. It may not be a near-term goal-but a world free of long-range, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles is surely an eminently worthwhile goal to strive for. It should serve for us as the distant star of Robert Frost, “to stay our minds on and be staid.”

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Testimony on The F u t u r e of Arms Control before T h e Senate Foreign Relations C o m m i t t e e March 3, 1992 Sidney D. Drell With the end of the Cold War, and indeed of the Soviet Union itself, we are witnesses t o momentous changes in the world’s political and strategic balance. These changes have triggered spectacular developments in arms control as confrontation and stalemate have transformed to cooperation and a dizzying pace of progress. The treaty reducing conventional forces in Europe (CFE) was signed on November 19, 1990 after more than two decades of negotiating effort. It balances the conventional forces on the European continent at a greatly reduced level and, together with the freeing of the countries of eastern Europe, removes any threat of a major attack from the east against western Europe. Less than a year ago, on July 31, 1991, the START Treaty was signed in Moscow almost ten years after the start of negotiations to reduce the strategic nuclear forces. START represents important progress. Its prompt ratification and implementation are in the security interests of the United States. Among its major accomplishments I mention three: 1. It reduces the nuclear attack potential. In particular the number of the most threatening warheads on ballistic missiles is cut in half and their aggregate throw weight is cut by almost a factor of 2 below the current total of the former Soviet Union. 2. It contains incentives for both nations preferentially to reduce the numbers of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) carried on ballistic missiles. Its provisions will result in a more balanced mix of forces less capable of threatening a first strike, especially by the forces of the former Soviet Union. 3. It institutionalizes unprecedented cooperative verification measures. Its carefully crafted provisions not only meet the requirements for verifying compliance with the Treaty’s numerical limits and operational restrictions, they also guard against using verification procedures as intelligence fishing expeditions. The greatly increased transparency in military activities that is achieved by the verification regime created by START is more important than ever for the United States as we view the political uncertainty and chaos in the former Soviet Union. Based on more than 28 years of involvement in technical verification issues, I strongly endorse these provisions as ensuring that covert

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activities on a scale and of a nature that could threaten discovered promptly.

US. security will be

The counting rules and the comprehensive verification structure established by START provide a framework for further reductions of the nuclear forces in the future. More recently we have received the best news by far, especially for those of us of a generation that has lived under the fear of nuclear weapons ever since Hiroshima. It came with the remarkable speech by President Bush on September 27 and President Gorbachev’s bold response 8 days later. These initiatives bid fair to go into the history books as a turning point of the superpowers away from their dangerous nuclear confrontation. First of all, they have dramatically reduced the role of the less than strategic weapons, giving promise that in Europe the reduced ground forces on all sides will be free of nuclear weapons as will the world-wide naval forces for all but the strategic submarines with their ballistic missiles. The weapons being retired are among the oldest, technically the most primitive and accident prone in the arsenal. Additionally they present the greatest danger of unauthorized dispersion, a matter of particular concern for the battlefield and short-range nuclear systems that had been deployed widely in the former Soviet Union. Altogether more than 3000 nuclear weapons will be destroyed, and almost as many more will be stored or taken off alert. Second, both leaders reduced the alertness of their strategic forces, moving further away from postures that presented the possibility of sudden attack. Third, by announcing unilateral steps, the leaders set a precedent for a new and more flexible process of arms control to serve as a companion to the increasingly cumbersome negotiations of formal treaties. Above anything else, this shows how much the old rules have changed for the good in the arms control process, now that cooperation has replaced confrontation and the fear of unilateral concessions that were so pervasive during the Cold War. Most recently in his State of the Union message on January 28, 1992, President Bush proposed to match the Russians with another factor of 2 reduction in strategic nuclear forces. This would leave each country with 4700 strategic warheads.*

* The notional US. force under

this proposal would consist of 500 Minuteman I11 missiles each with a single warhead; a Trident SLBM force reduced to about 2300 warheads by downloading the payload on each of the 432 missiles on the 18 boats from eight warheads to between four and six warheads and a SAC nuclear force of about 150 bombers loaded with approximately 1900 air launched cruise missiles and bombs. The US. would retain in addition about 1600 tactical, or short range, nuclear weapons.

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Shortly thereafter President Yeltsin proposed a still deeper cut to 2500 warheads. The two countries have now entered into very high level discussions on a broad range of arms control initiatives including, in addition to deeper reductions, assistance in safely transporting weapons to storage for disarming and dismantling, and cooperative development of early warning and ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems. It would be difficult - if not downright foolish - to look very far ahead and try to predict the future of arms control with so many unprecedently bold initiatives on the table, a somewhat chaotic transition still in progress among the republics of the former Soviet Union, and a prospective July summit coming up. However, there are some clear national security gods for the United States that, together with the new dangers we can anticipate during the coming decade, should guide our programs and policies for the immediate future. The most threatening new development we face is proliferation of the technology for building and delivering weapons of mass destruction. In particular I refer to nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles. The recent discoveries of how extensive and advanced the Iraqi programs were toward building deliverable nuclear weapons provided a rude wake-up call on the imminence of the danger of nuclear proliferation. This is further underscored by activities in North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and several other “hot spots” around the world. I agree with Secretary of State James Baker who, in a Washington, D.C.speech on September 19, 1990, pointed t o “proliferation as perhaps the greatest security challenge of the 1990’s” and indicated that “stopping and countering proliferation must be a central part of our agenda.” The challenge to counter or slow the pace of proliferation is one with many complex political as well as technical dimensions. It calls for devising the right mix of carrots and sticks - through the application of export controls on one hand and economic and technical aid on the other - as incentives discouraging new countries from entering the nuclear club. Above and beyond that, the Iraqi experience shows that it is important to take three specific actions. The first is to strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by giving it both the authority and resources needed to more effectively carry out its mission of verifying compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The second is to develop technologies, including improved sensors and a strengthened world-wide communication network, enabling the United States to achieve a better global awareness in order t o pick up earlier and more accurate signals of covert nuclear programs. Third, and most important, is to develop a broad international consensus and an effective policy for controlling the export of sensitive technologies and weapons-related materials. Such equipment is more essential to the success of would-be proliferators than are

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the surplus Russian weapons scientists they are trying to attract (and to whom the U.S. is rightly offering support to stay home and convert t o non-weapons work). The year 1995 marks an important date in facing the proliferation challenge. That is the year when the NPT with 140 signatories comes up for its crucial 5th review conference which will determine the Treaty's future duration. According to Article 10 of the NPT, the 1995 conference will convene "to decide whether the Treaty shall continue in force indefinitely, or shall be extended for an additional fixed period or periods. This decision shall be taken by a majority of the Parties to the Treaty." It is reasonable to assume that the support for extending the NPT will be strengthened among the non-nuclear weapons nations by evidence that the nuclear powers have achieved concrete results in reducing their arsenals, and thereby narrowing the gulf that divides the "haves" from the "have nots." This is one more strong reason to expedite the ratification of START, implement its provisions and get on with further reductions, guided by what has already been accomplished. The very fact of the current political instability in the former Soviet Union enhances the urgency of ratifying the START Treaty in order to lock its important provisions firmly into place. All four of the republics of the former Soviet Union in which strategic weapons are deployed have expressed their support for START and their willingness to fulfill its obligations. Once its provisions are ratified and implemented, it will be that much more difficult for a future Russian government to abrogate START in order to create a new threat. There is a natural temptation to call for amendments to START that would cut the force levels even more deeply in an effort to catch up with, or to get ahead of, President Bush's recent initiatives. I believe this would be unwise. The START Treaty achieves a very carefully crafted balance of the interests and concerns of its two signatories, as contained in 19 articles plus numerous annexes and unilateral statements extending over some 300 pages. They represent years of compromises and mutual concessions on types and numbers of weapons as well as accommodations on verification procedures that all fit together tightly. Any opening up of the Treaty for change is bound to cause prolonged delays as a new equilibrium of concessions has to be negotiated. I strongly recommend - in the interest of expediting progress, as well as improving the national security of the United States that the U.S. Senate expeditiously ratify the Treaty as is. The U.S. and Russia could then push ahead to further progress, both at the negotiating table and on the more flexible path of reciprocal unilateral measures. A START Treaty that is ratified and in progress of being implemented would be concrete evidence that the United States and Russia were honoring their commitment to reducing their nuclear arsenals as called for in the preamble to the NPT.

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For further evidence that the two countries were honoring this commitment, we should negotiate verifiable procedures for eliminating the nuclear warheads themselves. Such an initiative goes beyond START, which mandates reducing only the strategic nuclear delivery vehicles. It is clearly in US. security interests to eliminate warheads that would otherwise be available for rapid rearming if a future Russian government were to revert to confrontational policies. Eliminating warheads in a verifiable manner could further advance the objectives of nuclear non-proliferation by demonstrating to the non-nuclear nations that the nuclear ones were actually reducing the stockpiles of nuclear weapons and not simply putting them on the shelf. For these two reasons I recommend giving high priority to the elimination of warheads in the next step on the arms control agenda. In the spirit of the preamble to the NPT we should also seek to open negotiations with the Russians and with the other nuclear nations on a verified cut-off of production of plutonium and highly enriched, weapons grade uranium. We have no current needs for continued production and our existing stockpile exceeds any foreseeable requirements. We would naturally want to retain a capacity to restart production at an adequate rate should the need arise. (This goes for delivery systems as well as nuclear material and warheads). An issue that has been raised prominently in connection with the NPT review, and is also discussed in the Preamble to the Treaty, is the cessation of underground explosions of nuclear weapons, i.e. the negotiation of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Two factors are important for the United States to weigh in deciding whether or not a CTBT is in our national interest. One is political: is a CTBT central to our efforts to prevent or counter proliferation? The other is technical: do we have something important to gain or to learn from continued testing? The dominant technical issue is whether or not we can have confidence that our nuclear weapons meet appropriately conservative safety criteria for our stockpile against the possibility of an unintended chemical or nuclear detonation as a result of an accident or incident. Technical advances have permitted great improvements in weapons safety since the 1970’s. At the same time technical advances in the past few years - and especially the latest supercomputers - have given a much deeper understanding of the hydrodynamic and neutronic development of a nuclear detonation. A major consequence of these new results is a realization that unintended detonations leading to dispersal of harmful radioactivity, or even to a nuclear yield, present a greater risk than previously estimated (and believed) for some of the warheads in the stockpile.

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A comprehensive review of the safety of the U. S. nuclear weapons stockpile that I chaired in 1990 for the House Armed Services Committee* concluded that it was important to "identify the potential sources of the largest safety risks and push ahead with searches for new technologies that do away with them and further enhance weapons safety." The report argued further that today the uncertainties in the safety of nuclear weapons are simply too large. It also emphasized that we do not presently have the necessary data base to adequately assess the risks.

It is my personal view on this subject that we should be working technically toward enhanced safety of our nuclear stockpile. Many laboratory activities and operational procedures will contribute, but to go further and design new warheads with safety-optimized designs, or just simply safer configurations, it will be necessary t o perform some underground nuclear tests. The importance and desirability of these tests will have to be weighed against the political judgment as to how central a complete ban on underground testing would be to strengthening or even preserving the non-proliferation regime. It is very difficult for me at present to judge just how important a CTBT at this time would be. However, looking ahead, I presume that a CTBT would help strengthen a non-proliferation regime. It might also be a constructive step simply to reduce the number of permitted underground nuclear tests as well as their maximum yields, in a program justified and directed solely to enhanced safety.

At some point we will have to make a political decision on the importance and timing of a CTBT. If, or when, it is judged that agreeing to a CTBT would be an important aid to the non-proliferation effort, I recommend that the U.S. should agree to such a ban. Meanwhile I recommend that the U.S. abandon its current official position that we must continue to test as long as we have nuclear weapons. It shouId be replaced by a policy that limits underground tests to those that are required to insure that all the weapons constituting our future nuclear forces - i.e. warheads together with their delivery systems - do meet appropriately conservative criteria for nuclear weapons safety. This program would consist of several low yield tests per year. However, based on our 1990 review of nuclear weapons safety for the House Armed Services Committee, I do not believe that one can say now what is the total number of tests, or how many years of testing will be required, to meet this safety goal. We should talk publicly about our safety criteria, the objectives of our tests and the technologies we are developing in order to enhance safety. There would be no compromise of U.S. security to share many of these technologies with the Russians - or any sophisticated nuclear power - to help improve safety. On

* Nuclear

Weapons Safety, a Report of the Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety of the House Armed Services Committee (Sidney D. Drell, Chairman; John S. Foster, Jr., Charles H . Towns. (December, 1990)).

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purely military grounds I see no strong reason to avoid an exchange of general information on test goals. By now there are few real secrets to protect. It is about time for more openness and less obsessive secrecy in all matters nuclear. The recent presidential initiatives raise two additional issues of major importance that require prompt attention: 1. The future of ballistic missile defense (BMD) and the ABM Treaty.

2. The desired mix as well as size of a further reduced nuclear strategic force. 1). The Future of BMD In a world with new countries approaching or entering the “nuclear club” the United States and the former Soviet Union understandably share a desire to improve their security against the threat posed by one or a few ballistic missiles, whether launched accidentally against each other’s homeland, or from another country with a newly emerging, relatively primitive system. How to do this - or even whether the potential threat warrants deploying an expensive system - has yet to be decided. Any decision must be based on a realistic assessment of the available technologies, as well as on the impact of such deployments on our security, on the stability of the nuclear deterrent balance, and on prospects of further arms reductions. The U.S. R & D program on ballistic missile defense has now been redirected from its initial unrealistic goal of a nationwide “astrodome defense” to a more achievable one of global protection against limited strikes, or GPALS. We should learn from this effort what are the best technical possibilities as well as their realistic limitations. If the United States and Russia address the strategic and arms control issues raised by such a program, in addition t o the technical issues, in the same spirit of cooperation and of shared mutual interests that set the tone of the recent Presidential exchanges, there is reason to be optimistic about the prospects of making welcome progress. The key questions for GPALS are whether or when it is politically and strategically desirable to go ahead with any deployment; what realistic threats it should be designed to counter; and how many dollars should be committed to it?

A number of very different missions have been proposed for GPALS. They include a theatre defense of battlefield deployments of U.S. and Allied military forces and of population centers from attack by low-technology short-range ballistic missiles of Third World countries in regional conflicts. Very different kinds of missions include defense of the U.S. homeland either from unintentional or accidental launches of sophisticated Soviet strategic weapons, or from attack by primitive

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weapons from newly emerging nuclear nations (who incidentally have vastly simpler options than intercontinental range ballistic missiles for their delivery systems ranging from smuggling and boats to aircraft). These threats present very different technical problems - advanced countermeasures and penetration aids, or none; high vs. low reentry velocities - and a single unitary approach to all of them is not sensible.

I believe that we can have effective ground-based defenses against short-range tactical missiles with conventional warheads, and that this is a sensible mission for GPALS to address. The Gulf War has demonstrated the importance of developing such defenses. It is in our interest to move ahead on such a program, to which the Congress has already given its support. The execution of such a program will present no difficulties for the strategic arms control regime or for the ABM Treaty if the testing parameters are suitabIy restricted and we proceed in consultation with Russia, as President Bush has called for. Only when we have a better knowledge of what technologies we might deploy to deal with a direct threat to the U.S. homeland, together with an informed consensus of what potential threat it is realistic to prepare for, will we know enough to be specific about how, if at all, we want to modify the ABM Treaty. Then the negotiations can begin, as well as any deployments of actual systems on U.S. soil. Before negotiating changes in the ABM Treaty that would permit a significant growth in BMD deployments beyond the ceiling of one-site, 100 launchers allowed by the 1972 Treaty, it will be important to understand what impact such changes will have on prospects for further reducing the strategic offensive missile forces. In particular, if Russia were to deploy a BMD system up to the newly negotiated limits, would it forestall further reductions of the U.S. and Russian missile forces in the future? Would it freeze the sizes or encourage upgrades of the British, French, and Chinese forces? For the present and particularly with the current uncertainties in Moscow, we should reaffirm our commitment to the ABM Treaty and continue a high quality, treaty-consistent R & D program on defenses against ballistic missiles. We should offer to work cooperatively with Moscow to minimize, by technical and operational procedures, the threat of accidental or unauthorized missile launches. We and our friends and allies should also exploit fully the diplomatic and economic channels in an effort to head off proliferating deployments of long-range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads. In my judgment we are at least a decade away from any new threats of this type against continental U.S.An annual total funding of about $3B is appropriate for a well focused, high quality GPALS program. Finally, it is important to remember one clear lesson from the Gulf War when considering BMD, especially against nuclear warheads. In its first engagement PA-

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TRIOT found itself operating against unanticipated, and even unintended decoys - the fragmented SCUD booster and/or a warhead that wobbled and spiralled on reentering the atmosphere. The result was that the incoming warhead was often

not destroyed. In conventional conflict there is time for misses, and opportunity for a learning curve to improve performance. Against nuclear warheads, however, a defense of U.S.territory must work the first time in combat t o be at all effective. There is no margin for the kind of surprise we experienced in the Gulf War. This too must be remembered in assessing the value of BMD. 2). Mix and Size of Offensive Forces

A number of factors will determine the size and character of the future nuclear forces of the United States. We will want our forces to remain no smaller nor less capable than those retained by the republics of the former Soviet Union, and larger than those of other nuclear powers. We will also require that they can not be destroyed if attacked, and that they can be launched and effectively retaliate if called on. Ultimately our force structure should be sized by the missions and targeting requirements dictated by national policy.

U.S. nuclear forces can be reduced considerably below the levels negotiated at START and still meet their one and only valid mission: to deter nuclear attack against the United States or our alliance partners. The military requirements for our nuclear forces are very different from what they were during the Cold War when we also relied on them for the defense of western Europe against a conventional military force that was larger than NATO’s. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are gone, along with the massed conventional forces that threatened a major blitzkrieg into western Europe. As a result many targets have now been removed from the U.S. single integrated operating plan (SIOP). The Gulf War showed once again the irrelevance of U.S. nuclear forces in a regional conflict in which our adversaries lacked a nuclear capability. They did not deter the Iraqis from invading and remaining to fight in Kuwait. Nor did they have a role to play in defeating them. The Gulf War also showed that with our precision guided munitions we don’t have much need for even low yield nuclear weapons. A factor of 10 improvement in accuracy increases the effectiveness of a conventional warhead by a factor roughly of lo3 = 1000 against a localized hardened target. It should be the clearly stated policy of the U.S. not to introduce nuclear weapons in a regional conflict that involves no other nuclear powers. In order to apply such a policy we must of course be certain that all our adversaries in the conflict do not possess nuclear weapons. Otherwise they should know that they are also at risk. It is clearly in the U.S. interest to avoid the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstance, if at all possible. The United States has the most to gain by

QC

preserving the 46 year-old tradition of non-use of nuclear weapons; and conversely the most to lose if it is discarded. The targeting requirements for U.S. forces include the ability to deny political adversaries the capability to project power, to destroy the energy sources, storage and transportation facilities required for their society as well as their military to function, and to prevent the continued operation of critical defense industries essential to sustained military operations. Because such targets are distributed throughout an industrialized society, the collateral damage resulting from an attack against them will cause enormous, and unprecedented levels of human casualties and urban devastation. Another alternative for retaliation would be to directly target the urban population itself. This would require no more than about one hundred warheads (or more accurately, effective megatons of yield) to cause about 100 million casualties and create an unimaginable holocaust. There are military arguments against such a minimum force designed for "city busting" the population, particularly its lack of adequate options for measured military responses. I reject such a strategy more strongly on ethical and moral grounds. One can challenge the relevance of morality in a war waged with weapons of mass destruction. But it is morally unacceptable and inconsistent with our values as a society for this country to plan in peacetime to retaliate by targeting for "city busting." One can set a scale for the number of warheads required for the U.S. strategic forces by reviewing the number of military and industrial targets, transportation lines and nodes, and energy sources in the former Soviet Union. According to the U.S.National Academy of Sciences 1991 study on "The Future of the US.-Soviet Nuclear Relationship", "the most important 200-300 defense related industrial targets ...comprise over half of the total Soviet industrial capacity, both defense-related and other." More recently Dr. George Lewis of the MIT Defense and Arms Control Study Program has undertaken a detailed analysis of the data available from unclassified sources on the number and distribution of energy, transportation, and industrial targets in the former Soviet Union and come to a similar conclusion that "250 warheads, neglecting overlaps between types of industries, would devastate the Soviet industrial base, probably doing considerably more than 50% damage to nine key industrial sectors." He also commented that "attacks limited to Russia could be roughly 30-40% smaller in size" than for the totality of the former Soviet Union. Force projection targets fall into two categories. First there are the major

naval ports, intercontinental bombers bases and key nuclear storage ar,d infrastructure facilities numbering perhaps 50. In addition there is the Russian ICBM

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force including the 12 mobile missile bases declared in the START Treaty Annex. Assuming that there will be a major drawdown of land-based missiles in the post-START era, and also assuming that the remaining Russian ICBMs will primarily be mobile and carry single warheads, and therefore not useful to target for counterforce strikes, the total number of force projection targets including major communications links is no greater than about 150. One should also add about 300 warheads for other military contingencies that may arise, and for a strategic reserve. If we then multiply by a factor of two for reliability and possible losses due to an enemy’s first strike, this adds up to a total of 1500 warheads. Before reducing to such a force as a deterrent for the “foreseeable future”, additional requirements would have to be satisfied: the continued development of political cooperation between the U.S.and Russia, the emergence of no major new threats, no major deployment of BMD systems, and participation of the other nuclear powers in reducing their nuclear forces.

A notional force at this level is shown in the following table and compared with the one given for the Bush State of the Union proposal (in the footnote on page 2). The only tactical nuclear forces that would be retained are airborne weapons based overseas if they were judged to be required as in situ evidence of the U.S. nuclear umbrella for allies such as Germany and Japan who remain non-nuclear. Notional Forces

Bush Proposal System

ICBMs SLBMs SAC Bombers

Total

Early 21st Century

Equivalent Launchers Warheads Megatonnage

Equivalent Launchers Warheads Megatonnage

500

500

250

100

100

50

432

2300

650

250

750

300

100

650

250

160 1900 - 1092 4700

900

1800

-~ 450 1500 600

(Equivalent megatonnage is defined as the yield in megatons to the 2/3rds power. It measures the relative destructive power of warheads versus a large target like an airbase, a naval base, or an industrial area).

No major modernization programs would be required for the delivery systems envisaged for these forces. One can consider still deeper reductions below 1500 warheads for a world in which Russia and U.S.have become comfortable allies. If one followed current preferences in making these cuts we would preferentially preserve the SLBMs at sea as

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highly survivable, accurate, reliable, and quick. There is, however, a very different direction for such reductions towards building a safer world - one that is free of the threat of a preemptive nuclear attack poised just 20-30 minutes away from Washington, D.C. and the US. homeland. That is to remove all strategic ballistic missiles - or “fast-fliers” - as President Reagan first proposed at the Reyjkavik Summit in October 1986. Removing the strategic ballistic missile force of ICBMs and SLBMs would put the entire burden for retaliation on the strategic bombers. They constitute a flexible force with the dual advantages of being recallable in the event of accident or misunderstanding and of being many hours rather than minutes away from delivering their deadly devastation. It should be practical, if due attention is paid to maintaining our technical capabilities for surveillance and attack warning, to maintain confidence in the safety, security, and survivability of a dispersed bomber force. In particular no direct threat to such a force would exist if no long-range missiles were deployed.

I give great importance to building a world order that, if free of US.-Russian confrontation, is also as free as possible of nations retaining any ”quick-kill’ capability for nuclear attack at long range. It is generally understood that early in the next century a dozen or more countries may have the capability of delivering weapons of mass destruction over very long distances - up to intercontinental range. It is certainly in our interest to avoid such a threat to the U.S. homeland if at all possible. It is axiomatic that the ability to head off the deployment of such weapons by political means will be considerably enhanced if all nations are willing to forego them. Although recent experience with Iraq illustrates the difficulty in verifying how far a country can move covertly toward a nuclear capability, long-range ballistic missiles are large and their testing as well as deployment is impossible to hide from “national technical means” of detection. Although the idea of no “fast-fliers” seemed all too visionary when President Reagan first proposed it in 1986, it now seems to be more realistic in the aftermath of the Cold War - and also more compelling under the threat of proliferation. Such a proposal as this primarily faces political obstacles, but meanwhile science and technology should give a serious look at how to get us more than 20 to 30 minutes away from potential obliteration. It would require world-wide assurance of treaty compliance and of attack warning - capabilities we already demonstrate pretty well technically. More openness would also be important - such as open skies, the more than 35 year old Eisenhower proposal recently agreed to by the Russians.

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Conclusion

I have never known the prospects for a major reduction in nuclear arms to be brighter or the opportunities more promising. There is much to be done - and that can be done. The important first step is for the Senate to ratify the START Treaty - to provide the framework for further progress and to help strengthen the efforts against nuclear proliferation.

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SIDNEY D. DRELL

Abolishing Long-range Nuclear Missiles During the Cold War, the possibility of a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States was always remote. To be sure, there were crises, and there was always the chance of an accident or misunderstanding leading to catastrophe. But the buildup of huge arsenals of long-range nuclear missiles on both sides-and the assurance that they would be used to counter a f is t strike-kept disaster at bay. Deterrence worked. Still, the scariest aspect of the Cold War era was that nuclear missiles fired from Soviet soil could hit the U.S. mainland (or vice versa) in less than 30 minutes. This fear was felt deeply by millions of U.S. and Soviet citizens and was a major motivation behind Ronald Reagan’s astonishing proposal at the Reykjavik summit in October 1986 to abolish all longrange land- and sea-based ballistic missiles. Although embraced by Mikhail Gorbachev, that proposal eventually foundered on differences between the U.S. and Soviet positions on the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Sidney D. Drell, a physicist and arms control specialist, is professor and deputy director, Stanford Linear AcceleratorCenter, Stanford University.

The end of the Cold War and the threat of proliferation are compelling reasons to banfast-fliers. Today, however, the basic reason for the existence of these deadly fast-fliers, as President Reagan termed them-to deter a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States-has all but disappeared. Russia, which now effectively controls the arsenal of the former Soviet Union, and the United States are making remarkable progress on arms control and political issues, and they are rapidly building a genuinely trusting, constructive, and cooperative relationship. Might it not be time to reconsider Reagan’s bold proposition? The end of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation would be reason enough to abolish all strategic missiles. But there is an even more pressing concern, one that the United States and Russia share: the threat of proliferation of long-

range, nuclear ballistic missiIes. Whereas the United States could be almost certain that the Soviets would never launch a nuclear strike, can we be all that sure that at some point in the not-too-distant future a rogue state might not fire-suddenly and with little warning-a long-range nuclear missile at the U.S. homeland? By early next century, a dozen or more countries may be capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction over long distancesup to intercontinental range. It is certainly in our interest to build a world order that, if free of U.S.Russia confrontation, is also free from any nation retaining quickkill, long-range nuclear capability. Further, it is axiomatic that the ability to head off by political means the deployment of such weapons will be considerably enhanced if all nations take decisive steps to forego them. Although the recent experience with Iraq illustrates the difficulty of detecting covert efforts to attain nuclear capability, long-range ballistic missiles are large and their testing and deployment are impossible to hide from current detection technology. A ban on strategic missiles would not, of course, eliminate the capacity for offensive nuclear action. Rather, it would put a greater burden on the strategic bomber

Reprinted with permission from Issue in Science and Technology, Spring 1992, pp. 34-35. Copyright (1992) by the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC.

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force. But strategic bombers have many advantages. These slowflying planes are hours rather than minutes away from delivering their nuclear devastation and thus are far less threatening or useful for first strikes. They can be recalled in the event of a misunderstanding or accident, and they can be removed froman armed, alert posture-a step recently taken by both the United States and Russia-thereby further lengthening the time interval to catastrophe. Before we could rely on a force of strategic nuclear bombers as a deterrent, we would have to make surethat the bomber force would be able to survive a conflict. Already, however, there is a strong basis for believing that our bombers would be secure. For one thing, if there were no long-range missiles, it would be impossible to destroy a dispersed bomber fleet. Equally important, technology that we already have developed and demonstrated gives us confidence that our bombers--equipped with stealth technology and the ability to fire their nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from as far as 1,500 miles away from their target4an be effective. In the Gulf War, for instance, sealaunched Tomahawk cruise missiles-the same basic technology used in air-launched cruise mis-

siles-were successfullydeployed. With the disappearance of long-range missiles, there no longer would be any rationale for a costly, futuristic, Star-Wars-type missile defense system. However, cooperation in space exploration would be required to ensure that no country used acceptable space activities as a cover for military programs that would effectively circumvent a missile ban.

Remaining questions Difficult questions remain, most notably: How do we get there from today’s force structure? It won’t be easy and will take time, most likely a decade or more. Abolishing strategic missiles would cause tremendousdisruptions in our force structure-far greater than those occurring in the current downscaling. It would mean the end of our nuclear triad of submarines, bombers, and land-based missiles developed to meet the Cold War threat. Once we have satisfied ourselves on technical grounds that a strategic bomber force can survive and its cruise missiles can penetrate to their assigned targets, there would be no strategic reason for continuing to deploy long-range missiles. Politics would be the only remaining major obstacle to their

elimination. Not the least of the difficulties would be getting the other powers with long-range nuclear weapons-Britain, France, and China-to go along. Nuclear weapons confer great power, status, and prestige on their owners, and leaders will be reluctant to give them up. In his State of the Union speech in January, President Bush proposed cuts that, although large, would still retain a nuclear advantage for the United States. In particular,he called for eliminating all land-based missiles with multiple warheads-the category in which Russia is strongest-while proposing only a 30 percent cut in the area where the United States is supreme-submarine-launched missiles. The problems of balancing these disparate missile forces would end if we got rid of all strategic missiles. Although the idea of no fastfliers seemed too visionary when President Reagan proposed it, it now seems more realistic in the aftermath of the Cold War and also more compelling under the threat of proliferation. It may not be achievable in the near term, but a world free of long-range, nuclear ballistic missiles is certainly an eminently worthwhile goal for which to strive.

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REDUCING NUCLEAR DANGER NlcGeorge Bundy William J. Crowe, Jr. Sidney Drell

A Dramatically New Situation

T

W O ENORMOUS EVENTS of recent years have

opened the way for effective worldwide action against the danger of nuclear weapons. The first is the end of the Cold War and Soviet communism. The second is the sharp double lesson of the case of Saddam Hussein: that a rich and aggressive tyrant could get close to building a bomb of his own, but also that his effort could be blocked by effective international action. There is now a real prospect that almost all countries-those with many warheads, those with few and those with none-can come together in a worldwide program to reduce the existing nuclear arsenals and to prevent their further proliferation. There are three immediate tasks: to execute the large bilateral reductions in U.S. and Russian forces that have been announced in recent years, to assure that Russia remains the only nuclear weapon state among the successor states of the McGeorge Bundy is a Scholar-in-Residence, Carnegie Corporation of New York. He was Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, 1961-66, and is the author of Danger and Survival. Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is Professor of Geopolitics at the University of Oklahoma, Conriselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Wasliington, D.C., and Chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Sidney Ilrell, a physicist and Professor at Stanford IJniversity, is a longtime adviser to the U.S. government on technical national security and arms control issues. He recently chaired a study of nuclear weapons safety for the Congressional Armed Services Committees. The three authors are jointly responsible f i x a forthcoming report of the Carnegie Commission, Reducing the Nuclear Dan,p (Council on Forei350

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submarine hull and at the same time achieve maximum range. In this configuration, if the third-stage motor were to detonate in a submarine loading accident, for example, a patch of motor fragments would impact on the side of the reentry bodies encasing each warhead. As a result, some combination of such off-axis multipoint impacts might detonate the high explosive surrounding the nuclear pit in one or more of these warheads and lead to plutonium dispersal or possibly a nuclear yield. The 1990Nuclear Safety Study Report (see Ref. 1) raised the throughdeck configuration, together with the facts that the Trident warheads are designed with conventional rather than IHE and the rocket motor uses the detonable 1.1 class propellant, as a potential safety problem of the Trident force. The report questions whether the Trident warheads should be redesigned with IHEs and FRPs, perhaps with a buffer to shield them from the shock wave in the event of a third-stage detonation. Other possibilities were also considered, e.g. whether the propellant in the third stage should be changed to the nondetonable 1.3 class. This change would result in a range loss of no more than 4%, or a few hundred miles, because approximately half of the last velocity increment comes from the third-stage motor. Furthermore, when the START I1 reductions are implemented, the Trident force will carry fewer warheads-probably no more than four on a Trident I1 missile, which now carries a full load of eight. In this case a Trident I1 would have a maximum range no less than its present fully loaded configuration, even without a third-stage motor. The Trident safety issues lead us to question how much money the US wants to invest in further enhancing weapon safety and whether we want to continue underground testing in the years ahead. Changing the propellant in the third stage of the missile or removing the third stage altogether would require no yield testing of the warhead but would necessitate a development program of the weapon system at a cost that the Navy has estimated to be 1.6-1.8 billion dollars (3). These cost figures apply if the high explosive in the Trident warheads is not

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changed. If the high explosive is replaced with IHE, the costs climb to 3.6-3.8 billion dollars for a START 11-size force. To realize the full safety advantage of the change to a nondetonable propellant would require changing the high explosive in the warhead to IHE and adding an FRP.

4. RELIABILITY OF THE NUCLEAR WEAPON STOCKPILE Figure 10 illustrates the process of predicting and assessing the reliability of a US nuclear weapon type. The initial step is the development of a reliability model of the weapon design, less the device. Figure 11 shows an example of a top-level model for a bomb. This block diagram is greatly simplified and is intended only to illustrate methodology. To complete the model each major node is broken into more detailed models. For example, J 1 would be expanded to contain the safety switch and wiring. The safety switch in turn would be further expanded. In some cases the system designer chooses to include parallel (dualchannel) components to assure adequate reliability. For example, in Figure 11, the thermally activated pulse batteries and main thermal batteries (bomb power, node K2), are duplicated. Either (OR gate) will power the weapon if it was prearmed at release and if the pullout switch and pulse battery actuators function correctly. Some events require two properly timed inputs (AND gate). For example, the trajectory arm event (K5) requires electrical power during a proper parachute opening-a voltage-deceleration-time profile. This reliability model, which allocates a degree of reliability (actually,

of unreliability) to each component, is used to estimate the overall bomb reliability. Furthermore, it provides the necessary detailed insight to determine where the dual-channel approach is effective in meeting the overall reliability goal or where redesign or increased emphasis on the reliability of a specific component has the greatest potential for overall increased reliability. Components used in previous designs have an established production and stockpile history. If the stockpile-to-target environments are expected to be similar in a new application, the reliability allocation is straightforward, i.e. the existing data base is used. For new component designs, either the allocation is based on “looks-like’’ performance of similar components or, if there are no known “looks-like’’ components one relies on engineering judgment, and the component is flagged for special design and evaluation attention.

t DATA

sotmcEs

Figure 10 Block diagram displaying reliability allocationipredictioniassesment process. Figure courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories Defense Programs and Surety Assessment Organizations.

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BLOCK DIAGRAM AND RELIABILITY MODEL PREARM

HIGH VOLTAGE GENERIM

HIGH VOLTAGE

APPLKAM DETONATlON

Figure 11 Simplified bomb reliability block diagram. Figure courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories Defense Programs and Surety Assessment Organizations.

Once the component designers have agreed to the reliability allocations, test and evaluation programs are established to reasonably assure that the allocations will be met or, if not, that the shortfalls will be discovered. During development, this process results in refined or modified allocations and reliability predictions. As the development program winds down, emphasis shifts to prepa-

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ration for production and initial fabrication of piece parts (i.e. nuts, bolts, gears, levers, batteries, integrated circuits, resistors, capacitators, etc) and component assembly. The thrust of this effort is to establish a production capability of sufficient quality and stability to assure that the product reliability requirement will be met with homogeneous hardware of this type. During this development and preparation-forproduction period, we refer to allocation and prediction, not assessment. The Sandia National Laboratories’ weapon reliability and stockpile evaluation organizations hold that true reliability cannot be assessed without test and evaluation data from components and subsystems that could enter, will enter, or already have entered the stockpile. This information comes from three sources: component sample test programs, which test random samples of components designated acceptable for use in next assemblies: the New Material Evaluation Program, which examines, tests, and evaluates newly assembled weapons by tearing them down: and the Stockpile Evaluation Program, which draws random samples of weapons of each type (typically 11 per cycle-a cycle is every one or two years, depending on the accumulation of test results). Laboratory examinations and tests and realistically configured, instrumented droplflight tests are conducted, the latter as part of military service evaluations of weapon systems. This multiphase program yields two useful results: ( a ) this-point-in-time reliability assessment, which draws on the cumulative reliability data bases, and ( b ) performance trends. The first is useful for real-time reliability assessments and feeds targeting algorithms. The real-time assessment is generally considered valid for future projections if no significant degradation is detected. The second is important for contemplating corrective actions in case a significant performance degradation is detected.

4.1 A Nondevice Component An example of a nondevice component is the MC2969 strong-link switch, a safety switch used in early ENDS designs. The MC2969 was first used in bombs. The function of this switch is described in Section 3.1. The MC2969 contains 14 electrical contacts that, when closed, allow passage of all arming and firing signals into the exclusion region.’O The switch is moderately complex and contains -500 piece parts. Closure of the switch is accomplished by delivering a precise pattern of l o This switch is not a use-control feature. The pulse train required to change the state of the switch is a unique pattern, not a classified code. Use-control needs are accomplished by other methods, e.g. two-man rules, security forces, and permissive action links (PALS). More recent detonation-safety themes rely on “other-than-electrical’’ power and signal control, e.g. magnetic and optical coupling, as used in the W88 Trident I1 warhead and described in Ref. 4.

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29 long and short electrical pulses plus 10 operating pulses, typically by a bomb-prearming controller in the delivery aircraft. The pulse logic is stored in a read-only memory (ROM) chip physically separated from the controller circuit until the weapon is to be armed for drop. This separation is intended to prevent accidental generation of an enabling pulse train in case of an accident. A single incorrect pulse will lock up the switch and prevent closure. The MC2969 is also used with the W78/MK12A/Minuteman I11 weapon system. In this application the switch is enabled if the Minuteman missile delivers to the weapon prearm electronics a proper threestage acceleration profile and a signal from the guidance system indicating proper guiding. This acceleration profile is a result of the three stages of the Minuteman, each of which burns its propellant to exhaustion and then falls away. The resulting acceleration profile ramps to acceleration peaks at the instant before propellant exhaustion. The acceleration then drops sharply to near zero as the expended stage falls away and thrust of the next stage begins but gradually increases during the burn time of the lower-thrust next stage. The resulting waveform is a three-peak acceleration-time sawtooth. This sawtooth and the generation of a good guidance signal are uniquely associated with proper performance of the Minuteman missile. This design is intended to provide high probability that peacetime accidents will not generate the requisite prearming inputs. Weapons containing this switch first entered the national stockpile in 1977. From 1977-1993, 852 switches (as parts of a weapon) were subjected to new-material drop or flight tests or drawn from the stockpile for examination and drop/flight testing. For the new-material and stockpile evaluations no switches have been found in the closed position, nor have they failed to close when properly signaled. However, 7 countable failures have occurred in 1,100 tests at the component and next assembly levels. The reliability assessment of the switch is 0.996. No nuclear tests are required to continue this assessment process.

4.2

The Device

The device is a special case. As noted above, it is sophisticated but not complicated. The device designers hold that its performance is guaranteed if it is manufactured according to exacting specifications prepared during the design phase of the program. During this phase, the device is carefully tested, e.g. with yield tests. During production and while in stockpile, it (as part of the weapon) undergoes new-material and stockpile evaluations without yield testing. In the recent past a few weapons have been drawn from the stockpile, modified in some cases to comply with the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT), and detonated

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underground. Because these tests were infrequent (a given weapon type underwent perhaps one test during its stockpile life), they do not assess reliability except in the grossest sense, i.e. either 1 or 0. Many observers view these tests as a demonstration that perhaps tests the designer more than the weapon. Such tests should be considered tests of confidence, not reliability.

4.3 Reliability Assessment of the Stockpile With the introduction of completely assembled, maintenance-free weapons, the method of reliability assessment of the stockpile metamorphosed from total dependence on field-testing results to a stockpile sampling program. This program, begun in 1958, involved withdrawal of weapons and testing of the nondevice hardware at an initial rate of 50 weapons at 6-month intervals for the first 18 months of stockpile life. The sampling program could subsequently draw fewer weapons per cycle (perhaps 50 weapons per year), depending on initial evaluation results. All tests were laboratory examinations; no flight or drop test program was included. The test program quickly revealed that most problems were related to design and/or production. As a result, a new-material evaluation program was introduced in 1959 that examined newly produced weapons immediately after assembly at the final assembly plants. In this program, a few weapons were examined each month at production outset. Based on initial findings, this rate was modified in later production. Again, only laboratory tests were performed. In 1963 the new-material evaluation program was expanded to include joint AEC/DOD-sponsored flight and drop tests-generally four per year for most weapon types. Randomly selected weapons of a given type are withdrawn from the national stockpile and returned to the DOE final assembly plant (Pantex) near Amarillo, Texas. The device is separated from the remainder of the weapon, and an instrumentation/ telemetry package is mounted in its place. The mass and dynamic properties of this package match as closely as practical the mass and dynamic characteristics of the device. This package monitors the performance of the safing, arming, fuzing, and firing system as well as inputs from the carrier vehicle. Where appropriate, sensors are included to monitor the dynamic performance of the test item. This pseudoweapon, called a Joint Test Assembly, is then returned to the military for installation in a delivery vehicle for a weapon system test in a realistic environment. The results are telemetered to one or more receiving stations for analysis and evaluation. Beginning in 1970, accelerated aging units (AAUs) were added to the evaluation program in an attempt to obtain early warning about

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significant materials-related degradation. One or two complete weapons from early production were subjected to temperature cycling and high-temperature storage for one or more years. The interior volume was monitored by gas sampling. The AAUs were disassembled periodically for more complete inspection. AAU activity is not considered a formal part of the stockpile evaluation program because its environmental exposure is not representative of normal stockpile conditions. This activity is admittedly qualitative because there is no known way to predict an exact accelerated aging factor owing to the complexity of the reaction kinetics as a result of the numerous activation-energy coefficients associated with the materials in the weapon. Nevertheless, the information obtained from the accelerated aging program is important to the design and stockpile-evaluation community in its attempt to forecast aging effects. In the mid-1980s the evaluation program was again rebalanced to further emphasize the new-material assessment based on expanding data bases, which continued to indicate that most defectiveness resulted from design or production errors, not from degradation. The stockpile-evaluation portion of the program was relaxed to biennial sampling of 11 weapons per cycle after completion of production, another indication that the weapon types in the stockpile, when well designed and produced, exhibit good age stability. For example, some weapon types have been in the national stockpile for 25-30 years and with periodic attention exhibit no significant reliability degradaticn. Since the start of the current stockpile evaluation and reliability assessment program in 1958, 13,000 weapon evaluations have been conducted. During this period, the failure rate of the nondevice hardware suggests an expected weapon failure rate of 1-2% for the stockpile. This forecast assumes that the device has a reliability of one. The nondevice hardware is not perfect, and retrofits have been necessary to correct the problems noted above, the majority of which have been caused by design oversights and/or fabrication/assembly mistakes. Military service mishandling and aging-induced defectiveness represent only a small fraction of the total unreliability. Twice a year the DOE issues a document containing one or more reliability assessments for each weapon type in the stockpile. Several assessments are sometimes necessary to address different deployment options. Given that the stockpiled weapon types underwent thorough and complete design, development, testing, and evaluation, we have no compelling arguments for the necessity of continuing yield testing to retain confidence in the reliability of hardware for an extended period of time. To maximize the useful life, one can take such steps as refriger-

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ated storage, limited movement, no modifications, aggressive surveillance, etc. Most importantly, in the case of a test ban, one should not tamper with the device hardware once it has been certified. An article by Flectcher Pratt ( 5 ) occasionally has been cited as an argument for continued yield testing. We believe that, instead, the situation Pratt described supports the argument that thorough design, development, test, and evaluation are required before deployment, and in the absence of follow-on stockpile testing, hardware modifications must be avoided. The torpedo failures resulted from violations of all of these steps. New, untested devices should not be considered.

5 . NUCLEAR WEAPON EFFECTS The effects of nuclear weapons have been well studied. We consider two general categories of interest: (a) the effects of weapons on targets, i.e. military forces and structures; equipment such as ships, aircraft, land vehicles, and communication, command, and control systems; and civilian centers and populations, and (b)the effects of nuclear weapons on other nuclear weapons, either in the form of ABMs or fratricide (the effects of one of our weapons on other weapons of our own). Large data bases developed principally by the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) and its predecessor agencies, the AFSWP and the Defense Atomic Support Agency (DASA), inform analyses of the first category. The primary source of these data was atmospheric nuclear explosions prior to the LTBT of 1963. These data bases are widely available and rather complete. In the recent past a few large nonnuclear explosions have been used to study blast effects on military structures such as aircraft shelters. Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and electromagnetic radiation (EMR) effects are under study in large, above-ground, nonnuclear simulators. We believe that further underground nuclear tests would add little to the extensive DNA data base as it pertains to the first category of interest. For the second category of interest, low-yield underground nuclear tests, permitted since the LTBT, have allowed continuation of studies of the interaction of weapon outputs on weapons and quasiweapon systems. These outputs include neutrons, X rays, y rays, and their offspring: impulse, heating, overpressure, EMP, system-generated EMP (SGEMP), etc. The failure mechanics are generally defined as structural overload, fissile material heating, and electrical circuit damage. These effects tests, usually conducted in tunnels at the Nevada test site, were also largely sponsored by the DNA and executed at a recent rate of approximately one per year.

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More recently, these underground effects tests were supplanted by above-ground simulators constructed by the DNA and the military services, and by the DOE, mainly at Sandia National Laboratories. The simulators can generate threat-level effects, although not always at the desired geometric cross-section. In many cases the above-ground machines are considered superior to exposure to nuclear explosives for effects studies. For example, pulse reactors have replaced underground tests for neutron damage studies. For other effects, above-ground simulators are used for initial examinations. The underground effects test has been used principally as a final proof test in the recent past. Continuing weapon testing to support weapon-effects needs makes little sense for at least four reasons: ( a ) the current stockpile has been tested and certified in accordance with military needs and requirements; ( b )new weapon designs are no longer likely to be required; ( c ) no significant nuclear ABM forces are in existence or under serious development; and (6)hardening against neutrons, y and X rays, and blast has been limited to strategic ballistic missile reentry vehicles (RVs) and their warheads. With regard to strategic RVs, the in-flight deployment approach adopted by the US has always been to require hardening against nuclear effects only to a level that would avoid two kills per defense interceptor. The tradeoff then becomes investing weight in shielding vs weight in bus maneuvering fuel for spacing purposes. As a result of the ceilings on the number of warheads that are being negotiated by the US and Russia, fewer warheads are expected to be loaded on individual ballistic missiles than they were designed to load. This means that the missiles will be carrying less than the maximum throw weight for which they were designed so that more weight is available for maneuvering fuel. Increased spacing is therefore possible, although not likely necessary. From a strictly technical viewpoint, continued access to an occasional underground nuclear test for effects studies would be useful, but a growing above-ground simulation capability suggests many “workaround” opportunities.

6. DESIGN COMPETENCE By all applied measures, the existing nuclear weapon stockpile is robust and appears stable in the sense of performance for the forseeable future. Nevertheless, the cessation of underground yield testing eventually will raise questions of confidence concerning the performance of the existing weapons.

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A nuclear-yield test ban would leave the US with two options. The first is to allow device design competence, currently centered at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, to decline and eventually disappear. This would be the inevitable consequence of failure to support a weapon program adequate to maintain responsible stewardship of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, either by neglect or by deliberate choice. The alternative is to maintain strong scientific and engineering competence at the two laboratories while at the same time ceasing yield testing as a contribution to the attempt to control nuclear weapon proliferation. This competence is required to maintain and certify long-term safety, reliability, and effectiveness of the nation’s remaining arsenal in accordance with the standards and criteria discussed in Sections 3 and 4. In addition, the new circumstances of the post-Cold War place increased technical emphasis on nonproliferation work as a growing challenge to the weapon community. These issues raise the question of how to maintain design competence, confidence, and credibility. We see three national committments as requirements to maintain these design capabilities: 1. Maintain a motivation for excellence within the design community through appropriate statements of national policy and strong laboratory management actions. 2. Fund the design laboratories at a steady level sufficient to maintain a trained staff of weapon designers and support personnel as required for responsible stockpile stewardship. 3. Invest in the maintenance and improvement of computational and simulation facilities associated with retaining weapon design skills. Such facilities will be expensive and their designs challenging. Nevertheless, an investment in such facilities will likely be less costly than a several-year integral of the costs associated with the recent underground testing program.

7. VERIFICATION Since the 1950s, verification has been a key factor in all public debates over a CTB or even an LTB. Restrictions on nuclear tests cannot be verified with 100%certainty. Treaty restraints must be judged in terms of acceptable levels of risks and the cost-benefit ratio to all signatories. During the Cold War, test-ban opponents feared that the Soviet Union would evade a test ban by detonating explosions in large cavities that would muffle their seismic signals (a process known as decou-

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pling)" and as a result gain important military advantages. Since the LTBT of 1963, tests of nuclear weapons have been prohibited everywhere but underground. There is high confidence that the LTBT can be monitored by ( a ) satellites whose sensors can detect the visible and near infrared light emitted by a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere and ( b )acoustic sensors used to detect submarines and explosions conducted in the oceans. The difficulties of secretly conducting tests outside the atmosphere or in deep space and of retrieving useful data together with the risks of detection are generally considered to be prohibitive and to exceed any potential benefits. In 1974 a further restriction on testing was negotiated in the form of the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT), which limited the yields of underground tests to a maximum of 150 kilotons. This treaty was ratified in 1990. 1993 saw two major changes in the CTBT debate. The first is the disappearance of the former Soviet resistance to intrusive monitoring with on-site seismic stations arrayed throughout their territory, and their acceptance of cooperative on-site challenge inspections to verify compliance with arms reduction treaties negotiated in recent years. The second change is that the US has reduced its reliance on nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, which led President Bush in 1992 to er,d US development of new nuclear weapons. These changes seem to have caused the old debates over verification of a CTB to run out of steam. It now seems practical to use an array of in-country seismic stations to identify explosions down to a small fraction of a kiloton and fully decoupled shots down to at most a few kilotons. Cooperative on-site challenge inspections make the risk of an attempted evasion and the political cost to a country if caught much greater than the potential technical benefit of such low-yield explosions. Further, regardless of whether the US continues to test nuclear weapons, our lead in nuclear weapon technology cannot be overtaken by any emerging nuclear state that depends on clandestine testing. The future of a CTB rests largely on political decisions about its importance for achieving a robust and effective nonproliferation regime worldwide. The successful development of greater transparency among all nations to effectively monitor the activities of would-be proliferators is important; it will require progress in both political and technical dimensions. l ' A cavity with a diameter of at least 86 m-larger than the Statue of Liberty-would be required to fully decouple a five-kiloton explosion in salt. At high frequencies such a fully decoupled test would still generate a seismic signal 10-14% as large as that from a fully coupled explosion (see Ref. 6).

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8. POLITICAL ISSUES IN THE COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN TREATY DEBATE Our examination of the technical arguments for testing in the preceding section suggests that in the short term (within the decade), the primary reason-and in our opinion the only compelling one-for continued underground nuclear testing is to improve the safety of the US nuclear arsenal through further incorporation of IHEs, FRPs, and possibly safety-optimized designs based on the binary munitions concept. From a technical point of view, safety improvements could be achieved in a continued underground testing program focused on safety. From a political perspective, however, continued testing of nuclear weapons may hinder efforts to counter, if not prevent, the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the years ahead. This raises the difficult challenge of weighing technical vs political judgments: technical ones as to how important continued testing would be to enhance safety, and indeed “how safe is safe enough,” against political ones as to how important a CTBT would be for preserving or even strengthening the nonproliferation regime. For the longer term, we must examine the additional issue of how to maintain design competence. If we want to sustain the ability to evaluate and, if necessary, repair the devices in the current stockpile as well as the ability to design new weapons, we must devote careful attention to preserving this expertise. Arguments against a CTBT during the Cold War were based primarily on nuclear fear and competitiveness with the Soviet Union. However, with the end of the Cold War and the emerging US policy of reduced reliance on nuclear forces, these and most other arguments for continuing nuclear testing have faded. The end of testing has been an asserted objective of all signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for almost 25 years. As noted elsewhere (7) the US, which has always found reasons of one sort or another to resist a ban, has come to be perceived as deliberately hostile to an objective it accepted in 1968 as part of the bargain struck between states with and without nuclear weapons in the NPT. Any continued American opposition to a CTB therefore carries with it considerable political cost. Although one cannot argue that American testing affects the nuclear ambition of leaders like Saddam Hussein, for more than 20 years many people in many countries have continued to consider a test ban a high-priority item and to measure the commitment of nuclear weapon states to the prevention of nuclear weapon proliferation by their readiness to support a ban. Because our strengths are technical, we are much more confident in our technical judgments of the overall safety and reliability of the US

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arsenal and what can be achieved by way of enhanced safety with further testing than we are in assessing the contribution of a CTBT to the nonproliferation regime. With this caveat, and on the basis of our technical assessment of the current US nuclear arsenal, we do not feel that the need for safety testing is urgent or compelling enough to override all other objectives. We share the concern that continued US opposition to a CTBT could weaken the worldwide effort against proliferation. In our view, the early achievement of a strengthened and durable worldwide nonproliferation regime will contribute more significantly to worldwide nuclear safety than will further improvements in the safety of part of the US nuclear force. The current moratorium on testing initiated by President Bush in October 1992 and extended on March 15, 1994 by President Clinton until September 1995 (to be followed by a comprehensive ban on testing subject to conditions noted in the introduction) provides a valuable grace period during which the US should take the initiative and give priority to the following goals, which are essential to reducing nuclear danger: 1. The US should initiate and lead a joint effort by the five declared nuclear powers to negotiate an end to all nuclear weapons testing. Once the five declared nuclear powers achieve agreement in principle, the discussions will have to be broadened to include all signatories of the NPT participating in the 1995 NPT Review Conference. Beyond negotiating a worldwide NPT, this enlarged forum should promote the means of achieving greater openness in nuclear matters in all nations that develop a nuclear infrastructure, whether for power production, fuel reprocessing, or research. This openness will be required for timely discovery of any potential activities in violation of a NPT, including the production of bomb fuel or the conduct of very low-yield tests (less than a kiloton) that might not be detected and identified. 2. The DOE should develop, and Congress fund, a diverse and coordinated scientific program at the national weapons laboratories so that they can maintain and certify confidence in the US nuclear deterrent over a long period without testing. We disagree with those who argue that, without continued testing, it will be impossible to motivate first-rate scientists and retain nuclear competence. But this challenge will not be easy, and will require good planning and stable funding. As General Lee Butler, the then Commander-in-Chief of the US Strategic Command, emphasized in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 22, 1993, to retain the ability to handle technological surprises in the CTB regime “will

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require immediate and imaginative investigation by the scientific community. ” Inevitably, a CTB extending over several professional generations will gradually erode confidence in the reliability of remaining nuclear warheads, even though they are properly maintained and refurbished and diagnosed in experiments that do not produce nuclear yields. This diminished confidence will present new issues, and the proper response will depend on how much progress has been made in countering proliferation and in reducing both nuclear danger and the traditional reliance on nuclear deterrence of high technical precision. Should new challenges arise, the country will be able to respond,I2 as we learned at Los Alamos and Alamogordo in 1945, if we maintain a strong national base in science and engineering. Continued testing will not halt proliferation, nor will it protect us from it. We will fare better by devoting a portion of the savings obtained from terminating the testing program to strengthening our intelligence capabilities against proliferation by both technical and cooperative means and by increasing our ability to discover and deal with new nuclear threats, should they arise. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank William L. Stevens for providing us with Table 1 and Barbara Peurifoy for her invaluable assistance in preparing the manuscript. Any Annual Review chapter, as well as any article cited in an Annual Review chapter, may he purchased from the Annual Reviews Preprints and Reprints service.

1-800-347-8007;415-259-5017;email:[email protected] ~~

Literature Cited 1. Drell SD, Foster JS Jr, Townes CH. Print N o . 15, Nucl. Weapon Safety

Panel House Armed Serv. Comm. lOlst Congress, 2nd session, US Gov. Print. Off. (1990) 2. James E. Rep. UCRL-LR-113578 Lawrence Livermore Natl. Lab. ( 1993) 3. Harvey JR, Michalowski S. Rep. Cent. Znt. Secur. and Arms Control, Stanford Univ. (1993)

4. McCaughey KG. In Characteristics and Development for the MC3831 Dual Strong Link Assembly, Sand88-1412.6, Sandia Natl. Lab. 5 . Pratt F. Atlantic Monthly 186:25 (1950) 6. van der Vink GE. Arms Control Today 20:9 (1990) 7. Bundy McG, Crowe WA Jr, Drell SD. Reducing Nuclear Danger; The Road Away From the Brink, Counc. Foreign Relats. Books (1993)

The stability built into the nuclear balance by START assures that there will be time enough, and more.

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MERITS AND RISKS OF MORE UNDERGROUND TESTS The news report “End of an Era: Superpowers Sign START,Limiting Nuclear ICBMs” (August, page 49) contains the incorrect statement that the House Armed Services Committee Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety endorsed continued underground nuclear tests. That Danel. which I headed (John S. Foster df TRW and CharlesH. Townes of the Universityof California, Berke ley, are the other members), was asked to provide Congress with a technical analysis of the safety of US nuclear weapons as a basis for debating future policy decisions. Last year we did the first (and only) comprehensive review of the safety of the US nuclear stockpile since World War I1 and the subsequent buildup to more than 20000 warheads. The House Armed Services Committee initiated this study because of concerns about the safety of several weapons systems in the US arsenal--concerns that led the Secretary of Defense to take immediate steps to reduce the risk of accidental detonations that could disperse plutonium into the environment in potentially dangerous amounts or even generate a nuclear yield. Those steps included removing the short-range air-to-ground attack missiles from the alert bombers of the Strategic Air Command and modifying some of the artillery-fired atomic projectiles deployed with the US forces. It was a major conclusion of our study that “unintended nuclear detonations present a greater risk than previously estimated for some of the warheads in the stockpile.” An important contribution to the understanding of these greater risks has come from advances in supercomputers that make it possible to cany out more realistic, three-dimensional calculations to trace the hydrodynami c and neutronic development of nuclear detonations. We now appre-

ciate-and underground tests have confirmed-how inadequate, and in some cases misleading, were the earlier, two-dimensional calculations. The panel concluded that it is important to “identify the potential sources of the largest safety risks and push ahead with searches for new technologies that do away with them and further enhance weapons safety.” We also argued that “it is no longer acceptable to develop weapons systems without a factual data base with which to support design choices that are critical to the system’s safety.” The final recommendations of our study-some of which are being implemented, while others are still under review-include both technical goals and organizational changes to strengthen the safety assurance process. We also concluded: To accomplish the goals we have set out in this study the US nuclear weapons program will have to give higher priority and devote more of its resources to efforts to enhance safety-taking a long-range view in search of big advances in technology beyond just evolutionary, incremental improvements. Such a call for reorienting the emphasis of the current program should not be viewed as requiring an enlargement of the total prcgram, particularly a8 we look forward t o m a inta ining a smaller nuclear force in the new strategic environment. It does, however, require that adequate and steady resources be made available for the RM’&E [research, development, testing and evaluation] needed to underpin such a program. Our recommendations directly raise the issue of continued underground testing. It is a political issue to properly weigh the political benefits of a comprehensive test ban

Reprinted with permission from Physics Today, November 1991, pp. 9-1 3. Copyright (1991), American Institute of Physics.

170 against the fact that, today, the uncertainties in the safety of nuclear weapons are simply too large. In fact, as the report emphasizes, scientists do not now have the data base they need to assess the risks adequately. As individuals, my colleagues and I addressed the question of continued underground bomb tests in our testimony of 18 December 1990 before the House committee. Not surprisingly, our common technical conclusions did not translate into identical political views. My own views are expressed in the following statement, which I had prepared in anticipation of being questioned on this subject during the hearings (and which I read into the record almost verbatim): It is not easy to answer a question about what implications our report and its recommendations have on continued underground explosions versus a CTBT [comprehensive test ban treaty] b e cause difficult political, as well as technical, judgments must be made. On the technical side, which I am more comfortable to judge, I would emphasize that we can and should make important progress toward enhanced safety of the nuclear stockpile in a number of ways that do not require underground nuclear test explosions. They include: D r e d i r e c t i n g t h e weapons RDT&E program toward enhanced safety as its principal goal; D performing laboratory experiments to develop a data base that is required for sound analyses of the risks of initiating a nuclear yield or of dispersing plutonium under a variety of abnormal circumstances for existing weapons; D retiring older weapons from the stockpile that fail to meet modem safety design criteria; D adapting common warheads of compatible size that already exist and incorporate the desired safety features to several different weapons systems that are designated to remain in the US arsenal; and D adopting operational procedure-uch as limiting aerial overflights-to minimize handling and transporting risks. However, to go further and design new warheads with safetyoptimized designs, or just simply safer configurations, it will be necessary to perform underground nuclear tests. For a program focused on safety alone, the number of tests would be limited

and their yields considerably lower than the maximum of 150 kT permitted under t h e TTBT [Threshold Test Ban Treaty]. The importance and desirability of these tests will have to be weighed against the political judgment as to how central-now or perhaps five years from nowa complete ban on underground testing, i.e., a CTBT, would be to strengthening or even preserving the nonproliferation regime. I agree with Secretary of State James Baker when he said in Washington, DC, on 19 September [1990] that we cannot a p proach nuclear proliferation in a business-as-usual manner, and further when he went on to say, both in his name and in that of [former] Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, that “we both see proliferation as perhaps the greatest security challenge of the 1990s.. . and we agree that stop ping and countering proliferation must be a central part of our agenda.” A number of actions by the United States and the Soviet Union, the two nuclear superpowers, can play a role in strengthening the nonproliferation regime-in particular, the ending of the cold war and the development of constructive pclitical relations, and the signing of arms reduction treaties like the INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces], CFE [Conventional Forces in Europe] and START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty]. It is very difficult for me a t present to judge just how important a CTBT a t this time would be, in addition to these steps. However, looking ahead, I presume that a CTBT would help strengthen a nonproliferation regime; it might also be a constructive step simply to reduce the number of permitted underground nuclear tests as well as their maximum yields, in a program justified and directed solely to enhanced safety a t least for a fixed period of time. At some point we will have to make a political decision on the importance and timing of a CTBT. Recall that the NPT [Nuclear Proliferation Treaty] review conference is scheduled for 1995. While the US would like the NPT to be continued indefinitely, or for an extended period, we may well face proposals in the absence of a CTBT for only a very limited, or even a terminal, extension.

The US and, indeed, the nations of the world should support and work to implement Secretary Baker’s priority call to stop and counter proliferation. If, or when, it is judged that agreeing to a CTBT is important to “stop ping and countering proliferation,” in Secretary Baker’s words, I think we should agree to such a ban. Meanwhile, our testing program should be designed to advance the possibilities and understanding of enhanced safety and thereby help us prepare for the possibility of a CTBT. As scientists my fellow panelists and I did our best to present an informed, objective set of technical findings and recommendations on this important subject. As responsible citizens we also expressed our individual conclusions about its political policy implications. I regret that in PHYSICS TODAY’S reporting on this important technical safety issue, the political dimension was presented inaccurately. SIDNEY D. DRELL Stanford University Stanford, Culifomia

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“Safetyin High Consequence Operations”

Presented to the Safety in High Consequence Operations Symposium Sandia National Laboratory July 12, 1994

Dr. Sidney Drell Deputy Director Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

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“Safety in High Consequence Operations” There is a bit of a gambler in each and every one of us. This is evidently a rather wide-spread and prevalent condition as one reads about all the activities and wide participation at lotteries, gambling casinos, pari-mutual betting and the like. Gambling is no big deal if properly controlled and sensibly waged; that is if it does not threaten the life of oneself or others, or the physical overall well being and responsibilities to one’s family - in other words, if it’s a low consequence activity. I, personally, only make minor, relatively low consequence wagers: a bet there won’t be a traffic jam en route to the airport to catch a plane or not lugging a raincoat around all the time in changeable weather. But I’ve never bet that I could walk a tight rope more than 6” above the ground either.

I gambled when I accepted the invitation to talk here today that I would be able to come up with something to say that was perceptive, interesting, penetrating.

I suggest that you don’t invest in that wager, but I don’t want to imply that I view this to be a low consequence undertaking. Not at all. I am here because of respect for the organizers and all the important contributions made here at SNL in managing such high consequence operations as nuclear weapons with so exemplary a safety record.

It’s all very, very different for high risk operations and that is what we are here to talk about: really high stake operations. I thought a lot about safety and high risk operations a few years back, when together with two distinguished colleagues, Johnny Foster and Charlie Townes, I took on the task of reviewing the safety of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. This added greatly to my sensitivity to, and appreciation of, the world of high consequence operations, a world in which many

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of you here in this audience have been living, and indeed the world you have been

defining through your careers. And I’m happy to see here in the audience one of you who was such a valuable guru for Foster, Townes, and me, and my panel’s work: Bob Peurifoy. It is difficult to overemphasize or overstate the importance of avoiding an accident with nuclear weapons. When one considers the potential for tragedy, should a serious accident occur, as well as the consequences of such an accident for our national security, it is clear that no reasonable effort should be spared to prevent such an accident from occurring. Just a chemical explosion - not even a nuclear detonation - involving a nuclear weapon that aerosolized and spread plutonium could do serious damage to our nuclear deterrent posture and potentially harm our security given the sensitivities that we have to the word ”nuclear” now. Aside from our good safety record with the nuclear weapons themselves, very little in this country that is associated with the word ”nuclear”retains credibility in the public eye much less a welcome image. In medicine, we don’t say nuclear magnetic resonance but magnetic resonance imaging, without the nuclear, in referring to the new and very valuable diagnostic tool that many of us have already benefited from. So no effort should be spared to avoid such an accident - and this task has become more challenging - not more difficult - but, if anything, more challenging as we look to the future in the post cold war world with no underground testing in prospect. We have an obligation to assure formally that our stewardship of the remaining stockpile meets the rigorous criteria for safety that this nation set 26 years ago in 1968. What then should we be doing to meet the challenge of maintaining safety, and avoiding accidents in a high consequence operation such as stewardship of the

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nuclear stockpile? How do we go about maintaining and assuring the safety, not to mention confidence and reliability over the years ahead? I see the requirements as follows: First, we have to consider the intrinsic criteria to be met by the

process we establish for such a high consequence operation. Then we should also address important external factors that affect the process. Let me turn first to the intrinsic criteria for safety for high consequence operations. I will list four. They are listed in no particular priority:

1 Set the priorities in the proper order.

2 Bring to bear the best available analytical tools to analyze and understand the risks and consequences.

3 Enforce rigorous discipline and accountability at each step in the process. 4 Red Team the activities with good communication channels up and down

the chain between management and engineers. They may not be easy to enforce, but all four of these criteria are critically important. We have learned from tragedies in the past what can happen when one or more has failed to come up to standards. Perhaps the most analyzed case, because it was publicly so visible, was the Challenger space shuttle accident in 1986. For example, it was known from some previous flights preceding the fatal

51L Challenger launch, as described in the Presidential Review Board report, that

0 rings of the solid rocket boosters showed some erosion during some of the previous flights and as a result allowed blow-by of the hot gases. As Dick Feynman emphasized in his notorious, or by now almost legendary, Appendix F to the report

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of the shuttle commission, these 0 rings of the solid rocket boosters were not designed to erode and evidence of any erosion was an indication of something not totally understood; of something that was going on from which it was impossible to infer safety in any rigorous way. Why, in fact was there erosion on some previous flights and not on others? And why was this accepted and used as a basis for proceeding ahead with confidence in safety? It happened because of the success of all previous flights; and because of a measurement that, under normal temperatures, it would take something like three or so times as deep a level of erosion beyond what had been observed on Flight

51C before the 0 ring would fail. Computer models were made, codes written and carried through, parameters fitted and the summary of what came out of these models appeared in the analyses of previous flights. But note the following words that were written in the Summary Report of the accident: “Lack of a good secondary seal in the field joint is most critical and ways to reduce joint rotation should be incorporated as soon as possible to reduce criticality.” Shortly later however the summary report also said “Analysis of existing data indicates that it is safe to continue flying existing design as long as all joints are leak checked with the 200 psig stabilization etc., etc.,”. Evidentially as Feynman emphasized there is a contradiction between saying on one hand that something is most critical and subsequently that it is safe. All one can say is that the computer model didn’t indicate a failure. But if the computer model was only a phenomenological fit, without an understanding, the conclusions that can be drawn have to be carefully circumscribed especially with respect to excursions from normal conditions and sensitivities to factors not varied.

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What comes out of a computer never exceeds the quality of its input. Thus in this example the best available analytical tools were not brought to bear, nor was there adequate "red teaming." It is also documented in the shuttle report that there was a lack of discipline in following the manuals that existed for procedures when applying high pressure to make the reusable booster rocket sections circular in restoring their round shape. Procedures were not followed.

No doubt there must be a strong "can-do", success oriented leadership of programs like the shuttle, but not by lowering the priority of safety. One way to help avoid that danger of relegating safety to a lower priority is by assuring strong, confident good communications up and down the line. Feynman's Appendix F raises a serious concern in this regard when he tells of his asking for estimates of the

failure probability of the space shuttle's main engines. The responses varied from

a failure probability of one in a hundred, according to a consulting engineer to

NASA; or one in three hundred according to the engineers working at the Marshall Space Center; all the way down to one in one hundred thousand according to a claim coming from NASA management that was made at that time. This large a variation is troubling in trying to assess safety in a high consequence operation. It reminds us how difficult and sensitive it is when dealing with the far edges, or tails, of probability distributions for failure, and how critical it is to get solidly informed judgments on the variances and all the relevant sensitivities. There are many examples, and I don't want to pick just on NASA. Let me just mention a more recent example also leading to a tragedy when good analysis was available but did not prevail, whether due to business, political, or economic

interests, or due to lack of vigor in presenting the analyses; I don't know. There

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were two fatal accidents in the last year and a half involving planes operating too closely behind the new Boeing 757 and getting caught up in their wake turbulence.

8 people were killed in 1992 at Billings, Montana and 5 last December in Santa Ana. It could have been much worse had the trailing plane been say a 737. The 757, due to its fuel efficient design, creates invisible, horizontal tornadoes

that emanate from each wingtip and are more powerful and longer lasting than any produced by any other aircraft of the same size. This was known to the top FAA scientist who warned his agency of the danger, but, as reported by the

LA Times quoting from documents obtained under the FOIA, concerns about the harmful effect of the loss of revenues to the airline industry if a larger separation distance were enforced between the 757 and following planes during landing or take-off seems to have tipped the balance against safety. I have no idea of what the detailed evidence was, how vigorously the concern was pressed, or how rigorous the technical case was developed. But one is fortunate that larger planes were not involved so that the casualties were not of a higher number, as they might well have been. Incidentally there is another reminder in this case: Just as management has the obligation to know the facts, to listen, and not distort priorities, so scientists and engineers have a responsibility and bear a burden: to be heard, and to work at it if need be, Bob Peurifoy also called my attention to another recent case where failure of an organization to operate coherently and responsibly led to disaster: the

$1.7Bflood in Chicago’s tunnels. In 1992 defects were found, reported, videotaped and subsequently ignored by management for three months. These examples remind us how important it is to remain ever vigilant in high consequence operations even, and especially, when they become routine. No mat-

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ter how successful or lucky a system has been, it must not be allowed to breed complacency or justify the status quo. And that brings me to my primary subject for today

- the nuclear weapons

program with its safety system. Our 1990 study on Nuclear Weapons Safety for

Congress commended the Departments of Energy and Defense for their safety record in managing the nuclear arsenal. We were particularly impressed, and said so, by the extreme care and high professionalism of the military services in man-

aging and maintaining surety - secrecy, security, control - of the deployed nuclear

systems. But we also made clear that there was still room for substantial improvement, both in management and technology. Indeed we recommended specific changes to meet all four of the intrinsic criteria that I listed on page 174. In reviewing them here, briefly, it is not to criticize, but to learn from them to prepare for our future when we must responsibly steward our nuclear arsenal under new restrictions with changing priorities and new challenges - both political and strategic - and with the benefit of vast improvements in technology and analytic tools. First of all, setting the right priorities means insisting that the burden of proof rests on proving that the system is safe, rather than being satisfied with lack of evidence that it is unsafe. It was exceedingly difficult to implement such a priority for the stockpile in the chilling environment of the cold war and within a process

that evolved gradually through those years starting in the 1950’s. Modernization and improvement programs for the weapons gave priority to meeting military requirements, such as achieving maximum yield-to-weight ratios for warheads and maximum payloads and ranges for missiles. Safety was,in general, not viewed with

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quite the same urgency. Moreover in the earlier years we knew much less, had few analytical tools and limited capabilities for simulation. By 1984 policy guidance was formulated in DOD Directive 3150.2 “to incorporate maximum safety consistent with operational requirements.” Modifications of stockpile weapons, in order to bring them up to modern safety criteria, proceeded slowly under a stockpile improvement program that, within its budgetary limits during those years, gave priority to the introduction of new weapons rather than fixing up the already deployed ones. Thus, in anticipation of acquiring new weapons, many older systems remained in the stockpile up until a few years ago. These were weapons that did not meet the modern safety design criteria that were developed in 1968. These criteria call for a probability of a premature nuclear detonation due to malfunction in the absence of any input signal, except for specified monitoring and control ones, to be one in a billion, prior to receipt of a pre-arm signal, for normal storage and operational environments in the lifetime of the weapon; and one in a million per warhead exposure or accident for abnormal environments prior to receipt of a pre-arm or launch signal. Some of the results of compromises made on the priority of safety are now well known. Short-range attack missiles with the W69 remained loaded on the alert strategic bomber force for more than a decade after the danger of their detonation in an accident was emphasized by people in this audience. The reason for this danger was the fact that the weapon had none of the modern safety devices, neither the modern electrical detonation system (ENDS) nor insensitive high explosive, nor fire resistant pits to protect against an aircraft fuel or engine fire; particularly for

the alert a-force parked near ends of operating runways, and occasionally exercised

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in engine start exercises, even after the 1968 end of an airborne alert force. In fact, recall that the 1985 report of President Reagan's Blue Ribbon Task Group on management of the nuclear weapons program, that was chaired by Judge William

T. Clark, commented in its appendix that "technical means to improve stockpile safety were identified in 1973" adding "the task group finds it distressing that it took until 1984 to begin modifying weapons" - and how lucky we were in the 1980 Grand Forks SAC fire on an alert B52 in a training exercise. Evidently, there's room, even in so successful a system as for the nuclear weapons, to improve the safety assurance process. And setting priorities has remained a difficult process until more recently. In 1983, the cold war requirements for range, megatonnage and numbers of warheads led to the decision that the Navy's new Trident 2 W88D5 warhead system would be built with sensitive high explosive; this because it has some 30-40% higher energy density than the insensitive one, thereby allowing an extra warhead to be loaded per missile, or an extra few hundred mile range for a given warhead loading, or somewhat larger megatonnage to be packed into a given volume. This was a decision which is now less than optimal as we face the post cold war situation, and under START are off-loading warheads. Technology, of course, will never replace judgment in making such priority calls and it is true that decisions made under one set of circumstances in

1983 may look less wise in 1994 than it did back then. Judgment is and always will be important, but it must be founded as strongly as possible on data, and that is why, using the best analytical tools to analyze and understand the risks and consequences is so important. We have those methods - they're called "fault-tree analyses" or "probabilistic risk assessments" - and they allow one to find the large

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partial derivatives in the safety chain and to identify common failure modes, when these factors are understood based on data and analysis.

Such fault-tree analyses have been initiated and carried through in the past few years, both for some of the missile systems and their operational configuration, and for handling and transportation procedures. They require a lot of hard, careful work to calculate overall safety risk and safety levels in terms of all the individual steps for complex operational procedures and for many system components. One has to make many measurements and assemble a lot of data to evaluate overall safety, carefully using the available analytic tools. This procedure - along with modern analytic tools, in particular the ability to do 3-dimensional hydronuclear computations on the behavior of primaries, have taught us that there were safety problems not previously appreciated. Their value is clear. The Trident 2 warhead, with its highly detonable propellant and sensitive high explosive in a thru-deck configuration wrapped around the 3rd stage is a case in point. Only with refined analyses - including all the uncertainties - could we begin to appreciate with any accuracy the risks of loading and unloading them, fully mated with warheads, onto the sub; and still there are questions about multi-point impact and detonation if the motor goes. We can only begin to approach this with 3-d calculations, and the

W88 is a warhead slated to remain in our arsenal. In several examples in the past 7 or 8 years we have seen how the latest analytic tools, in particular the ability to do three-dimensional calculations on poten-

tial warhead accidents, have given us new and more conservative estimates of the safety of the weapons in the arsenal. The most vulnerable location for single point detonations has moved. This data is critical as input to inform judgments about

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how best to handle the weapons, how best to move them, load them and meet the stated criteria that we gave earlier. Our history of stockpile problems with bombs that were introduced into the arsenal without adequate testing after the 1961 test moratorium is a testament to the importance of enforcing rigorous discipline at each step, and not introducing changes in manufacturing process or design without rigorous analysis and test data. Above all, we should not be so arrogant that we think about improving or changing so sophisticated a system, its manufacturing procedure, components, or design, when we are dealing with such high consequences of a failure to safety. A strong management system that challenges would-be innovators at each stage is the best antidote to either arrogance or complacency when it comes to theorizing one’s way around the problem. And I say this as a theoretical physicist who knows how wrong one can go by making simple changes until data is available to put us back on the right track. Finally, criterion 4 is important - essential - when dealing with an operation that is required to meet such exacting standards as we have put for the nuclear program; and it also applies for other comparable operations with high risks associated with them. It takes a special organization to establish confidence and maintain vigilance in the process; one that challenges the weapons designers and weapon handling procedures in the case of nuclear weapons, in search of any or all dangers that may have been overlooked or not properly evaluated. And this is what one can achieve with a red team or a rigorous peer review process, as well as good communications up and down the line.

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In our weapons safety report we spelled out in detail what this would mean in a nuclear weapons safety process: Red Teams and also transparent communication

channels back and forth, up and down the chain between the top management, the decision folks, and the engineers and scientists doing the designs and integrating the systems. The 1985 presidential panel of Judge Clark and the subsequent one formed by Adm. Watkins as Secretary of DOE and chaired by Gordon Moe in 1988 tried to improve this communication process. We found it still necessary in our

1990 study to carry it further as we reviewed actual implementation of the earlier recommendations and realized there was still too much impedance between the top and bottom in the channels of communication. Therefore we recommended Red Teams in the evaluation of weapons design at stages known by Phase 2a: Design Definition, and Phase 3: Development Engineering. Of course now we are not designing new warheads, but we are in an evaluation program of aging

and handling of weapons. Red Teams with a pipeline up to the Nuclear Weapons Council are critical, plus a Joint Advisory Committee or JAC for nuclear weapons surety, which now exists under Gen. Larry Welch as chair, reporting directly to the Secretaries of DOD and DOE. It is charged to provide oversight and to be responsible for examining on-going practices with respect to safety and surety, It has over-sight of the safety reviews conducted by the Departments of Energy and Defense for specific systems, and it would identify and inform the Secretaries of Energy and Defense of any serious issue, and provide advice as to

the appropriate response. Such a process should insure accountability at all levels and strengthen the process for resolving surety issues in an effective, informed and expeditious manner.

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I think of this process of red teams, peer reviews, advisory committees and effective oversight to insure communication links as a way of leveling the playing field, to use a popular phrase, between the safety and military requirements. In the early days of pro football, there were the offensive players and leaders, who were the great heroes. Now we see, for every Joe Montana, a Lawrence Taylor or a Mike Singletary. Offense and defense are both fully appreciated. The same must be for the red teams here. They must not be dismissed or view as “party poopers”, as was the case for the countermeasure folks who brought, or tried to bring, reality into the early

SDI program with reality checks on early extravagant

claims of effectiveness. They’re essential and must be recognized as such. Many a scientist has said that we are much more prone to fool ourselves, but nature cannot be fooled. In fact, in a statement at the end of his Appendix F, Dick Feynman wrote a sentence that summarizes the need for all four of the criteria

I have given in discussing high risk operations when he said, ”For a successful technology reality much take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” In any and every important, high risk operation, that precedence for reality is important over all other aspects, not just for its

P.R.Decision makers

and managers should have a “can do” attitude; it is essential. It is also important

for scientists and engineers. But a good scientist and a good engineer is one who also inevitably has doubts and concerns, because there is no absolute certainty in our work, nor any system absolutely free of accidents. Appropriately the first talk at this conference by Prof. Charles Perrow is entitled “The Inevitability of Accidents.” They will occur and we must do our best to be prepared for them. These issues are important as well as timely to discuss here because we are

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now entering a future where the nuclear arsenal is going to have to be sustained with a stockpile stewardship program that can no longer rely on underground tests to maintain or confirm safety, or our confidence in them, or to help us identify potential aging problems. That means that we must work harder to understand some of the phenomenology in our codes and to improve the scientific base of our understanding of nuclear explosions in detail. Today’s uncertainties and phenomenological characterizations are wrapped up into aged words that have been

around for decades, like the fudge factor. Since we can no longer rely on tests for data to scale or extrapolate from laboratory results, we must work harder with the best analytic tools to understand better the underlying science of the weapons. We have now computers and diagnostics that can help us advance our understanding of the science without underground nuclear tests to supply new data. They are a necessary part of stockpile stewardship program. In fact, to use a word that the

Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs at DOE likes, since we don’t have underground tests available, our stockpile stewardship program should be a science

based stockpile stewardship (SBSS) program. Peer review and red teams will remain essential and at least for the near term future, more important than ever, as we begin to master with confidence the challenge of maintaining a stockpile over a long period without being able

to use underground tests for reality checks, relying instead exclusively on above ground experiments and excellent diagnostics of secondaries and primaries, and advanced computer modeling tested against above ground data in order to maintain confidence in our stockpile. I have to say that for me that means in today’s changing and uncertain world, and certainly for the next 2pi-3pi years, not “greening” one

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of the weapons labs. Not yet anyway as we move to a smaller stockpile with fewer types, and no underground tests to validate our judgments and safety demands. Also necessary for a strong SBSS program is retaining, sustaining, recruiting high quality scientists and engineers without which a responsible stockpile stewardship effort is not possible. This is then a major challenge for the government, the country, the public at large to understand for the future. Responsible stockpile stewardship will require a program that brings together good science, sustains, retains, develops outstanding young people and provides the weapons physics and diagnostics that we will be relying on in place of underground nuclear explosions. Only people who don’t want such a program for their own political reasons, or who don’t understand the sophistication required to do a good job, can think otherwise.

I hope the leaders in Washington, in Congress and the Executive, understand, and act, appropriately. It will require money - it doesn’t come free. But the weapons program also has to understand not to ask for or to insist on too much either. We are entering a comprehensive test ban (CTB) era because in the post-Cold War, it is believed that a CTB Treaty will be a contribution to non-proliferation - a goal of great value to overall security if achieved. This also then requires us to find that fine line of a strong SBSS program that is not viewed as a continuing effort

to advance and enhance nuclear capabilities for new missions. I want to turn to my last point now. In addition to these four intrinsic criteria we have been discussing, there are two important, external variables that one has

to pay attention to in maintaining important high consequence operations in our democratic society, and these are listed in the next transparency. One is to provide strong motivation to the participants in that program and the second, is to keep

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the public adequately informed on the risks that it entails. The first of these I have addressed in part by saying we had to challenge the best young people and sustain them with good science. But we also have to recognize that in the melliu of public life the pride and honor that go with a good job that is understood to be important for the nation has to be recognized. And that means for the nuclear program in particular that it will be up to society and Washington to show the kind of support and respect for a community that has done so much to win the cold war, and that we now need to continue to drive ahead for a

more peaceful world and a safer 21st century. That is a short statement for a big

problem, but it is a real one. The second requirement, keeping a public adequately informed on risks, needs no more defense than to see what's happened to those highly visible, high risk operations where such an effort to keep the public informed was inadequate. The odor that goes with the word "nuclear" in connection with nuclear reactors, nuclear

waste, and nuclear fallout in modern times is certainly an expression of lack of effort in the early days of the nuclear era to inform people that, yes, nuclear energy and nuclear radiation may have many benefits to offer, but they are not totally risk free: fall out, waste disposal, the inevitability of accidents. The whole nuclear endeavor started with the responsibility for development and for safety cautions combined together under one and the same direction, and with the public assured of "no risks". It can't and shouldn't be done that way. This is the most difficult problem of all that 1 have talked about - how to help the public understand risk; but if one should lose their confidence in a democratic society, it is very hard, nigh impossible, to gain it back. Choices about risk and

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risk management need to be discussed and understood in a democratic society. It is a responsibility that cannot be ducked. Thanks for hearing me out.

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S. Drell

The Route to the CTBT Las Vegas, NV - May 13,1998 The U.S. commitment to a true zero-yeld comprehensive test ban treaty, that President Clinton signed on September 26, 1996, depends on you - on the success of this community to meet the major challenge that has been presented to you. Under a ban on all nuclear explosions, you must do the good science, which means gathering the critical data and developing the understanding that will be necessary if we are to maintain, as we must, in the years ahead what we now enjoy, i.e. confidence in our enduring nuclear weapons stockpile. You, and through you our government and military leaders, must have the confidence that you will hear whatever warning bells that may ring, however unanticipated they may be, alerting us to evidence of deterioration of an aging stockpile. You also must have the means, and the knowledge, to do what has to be done, in a timely way, by way of refurbishment and/or remanufacturing in order to fix problems that may arise. The importance of your succeeding in meeting this challenge also puts a serious obligation on the American public, and on our political leaders. That obligation is to provide steady support for a strong stockpile stewardship and maintenance program - that is for your work - so that you can do this job. You will need the tools. These include the

necessary facilities for enhanced surveillance and forensics, for detailed diagnostics, and for accurate and reliable simulations and validation of codes based on greatly increased computer power. This support will make it possible for you to get the vital data that you must have. Many factors will be involved in maintaining the support required for a strong and successful SSMP

-

not the least of which will be the credibility you maintain with the

public, the military, the political leaders and with your scientific peers, both in and

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outside the national security community. This credibility is a priceless asset, and must be guarded assiduously. Finally there is a third factor that will be critical for bringmg the CTBT into force and that is the behavior of other nations - particularly the nuclear ones like India. More on that later. Let me develop these thoughts a bit more. First of all, let me make clear why I think the CTBT is so important. The importance of a ban on all nuclear testing was made clear in the debate in the United Nations in 1995 that led to an indefinite extension of the 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty at its fifth and final scheduled five-year review. A commitment by the five nuclear powers to cease testing, and developing and deploying new weapons, was a condition by many of the 181 signatories of the NPT extension (now 185). It is nonproliferation that is so important for reducing nuclear danger around the world. The nuclear powers must now honor that commitment to cease testing and reduce the current discriminatory situation between the nuclear and non-nuclear nations who have signed the Nonproliferation Treaty. For me this is a new circumstance. I had doubts about the necessity of the comprehensive test ban as an ingredient of maintaining and extending the nonproliferation regime as recently as 1990 when I led the study on Nuclear Weapons Safety for the House Armed Services Committee, and again in 1992 in the debate on the Hatfield-Mitchell-Exon Amendment to allow 15 tests, over a three year period, that were designed to improve weapon safety. No longer do I have those doubts. A CTBT clearly became a policy necessity in the debate over extending the NonProliferation Treaty in 1995. Not only does the CTBT help limit the spread of nuclear weapons through an NPT regime, particularly if current negotiations agree on effective provisions for verifying that Treaty, and appropriate sanctions are applied for non-compliance. The CTBT will also

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dampen competition among those who already have warheads, but who now will be unable to develop and to deploy with confidence more advanced ones at either the high end or the low end of destructive power. It will also force rogue states seeking a nuclear capability to place confidence in untested bombs. India is a special problem to which I shall return later. Notwithstanding a strong case for the CTBT, the U.S. must be convinced that, under a ban on all nuclear explosions, we

can retain

our currently high confidence in the

reliability of our enduring nuclear arsenal over the long term as the weapons age and their numbers are reduced. This technical question was of course thoroughly studied, leading to a conclusion that was accepted broadly - if not unanimously - by an informed scientifichechnical community. The conclusion can be stated simply as follows: with a strong scientific and technical infrastructure in nuclear weapons, and a balanced and multi-faceted program of stockpile stewardship and management that has the necessary diagnostic equipment and analytic capabilities, and will continue to be led, as it is at present by first-class scientists and engineers at the National Labs, there is no need to continue nuclear testing at any level of yield. We are now relying on you folks and your Labs to make good on that promise and that judgment. The immediate working challenge to you is to fill in substantial gaps in our understanding of the physical processes in a nuclear explosion and in our knowledge of long term aging effects in components in the weapons systems that will remain in our enduring stockpile. Age related changes that can affect a nuclear weapon and must be understood and evaluated include: 0

Structural or chemical degradation of the high explosive leading to a change in performance during implosion.

0

Changes in plutonium properties as impurities build up due to radioactive decay

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0

Corrosion along interfaces, joints, and welds

0

Chemical or physical degradation of other materials or components.

An intensified stockpile surveillance program that looks for cracks, component failures or other signs of deterioration, and develops quantitative measures to determine when these can unacceptably affect the performance of the primary, will be crucial for the short term confidence in the stockpile over the coming decade. This confidence can be gained only when one has the necessary data. There are very many other non-nuclear components of a weapon system that are crucial to its successful operation, including arming and firing systems, neutron generators, explosive actuators, safing components, permissive action link coded control, radar components, batteries and aerodynamic surfaces. All of these are also critical to mission success, but testing of these non-nuclear components and making improvements as may be indicated are not restricted by a CTBT. To ensure performance over the longer term, there will be a need for new facilities to bench mark advanced full-physics 3-D burn codes against physical conditions during an explosion, and greatly increased computer power to handle such codes. There must also be a significant industrial infrastructure to enable us to do required replenishing, refurbishing, or remanufacturing of age-affected components, and to evaluate the resulting product. And above all on top of this, and in fact supported by the data that these challenging technical opportunities will provide, there is a critical importance of retaining experienced nuclear weapons scientists and engineers, and training a new generation to maintain a high standard of excellence in the program.

I realize that what I am calling for here is a tall order. I also have to tell you that when I carried out reviews of the program, both with the UC Oversight Panel and with JASON a year ago, I became very concerned. I kept hearing strong statements fi-om the labs of

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serious worries about the aging of weapons and the problems we faced. By and large these were based on a lack of data, and I did not see then a priority effort in the program to get the necessary data in a timely way. Of course it is essential to be very critical and uncertain about agmg weapons if you don’t have the data. But it is also essential to make the commitment and give high priority to getting that data. There is no substitute for such data; and getting it without undo delay so timely action can be taken if needed. Today I am now happier and more encouraged, and so are my participating colleagues. We revisited this issue during the past winter, and saw a real change in culture with intensified efforts to acquire data on signatures of aging (e.g. void swelling and surface damage from recoiling U and He in radioactive decay of aged Pu). What is more this data has added greatly to the confidence we can all have today in our understanding of agmg and in the continue reliability of the weapons in our stockpile over the coming decade.

So I am pleased to say here that the recent developments in the stewardship program have added greatly to my confidence that you are doing - and proving that you can do the essential job of getting the necessary data. Of course you still have a long way to go, but the route to meet the challenge of the CTBT is indeed being properly paved and I applaud you for that. What is more, your data and understanding will enable you to assure our military and defense officials and government leaders that they can have high confidence in the stockpile. That confidence will be the heart of your establishing the high credibility in this program and in your work as a foundation on which to assure continued program support and success. Beyond the stockpile stewardship program itself, I also want to add it is enormously satisfylng to me to see how much the scientific atmosphere has improved in your laboratories over the past four years. It is not an exaggeration to say that the weapons

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labs are enjoying a real scientific renaissance. I look back to the time of the election in November 1992 when I was called in at the very last moment to the DOE transition team, only after the people there realized that they had totally forgotten to bring someone to look into the needs and problems involving the national laboratories that the new Administration had to face. Not only you folks, but also high energy labs doing basic, unclassified research like SLAC and FERMILAB, for example, were forgotten. That is how far out on the fringe our activities were viewed by many of the new people coming into government. That is no longer true. Budgets for the nuclear weapons program are no longer plunging. They are now solid. Political support nationwide is high, also for very important problems that are broader than just the stockpile stewardship program. For example the labs are challenged to provide the technology to put some verification teeth into the NonProliferation Treaty as well as to the comprehensive test ban. Advances in the ability to simulate the behavior of scientific systems, using computers whose power has advanced by orders of magnitude years ahead of the anticipated industrial schedule, are going to be a boon to all science. Your mission is recognized as one of great national importance, and your support is solid - and will remain so, I believe, so long as you deliver, and maintain your credibility. I have emphasized the scientific/technical component of your credibility. There is

also the public component. I cannot overemphasize the importance of caution, balance, and precision when you make public statements. Coming from senior scientists in the program like you, they are heard by our political leaders and the editorial writers, and will influence their continued support for the stewardship program, as well as for ratification and world-wide implementation of the CTBT. You are a unique community working on nuclear weapons. Your statements are of singular importance. All of us involved in this

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process must measure our words carefully, guarding as best we can against hyperbole and statements that can be taken out of context, misinterpreted or distorted. Of course the fundamental rule is: at all times say what you believe is true, but say it carefully. I urge you to make a serious effort to help build public understanding, and support and confidence in this program. Let me add a bit of advice on this very point, specifically addressed to the managers in the audience. The labs should at this time be making a stronger effort to broaden the communication of your results with the Department of Defense and military leaders, especially on the enhanced surveillance program, and their implications for the behavior of the weapons during the coming decade. This will help provide them with a better understanding, a needed understanding on their part, of the relevance of the stewardship program for meeting their mission needs - both for the short and long terms. There is an evident need for DOD to better recognize the benefits it will gain as your customer. The DOD budget has been tithed for the coming decade to help pay for the SSMP’s annual

$4.5billion budget. This has led to strained relations between defense and energy. The better they understand why you need all this program including their dollars, the better will be your relations and the stronger their support. At this time the stewardship program holds a high ground in the policy debates. There are extremists chipping away, including those of the chicken little school who assert that we are incompetent to maintain the weapons without testing, as well as the anti-nuclear cadre who view a well supported, good stewardship program as an end run around the CTBT. I believe neither of these extremes will be decisive if you do your jobs well and represent your work accurately. Above all, success starts with getting the necessary data; building the infrastructure to permit timely response to problems as they

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may arise; providing the deliverables required by your customers in the military; and investing in necessary facilities for the long haul. Two final brief comments. First, there will be great value in managing the program as openly as consistent with U S . security needs. You will thereby benefit from scrutiny and valuable peer review by colleagues outside of the weapons community - a process of long recognized value in the scientific process. Furthermore openness will provide convincing evidence to other nations, and to skeptics in general, that our ambitious stewardship program is in fact totally consistent with the CTBT, and indeed is an integral part of that policy decision. And finally I emphasize the importance of the U.S. moving ahead with CTBT ratification during the coming year. The treaty as currently written won’t go into effect until all 44 nuclear capable nations have signed on. India as you know claims to have carried out 5 tests this week, and has been a hold-out demanding the five declared nuclear powers set a date-definite for getting rid of all nuclear weapons before joining the treaty. That of course won’t happen anytime soon. There will be a scheduled review conference next year

-

in 1999

-

3 years after the signing to attempt to resolve this issue by

considering changes in the conditions for the treaty to enter into force. Unless we ratify the CTBT by then the U.S. will have no place at the table. After India’s action we are in danger of losing the world-wide commitment to the CTBT. Only with U.S. leadership can I see hopes for keeping the CTBT on track and keeping the 185 signatory nations to the NPT together. For this we must be at the table and lead a united effort through application of political pressures and sanctions. We ought to get moving. India’s recent tests have increased the urgency,

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Sidney D. Drell, Abraham D. Sofaer, and George D. Wilson

THE PRESENT THREAT The threat of biological and chemical weapons is already upon us-and

in

some ways is even more grave than the threat of nuclear weapons.

The existence of a direct threat from abroad to the U.S. homeland is not new. Nuclear weapons have posed one for more than fifty years. But today we face the new-and

in many ways more challenging-threat

of attack from biological and

chemical weapons (BCW). This present threat is not posed by just one or two nuclear-armed nations. It is much more pervasive. With modern advances in biotechnology and pharmaceutical manufacturing, there is a threat of attack against U.S. society from a growing number of nations and terrorist units. Although the BCW threat cannot be eliminated, there are constructive steps we can take to reduce the dangers or mitigate the consequences of BCW attacks and perhaps even move toward establishing a norm for the nonuse of BCW, such as has existed, de facto, for nuclear weapons for more than fifty years. That a “nonuse norm” for nuclear weapons exists is strongly indicated by the fact that the United States, the former Soviet Union, France, and China have all been denied victories in military conflicts in which they nevertheless refrained from using their nuclear arsenals against nonnuclear-armed adversaries. Steps that would raise the cost-tobenefit ratio for the use of BCW would also reduce their attractiveness and thereby move the world along a path toward establishing another nonuse norm. Sidney D. Drell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, an emeritus professor oftheoretical physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and a member oftbe National Academy of Sciences. Abraham D. Sofaer is the George P. Shultz Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. George D. Wilson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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South Korean sddiers prepare for the possibiility d a biologicat and chemicar weapons attack in this military exercise i n a Seoul subway station, August 1994.

An agenda to deal with the BCW h e a t is essential and feasible. Here are the five areas where actions can be effective in reducing the dangers and potential damage from tine use of BCW:

1 . Intelligence. A primary goal of an effective program against BCW is to obtain early and reliable intelligence and, best of all, clues as to the intentions of would-

be perpetrators. Clues as to intentions are critically important for discovering emerging BCW threats. The relevant facilities, equipment, and material can have dual purposes. They ma? be used in legitimate civilian activities, such as manufxturing commercial drugs, pesticides, antibiotics, and vaccines, as well as in manufacturing arid sxackpiling BCM? Discerning intentions requires a strengthened, robust capability for h u a n intelligence and clandestine means of acquiring this information. On the domestic front, information gathering and surve2hce by the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and local law-enforcement personnef will be critical, but it must remain within legal restraints as man&ted by the Constitution and be consistent with the core values of our S Q C ~ ~ ~ Y .

199 Comprehensive and timely databases maintained by health officials on disease

and illness patterns can provide early evidence of hostile actions. Similar efforts by U.S. aFim1tw-e officials monitoring crops and livestock conditions m d contamination can proxide vital intelligence warnings.

An overall information system and technical tools for detecting and identifying developing threats (or actual atxackscs)can be upgraded in significant ways. Possibilities exist for detecting small quantities of agents -with compact, covert, autonomous, as well as remote, sensors -using advanced technologies. The Department of Defense is developing new sensors of great sensitivity for warning and detection. The Department of Energy’s weapons laboratories are applying their impoTtmt assets and experience with nuclear sensors to the advancement of sensor t e c h o l o u for use against BCVi7, a task currently supported by the 1996 kderal Nu-Lugar-Domenicilegislation. Better intelligence of traditional types

will be important against delivery systems and, in particular? against theater or short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, such as the SCUDS and their derivatives that (together with their launchers) the United States failed to locate

during the GdLf war. 2. Research. On both the scientific and the medical fronts, a strong research base is i.taaH to stay ahead of n a t w d y occurring bacteria and viruses as they mutate into

forms &at evade current antibiotics and vaccines. A strong public heal& system supporting good health practices will help provide a database and a system on

.it-hich to bifd for recovery. Improved techniques are needed for simply mcl retiably detecting Infections during the early inncubation period, for example, by using E92

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saliva tests, nose swipes, or sophisticated sensors. Above all, the biomedical community should get more heavily involved in these efforts.

It is increasingly important for doctors and scientists with relevant expertise to become more deeply involved in helping address what can and cannot be done technically, in developing ethical standards for their own activities, and in educating the public. An "extended" Hippocratic oath by the scientific and medical community, taking a moral stand against any actions violating the international BCW conventions, could be a powerful influence.

3 . Inspection. The involvement of industry will be key in developing protocols for inspections to implement the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). T h s is the way a consensus was achieved in the United States to support the signing and Senate ratification (April 1997) of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), a treaty banning all chemical weapons. Regrettably, the Senate added unilateral waivers and exemptions that could weaken the CWC regime and undercut its effectiveness. Implementing the BWC is a more difficult challenge because constraints based on the quantity of a biological agent are not effective, given the rapid rate at which such agents multiply. In addition, the pharmaceutical industry is extremely sensitive to the potential loss of proprietary information. Experience

with nuclear weapons has demonstrated a need for effective challenge inspections. The International Atomic Energy Agency has recently developed a strengthened safeguard regime and is currently negotiating bilateral agreements with member states for its implementation. This is a difficult, but,not impossible, problem to address for BCW. The value of routine inspections has been called into question, however, and should be determined on the basis of sound and objective criteria, to avoid unwarranted burdens. Emphasis should also be placed on the high costs to would-be proliferators if these efforts fail and they feel that they must build up and maintain sophisticated BCW stockpiles and capabilities. In both the nuclear weapons and the chemical weapons debates in the United States, serious opposition to ratification of treaty limits or to accepting verification protocols has been based, in part, on the fear that success in negotiating a set

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of provisions and treaties will lull us into false confidence that we are safe or have accomplished more than, in reality, has been achieved. This points up the importance of not making excessive claims, of insisting on effective verification as a necessary part of any control regime, and of diligent enforcement of compliance measures. Violations of treaties must not go unpunished. Furthermore, although the United States should support the treaties and abide by them, it should at the same time proceed in its national-security planning with contingency preparations for appropriate responses to potential treaty violations and noncompliance.

4. Consequence management. A great deal remains to be done to enhance national, state, and local programs for managing the consequences of BCW attacks. The United States must build a bottom-up system from the local level, making effective use of national resources, such as databases, information banks, and communication systems. We have to develop an effective process for making crisis decisions, both in periods of true catastrophe and in situations where panic is the greatest danger. A public affairs policy must also be crafted that applies available resources and benefits fairly, in accord with U.S. law and codes of social justice, and that also establishes a proper balance between transparency and secrecy in malung information available to ensure proper public awareness of dangers and actions without causing panic. We must honor our values as a society in any restriction on citizens’ freedoms, including the right to travel, while at the same time preventing victims of contamination from contributing to the further spread of disease. This is a complex problem of information management and deserves serious and timely attention. Preparations for consequence management should also highlight the risks that will be faced by would-be perpetrators should they initiate BCW attacks.

5. Defense. Defense encompasses both passive and active efforts. Passive defenses, including equipment, preparations, and training of medical response and cleanup teams, can play an important role. Ongoing efforts for active defenses are also essential, but need continued, careful evaluation of their realistic potential and

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202 the prospect of operational countermeasures. Sanctions, and in particular trade as well as military sanctions, can be important, although their effectiveness against indigenous terrorist groups as opposed to state actors is highly doubtful. Export controls over critical substances and equipment are essential. Preemptive or preventive strikes have been, and will likely continue to be, taken regarding BCW. Accepted rules concerning such actions are elusive, however, and unilateral measures would need to satisfy the stringent criteria under the United Nations Charter. Nations that act preemptively will have to be prepared to balance their unilateral aims against their international policy goals, as well as to defend their conduct by revealing intelligence as a basis for action-in addition to meeting the conventional requirements of proportionality and necessity for acting against a BCW threat. Such issues have to be addressed on a caseby-case basis. The economic and scientific strength of a nation and, even more, its credibility are important factors in its ability to dissuade, discourage, or even prevent a BCW attack. For this and other reasons, the United States must maintain credibility by forgoing unwarranted threats and by following through on such threats as it does make-while

insisting on, and subjecting itself to, strict account-

ability. As to what specific means, nuclear or otherwise, will or will not be employed in undertaking reprisal actions, little can be gained by explicitly “tipping one’s hand.” The prospect, however, that the fifty-year norm against use of nuclear weapons would come to an end in response to the use of BCW is patently unappealing. Our policy should clearly show that we will seek to rely on other credible options, but it should stop short of ruling out any single action absolutely and totally. Finally, examining the full range of issues relating to BCW conveys one overriding lesson. In every major respect, apart from battlefield use in open military conflict, the dangers posed by BCW-and thereby reduce those dangers-are

the measures needed to manage and

similar in principle to the dangers posed by,

and the measures needed to manage, peacefully generated biological and chemical hazards.

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203 The p&&c he&

inhastructure and methods needed to respond to naturally

occurring and ncnmilitaq biological and chemical hazards overlap significantly with those requked to deal with deliberate BCW attacks. The medical data needed to eduate h e incidence of injury or disease are the same for both peacem a d defensive purposes. The detection and evaluation technologies &at are being d ~ d o p e in d both the chemical a d the biological fields will serve equally critical roles, regardless of the source or motives behind the substances endangering the pcp-dation. The infrastructure needed to deal with cbemicd and biological hazards is afso t l e same: (a) properly equipped response teams able to circumscribe, nneu~Aize,and decontaminate areas; (b) a system for informing the affected public md for isolating and treating injured or contagious individuals; ( c ) the produ&orm, distribution, and adr&&trztionn of necessary medications; (d) securing public cooperation without causing panic; md ( e )the development of long-term protection in the form of protective devices and treatments.

f m p m t m differences do exist between nondeliberate and deliberate chemical

and biological hazards with respect to the measures &at may be possible to regulate, deter, and defend against &ern. States that are threatened by identifiable regimes or terrorists may be able to slow or diminish the effectiveness of BGW programs by limiting the availability of necessary prerequisites, such as equipment, ehemicd precursors? biological! media, delivery systems. The dangerous Libyan chemical weapon program of Colonel Muammar Qadddi, for instance, :asbeen sign&CzntJy slowed and limited through such egorts. Preemptive actions, such ;as the U.SLattack ~n &he SMa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, S u d q in August 1998: may also be possible. B 16

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Although potentially valuable, these measures are only feasible in the case of known enemies whose intentions are discernible and pose a substantial threat. The growing threat posed by BCW is largely composed of situations that fall outside this narrow category. In many, if not most, situations, it will be impossible to determine whether and where potential users are developing BCW, and it may often be impossible to know who is responsible for such attacks or even whether a particular incident or outbreak of disease was deliberately caused. The relative ease of access to BCW-even

by nonstate actors-and

the diffi-

culties of using such weapons as a deterrent strongly support the policies adopted in the CWC and BWC, prohibiting not only use but also possession and development. For the same reasons, however, it is essential to assume that no practical means exist to prevent all violations. Consequently, effective deterrence can only be assured through the imposition of severe sanctions for proven violations of the conventions. Significantly, no sanction has yet been imposed for such violations or use by states, groups, or individuals, and no prospect exists for including any in the conventions. Therefore, an effort to adopt an international convention to criminalize serious violations of the CWC and BWC is worthy of serious consideration. In addition, it appears equally important to persuade the U.N. Security Council to adopt a resolution for the mandatory imposition of appropriate, punitive measures by member states for BCW violations-as peace and security under the U.N. Charter-even that refuse to ratify the CWC and BWC.

a threat to international

with respect to those states

CI

Adapted f r o m t h e introductory essay in t h e new Hoover Press book The New Terror: Facing the Threat of Biological and Chemical Weapons, edited by Sidney D. Drell, Abraham D. Sofaer, and George D. Wilson.

The N e w Terror: Facing the Threat of Biological and Chemical Weapons is now available

from the Hoover Press. To order, call 800-935-2882.

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Chapter IV

New Challenges in the 21st Century: Escaping the Nuclear Deterrence Trap and Facing Terrorism

Chapter IV of this book takes us forward in time into the 21st century, up to the present. The gravest danger today is no longer viewed to be a nuclear holocaust between two superpowers, one of which has passed into history. In fact the United States and Russia have declared themselves to be allies in the war against terrorism. The gravest danger we face today is the chilling prospect that nuclear weapons, capable of destruction and devastation on an historically unprecedented scale, may be acquired by very dangerous hands be they rogue nations or suicidal terrorists. Our daunting challenge -brought home so vividly on 9/11 - is to preserve and strengthen a nuclear nonproliferation regime that is threatened by the spread of technology. The main policy issues of this growing danger and their related implications were analyzed in a book, ”The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons,” co-authored with former Ambassador and arms control negotiator James Goodby that was published in 2003 by the Hoover Institution Press at Stanford University (with a Foreword by George Shultz). The first essay in this chapter, ”The Gravest Danger,” is an abstract from that book. It appeared in the Hoover Digest in 2004. The second essay in this chapter, entitled ”Nuclear Weapons and their Proliferation: The Gravest Danger” draws on the text of that book, as adapted in a number of talks I have given to changing circumstances on the political and strategic stage over a several year period since 2003. (It appeared in abbreviated form with the title “The Shadow of the Bomb, 2006” in Policy Review ((No. 136, April and May, 2006)) published by the Hoover Institution). I emphasized the growing danger of nuclear proliferation as one of the Tough Challenges, in an address with the same title, to Stanford University students at the ceremony marking their initiation into the Phi Beta Kappa scholastic honorary society in 2004. It is the third essay included in this chapter. By 2005, more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia had formally buried their adversarial hatchets, as declared by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin. As allies the two nations were seeking to escape the trap of nuclear deterrence based on massive assured destruction. This changed circumstance clearly called for a fresh look at the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense planning. James Goodby and I undertook to do that in a report commissioned by the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C. as a sequel to our earlier book. That report, ”What Are Nuclear Weapons For? Recommendations for Restructuring U.S. Strategic Forces” is the fourth article in this chapter.

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The fifth article, entitled ”In the Shadow of the Bomb,” is essentially a wrap-up of much of what has been said throughout this volume. It was presented in 2005 as the keynote address to the annual meeting of the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science in San Francisco.

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Sidney Orel! md James Goodby

The Gravest Danger weapons could onfy too easily fall into the hands of rogue and terrorists. Sidney Drett and James Sootfby explain how to ffmt Last year CIA director George Tenet cautioned the U.S. Senate that we are seeing "the continuing weakening of the international nonproiiferation consensus" and that "the domino theory of the twenty-first century may well be nuclear." Lets hope he will be proved wrong, Iraq was a dry well as far as existing nuclear weapons are concerned, but the danger of their proliferation is very real, as is evident in North Korea and Iran, Nuclear bombs are not jyst one more weapon. With an energy release a million times larger than that of previous explosives, mass destruction is inevitable. These weapons pose an existential issue: Can civilization survive? Ronald Reagan, who understood this, often said, "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." This prospect of the spread of nuclear weapons and other dangerous technologies to the hands of suicidal terrorists and rogue nations unrestrained by the norms of civilized behavior has led George W, Bush to remark that "the gravest danger our nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology." The nuclear restraint regime constructed by the nuclear superpowers during the Cold War is not necessarily going to be replicated. A worst-case scenario can easily be imagined: « The era of managed nuclear weapons competition, essentially by two nations, is over, and, with it, the stability fostered by a long period of nonproiiferation will break down.

Stingy Orett is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution ana a /wfessor

of physics at Stanford University,

James GoodDy was (tiptomat-in-residBnce at Stanford's Institute for International Studies in 2003, ft

Hoover- Digcs1, r. 2004 • No. I

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* This wjJi generate increased pressures many countries in unstable regions 10 make biological weapons to offsetdie the growing nuclear capabilities round chess. * T«s3snationai terrorist organizations will have an easer time gaining access 10 tiucleaf weapons, by theft o? by deliberate transfer o the weapons, * Thiscascade of easily forseeable events will lead,sooner or later to the use of nudear weapons in combar by nation-states or to attacks on major

population centers, jaciudmg American cities, by terrorists equipped with nudear weapons. work widh all the inspiration and determiThe United status will have to nation it can muster m meet new throats to the proliferation regime and prevent such a scenario from occurring.

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Since 1945, restraint to .nuclear affairs km played an important role in preventing the use of nuclear weapons in war, .Leaders recognized thai their dererrence to be used as weapons of defensive only artional purpose was for for last resort This lias helped Emit As nycrsber of nuclear weapon statestoto eight. However, prospects for formaintaining and aospfollfcratlon and strengrhening the nonproliferation regime would Inevitably be dashed if she Ursited States, with the most powerful military forces in the world, now to conclude that it has no choicebut to nuclear develop weapons for use In limited military engagements. Regrettably, raked., signals from Washington Jaave raised the prospect chat this is "A new requirement tor our national security. Such an action, by broadening the missions the threshold ami loweringAe tor Ruclear use, would .nvite oslier countries to concludethat they too need nuclear weapons for their security purposes.

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Military force—whether applied for preemption for against an imminent attack or for prevensionto forestall a developing potential attack—is not likely to be the key to solving the genera! problem of nuclear proliferation, an indispensable backup role. Obviously, factors quite although k will plplay apart from worries about nudear proliferation reinforced the determination or PresideiK Rush to wage war against lraq. Iraq,

forrunately they are other actions available to thre United states in cases where military force is mot the right answer la fact, strong-willed diplomacy, backed by all the instruments of national power is b generally going to be the right response IsspottajK took of diplomacy include * Ssreaf .dhejfung die Nuclear Honprolifemion Treaty by expanding the autboritfof the international Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for inspectioo of suspicious activities * Combtulsg rhe moratorium, -on umbrgtound nuciear explosive resting and working roward bringinga aCompieheosbe-lest Treaty into force * Piusumg multilateral cooperationosonbfir^ng-eariy-waming and. defensive systemslate in to force can help buIM a stronger anri-p»lifetado.n coalition The most direct way for terrorists to acquire a usable nuclear weapons capability would be through theft or illegal purchase,and the danger is real The best means of denying a nuclear capability to terrorists is to provide maximum protection for existing stockpiles of weapons and nuclear materials and to reduce their size. This calls for the geographic extension and aggressive application od effective cooperative threat reduction measures, first developed in the 1990sunder the nunn-Lugr legislation for the formar sovier Union, plus an expedited implementation of the nuclear force reductions negotiated by presidents bush and putin in moscow in 2002 Potential proliferants are motivated to acquire nuclear weapons primarily by feraof aggressive neighbors and by a desire to enhance their status. We must

target our policies to deal with these concerns, rather than viewing each

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proKferam simply as a nuisance at best aad a dangerousenemy at worst. A targeted diplomatic approach, including cooperation as well as confrontation, woulsdofter ffi« option of actually trying to respond to the specific motivations of .potential proliferants, The United States,, therefore, must address issues of regional security and prestige in a cooperative, as well as coercive, way. Developing the habits of cooperation can begin with modest confidence-building measures, but cite ultimas ga should be clear to roll back, cmefcar proliferation, not just to improve iatmmionai relationships. The priority assigned to achieving this 4 goal must match rise gravity of the danger presetttt d by the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities. Tkis has not always beea the case due to conflicting policy requirements.

I

Is it possible for the United States and Its friends to agree on criteria compelling action against terrorirts who are attempting to acquire nuclear capabilities or against the ststes that arc harboring them? The experience as the United Nations leading up to the .invasion of Iraq shows how difficult that challenge will be. But there is a need to .restore and strengthen the international consensus that nuclear proliferation should be prevented, and it must begin with building a consensus within the U.N. Security Council OR what to ck> aJbous terrorists and their to nuclear weapons. Tk international Atomic EnergyAgency is the monitoring for the NoRproiifemrion Treaty; It needs to be given more support, including a requirement that tougher monitoring arrangements ("the Additional Protocol") be a prerequisite for nuclear-related assistance. Enforcement of the Noaproliferadon Treaty is a task for the U.N, Security Council, and k must become a higher priority for the councils five permanent members, A closer, more routine connection between the IAEA and the LIN. Security Coimcii is needed: she United States should take the lead in this.

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Plutonium reprocessing and uranium enrichment plants (die front-ead of the nuclear fbei cycle) in the possession of non-nuclear weapons states should be discouraged. These plants provide stares with the capacity to develop nuclear weapons rapidly. They tend to destabilize the entire .nuclear restraint regime Guaranteed assurances of uninterrupted nuciear fuel supplies from multiple sourceswill be a necessary part of such a policy. A Security Coiaicil resolution setting forth guidelines for acceptable behavior, applying to all U.N. member stares, should be adopted as a means of reinforcing site Nonproliferation Treaty.

One reasonthat the United states is not enjoyingthe broad international support k -should have for the campaign against the linked problems of terrorism and proliferation of nudear weapons is the perception that uniiateraJ prevbentive war has become the dominant strain in American diinking about the problem, Th« adtninlstradon can and should changeddbar perception by emphasizing that a continuum of meatts— keyed 0n patient, determined diploimqr supported by coercion force when required—mast be used to deaf with the threats posed by such weaponsagainst the the security of the United stares and 'as allies, A high degereofdegree mtermdfiaal consensusand a eooperaii'/e ouclear restraint regime are the essential foundations foe a successful U.S.anti-prolioferation program. This providesa the basis for establishing standards of expecred behavior & wgll~.undet$3xxxl .cause arotiad which like-minded nation can raMy. "Tills is die first first of defense against audear terrorism, ss

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Nuclear Weapons and Their Proliferation: The Gravest Danger

We are going to be talking about nuclear weapons. A good place to start is by reminding you what they are and what they can do. Nuclear weapons are unique in their terrifying destructive potential. Their energy release is millions of times larger than that of previous explosives. Mass destruction is inevitable if they are used in conflicts. One primitive atomic bomb destroyed - literally wiped out the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of WWII, causing more than 200,000 casualties. That bomb was little more than a trigger of a modern thermonuclear or so-called hydrogen -bomb that releases 100 times or more destructive energy. There are several 10’s of thousands of them in the world today. Through the decades of the Cold War, the prospect of a nuclear holocaust was all too real. The U.S. and the former Soviet Union stood toe to toe with their fingers on the trigger ready to launch, perhaps by accident or misunderstanding if not deliberately, many thousands of nuclear warheads to annihilate one another. During his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower remarked that war with nuclear weapons can come close to ”destruction of the enemy and suicide.” The fate of civilization as we know it lay in balance. Thank goodness that specter of doom has passed. But today we face a grave new danger that has emerged. It is the danger of nuclear weapons and the material that fuels them falling into very dangerous hands, whether they be those of state leaders or terrorists, or simply suicidal fanatics unrestrained by the norms of civilized behavior. The top priority for U.S. nuclear weapons policy must be to keep that from happening. It is easy to recognize and to state this priority - but it is a most difficult challenge to figure out how to prevent such proliferation. On the diplomatic front, which is the most challenging, we must strengthen and sustain an international nonproliferation consensus that today appears to be fragile and weakening. At the same time, on the technical front, so long as we retain a nuclear deterrent, we must work to ensure its security, reliability, and effectiveness against newly emerging threats. A Cold War Success During the darkest days of the Cold War, we were successful in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons to no more than a handful of nations. A norm of nonpossession of these weapons was established, as was a norm of their non-use in

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military combat that has extended over 60 turbulent years. This record belies a view frequently expressed by those who disparage the value of international cooperation and arms control treaties, and who consider continuing negotiating efforts against nuclear proliferation to be futile. Today only eight nations are confirmed nuclear weapon states: the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France, India, Pakistan, and Israel, a non-declared nuclear weapon state (see Figure). The evidence is unclear as regards North Korea, though North Korea's government has the fuel for nuclear bombs and wishes the world to worry that it has them. Iran has been aggressively building a nuclear infrastructure. This number of eight nuclear weapons states is much smaller than was anticipated in the early 1960's when President Kennedy predicted 16 by the end of the decade. And the number has not grown over the past two decades.

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This is all the more impressive when one recalls the many nations that flirted with the idea of going nuclear plus those that started down the path to nuclear weapons and turned back. These include Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan, South Korea, and Sweden; and South Africa, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan which gave them up. But we are reminded daily by what is happening in North Korea and Iran, that the nuclear restraint regime is facing tough challenges. And we cannot forget Pakistan with its precarious arsenal and the extensive, wholesale nuclear supplier network created by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan.

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The nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT) which entered into force in 1970, more than 35 years ago, has been a bulwark for worldwide efforts to counter the spread of nuclear technology and weapons to other nations. These are its basic provisions: First, it requires that there be no transfer of nuclear weapon technology between nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states. Second, it assigns authority to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna for full scope safeguards over the declared sites for peaceful nuclear activities of all signatories; this is designed to prevent the diversion of nuclear materials to use for weapons. Third, it stipulates, as part of the Grand Bargain with the non-nuclear weapon states, the peaceful benefits of nuclear technology will be made available to them. The partners to the Treaty are also committed to good faith negotiating efforts toward an eventual goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons. At present the Treaty has almost universal support: 188 nations, all but four in the world have signed on to it. The only outliers are India and Pakistan, which became nuclear after the treaty entered into force in 1970; Israel, which has never explicitly admitted to being a nuclear power; and North Korea, which withdrew in 2003. And currently Iran is threatening. As we face the new challenge of the spread of technology to rogue nations and terrorists, some are asking if the NPT still meets our security needs. The United States and our allies, including the other nuclear weapon states, recognize a need for new restraints and modifications to make the Treaty effective in keeping the worst weapons out of the worst hands. On the other hand, many non-nuclear states expressed serious reservations about extending the Treaty into the indefinite future, when it faced its final scheduled review in 1995 at the United Nations. They objected to its discriminatory features and, as a quid-pro-quo for their continuing to renounce nuclear weapons, called on the nuclear powers to make serious and timely progress in reducing their excessively large arsenals and reducing their reliance on nuclear weapons. They also called on them to continue to adhere to the moratorium on all underground nuclear explosive tests that had been initiated in 1992by the first President Bush, and to continue to work toward a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that would formalize a test ban and extend it without limit of time. Without a doubt, the leadership and example of the U.S. will be decisive to efforts to sustain and strengthen the nonproliferation regime. This is an important

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factor for Washington to weigh in our nuclear policy decisions and actions. The U.S. and Russian commitment to the NPT, and to fulfilling their obligations under it, was explicitly affirmed by Presidents Bush and Putin in their Joint Declaration at the Moscow summit in May 2002. However those good words and promises have yet to be turned into the solid actions needed to convince the world that the U.S. and Russia, possessors of more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, are serious and determined partners in the campaign against proliferation. Preventing Proliferation

Cooperation among all nations - non-nuclear as well as nuclear - will be crucial in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. The most direct way for states or terrorist entities to acquire nuclear weapons is through theft or illegal purchase. Barring that, their biggest hurdle to achieving a nuclear capability is getting their hands on nuclear fuel by legal or illegal means. Fuel €or nuclear weapons can be made either by enriching uranium ore from its original mix as found on the earth that contains 0.7% of the fissioning isotope of uranium, U235,to highly enriched uranium (HEU) containing go+% U235;or alternatively, it can be made into fuel rods for a nuclear reactor that produces plutonium, an element that does not occur in nature. (The most common reactors utilize ordinary water for cooling and are fueled by uranium which is enriched to 3-5% U235,or LEU). Of particular concern in this regard is the large quantity of nuclear materials and nuclear warheads stored in the former Soviet Union in far less than ideal security circumstances. Their stockpiles are the largest in the world. Russia still has many hundreds of tons of dangerous nuclear material as a legacy of the Cold War, enough fuel for more than 50,000 nuclear warheads, in addition to its in excess of 10,000 warheads that still exist. The material is spread over many dozens of sites in structures and bunkers, many of which are only poorly guarded and protected. This constitutes a very rich treasure for would-be proliferators, and especially for terrorist organizations, emphasizing the importance of cooperative measures to secure them from theft or sale. With the lifting of the oppressive measures that regulated travel and other aspects of life in the Soviet Union, and the deterioration of Russian security services, there is currently a need for better systems of protecting and accounting for their vast stores of nuclear materials that remain as a legacy of the Cold War. Technology is available to protect this material by installing new security systems, and substantial progress has been made in the former Soviet Union under the Nunn-Lugar CTR program that has been funded by the U.S. Congress since 1992. (The United States currently spends approximately $1B/ year, including funds from

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the Departments of Defense, Energy, and State). It is an outstanding example of U.S. statecraft. But vulnerabilities still remain. Roughly half of the nuclear material in the former Soviet Union still remains to be protected by improved security for material protection, control, and accountability; and there is an eager market to get their hands on it. And many border crossings are unprotected. A review of the Nunn-Lugar CTR program in 2001 was commissioned by the Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board and led by former Senator Howard Baker and former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler. Under the title “A Report Card on the Department of Energy’s NonProliferation Programs with Russia,” this bipartisan senior group wrote: ”The most urgent m e t national security threat to the United States is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons useable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nation states.” Beyond endorsing the Nunn-Lugar program, they recommend greatly strengthening it in Washington by designating this threat as top priority; giving it an overall strategic plan with a senior official at the White House level in the United States being put in charge of carrying it out; and tripling financial support for the program by the U.S. from $lB/year to $3B/year for the next ten years -which is still less than 1%of our defense budget. In practical terms the U.S. should translate this into a definite goal of putting all vulnerable nuclear material under tight security control within five years. Also, to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on it elsewhere, we must do the same at other locations around the world by removing or safeguarding nuclear usable material from all power and research reactors. An international funding base should be engaged in this effort including the G8, which, in an important and commendable action, have very recently pledged up to $10B for the decade ahead. For those nations that possess uranium deposits within their borders, or manage to purchase large quantities (many tons) from abroad, the challenge to deny them a nuclear capability is quite stark: it is to keep them from acquiring or constructing the infrastructure to enrich uranium or to manufacture plutonium. A nation with access to uranium ore that possesses such an operating facility is a potential and, in fact, a latent, nuclear weapon state. This is the prospect looming today in Iran. A blueprint meeting this challenge is contained in the May 2002 Bush-Putin Declaration of Moscow. It calls on all nations to cooperate to prevent such infrastructures from being developed by strictly enforcing export controls, interdicting illegal transfers, prosecuting violators, and tightening border controls. In addition

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to working to broaden the coalition of nations that are cooperating on implementing these powers, as called for in the Proliferation Security Initiative that has been proposed by the Bush administration, the authority of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will have to be expanded. Currently the IAEA has the authority for inspecting only the declared peaceful nuclear activities of the signatory nations to the NonProliferation Treaty. Its authority will have to be expanded to include on-site challenge inspections of undeclared and suspect activities as well. Such inspection rights are included in the Additional Protocol to the NPT that has been negotiated with the IAEA by many, but not all, nations. So far 107 nations have signed, and 73 have ratified, the Additional Protocol. Effective enforcement will also require the United Nations Security Council to give appropriate enforcement powers in cases where nations refuse to admit or give access to inspectors. This program presents a considerable intelligence challenge, and also a political one, requiring broad international cooperation to monitor such compliance measures and activities in a nation that has initiated a serious effort to build nuclear weapons. To illustrate what is required, consider a nation that has adequate uranium deposits in its territory as well as the technical-industrial base to produce nuclear weapons indigenously. Let us assume it chooses to build a gaseous centrifuge plant to enrich uranium to fuel a gun-type weapon. Technology for gas centrifuge machines is widely available. Such a first generation fission bomb, fueled by HEU in a gun-type assembly was what the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima. No large reactor to produce PuZ3’ is required, nor perfecting the more sophisticated implosion mechanism as needed for a plutonium bomb. Furthermore, it could be deployed with confidence without requiring an underground nuclear explosive test just as we did with the Hiroshima bomb. I do not want to imply that building up a functioning nuclear weapons program is a simple task. In spite of all that is now known and is widely available in the public domain about nuclear technology, it still requires a major capital investment in the plant and a substantial effort involving large numbers of trained people with specialized engineering and scientific skills. Nevertheless, if a proliferating country wished to conceal a gas centrifuge plant capable of enriching enough uranium to fuel several weapons per year, the required facility could be contained on a factory floor space of modest size that could be readily built underground. The large halls at the uranium enrichment facility recently observed at Natanz in Iran -roughly two football fields in size - are estimated to be capable of holding over 50,000 centrifuges that would have a capacity to fuel a dozen or more uranium bombs per year. For several bombs per year the plant could be proportionally smaller. With current widely available technology it would require perhaps

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3,500 gas centrifuge machines, depending upon their efficiency, to produce HEU fuel for just one primitive enriched uranium weapon in a year. This is an order of magnitude smaller than the infrastructure and size of the centrifuge cascade that would be required to provide the fuel for a large civilian power reactor delivering a gigawatt of power. With more modern gas centrifuge technology, the plant size could be significantly still smaller. This emphasizes the importance of monitoring from the very beginning of the construction, together with insisting on authority for on-site challenge inspections once a suspicious activity has been identified. This will almost certainly require mandatory full-scope on-site inspection measures beyond authority that the IAEA currently has to monitor only the declared peaceful nuclear activities. It will have to include challenge on-site inspections also of undeclared and suspect activities as well, as called for in the Additional Protocol to the NPT as described above, and that has yet to be acted on by many nations. That protocol to the NPT, advocated by the Bush Administration, will also require in addition to universal acceptance, enforcement powers to deal with cases where a nation refuses to admit or give access to inspectors. These observations give a picture of the scale of effort and difficulty involved in detecting and/or hiding nuclear production activities. This monitoring problem is a complex one that requires more than just the satellites, or so-called national and technical means, circling the earth and sampling all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum from a couple of hundred kilometers up to synchronous orbits. On-site inspection and familiarity with the culture and the language have become the part of the new intelligence challenge. We have a measure of confidence in the ability to meet this challenge based on our experience with Iran and North Korea and the fact that their efforts at covert programs have not succeeded for extended periods of time. But for high confidence in timely detection we will require bringing into effect the Additional Protocol to the NPT strengthened with enforcement authority. This presents one of the really hard problems for maintaining a nonproliferation regime in today’s world, as illustrated in current discussions with Iran and North Korea. I have described a broad menu of intrusive procedures that will be required to monitor compliance and to identify any and all serious efforts by a would-be nuclear power to build nuclear weapons covertly. Negotiating to bring them into force with clear inspection protocols presents a major intelligence and diplomatic challenge. In our approach we must also recognize and deal with the concerns and basic motivations which drive some countries to seek to become nuclear powers. That requires much more than simply arguing that proliferation is bad for your

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health but nukes are OK for me and the other seven nuclear weapon states that already have them. As diplomats and all parents know from experience, when you brandish the stick, it helps a lot to offer a carrot. This means that the restrictions I have described that are designed to prevent nuclear proliferation must be balanced by offering benefits in the form of compensating security guarantees and economic aid. There is one more guarantee that will be of great importance. It is a guarantee of secure sources of energy, nuclear or otherwise, to NPT signatories that accept the restrictions of the Proliferation Security Initiative. This guarantee is included in constructive and important proposals that have been made in considerable detail by Dr. Mohamed EIBaradei, Director of the IAEA and also by the Bush administration in Washington. According to these proposals, the nuclear fuel to power nationally operated reactors for peaceful research and for civilian electrical power will be guaranteed. However this fuel and the technology to enrich it at the front end of the cycle and to reprocess it at the back end will remain under international control under IAEA safeguards. Such international control and guarantee of adequate supply would replace national control and manufacture of materials that could be diverted to weapons use at some future date. This issue is currently being discussed.

U.S.Nukes It is not necessary to look abroad for challenges to the present nonproliferation regime. There is also an apparent challenge originating in Washington as a result of American initiatives for new nuclear weapons that signal potential changes in our own policy. The Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (December 31,2001), issued by the Department of Defense, highlighted a need for new earthpenetrating nuclear weapons to defeat emerging threats of hardened underground targets of military interest being built in many countries. According to recent official government reports there are some 70 nations with more than 1,000 hardened buried facilities being built in a number of countries for protecting strategic military, and leadership targets. This recommendation raises two important questions: What will be the effectof developing new nuclear weapons on the nonproliferation regime and U.S. security? And, on technical grounds, what is the military utility of such weapons? Consider first the technical issues. The effectiveness of warheads for destroying hardened underground targets is enhanced if their designs are sufficiently rugged so that, when delivered by aircraft or missile, they can be rammed into the ground intact and penetrate some ten or so feet into the earth without damage before deto-

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nating. Such warheads will deliver a shock to destroy an underground bunker that is considerably stronger -by a factor of ten to 25 - relative to the shock from the same warhead if it is exploded at or above the earth’s surface, in which case much more of its blast energy would be spent in the atmosphere. Many hardened underground targets are at relatively shallow depths of a hundred or so feet, particularly large industrial targets for manufacturing weapons or producing fissile material to fuel nuclear weapons. Others of very high value are more likely to be built at depths of 1,000 feet and hardened to withstand the order of 1,000 atmospheres over-pressure. Doing the very best possible, taking into account experimental data and known limits on material strengths, the yield of a warhead would have to be significantly larger than 100 kilotons for the shock from its blast to reach down to 1,000 feet with enough strength to destroy such targets. Very low-yield warheads allegedly offer a possibility of attacking underground military targets, particularly those containing biological or chemical warfare agents, at shallow depths and are purported to be ”more useable” since they would cause reduced collateral damage. It is unavoidable, however, that any such warhead that has penetrated into the earth as deeply as it can before detonating will still create a huge cloud of radioactive debris and a very large crater. The blast of even a very “low-yield”one-kiloton earth penetrator detonated at the maximum depth to which it can penetrate in intact in hard rock will eject more than one million cubic feet of radioactive debris from a crater about the size of ground zero at the World Trade Center - bigger than a football field. A nuclear weapon with a yield capable of destroying a hard target 1,000 feet underground - well over 100 kilotons - will dig a very much larger crater and create a substantially larger amount of radioactive debris. That would certainly not be a low-yield weapon. The primitive atom bomb that pulverized Hiroshima had a yield of only 13 kilotons. The United States has many high-yield weapons in its arsenal for attacking hardened, deeply buried targets. The main problem is being able to identify and locate such targets accurately. The technical realities of nuclear weapons and their value in destroying biological and chemical weapons in neutralizing the deadly effects of biological pathogens and chemical gases is severely limited by the fact that the blast effects of nuclear weapons, when detonated in earth, extend beyond the range of high temperatures and radiation they create and that are required for destroying such agents. Therefore, they would be more likely to spread these agents widely than to destroy them completely. On quantitative technical grounds, one is led to conclude that low-yield penetrators are of marginal military value, useful only for relatively shallow targets.

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The collateral damage they cause may be reduced due to their lower yield, but it will still be very substantial. President Eisenhower’s warning of ”destruction and suicide” as the potential outcome of nuclear war suggests the dangers and risks if one crosses the nuclear threshold, especially for limited military missions. Improvements in intelligence can lead to valuable payoffs in the ability of the military to functionally defeat as opposed to destroying physically hardened underground targets. What is needed is the ability to locate, identify, and characterize such targets with accuracy and to define, identify, and seal off their vulnerable parts - such as air ducts and tunnel entrances for equipment, resources, and personnel. These vulnerabilities can be exploited with specialized delivery systems and conventional munitions with multiple detonations for enhanced earth penetration. What is the likely impact on U.S. security of a new initiative for new low-yield weapons? First, it is generally agreed that already tested weapons are available for most bunker-busting missions. In view of that, a decision by the world’s only superpower to develop and deploy such presumably ”more useable,” low-yield nuclear weapons as bunker busters would send a clear and negative signal about the nonproliferation regime to the nonnuclear states. If the United States, the strongest nation in the world, concludes that it cannot protect its vital interests without relying on nuclear weapons in limited war-fighting situations, it would be a clear signal to other nations that nuclear weapons are valuable, if not necessary, for their security purposes too. It would be counter to repeated urging by the nonnuclear weapon states, when they agreed to the NPT extension at the UN in 1995, for the nuclear-weapon states to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to continue the moratorium on underground explosive tests of nuclear weapons, leading to a CTBT, and for further reductions in nuclear forces. The United States could thereby be dealing a fatal blow to the nonproliferation regime in order to provide itself with a capability of questionable military value. The 188 signatories to the NPT are calling on the nuclear-weapon states to decrease rather than increase the discriminatory nature of the nonproliferation regime by developing new warheads for new missions while they themselves renounce any such armaments. For fiscal year 2006, Congress zeroed out funds supporting the development of new so-called bunker busters, or robust nuclear earth penetrators. This followed their action in fiscal 2005 to remove spending for the development of new concepts for low-yield weapons designed to attack shallow hardened underground targets. Members did, however, fund an important new program of fiscal 2006 called the Reliable Replacement Warhead, or RRW. Its stated purpose is to adapt nuclear infrastructure and weapons so that the U.S. will be able to maintain long-term high confidence in its arsenal more efficientlyand economically without requiring the

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resumption of nuclear testing. The specific direction given to the activities under this program, as stated in the House-Senate conference report on the authorizing legislation, forbids the development of new weapons for new military missions. It reads: ”The conferees reiterate the direction provided in fiscal year 2005 that any weapon design work done under the RRW program must stay within the military requirements of the existing deployed stockpile and any new weapon design must stay within the design parameters validated by past nuclear tests.” It is very important to restrict design changes to weapon parameters validated during the half-century of more than 1,000 tests in developing our current stockpile. Otherwise it would take an extraordinary flight of imagination to place higher confidence in a new design, that lacks a test pedigree, relative to our current stockpile without resuming underground nuclear test explosions. Would a responsible leader - president, general, or admiral - seriously consider relying on an untested new design to protect our national security? If underground nuclear explosive tests were to be resumed, the damage to the broader nonproliferation regime, and thus to U.S. security interests, would far outweigh any conceivable advantages to be gained from the new designs. Nonnuclear-weapon states would interpret resumed U.S. nuclear testing as a repudiation of Washington’s NPT commitments, which could have serious implications for how they might then view their own treaty obligations. It seems inconceivable that the nonproliferation regime would, or could, survive if the newly established Reliable Replacement Weapons program were to become a design program for new U.S. weapons, as some advocate, rather than focusing on increasing long-term confidence in our current arsenal within experimentally established parameters.

The Case for the CTBT For a truly positive leadership step of singular importance I believe that it is time for the U.S. to step up and ratify the CTBT. Technically as well as politically it is in our interest to do so - now. All U.S. allies in NATO, including Great Britain, Germany, and France, have signed and ratified the CTBT, as have Japan and Russia. Israel has signed the CTBT and is participating energetically in the work of setting up a verification system. Others, including China, have indicated they will work to bring the treaty into force once the United States has ratified it. Currently 33 of the 44 states that have built nuclear reactors, the so-called ”nuclear-capable states,” that must ratify the treaty for it to enter into force have done so. In all, 129 states have ratified and 176 have signed. It is time for the U.S. to reconsider the issue of ratifying the CTBT. More

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than 40 years ago, in May 1961, shortly after he completed his eight years in the White House, President Eisenhower remarked that not achieving a nuclear test ban ”would have to be classed as the greatest disappointment of any administration of any decade - of any time and of any party.” President Clinton, upon signing the CTBT back in 1996, heralded it as “the longest sought, hardest fought prize in the history of arms control.” The White House and the Senate should enter into a serious debate to clarify the underlying issues, both the concerns and opportunities. This debate was not adequately joined in 1999 when the CTBT first came before the Senate for its advice and consent to ratification. I deeply regret that the Bush administration, in 2001, announced it had no intention to seek ratification of the CTBT, and I am not aware of any change in their position. It has thus far refused to reopen the question. Why is the United States reluctant? Opponents of the CTBT have raised two questions: (1) ”How can we be sure that many years ahead, we will not need to resume underground explosive yield testing in order to rebuild the stockpile?”; and (2) ”How can we monitor compliance by other CTBT signatories to standards consistent with U.S. national security?” The answer to the first question is that total certainty can never be achieved. But I am confident that the United States can be assured of the reliability of our nuclear forces under the CTBT. I say this because we are successfully pursuing a strong technical and scientific program at the national weapon laboratories (Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia) that is providing a deeper understanding of their performance, and is maintaining and refurbishing them as appropriate. This is a rigorous program relying on extensive surveillance, forensics, diagnostics, extensive simulations with new computers, and experiments with advanced facilities. It is, in fact, enhancing our confidence in the arsenal - and in our ability to hear any warning bells of unanticipated problems that may develop in the future. This conclusion has been demonstrated by a number of detailed technical analyses. In 1995 a team of JASON scientists working with colleagues from the weapons community, including technical leaders involved in creating the current nuclear arsenal, reached this finding provided the U.S. has a well-supported, science-based stewardship and maintenance program, together with a capability to remanufacture warheads as needed (”Nuclear Testing” JASON Report, JSR-95-320, August 3,1995). Such findings were important to the U.S.decision to negotiate the CTBT and sign it in 1996. More recently, in August 2002, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences (”TechnicalIssues Related to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test

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Ban Treaty”, 2002) reaffirmed this conclusion. And in 2001 so did a government sponsored study, led by General Shalikashvili, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that addressed strategic as well as technical issues. (“Findings and Recommendations Concerning the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty”, January 2001). In his letter to the President, General Shalikashvili affirmed that the CTBT ”is a very important part of global nonproliferation efforts and is compatible with keeping a safe, reliable U.S. nuclear deterrent.’’ I know of no leader at the laboratories who says that there is a need at present for nuclear testing to maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Looking ahead, I see no need for the foreseeable future. Concerning the question of compliance, there is a broad, if not unanimous, agreement that the United States could monitor CTBT compliance to standards consistent with its national security. Based on its technical analysis, the National Academy of Sciences study group concluded that The worst-case scenario under a no-CTBT regime poses far bigger threats to U.S. security - sophisticated nuclear weapons in the hands of many more adversaries -than the worst-case scenario of clandestine testing in a CTBT regime, within the constraints posed by the monitoring system. When fully implemented under a CTBT, the verification system becomes more robust and difficult to evade, by acquiring challenge rights to check out data initially derived from remote sensors and conduct short-notice, on-site inspections of suspicious events. A further strengthening of the sensitivity of the CTBT to detect covert, treaty-violating activities could be negotiated by adding appropriate bilateral transparency and confidence-building measures with the other nuclear powers, Russia and China in particular. These would permit on-site sensors to be introduced at their instrumented test sites to monitor for signals - seismic and radiological - from possible underground tests that are banned by the CTBT. The Bush administration should clearly state its willingness to initiate such an arrangement, reciprocally with the Russians, at Novaya Zemlya and the Nevada Test Site. The CTBT does not increase the requirements for the U.S. to monitor and identify underground testing. The U.S. will want all information on testing activities, with or without the treaty. It does, however, add to the difficulties for a country to evade the treaty not only by strengthening the system but also by adding the inspection rights. Furthermore, given that the United States has the most advanced and sophisticated diagnostic, analytical, experimental, and computation facilities, it is in a stronger position than other nations to maintain a deterrent under a test ban. As General Shalikashvili concluded in his study, ”I believe that an objective

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and thorough net assessment shows convincingly that U.S. interests, as well as those of friends and allies, will be served by the Treaty’s entry into force.” What If Our Nonproliferation Efforts Fail?

Back to policy issues: Despite our best efforts, we may fail to keep dangerous people from getting their hands on the most dangerous material by whatever means - theft, illegal purchase, or simply by refusing to cooperate with our antiproliferation efforts. And we may then have to face the prospect of their moving ahead toward building nuclear weapons. What do we do then? This is not an idle theoretical question. This issue is very much on the agenda, and was explicitly raised in our most recent official National Security Strategy document in 2002 (and updated in 2006). It states that against emerging threats of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, the United States must be prepared to take ”anticipatory action to defend ourselves even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack”; that is we will take preventive military action before the existence of an established threat. While we cannot rule out the use of force under any circumstance, we have to recognize that the use of force brings its own serious risks and raises tough new questions. Under what circumstances can and should we apply military force? Against whom? Which targets? When and how? Preventive military action requires exquisite intelligence to evaluate the danger accurately and to identify the critical targets correctly. Our current difficulties and debates about U.S. policy in the mid-East, however you view the choice that the U.S. has made to initiate war against Iraq, are clear evidence of the risks of taking such actions. Most decisions to initiate preventive action have to be made even though there may be big uncertainties, as well as gaps and wrong information on essential facts. This is almost inevitable. It is the very nature of intelligence information. These circumstances may result in divided support and challenges to the legitimacy of the mission, both at home and abroad, if not its outright failure. That is all the more reason to exhaust all possible avenues of diplomacy before relying on force only as a last resort. To be sure, it is a very tough order and a frustrating ordeal to engage in patient, multi-national diplomacy with rogue nations that are bent on joining the nuclear club. It is even more daunting to get at the roots of what generates fanatical destructive behavior in terrorists. Changing such behavior patterns takes a lot of time and determined effort. In the short term, we have to pursue practical measures that can be effective in keeping evil despots and suicidal terrorists from being able to threaten us with nuclear weapons.

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We have several examples from recent history that illustrate the three conditions that almost certainly will have to be satisfied simultaneously if preventive military action, or even its threat, is to be effective:(1)there is very little likelihood of successful retaliation by the potential proliferant, against the homelands of the attacking powers; (2) the proliferant is viewed by large parts of the international community as a threat to its neighbors; (3) peaceful means of blocking nuclear weapons programs has failed or seems unlikely to work. To support this judgment, recall several cases where not all three conditions existed, and military force or the threat of force was not credible and was not brought into play. They include the Soviet Union in the 1950s as it tested and began to deploy nuclear weapons, and China, when it began to move toward a nuclear weapons capability in the 1960s. There were influential voices in the United States that spoke out for preventive war against the Soviet Union in the 1950s, fearing that a Soviet nuclear arsenal would prove devastating for American’s position in the world and for the American homeland itself. Fortunately, President Eisenhower knew better. A similar discussion took place at high levels of the American and Soviet governments during the Kennedy administration when China was seen to be nearing a nuclear weapons capability. The discussion led nowhere, another example of the disutility of military force under the circumstances then existing. In both these cases patient diplomacy proved its superior mettle. What about today’s most worrisome cases: North Korea and Iran? North Korea is already close to posing an actual nuclear threat, if indeed it does not already exist, and our military options are tightly constrained by the existence of their million man army with many, many thousands of artillery tubes almost on the outskirts of Seoul. In targeting diplomacy for halting and reversing North Korea’s nuclear programs, the U.S. and our allies in the region will undoubtedly have to negotiate a non-use of force commitment in the context of a freeze and dismantlement of all North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. The Agreed Framework of 1994 during the Clinton Administration froze their nuclear reactor and reprocessing activities in return for promises of power for civilian needs and of limited economic aid. We now would insist on the return of IAEA inspectors with the authority to inspect not only the reactors and the Pu they already produced, but also the elements of a gas centrifuge facility for enriching uranium components which North Korea has recently been acquiring in violation of the Agreed Framework. We would also insist on setting a firm schedule for removing the plutonium, including all spent fuel rods, from North Korea and dismantling its nuclear weapons facilities and program.

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It would be a serious mistake to allow the process to stop there. The North Korean leadership is primarily interested in survival and seems to be aware that economic changes will be necessary for that to happen. Our diplomacy must help support efforts on their part to make such changes, and convince them that it will be safe for them to pursue them. A broad program of economic cooperation and security guarantees should ultimately include North Korea’s neighbors - South Korea, above all. Since North Korea poses a threat to its neighbors, guarantees must be a two-way street. Looking Ahead

Are the U.S. Congress and the American public ready for this? With presidential leadership, perhaps so, especially since the alternative very likely will be not only a nuclear-armed North Korea but also, as a consequence, the entry of Japan and South Korea into the ranks of nuclear-weapon states; maybe Taiwan also. This would affect China, which would affect India, which would affect Pakistan.* An Asian arms race rivaling the Cold War’s U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race could be the result. We are also currently engaged, in support of our NATO allies and Russia, in negotiations trying to resolve the differences with Iran on their building an infras*Note added in Proof In this context I am troubled by the U.S.-Indian agreement calling for full nuclear cooperation that was signed by President Bush in March, 2006 during his trip to India. Instead of conforming with measures presently required by the NPT for assuring treaty compliance, plus the additional initiatives for enhanced monitoring that I discussed earlier, it provides important exceptions from meeting some of the existing requirements. For example, not all of India’s reactors for producing civilian power will be under IAEA monitoring and safeguards and there will be no cut off on their producing fissionable material for nuclear weapons. As the world’s largest democracy, India should have the global role that rightfully belongs to it, including access to technology and resources to build up its civilian nuclear power industry. Moreover America and India should be partners in world affairs. But the recent U.S.-Indian agreement on nuclear cooperation is not the right way to achieve those goals. No one should have any illusions. The nonproliferation regime will be weakened if the U.S. Congress amends American nonproliferation laws to carry out the deal as it now stands. For decades, responsible leaders in many countries, including India and America, worked together to build internationalrules to constrain nuclear weapons. If this new agreement is approved as it now stands, the measure of merit for nuclear cooperation will no longer be based on rules but on whether the recipient is believed to be a responsible friend of the United States. This judgment will be the basis for dividing nations into two groups and deciding who can and who cannot enrich uranium, and thus acquire a capability to build nuclear bombs. The new exemption proposed for India will mean that other nuclear weapon states, can, and likely will, apply their own standards for their friends. Can the United States expect to be effectivein preventing or dissuading other nations from following this precedent? Probably not in every situation and so similar exemptions to nuclear restraints will be made for others, including many less worthy than India. Before giving its approval to this agreement, Congress should insist on appropriate conditions to the US.-India deal to counter the harm it is likely to cause to our nonproliferation goals. I agree with former Senator Sam Nunn, currently the head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative think tank in Washingtonwho wrote in the Wall Street Journal on May 24,2006: ”Unless Congress attaches conditions, the agreement is likely to make securing nuclear materials around the globe and preventing nuclear terrorism more difficult . . . Congress has a crucial choice: It can unconditionally approve the US.-India deal and watch the world get more dangerous - or it can impose principled conditions that would make the world safer and help prevent our worst nightmare.” It will be difficult to negotiate such changes, but diplomatic efforts to fix the deal without killing it should be pursued.

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tructure to enrich uranium allegedly for peaceful nuclear purposes. The situation sounds grim but recall Libya this past year and its decision to abandon its nuclear program after much pressure and difficulties from abroad. Finally, we have to ask: Is it possible for the United States and its friends to agree on criteria for diplomatic initiatives to head off other crises like the one we now face in North Korea, and possibly looming with Iran? And if the diplomatic initiatives fail in North Korea and Iran, and perhaps elsewhere in the future, will we be able to agree on criteria appropriate for imposing sanctions and perhaps, eventually, if necessary, initiating forceful actions against those who insist on moving ahead toward acquiring nuclear capabilities and are behaving aggressively? The experience at the United Nations leading up to the invasion of Iraq shows how difficult that challenge will be. A serious effort to come to such agreements will have to start by restoring and strengthening the international consensus against nuclear proliferation, and defining clear responsibilities and authority for action by the UN Security Council. It will be essential for the United States to change a perception that the use of elective, or preventive, force has become a dominant strain in American thinking about international challenges such as nuclear proliferation. The lesson that the United States and our allies and friends have learned since the dawn of the nuclear era in 1945 is that deterrence waged with patient and firm diplomacy will be key to keeping the worst weapons out of the most dangerous hands. This will require that we resort to a continuum of means keyed on patient, determined diplomacy, supported by coercion if or when required, to face the challenge to us and indeed to civilization posed these terrible weapons. The Bush administration, as of this writing in the spring of 2006, is pursuing a multilateral diplomatic approach to this challenge. There is initial optimism that it is making some progress but the need for caution and patience is evident. The nuclear genie cannot be put back in the bottle. It is noble to strive for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons as an ultimate goal. However, for the present the United States must engage diplomatically and give the strongest support for specific actions that can reduce nuclear danger by preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. These include, to summarize: 0

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Expanding the authority of the International Atomic Energy Agency to carry out onsite, challenge inspections of all suspect nuclear sites under the Additional Protocols to the NPT. Broadening the international participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative allowing interdiction of suspect shipments and improved export controls. Guaranteeing nuclear fuel under international control for peaceful purposes as

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an alternative to indigenous fuel cycles for enriching uranium and processing plutonium which henceforth will be forbidden. Giving strong support to beefing up protection of large stores of dangerous nuclear materials around the world, in particular the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Reduction Threat program for securing repositories of nuclear material in the former Soviet Union and around the world, as protection against terrorists and their kin; and Continuing to adhere to the moratorium on underground nuclear bomb testing.

We should work to bring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force rather than developing new, putatively more useable, nuclear weapons. At the very least we should continue U.S. adherence to the moratorium. The urgency for such a commitment to deal with the nuclear threat - a danger with no precedent in human history - has been expressed powerfully and dramatically by Father Bryan Hehir, former dean of Harvard Divinity School, in his keynote address on "Ethical Considerations of Living in the Nuclear Age" at a Stanford University conference in 1987: For millennia people believed that if anyone had the right to call the ultimate moment of truth, one must name that person God. Since the dawn of the nuclear age we have progressively acquired the capacity to call the ultimate moment of truth and we are not gods. But we must live with what we have created. This is our challenge!

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TOUGH CHALLENGES Presented at the Phi Beta Kappa Initiation Ceremony at Stanford University June 11,2004 Sidney D. Drell

For you students this is a wonderful moment of recognition. Congratulations. By your own good work, and with valuable encouragement from your families and teachers, you earned the opportunity to attend one of the world’s great universities; and, as is clear from the recognition you are receiving here tonight, you took full advantage of it to widen and deepen your horizons of knowledge. This achievement is all the more impressive to me considering where you did it, surrounded by the extraordinary beauty and attractions of nature in this region that present monumental temptations to distract you away from work. I stand in awe of your achievements. You have witnessed a number of changes on campus during your years here: new buildings, new academic programs, some great successes on the playng fields. Overall it’s a pattern we have grown to expect from Stanford as it continues to strive toward ever higher goals. During these years, while you were doing your thing on campus, there have been some truly momentous changes out there in the wide world. Some take the form of breathtaking successes that are deepening our understanding of nature and life. But troubling new challenges have also emerged that must be understood and addressed if we are to avoid our worst fears of terror and destruction. Let me start with successes: Of extraordinary importance is the sequencing of the human genome that provides hope for developing new ways to defeat diseases and infections that threaten populations on a global scale, from HIV/AIDS to cancer. Here is another example that closely overlaps my own area of research in particle physics: With powerful new eyes and ears on spacecraft circling far above the distorting and absorbing effects of our atmosphere, we have begun to draw detailed maps of the universe and its hundreds of billions of galaxies each with some hundreds of billions of stars. We can see and hear signals arriving from sources out there that are racing away from us with ever increasing speed out at the farthest horizons, many tens of billions of trillions of miles away. These signals are providing clues as to what was happening more than 13 billion years ago when our physical universe was created in the Big Bang. What we think we have learned so far is rather humbling. Up until Copernicus and Galileo less than five hundred years ago, people thought that we and our planet Earth were the center of the universe. It was a shock to them to learn that we inhabit a small planet rotating about a minor star far out in the suburbs, near the outer edges of our galaxy. During your years at Stanford, we have now learned that what we are made of, including the earth, our solar system, and all that we actually see out in space with our powerful instruments, is basically different stuff from whatever it is that constitutes 95% of the energy in the universe. We call that 95% dark energy and dark matter, meaning we don’t have the slightest clue of what it is. Are we after all just an apostrophe or impurity in the big picture of our universe, or is it deeper than that? Great puzzles indeed - and dreams of future discoveries yet to be made.

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But: Unfortunately and inexorably, just as the forward march of science inspires great dreams of discovery, it also raises the specter of increasingly more ominous nightmares of terror and devastation that we cannot ignore. Figuring out how to prevent these nightmares from materializing into real tragedies presents a serious challenge to all of us - and that includes your generation as you now begin to assume the burden and the opportunity of shaping a future for this nation, and indeed, for the world. There is nothing surprising about your facing difficult new challenges. It is a simple fact of history common to all generations. For my generation that came of age during World War 11, nuclear weapons presented a grave new challenge, perhaps our greatest one. Through the darkest days of the Cold War, our imperative was to avoid the nuclear holocaust which would result from weapons that are a million times more destructive than their predecessors. With nuclear weapons, war was no longer an option. Mass destruction would be inevitable. We were presented with a fundamental issue: can civilization survive? As President Eisenhower said in 1956: “We are rapidly getting to the point that no war can be won.” Conventional wars can be fought to exhaustion and surrender, but nuclear war can come close to, in his words, “destruction of the enemy and suicide.” New thinking about conflict resolution was urgently called for. It was essential for us to learn how to resolve our dangerous confrontations and to terminate deadly conflicts before they escalated into a nuclear war that nobody wanted and all too few would survive. When the grim realities and futility of nuclear war finally sank in, nations around the world recognized the necessity of working together to prevent one. With American leadership, they began to cooperate in multi-national diplomatic efforts to reduce the danger and prevent the proliferation of these weapons. Despite some very hghtening crises en route, we have achieved major successes. The spread of nuclear weapons has been limited to no more than a handful of nations, a norm of not using them in conflict has been established, and this norm has lasted 59 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear weapons have become weapons of last resort. We recognized that their only use was to deter nuclear attack; to send a warning by their very existence, that, if you do it to us or our fhends, the response will be the end of you. Physicists who were responsible for creating nuclear weapons understood only too well the horror they could create. Not surprisingly many played prominent roles in technical efforts to reduce their danger and in developing a global community united in the effort to bring them under control. Here is an example of one of the great technical challenges emerging in 1960 that I happened to get deeply involved in. It was to penetrate the Iron Curtain surrounding the Soviet Union in order to learn how serious was the threat of a surprise nuclear attack against the American homeland from their ballistic missiles. This mission required us to build and operate fantastic cameras mounted on satellites circling the earth above the atmosphere that could detect and identify detailed activities at distances greater than 100 miles. We faced extreme demands on precision optics and targeting that stimulated major advances on many technical frontiers that are evident today in our exploration of the universe from space.

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American overhead reconnaissance satellites served an additional function of enormous value. They enabled us to initiate important negotiations with the Soviet Union aimed at setting mutual and verifiable limits on deployments of threatening nuclear armed missiles and bombers. Confidence in our ability to verify Soviet compliance with negotiated limits was an essential ingredient for maintaining a stable strateBc balance and reducing nuclear danger. Blind trust alone was not adequate for either country. Scientists also recognized the power of international cooperation. This has long been the hallmark of scientific efforts to understand nature. After all, the laws of nature are universal, or in the words of the great Russian writer, Anton Chekhov: “There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.” This need for working together in a community with a common sense of purpose - so important both to advancing the frontiers of science and to keeping a lid on the nuclear threat - is evident today as the world is gearing up to confront a serious new danger that has emerged during your Stanford years. The emerging danger I am referring to is this: very dangerous people, including fanatical and often suicidal terrorists, may acquire and use advanced weapons capable of devastating destruction and terror - particularly nuclear and biological ones. As President Bush has cautioned’, “The gravest danger to freedom lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology.” All nations must work together as a community with a common goal to prevent this danger of very bad people getting their hands on very bad weapons. If we take a long term point of view, in order to achieve enduring success against terrorism and the dangers it spawns, we must get to its roots. We must try to understand it better. What generates terrorists? What can we do to reduce, if not remove, its causes - ignorance, desperation, poverty, fear, religious fanaticism, and just plain hate? To accomplish this will take nothing less than a sustained world-wide cooperative effort grounded in patient diplomacy, economic aid and cultural understanding, and backed, if and when needed, by forceful persuasion. As we have learned all too well from history, such an effort will take a lot of time. In the meantime, therefore, we have to pursue practical measures that can be effective in the short term in protecting us from destructive attacks by governments and terrorists who are willing to act outside of civilized norms. The terror strikes of 9/11 and, just three months ago in Spain, provide ample warning of this need.

To meet the developing challenge at the crossroads of radicalism and technology the United States has adopted an official policy2 stating that we “will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.” But we must recognize the serious risks in implementing such a policy. Preventive military action requires exquisite intelligence to evaluate the danger accurately and to identify the critical targets correctly. It is almost inevitable that decisions to initiate preventive action have to be made while there are big uncertainties, as well as gaps and wrong information on essential facts, resulting in West Point, N.Y.: June 2002

* The National Security Strategy of the United States of America; September 2002

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challenges to the legitimacy of the mission and divided support for it, both at home and abroad, if not its outright failure. That is all the more reason to exhaust every avenue of diplomacy before relyng on force as a last resort. If the use of military force is deemed necessary, its effectiveness will benefit when decisions about its use are informed by judgments and contributions of a broad community of nations strongly opposed to terrorism. In order to build such a global community, the United States will have to avoid creating a perception that the unilateral use of force is becoming a dominant strain in American thinking about problems we face abroad. Here again we face a challenge to build a global community united in purpose. Yes, indeed you and your generation face tough challenges. What is more, these challenges are dynamic - they evolve under changing circumstances - and so must our understanding of how to tackle them. That requires commitment to continued learning a talent you have demonstrated very ably at Stanford, and for which you are being honored here tonight. But, hey we - my generation - didn’t do so badly in meeting the tough new challenges of the nuclear age. Why then should we expect less of you and your generation in facing today’s new challenges? It is my fondest personal wish that you will do better than we have done: that you and your generation will be in the vanguard of building a better 21St century. Historians marvel at the advances in science and technology during the 20thcentury, but lament its record of brutality: the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Killing Fields, brutal wars and conflicts of unspeakable horror. Does it always have to be that way? Can we not build a better society? The character of a society is molded from its values and ideals, by its ethical principles and commitment to justice. I look to you outstanding and highly honored graduates of this great university to contribute to molding that character and providing a better text for historians of the 2 lStcentury. Who better than you? I salute you and wish you good luck in pursuing your dreams and enjoying a happy and fulfilling life. Once again, congratulations.

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ssociation Report An Arms Control Association

What Are Nuclear Weapons For? RECOMMENDATIONS FOR RESTRUCTURING

U>S> STRATEGIC NUCLEAR FORCES

April 2005

Sidney D. Drell and James E. Goodby

Reprinted with permission from An Arms Control Association Report, April 2005. Copyright (2005) by Arms Control Association.

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Executive Summary he role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense planning needs a fresh look. The United States and Russia have now officially adopted a policy of cooperation against the new threats, faced by both nations, of terrorists and unstable or irresponsible governments acquiring nuclear weapons. This replaces the former adversarial relationship of nuclear deterrence based on mutual assured destruction. As stated in the Joint Declaration

of Presidents Bush and Putin of November 13, 2001: “The United States and Russia have overcome the legacy of the Cold War. Neither country regards the other as an enemy or threat.” What then are the anticipated missions and targets for the thousands of nuclear warheads remaining in their arsenals? Based on an analysis of the present and prospective threats that define missions for U.S. nuclear weapons we conclude that the strategic arsenal required by the United States can be reduced to considerably lower numbers. We recommend a U.S. force structure of 500 operationally deployed nuclear warheads, plus 500 in a responsive force. The United States and Russia should cooperate to achieve this in the year 2010. We propose, as a specific suggestion for the individual components of a “500+500 in 2010” force for the United States, the following:

OperationallyDeployed Force m Three Trident submarines on station at sea,

each loaded with 24 missiles and 96 warheads (a mix of low-yield W76s and high-yield W88s). Reducing the D5 missiles from their full complement of eight warheads to four per missile will substantially increase their maximum operating areas. @

B

100 Minuteman I11 ICBMs in hardened silos, each with a single W87 warhead in a Mk 12a reentry vehicle. 20-25 B2 and B52H bombers configured for gravity bombs or air-launched cruise missiles.

Responsive Force B

Three Trident submarines, each loaded with 96 warheads, in transit or being replenished in port for their next missions as part of a Ready Responsive Force for a rapidly building crisis, plus two or three unarmed boats in overhaul.

e

50-100 additional Minuteman I11 missiles taken off alert and without warheads, and 20-25 bombers, unarmed, in maintenance and training, all of which would comprise a Strategic Responsive Force, for a more slowly building confrontation.

This force is composed of existing warheads and delivery systems and requires no new nuclear weapons. It retains the current diversity of systems as a hedge against common failure modes. We believe that, in time, nuclear deterrence might be maintained entirely with a responsive force, with the responsive force consisting of no more than the 500 warheads that are initially postulated for the operationally deployed force. We find no need for designing new nuclear weapons against potential new threats, believing that those weapons which the United States has already developed to counter the Soviet Union will be sufficient for new threats. To the contrary, we do

237 see important opportunities for the United States to seize that would improve its national security by strengthening the nonproliferation regime. To this end, timely initiatives by the nuclear-weapon states to significantly reduce their nuclear arsenals and to

restrain the development of new nuclear weapons can play an important role by addressing increasingly voiced concerns of the non-nuclear-weapon nations about the discriminatory nature of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

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What Are Nuclear Weapons for? he role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense planning needs a fresh look. Although the U.S.-Soviet superpower competition that gave rise to the building and deployment of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons ended more than a decade ago, the thinking of that era dangerously persists. Yesterday’s doctrines are no longer appropriate for today’s realities. The traditional role of deterrence has diminished with Russia’s

ongoing transition from strategic foe to partner. The new threats faced by the international community do not present situations where the net effect of using nuclear weapons except in the most extreme circumstances would benefit U.S. interests. The U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and attendant doctrines should be adjusted to minimize the salience of nuclear weapons and to ensure that they are truly weapons of last choice. Adopting such a posture would support the nation’s highest national security priority: preventing the use of nuclear weapons and their proliferation to terrorists and to additional states. Official U.S. thinking about nuclear weapons has changed many times during the 60 years since the first nuclear explosions in 1945. These changes reflected evolving assessments of what it would take to deter a well-armed adversary, the Soviet Union, from attacking the United States, its European allies, or its vital interests. In turn, the reassessments resulted in changes in strategic planning, targeting, and the types and numbers of weapons in the U.S. stockpile, all of which are interrelated. The clarity of the bipolar US.-Soviet world has given way to the ambiguities and uncertainties of a world where international security is threatened by transnational terrorists, unstable and failed states, and regimes that scorn a world order based on broadly accepted principles. The dangers inherent in such a stew are magnified by easier access to nuclear technology, inadequately protected stockpiles of plutonium and highly enriched uranium-the two key fissile materials needed to build nuclear weapons-the growing availability of missiles worldwide, black market nuclear supply networks, and a trend toward acquisition of “latent” nuclear

weapons capabilities through the possession of the entire nuclear fuel cycle. The history of the nuclear age shows that concepts of what it takes to have a sufficient nuclear weapons capability are far from immutable and that the unique character of nuclear weapons has become ingrained in the nuclear-age culture. A sense of doom persists even today, but in an attenuated form. The first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 had a destructive energy 10,000 times larger than previous explosive devices. Within a decade, the United States and the Soviet Union designed and built thermonuclear bombs, the so-called hydrogen bombs, a thousand times more powerful than fission bombs. Fearful for the fate of civilization and of humanity itself, a shocked world asked why these terrible weapons existed. Under what circumstances and for what purpose could the use of the world’s most destructive mass-terror weapons ever be justified? Could or would civilized people actually use them again, causing the indiscriminate deaths of innocent civilians on an unprecedented scale?

239 As nuclear arsenals grew larger and the "secret" both expanded their forces to numbers exceeding technologies behind them became more widely tens of thousands of warheads on several thousand available, a deeper understanding of the horrors launchers capable of delivering several thousand of a nuclear conflict spread throughout the world. megatons of destructive energy. This was done despite This awareness was sharpened a greater understanding and fear by repeated tests of hydrogen The U.S. nuclear weapons of the devastating consequences of bombs that could destroy all life using nuclear explosives in combat, stockpile and attendant and structures within a distance even at a much lower level. The doctrines should be of approximately ten kilometers evolution of the deterrence concept adjusted to minimize around a single bomb's detonation and the highlights of the nuclear the salience of nuclear age are discussed in Appendix 1. point. That scale of potential destruction was unprecedented Despite the excessive numbers, weapons and to ensure in human history, and it became not because of them, policy that they are truly obvious that such weapons could choices of governments and a good weapons of last choice. not be treated simply as more measure of luck brought the world through the danger years without effective and efficient tools for waging war. Instead, the value of such weapons began a nuclear conflict and with broad agreement on the to be seen by U.S. political leaders almost from the need to limit the spread of materials and advanced technology necessary for building nuclear arsenals. outset as a means of deterring a Soviet attack on the United States or its allies. Soviet political leaders The two superpower rivals averted a direct clash, eventually accepted the same view, in reverse. in part because the existence of nuclear weapons Perversely, the two adversaries' arsenals grew had the effect of imposing prudence on a Cold War confrontation that had the potential for erupting into rapidly to senseless numbers in the name of deterrence, which was defined as requiring nuclear World War III. This prudential effect surely would have been achieved at far lower levels of nuclear forces that could survive an adversary's all-out first strike and respond with an attack capable of stockpiles and could be achieved at far lower levels delivering massive destruction on the initial attacker. than currently planned by the United States for a wholly different era and set of security challenges. Over time, the United States and the Soviet Union

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255 into account in implementing the strategic force reductions. The force structure we have outlined is a very conservative one in terms of target coverage, allowing for the fact that the door is closing too slowly on the Cold War orthodoxy of assured destruction thinking by the United States and Russia. After a transition stage of surely less than a decade, a further halving of the warhead levels should follow, with all remaining warheads being assigned to a Responsive Force. Second, this number of warheads would also cover for deterrence purposes all the other potential targets in other countries, assuming nuclear restraint elsewhere in the world. It is not necessary to have a separate deterrent force for each potential or present adversary because two or more nuclear conflicts at the same time is a very unlikely scenario. Pre-planning and adaptive planning can make use of deployed warheads for a variety of contingencies. Third, in order to insure against the possibility of negotiated force reductions being rapidly reversed and to provide confidence to the rest of the world, the United States and Russia should negotiate verifiable procedures for destroying excess warheads and delivery systems beyond those slated for the operationally deployed and responsive forces.

Contingencies involving As we noted earlier, future contingency planners are likely to consider whether nuclear weapons are needed to deal with conceivable wartime scenarios. Our view, to repeat, is that modern non-nuclear weapons almost

certainly would be able to handle most foreseeable military challenges. Even if one assumes otherwise, the target list would not generate requirements for large numbers of nuclear warheads. Potential Chinese targets are likely to cover the same generic list as for Russia, cited above, including their strategic strike forces, command and control centers, major military bases, and ports in the vicinity of Taiwan. With China’s long-range nuclear forces remaining at anything like their present levels, the target list would be considerably smaller than the 200-300 estimated for Russia. This list would not generate U.S. force requirements in addition to the numbers we have proposed for hypothetical emergencies involving Russia. The same warhead can be targeted against multiple designated ground zeros. Yet, if there were drastic changes in the worldwide strategic picture that led the United States to simultaneous major nuclear confrontations against Russia and China, the United States would evidently begin a major buildup of its own. This would take time, but so would a major Chinese buildup. The force configuration of “500+500”that we propose provides a ready basis for such U.S. action. The warhead delivery capacity of the Trident force can be doubled above the level to which we have proposed downloading it, and as we have described earlier, the United States would maintain a functioning nuclear infrastructure. Regarding potential targets in North Korea or Iran, the list presumably would be much shorter because the territories are smaller, and the numbers of defense-related installations are much fewer than in Russia and China. That list would very likely be limited to single digits in each country.

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Are New U.S. Nuclear Weapons Needed? lthough the systems we propose for the “500+500”force were designed against a very different Cold War threat, they can readily be adapted to meet today‘s challenges to U.S. national security. Were the United States to start from scratch to build a new nuclear force structure to counter today’s threats, it would very likely create different weapons incorporating newer technologies that would provide maximum flexibility to readily adjust to changes in the strategic scenario. Here, we will discuss potential benefits as well as problems with undertaking some of the technical changes that may be considered for adapting U.S. forces to the new post-Cold War strategic environment. In some cases, the changes would be straightforward and valuable to implement and are already underway. Others of questionable military value might prove more harmful than helpful to U.S. national security due to their potential, even likely negative impact on efforts to sustain and strengthen the nonproliferation regime. They should be rejected. The United States has built and currently maintains a nuclear arsenal that is robust and reliable and should remain so for the foreseeable future. Congressional pressure during George H. W. Bush’s presidency led the U.S. government to recognize that there was no need to develop and test new nuclear warhead designs. This resulted in a moratorium on underground nuclear tests that is still in effect. As a consequence, existing warheads are remaining in the arsenal for more years than originally anticipated and longer than had been the case during the first five decades of the nuclear era, during which the arsenal was being regularly modernized with new designs based on technological advances. An enhanced, multifaceted, science-based program of stockpile stewardship was established in 1994 to provide confidence to the U.S. weapons community and, through it, to the government that the health of the stockpile and the way in which special bomb materials age is well understood. This strong technical and scientific program at the national weapons laboratories is providing a deeper

understanding of the performance of these weapons. Maintaining and refurbishing the warheads, as well as sustaining the competence of the weapons scientists, is proceeding, relying on comprehensive surveillance, forensics, diagnostics, extensive simulations with new computers, and experiments with advanced facilities. In fact, it has served to enhance confidence in the arsenal and in the U.S. ability to hear and heed any warning bells of unanticipated problems that may develop in the future. One direct way to simplify the process of certifymg the reliability and effectiveness of the warheads and to sustain this confidence over a longer period of time is to increase their performance margins. An example of this is to further enhance the explosive energy provided by the primary stage of a nuclear weapon above the minimum required to ignite the secondary, or main, stage of a nuclear weapon. A straightforward way to do this that requires no explosive testing to validate is by adjusting the boost gas fill in the primary during scheduled maintenance or remanufacturing activities. This is a n example of

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an existing process for maintaining long-term high delivered by aircraft or missile, they can be rammed confidence in the arsenal. It is already available, has into the earth intact and penetrate some three or high merit, and should continue to be implemented.' more meters into the earth without damage before This approach is the appropriate focus of effort for detonating. Such warheads will deliver a shock to the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program destroy an underground bunker that is 10-20 times currently being funded at the U.S. national weapons stronger than that of the same warhead exploded laboratories. at or above the earth's surface, in which case much Turning the RRW program into an effort to develop more of its blast energy would be spent in the new-warhead designs by altering the nature of the high atmosphere. explosives or the amount of nuclear fuel in the primary Many hardened underground targets are at without testing, as some have suggested, would be a relatively shallow depths of some 30 meters, mistake. It takes an extraordinary flight of imagination particularly large industrial targets for manufacturing to postulate a modern new arsenal composed of such weapons or producing fissile material to fuel nuclear untested designs that would be more reliable, safe, weapons. Other targets of very high value are more and effective than the current U.S. arsenal based on likely to be buried at depths of 300 meters or more more than 1,000 tests since 1945. A and reinforced to withstand overcomprehensive and rigorous stockIt takes an extraordinary pressures of 1,000 atmospheres pile maintenance program confirms or more. Assuming the optimal flight of imagination to and sustains this high confidence. penetration capability into postulate a modem new the earth, taking into account If testing is resumed, the damage to the broader nonproliferation regime, arsenal composed of such experimental data and known limits untested designs that and thus to U.S. security interests, on material strengths, a warhead's would far outweigh any conceivable yield would have to be significantly would be move reliable, advantages to be gained from the larger than 100 kilotons for the safe, and effective than new designs. Other nuclear-weapon shock from its blast to reach down the current U.S. arsenal to 300 meters with enough strength states, most notably China, would based on more than surely follow the U.S. testing lead. to destroy such targets. That is 1,OOO tests since 1945. Non-nuclear-weapon states would certainly not a low-yield weapon. interpret resumed U.S. nuclear The primitive atomic bomb that testing as a repudiation of Washington's NPT commitpulverized Hiroshima had a yield of only 15 kilotons. ments, which could have serious implications for how Low-yield warheads, with yields less than five they might then view their own treaty obligations. kilotons, offer a possibility of attacking underground Two initiatives proposed by the Bush military targets at shallow depths, particularly those administration for developing new earth-penetrating containing biological and chemical weapons. Their weapons have also raised serious concerns. One alleged value is that the reduced collateral damage calls for developing advanced concepts for very lowthey would cause makes them more useable. It is yield weapons that are advocated as being "more unavoidable, however, that any such warhead that useable" for limited military missions, particularly has penetrated into the earth as deep as it can before against shallow underground targets, because of the detonating will still create a huge cloud of radioactive reduced collateral damage they will cause. They are debris and a very large crater. The blast of even a very low-yield, one-kiloton earth penetrator, detonated also proposed for neutralizing stored biological and chemical agents without dispersing them widely. at its maximum penetration depth of 15 meters into A second program, called the Robust Nuclear Earth dry hard rock, will eject more than one million cubic Penetrator (RNEP) program, would convert an existing feet of radioactive debris from a crater about the size high-yield, air-delivered nuclear bomb into an earth of ground zero at the World Trade Center. A nuclear weapon with at least a 100-kiloton yield capable of penetrator to make it more effective against deeply buried and hardened targets. destroying a hardened target 300 meters underground will dig a much larger crater and create a substantially The need for such earth-penetrating weapons is highlighted in the Nuclear Posture Review, in order greater amount of radioactive debris. "to defeat emerging threats such as hardened and The technical realities of nuclear weapons and their value in destroying biological and chemical deeply buried targets" of military interest being built in many countries. weapons must also not be exaggerated. In order to The effectiveness of warheads for destroying neutralize the deadly effects of biological pathogens hardened underground targets is enhanced if and chemical gases, they must be subjected to very their designs are sufficiently rugged so that, when high temperatures or radiation levels. The energetic E